By Keith Clarke

For John Cage fans, the sleepy German town of Halberstadt was the place to be in 2004. In an abandoned church, two further notes were added to the three that have been sounding on the organ since February 2003, part of a planned 639-year performance of his Organ squared/As slow as possible. But if followers of the wild and wacky found their musical excitement there, it was in the German capital Berlin that things were really stirring. In a city still crippled by $55.6 billion of municipal debt, a foundation set up to try and maintain the capital’s three, heavily subsidized major opera houses—the Deutsche Oper, Berlin Staatsoper, and the Komische Oper—found itself trying to push water uphill.

Deutsche Oper General Director Christian Thielemann spoke darkly of “artistic decline,” complaining that while the company’s $8.28 million debt had been cleared, it still struggled with higher taxes, since it is in the west of the city while the other houses are in the formerly communist east. In May, after an ultimatum had been rebuffed, Thielemann threw in the towel. It was a dramatic move, and sifting through the ensuing press coverage, MusicalAmerica.com’s Paul Moor reported: “Overall, one gains the impression that Thielemann—for all his unquestioned musical charisma—enjoys considerably less popular support here than he apparently assumed.

Something similar was said about Simon Rattle, when Daily Telegraph Berlin correspondent Kate Connolly questioned whether his honeymoon with the Berlin Philharmonic was over. ”While Rattle romps expressively on the podium,” she wrote, “the Philharmonic musicians sometimes tend to play as inconsequentially as if they were a wife reaching to the fridge to get out a beer for her husband.” This produced much huffing and puffing on both sides of the argument, with Rattle variously accused of being both unadventurous and too wedded to contemporary repertoire. It was his conducting of standard repertoire that continued to produce mixed reviews, a familiar claim being that he lived for the moment rather than the musical line. It was not just music that kept Rattle in the headlines. In August he was reported to have left his second wife, American-born author Candace Allen, for the Czech mezzo Magdalena Kozena.

While the German press chewed over various Rattle matters, back in his home country Wagner was declared a road hazard by Britain’s RAC Foundation for Motoring, which named the “Ride of the Valkyries” one of the pieces most likely to cause accidents if listened to while driving. The “Dies Irae” from Verdi’s Requiem was declared a no-no, too.

France got a new culture minister in Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, his predecessor carrying the can for an inability to stop the widespread strikes by performing artists that caused the cancellation or curtailment of several prominent festivals.

In Austria, where some people were still in shock over the arrival of women in the ranks of the Vienna Philharmonic, the Vienna Boys’ Choir broke another tradition by swapping their trademark sailor suits for new outfits described as making them look like “extras from Star Trek.” The choir caused further shockwaves among Viennese polite society by including some Metallica and Madonna in their catholic repertoire.

Recording
Slash and burn was a likely epitaph for the recording business, companies slashing artists and staff while buyers burnt their own CDs, or settled for digital files. Warner, Universal, EMI, and BMG all hit the headlines for swingeing cuts. Sony and BMG spent much of the year fearing a thumbs down from the European Union for its proposed merger but emerged smiling when the Brussels bureaucrats decided they could not find enough evidence that the deal would harm consumers. As the two companies prepared to climb into bed together, BMG shedding 60 percent of its artist roster (as well as a reported 10,000 employees) along the way, another pair of would-be lovers cried “What about us?” A few years back, Brussels disapproved of a liaison between EMI and Warner, who now stepped forward in the hope of a long-delayed consummation of their affair.

There were shockwaves among the independent labels when a high court ruled that Hyperion Records should pay copyright fees to Lionel Sawkins for preparing a performing edition of four 300-year-old motets, leaving the company with hefty legal bills and setting a precedent with wide implications for the recording business.

One man waving farewell to that business was EMI Classics President Peter Alward, who stepped down as president in November, while former Vivendi Universal Chairman Jean-Marie Messier was arrested under suspicion of possible stock manipulation.

While the RIAA was showering lawsuits on illegal downloaders in the U.S., its U.K. counterpart, the British Phonographic Industry, launched legal action against two online retailers for selling CD imports but played down suggestions in the Financial Times that it was launching an official investigation of Amazon.com.

Orchestras
As Rattle continued to polarize opinion with the Berlin Philharmonic, two of the city’s other eight full-scale symphony orchestras were reported to be on the point of merger: the Berlin Symphony and the Rundfunk-sinfonieorchester, with 90 musicians falling by the wayside. But the German orchestra that claimed the headlines was the Beethoven Orchestra in Bonn, where the violin section brought a bizarre lawsuit demanding higher payment than the rest of the ensemble on the reasoning that they played more notes. The suit was dropped on the day it was due to hit the court.

Donald Runnicles was rumored to be lined up to take over from Leonard Slatkin at the BBC Symphony (which made history in January by broadcasting all four minutes and 33 seconds of John Cage’s famous 4’33” silence). At the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, players passed a vote of no confidence in Gerard Schwarz and the management upset local dignitaries by announcing that his contract would not be renewed in 2006, two years before the city becomes European Capital of Culture. The London Symphony celebrated its centennial by plunging into the red to the tune of $925,000, largely as a result of its stewardship of a new education center, then learnt that it was to lose its long-standing managing director, Clive Gillinson, to Carnegie Hall.

Bernard Haitink marked his 75th birthday by conducting Barbican concerts with the Royal Concertgebouw, London Symphony, Berlin Philharmonic and the Dresden Staatskapelle. He also conducted the Staatskapelle to great acclaim at the Proms, but during the summer announced that he would be stepping down as chief conductor after less than two years in the job. He was reported to have been disgruntled by the appointment of Fabio Luisi as conductor of Dresden’s affiliated company, the Semper Opera.

