At a distance,from row 20 of the orchestra circle onwards, the jurors of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra scrutinize the musician who would like to be one of them.Maestro Zubin Mehta, chief conductor of the orchestra for more than 40 years, sits surrounded by the representatives of the string sections: the concertmaster is among them, the principal cellist, the principal double bassist. All of them belong to the committee that is to decide which of the three candidates who are playing today is worthy of being accepted into the orchestra. All of them have suffered through this examination themselves. They know the oppressive fear of failure, these moments, in which wind players suddenly catch their breath and string players' bows tremble. They all have an idea what it takes to be accepted. "We are searching for musicians who have something to give," says Peter Marck, the principal bassist, "who have an attitude of their own, an internal sound."
"Vanhal" – Zubin Mehta's announcement comes from the auditorium. Excerpts from the double bass concerti by Johann Baptist Vanhal and Serge Koussevitzky are on the list of pieces that the candidate has to present. Upright, with his left leg bent and his stretched right leg at the lower ribof his instrument, he begins to play. His tone sounds cautiously nervous and is accompanied by a strange crunch somewhere below him. The double bass player ignores it; he cannot be distracted during this examination, which will determine his musical life. "Slower," Mehta interrupts him, not because the young musician in his black, short-sleeved t-shirt is too fast, but only in order to see how he deals with instructions regarding changes of tempo. The candidate now plays not really more slowly, but at least with a more powerful sound. His upper body bends down lower, when the crunch suddenly gets louder, then there is a crash – and the wooden chair collapses underneath him.
Shocked silence in the auditorium. And then no one can contain himself any longer, the jury bursts into thunderous laughter. Only the conductor remains serious. "I'm only glad it wasn't the double bass," Mehta says dryly and waits, until a stage hand has passed a new chair to the desperate examinee. Mehta conducted this orchestra in wartime, when Israel was under rocket fire,he conducted during a state of emergency, when the spectators in the auditorium were wearing gas masks. So why should he take such a trifle into consideration or feel pity for the nervous bassist? "Continue," Mehta says impassively. And among the wreckage of the stool, the young bassist starts anew.
Whoever wants to be accepted into the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra must know that this is not simply an orchestra but rathe ra symbol for musical resistance, must know that the state of emergency made up of war and crises belongs to the normalcy of these musicians.
The entire Jewish history of the 20th century is reflected in this orchestra – anti-Semitism and Shoah as well as Zionism and the founding of the State of Israel. Violence and fear make up the existential sounding box of this orchestra just as hopes and dreams. All disruptions of the Israeli past, but also all inconsistencies of the Israeli present are to be found in this orchestra.
Mordechai Rechtman sits upright in a black leather armchair and looks out of the window at the cityscape of Tel Aviv in the afternoon light. He offers a bowl of fresh cherries and grapes. His audition dates back seventy-one years to 1938, when Mordechai Rechtman was barely twelve and hardly tallerthan his bassoon. Only four years had he been in Palestineat the time,and yet he immediately received a scholarship and was soon accepted into the orchestra. "It was like a miracle to me that I was accepted," says Rechtman. Palestine was still small, there still wasn't a large scene of excellently trained musicians at the time. "It was a bassoonless country," he says and laughs, "that was my luck."
Mordechai Rechtman belongs to the generation that fled Germany evenbefore the war. Born 1926 in Wuppertal, Rechtman's family fled in 1934 into what was then Palestine. He remembers how the 2nd grade teacher in the school in Barmen counted the children according to their religions: "Jew," "Christian." Mordechai Rechtman raises his hand, counting in the air, and recollects how the children surrounded him in the school yard and screamed, "You're a Jew," "Stab him!"
Zeev Steinberg, a violist from Germany, arrived at the same time as Rechtman, however initially without his family. One day after Hitler came to power, on January 31 1933, Steinberg's father, a physician in Trier, had written a letter to the Jewish Agency in Berlin and asked to immediately take his son Zeev, who at the time was still singing in the choir of Trier Cathedral, to Palestine. "I belonged to the first group of children who arrived in Palestine, and we were shocked," remembers 91 year-old Steinberg. He is sitting in his little house in Kiryat Ono, east of Tel Aviv, surrounded with books and photos, in which he can be seen with his viola and conductors he used to admire. "After all, we were coming from the Germany of the Stürmer, where Jews appeared only as caricatures, and then we landed here, and the first Jewish children we saw were blond and blue-eyed."
Steinberg's father had read Mein Kampf early on and intuitedthat Hitler would make good on his announcement of the persecution of the Jews."He tried to convince my grandfather to flee," tells Zeev Steinberg, "but he wanted to stay in the old age home with his 'skat' buddies." In 1942, at the age of 82, the grandfather was deported to Theresienstadt. Eight days later he was dead.
