A musical tour of Berlin: from Wagner’s epic opera to techno raves

29.01.2024 - 11:17 / theguardian.com / Marlene Dietrich

Music soundtracks our travels, kills time and distracts, entertainingly. In Berlin, which has more than 300 train stations and where you can see everything panoramically from the overhead S-Bahn, a well-loaded smartphone or MP3 player turns a journey into a film with a score.

I have more records related to Berlin than to any other city. I can’t help feeling the city should have a nexus or mother venue where all the currents cross – a musical equivalent of the mighty Berlin Hauptbahnhof, opened in 2006, a powerful symbol of reunification.

But which artists would play there?

For a child of the 1970s, it would be easy to start, and end, with David Bowie. But Berlin is more interesting than any single artist. The city was on the old German classical music circuit. Weber’s Der Freischütz, considered the first romantic German opera, premiered in 1821 at the Schauspielhaus – known today as Konzerthaus Berlin.

The Berliner Philharmoniker was founded in 1882 and is based at the extraordinary, asymmetrical, tent-like Philharmonie Berlin. The orchestra’s first ever recording, of Wagner’s Parsifal, was conducted by Alfred Hertz in 1913. The hisses and crackles reflect the rudimentary technology; musicians crammed themselves into a tiny room to sit as close as possible to a gigantic recording horn.

The Weimar Republic had its headquarters at the Reichstag, though the mythological narrative wishes it were run from cabarets and dive bars. Tourists search in vain for Weimar decadence, which was short-lived and hugely exaggerated. As for finding the haunts vaguely alluded to in Christopher Isherwood’s novels Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939), as Isherwood said to Bowie: “People forget that I’m a very good fiction writer.”

At the end of 1930, after several moves, Isherwood settled into a flat, at Nollendorfstrasse 17 in the Schöneberg district, which he shared with the British war correspondent Jean Ross, the model for Sally Bowles in his fiction – and, ultimately, the musical – Cabaret.

There were 38 cabarets in Berlin in the early 1920s. Possibly, Isherwood caught a show called Tingel-Tangel that took place in the Theater des Westens (Kantstrasse 12). Marlene Dietrich and Josephine Baker performed there. Berlin’s cabaret songbook is, unsurprisingly, extensive. The most famous entry is Dietrich’s Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss auf Liebe eingestellt (Falling in Love Againis the English version),recorded in both languages for the 1930 film The Blue Angel, which was shot at theBabelsberg film studioin nearby Postdam. Danish tenor Max Hansen – who founded the Kabarett der Komiker – recorded lots of cheeky show songs, including Meine liebe Lola andWar’n Sie schon mal in mich verliebt?, which satirised