Missing from the BBC Proms was the Cleveland Orchestra, turning down two concerts because no extra cash was offered for radio broadcast and internet streaming. London’s West End ran its own version of a Broadway fight, with musicians threatening to strike if impresario Cameron Mackintosh carried out a plan to replace 12 musicians in Les Misérables with a virtual orchestra.

In Bratislava, Slovak Philharmonic artistic director-designate Jirí Belohlávek quit before he had started, claiming that the Slovak cultural minister had reneged on a promise of more funds for the orchestra. The Göteborgs Symfoniker got a new managing and artistic director in Edward Smith, whose two-year tenure as executive director of the Toronto Symphony reached its final bar in 2002 when he tried to fire principal cellist Daniel Domb while he was on unpaid medical leave. Sydney Symphony Orchestra named corporate and finance lawyer David Maloney as new chair and director.

Orchestras far and wide mourned the loss of Carlos Kleiber, who died in July aged 74, drawing heartfelt eulogies. The Vienna State Opera’s director Ioan Holender told the Austria Press Agency: “The greatest living conductor has left us,” and few would disagree.

Opera
Scottish Opera picked up a Royal Philharmonic Society award for its Ring cycle but moved from Wagnerian myth to Greek tragedy as a series of blows threatened the company’s existence. With inadequate funding from the Scottish Executive, the company planned extensive staff cuts, with the country’s leading composer James MacMillan releasing a colorful outburst of Anglo-Saxon invective against Scotland’s new culture commission. The plot thickened with claims that the Scottish Arts Council had been nursing a secret plan to scrap the company, and reached a new low when chorus members were reported to have been given notification of their likely dismissal just ten minutes before going on stage.

With its newly refurbished theater nearing completion, English National Opera looked forward to rebuilding confidence after a traumatic period, but suffered repeated postponements, a production of Nixon in China falling by the wayside. Undaunted, the company set about getting its name in the news with a series of initiatives, playing an act of Valkyrie at a celebrated rock festival at Glastonbury, covering London’s Trafalgar Square in Astroturf for an al fresco performance of La Bohème (cancelled as a result of the English “summer” weather), and commissioning a rap group to produce a new work about Libya’s Colonel Gadhafi. It was all good for column inches, but many observers wished the company would concentrate on its bread-and-butter work and beefing up its vocal strength. There was more press coverage when it was revealed that a new company policy statement advised staff not to call each other “darling,” which would constitute sexual harassment.

The Royal Opera shot itself in the foot in March by sacking Deborah Voigt from a June production of Ariadne auf Naxos since her generous proportions would not do justice to the little black dress the designer had in mind for the part. The soprano got a good deal of supportive publicity as a result, and her slimline replacement sang to mixed reviews.

The Voigt episode was judged to be the best operatic fat-lady story since the time another ample soprano got stuck in a hotel revolving door, allegedly rebuffing the manager’s helpful suggestion that she should try coming in sideways with the remark: “Honey, I ain’t got no sideways.”

The Royal Opera was on safer ground announcing that 100 of its best opera and ballet seats would be up for grabs on Monday evenings for just £10 ($18), claiming that 39 percent of patrons in 2002 had been first-time callers. Impresario Raymond Gubbay launched a new company, Savoy Opera, aiming to attract operagoers to London’s West End with low-cost opera in English. It was a useful experiment in discovering whether the city could sustain three opera houses, but the company closed after two months of unexpectedly poor ticket sales.

In Munich, the Bavarian State Opera boasted that its 2004-05 season would be “the longest and richest season of all the major opera houses worldwide with no fewer than 44 operatic productions, 14 ballet productions, five new operatic productions, and one newly prepared production” over a 50-week period. Finnish National Opera was hit by a four-week strike, but it gained a new general music director in 25-year old Mikko Franck.

Winners
Singers took pride of place in prize-giving ceremonies, with Renée Fleming honored for “Outstanding Contribution to Music” at the Classical Brits and Thomas Allen picking up the BBC Radio 3 Listeners Award at the Royal Philharmonic Society Awards, where the Audience Development Award went to “Operatunity,” an extraordinary production for Channel 4 television in which young hopefuls with no experience of opera had the chance to train and compete for a place in an English National Opera production. There was a posthumous RPS award for the much-loved soprano Susan Chilcott, who died aged 40 in September 2003. In Brussels, 22-year old Polish soprano Iwona Sobotka won the Queen Elisabeth Competition. James Conlon was made a Commander of Arts and Letters, France’s highest cultural honor.

There was less good news for singers with the closure of the Wigmore Song International Competition, a casualty of the hall’s new management. Composers Steven Burke and Harold Meltzer were among the winners of the 2004-05 Rome Prize, held by the American Academy in Rome.

New music
It was perhaps inevitable that Thomas Adès’s first full-length commission for the Royal Opera would to some degree fail to measure up to the pre-performance hype, and The Tempest opened to mixed reviews. But it is a highly inventive work and Adès’s star remains in the ascendant. Sir Harrison Birtwistle had a new opera to display, too, his 90-minute music-theater work Io Passion, opening the Aldeburgh Festival, revealing some of the composer’s most lyrical music to date.

Another iconoclastic composer, Philip Glass, unveiled a new work under the stars at the vast 1,843-year old amphitheater of the Herod Atticus Theater in the shadow of the Acropolis in Athens. Commissioned by the Cultural Olympiad, the 90-minute Orion featured Glass’s ensemble with soloists from an eclectic array of musical cultures. While racial polarization increasingly dominated news bulletins, Glass quietly put on a salutary display of widely divergent cultures working together to produce something beautiful. ?

Keith Clarke is editor of Classical Music magazine and a regular contributor to MusicalAmerica.com.