"The first musicians who arrived here knew what was going to happen," says Mordechai Rechtman, "the orchestra would never have been founded without the persecution of the Jews in Europe." Already in the beginning of the thirties, the Polish violinist Bronisław Huberman had seen the catastrophe looming. He persuaded 75 musicians from European orchestras to emigrate to Palestine and found an orchestra of their own there. On December 26, 1936 the famous conductor Arturo Toscanini came to Palestine, in order to conduct the first concert of what was still called Palestine Orchestra at the time. Without a fee, but with the aspiration, "I am doing this for humanity."
It was Hungarian, Polish, German and Austrian Jews who formed the core of the first orchestra, hardly anyone spoke Hebrew, most spoke German. They were people with the same experiences and traditions, friends who celebrated together and even went on vacation together. The sense of community was so strong that they organized the orchestra in a self-governing cooperative.
"The identity and also the sound of the orchestra were German," says Zeev Steinberg, adjusting his huge horn-rimmed glasses. It was the Austrian school, the warm, gentle sound of the strings, not always entirely disciplined, but always with a lot of feeling, which determined the sound of the orchestra in the first years.
A lot of money there wasn't for this.Zeev Steinberg worked in the Jewish underground organization Haganah on the side, taught music and drove a cab. About Arab inhabitants Steinberg does not say anything – as if there had never been any contact with them. "When we came to Palestine in 1934 we had an Arab friend," Mordechai Rechtman remembers and adds tersely, "He had to flee later."
The young orchestra was the expression of a double community: a lost one, of which it reminded with its music, and a new one which it brought aboutwith its music. The orchestra lived with this utopia of a Jewish state in Israel and contributed to its becoming a reality. It made musicwith the awareness of the Shoah without ever talking about it onstage. "I do not know any orchestra," says Maestro Zubin Mehta, the chief conductor, "that makes music with this kind of history." With the founding of the state the orchestra received its currentname: Israel Philharmonic Orchestra,in short:IPO.
At the celebration of the Declaration of Independence in May 1948 it played the Israeli national anthem Hatikvah, The Hope, and it sounded like an echo out of mourning and pride, the entire ambivalence of survival. It was not just how this orchestra made music that touched people, but that it made music at all. The listeners, Jewish immigrants from Europe, survivors of the camps or thosewho had lost their relatives, heard the music with which they had grown up, which they had heard in the concert halls of Vienna or Berlin, Amsterdam or Paris; they listened to Beethoven, Brahms or Mahler and thus attached themselves to the world from which they had been expelled. "Only Wagner we couldn't play," says Mordechai Rechtman, "out of respect for those in Israel who connect painful memories with it."
In the newly established State of Israel the orchestra now no longer played only to resist the shadows of the past,but also the fragility of the present. In November 1948, in the middle of the first Arab-Israeli war, the orchestra gave an open-air concert in front of 5,000 exhausted but proud soldiers of the Israeli army in the newly conquered dunes of Beersheva.They played the B Major Piano Concerto by Mozart with the then nearly unknown Leonard Bernstein as soloist and conductor. "What was unbelievable wasn't the orchestra," remembers Zeev Steinberg, "but the soldiers who were sitting there on rocks or in the sand or simply standing and listening. They were totally covered in dust and filthy."
The musicians of the Israel Philharmonic developed a sense for the times of distress in Israel, in which their music was not only listened to but needed. An orchestra in a state of emergency, which was always quickly at handwhen there was a need to console or celebrate somewhere. Sometimes the musicians were summonedby the military to do so. They drove to Haifa in armored vehicles in order to make music there, gave concerts for wounded soldiers in military hospitals. "We always played," Mordechai Rechtman describes this ethical task,"we never stopped." They were supported by great conductors and soloists who arrived from all over the world out of solidarity with the state of Israel: Isaac Stern, Arthur Rubinstein, Leonard Bernstein, Pinchas Zuckerman, Yitzhak Perlman, they all appeared with the orchestra and they all waived their fees, as if for them it were taken for granted.
Just before the Six-Day-War broke out in 1967, the then 31-year-old Zubin Mehta was in Puerto Rico at a festival. Since 1961, the young Indian had been conducting the orchestra. When he heard that the Austrian conductor Erich Leinsdorf, who was scheduled for the next concert, had left the country helter-skelter for fear of the war, Mehta, perching on an ammunitions box in a supply plane, travelled to Israel, in order to be with the orchestra during the crisis. When he finally arrived in Israel, the war had already broken out. After the Israeli troops re-conquered East Jerusalem, Leonard Bernstein in the USA decided, out of joy over the conquest of the city which had been divided since 1948, to travel to Israel and conduct on Mount Scopus.
The area around Mount Scopus of the Hebrew University had just been conquered again. The people, shakenby the war, flocked to the concert, for which Bernstein had chosen the Resurrection Symphony in C minor by Gustav Mahler, because for him, Israel was "a symbol of resurrection." "There still were wounded people," remembers Zeev Steinberg, "there were widows who had just lost their husbands." Among the listeners on Mount Scopus was also the first tierof Israeli politicians: David Ben Gurion, Moshe Dayan and Golda Meir. "That was a different generation of politicians than today's," says Zeev Steinberg, "they had not yet switched off their reason while governing."
The cellist Enrique Maltz, 51 years old, is sitting in the somewhat run-down foyer of the Mann Auditorium. Around the building there isan eternal construction site, at which work is done only occasionally and which gives the interior a bunker-like atmosphere. It's rehearsal break time, the Argentine has left his cello in the dressing room, Russian cleaning ladies are cleaning uparound the rows of tables. "I came to my audition in 1988 in a tie and a suit, because this is what I was used to from Argentina," Maltz says ina quiet voice. "And in the auditorium the jury was sitting, chatting and dressed very casually. That was a culture shock."
The orchestra still lives on the enthusiastic spectators; it still has 26,000 subscribers who bequeath their season tickets to their children like a valuable asset. But the orchestra also has to fight for contributions and support by the state. While it is considereda national icon and is celebrated abroad as a figurehead of the State of Israel, the state only supports the orchestra with aroundEUR 1.5 million, barely12 percent of the budget. The rest comes from contributions from abroad and incomefrom tours.
Maltz looks a little tired. They have been rehearsing since the early morning. Beethoven's Symphony no 7 in A Major. Conductor Mehta is in Israel for the month; for the entire week, rehearsals are planned in daytime and concerts in the evenings. Soon the orchestra will go on its summer tour to Latin America – the days are precisely organizedand every minute is planned out, which is why Maltz is still carrying around the carefully wrapped sandwich which he meant to eat hours ago.
As a boy of thirteen, Maltz had played for the American cellist Leonard Rose in Buenos Aires. Rose advised Enrique's father to send the boy to the Juillard School in New York. "But we had no money. This my father explained to him in Yiddish; English he didn't know." Thereupon Rose wrote a letter of recommendation to the Israeli Embassy in Argentina. Only the state of Israel, this was the hope, would make an educationpossible for a Jewish talent without money.
Enrique Maltz belongs to the new immigrants who joined the ranks of the Israel Philharmonic in the seventies and eighties. They no longer came only from Europe but from all parts of the world, from the USA, Latin America and Russia. German as a common language, as in the daysof Mordechai Rechtman and Zeev Steinberg, the bassoon and the viola from Wuppertal and Trier, no longer exists. Now, Hebrew is spoken, English or Russian. Likewise, the reasons for immigration have changed. The new musicians no longer fled from anti-Semitism alone, but also from poverty and the lack of opportunities in their home countries. This generation was not necessarily unified by its view of Israel, they shared no Zionist utopia but sometimes only the wish to leave something behind, to find a secure existence.
At the time,thirty years after its establishment, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra had become an icon of the growing Israeli state, but the intimacy of the first years was gone. "On the day of my audition, the orchestra gave a concert in the evening, Brahms, Symphony no. 2," Maltz laughs, "it was total chaos, technical chaos, absolutely undisciplined – but such passion!"
The rehearsal resumes. The musicians are sitting in theirsummer clothes in their chairs in the semi-circle, among the strings of late many young women. Mehta is standing on the podium, the open score of the Beethoven symphony in front of him, the orchestra begins, plays a few bars, until Mehta interrupts: "Not even student orchestras have a problem with this passage!" the Maestro shouts impatiently, "because they simply play what is written!"
His strictness cannot belie the fact that Zubin Mehta has always respected the unique heritage of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, since he conducted it for the first time in 1961. The special passion of this orchestra, this burdenof history, have always attracted him. Perhaps also because the meaning of music is a very special one for people in distress. He has consigned his soul to Jewish history as if it were his own. For his ability to empathize with vulnerability,for his commitment to this country Mehta is revered in Israel: not only for his journey to Israel in the Six-Day-War in 1967, but also because of his concerts during the first Gulf War in 1991.It is part of collective memory in the country that Mehta conducted unfazed when Saddam Hussein was attacking Israel with Scud missiles.
Zubin Mehta has defended Israel whenever it has been attacked, but he has also criticized it, has interfered and has again and again touched the limits with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in the past and in the present: his own musical ones, but also the historical-political ones. He criticizes the current Netanyahu government and its settlement policy ("they aren't just settlements, they are entire cities!"), he longs forArab musicians amidst the Jewish ones in his orchestra ("That would be a dream").
Of all famous and moving concerts, Mehta relates in his austereroom, which bears the euphemistic name "Zubin Mehta Maestro Suite," especially close to his heart is the one that he conducted in 1977 on the Lebanese border. The Israel Philharmonic Orchestra gave an open air concert for a mixed audience of Israelis and Lebanese, on both sides of the border."People were so unbelievably happy," the maestro says with a bright smile, "we played Dvořák's Slavonic Dances, and they danced. And the Arabs hugged the musicians."
Mehta challenges the orchestra. Time and again. He, the Mumbai-born Indian, who became an honorary citizen of Tel Aviv, is used to crossing his own limits. He has shown how it can succeed to be certain of one's cultural identity and still open up to another one. And thus he dares to approach also in Israelthe wounds that mark boundaries, because they are supposed to be untouchable, the taboos that have grown out of suffering and yet continue to keep the suffering present,like the music of Richard Wagner. In 1981 Mehta had played the overture to Tristan and Isolde in a concert in Tel Aviv, not without declaring himself to the listeners and givingindividual musicians of the orchestra and the audience the possibility to leave the hall, so that they would not have to hear the music which awakens in them painful memories of National Socialism. "In Israel, we must respect those with the numbers on their arms," says Mehta, but he also knows that with the descendents of the younger generations the emotional topography in his orchestra and in Israel is changing.
A third of today's orchestra consists of native Israelis, such as the young bassoonist Uzi Shalev.50 percent of the musicians hail from the former Soviet Union. At one million people, in Israel itself the Russian immigrants have already become the largest minority. The new, rightist-populist foreign minister of the Netanyahu government, Avigdor Lieberman, belongs to this group of immigrants. The technically excellently trained Russians have musically professionalized the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, but they have also set an entirely different social dynamic going. "The orchestra used to consist only of people who came from a monarchy or from the ghetto," Mehta explains the mentalities that are now clashingin his orchestra, "and these people are different from those who come from a communist regime." The differences are apparent every day, for example when some of the Russian musicians question the cooperative self-governance of the orchestra because they consider it old-fashioned.
Ilya Konovalov, the young concertmaster of the orchestra, belongs to this Russian generation that gives the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra a new character. He was born in Novosibirsk in 1977 and came to Israel only for the audition. "I am a Jew, but that wasn't my reason to come to Israel." For Konovalov and many of his colleagues, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra is about making music and nothing else. They want to learn from the excellent soloists who appear with the orchestra, from the famous conductors, they want to improve the musical identity of the orchestra, "but what disturbs me," admits Konovalov, "is this political meaning, the emphasis on the Jewish identity of the orchestra."
Along with the chilly relationship to the utopian history of the orchestra goes a certain condescension towards the quality of the non-Russian colleagues. "In the past they simply took whatever was there," says principal cellist Marcel Bergman, who was born in 1950 in Czernowitz and came to Israel in 1978, "in the string sections one half played and the other just pretended."
For this new generation it is not the respect for the feelings of survivors that speaks against the music of Richard Wagner but rather the respect for the financial repercussions for the orchestra. "Of course we could play Wagner," says Konovalov, "but for fear of economic pressure it's better to give up on it." For Konovalov, this is also the reason for the musically rather conservative repertoire of the orchestra. The taste of the Israeli audienceis conservative, and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra is dependent on its subscribers and ticket sales.
In the present political and economic situation it is not getting easier for the orchestra. Because of the economic crisis, Avi Shoshani, the manager of the orchestra, fears for future revenues. Two tours have just been cancelled, because the promoters cannot fulfill their financial promises."The concert tour in Scandinavia was cancelled," says Shoshani and looks at his desk, which is ladenwith papers and yellow post-it notes, "but my gut feeling tells me that it also has to do with the Gaza war and anti-Israel emotions."
The orchestra, which used to be celebrated as a symbol of the state of Israel, is now suddenly also punished as a symbol. For some in the younger generation a changed relationship with the Palestinians has therefore become a moral obligation. Uzi Shalev, the Israeli-born bassoonist, has learned Arabic for this purpose. "The Gaza war disappointed me," says the cellist Enrique Maltz. Shalev and Maltz are worried that as the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, they are associated with the Israeli offensive. "That's nonsense," objectsthe old Zeev Steinberg, "the orchestra has as much to do with Gaza as I have with tightrope walking."
The union this orchestra once formed with the Jewish community in Israel remains unbroken, but it has become more complex. Perhaps this is the price of normalcy, for which once one did not even dare to hope."The old generation lived in Israel in a permanent state of emergency, every event was something special," says Peter Marck, the double bass player. "That was a different world…" He suddenly pauses, thinks for a moment and then adds: "We have to accept the whole story, the chaos, we have to accept all that – but only then do we also have this special sound, this passion."
Of the three candidates who auditioned for a position as a double bassist in the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, none was accepted. Perhaps they did not have it, this special sound.
Translation: Barbara A. Schmutzler and Marisa Elana James
Copyright with DIE ZEIT