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Germany Celebrates Wolf Biermann, a Singer Who United East and West

by Aurelia Butler 7 July 2023, 16:00

A show at the German Historical Museum honors Wolf Biermann, whose music and moral stance endeared him to audiences across the once divided country.If passers-by on a busy bridge in central Berlin on a recent summer afternoon recognized East Germany’s most famous songwriter, poet and dissident, they did not show it.Posing for this article’s photographs in front of a huge wrought iron eagle that featured on one of his best known record sleeves, Wolf Biermann, 86, smiled and tried joking with the afternoon crowd. But the office workers and tourists ignored him and continued their journeys across the river.Nearly five decades after Biermann was thrown out of East Germany for criticizing its totalitarian Communist government, the German Historical Museum is honoring him with a major exhibition. Biermann may not be recognized on the street, but the show, which opens Friday and runs through Jan. 14, 2024, proves he is far from forgotten: He is the first living person in recent memory to be the subject of such an exhibition at Germany’s national history museum.In a life that crisscrossed the East-West border that once divided Germany, Biermann’s music and principled moral stance made him a rare figure who transcended that barrier. Now, his tale is a perfect one for the united Germany to celebrate.“His story is both East German and West German history,” said Monika Boll, the exhibition’s curator. “You can’t get more German than that.”Biermann was born under Nazism, in 1936, and raised in West Germany. As a teenager, he defected to the East and made a career as a singer of witty, folk-inspired songs — until an anti-authoritarian streak in his music began to trouble the Communist authorities. For a decade from the mid-60s, Biermann’s songs, many of which he recorded in his East Berlin apartment, were smuggled to the West and released by record labels there, then smuggled back behind the iron curtain.After a 1976 concert in Cologne, West Germany, in which he criticized the government of East Germany, Biermann was barred from re-entering that country, where he had made his home.Barbara Klemm/Frankfurter Allgemeine ZeitungYet Biermann wanted to stay in the German Democratic Republic, or G.D.R. Although he was the subject of a yearslong state surveillance operation, he was never imprisoned, unlike many other critics of the government. The authorities worried about a backlash from West Germany, where the press was taking special note of Biermann’s career.In a speech at the exhibition opening on Wednesday, Claudia Roth, Germany’s culture minister, compared Biermann to a “raised middle finger” aimed at the “pride of the G.D.R. leadership.” The opening’s guests included many former East German dissidents, and Angela Merkel, Germany’s former chancellor.In an interview, Biermann said that his life story was instructive for anyone who wants to understand Germany’s complicated postwar past. “I’m the ideal counterpoint,” Bierman said, to what was typical in those decades. “To recognize what was normal, you need to look at the exception,” he added.Right from his childhood, he did the opposite of everyone around him, he added. His family was staunchly communist, he recalled, and his father was Jewish. Naturally, he said, they detested the Nazis — unlike most German families at the time.Even the British fire bombing of his hometown, Hamburg, which he only survived by diving into a canal with his mother, did not stop Biermann rooting for the Allies. In a song, he later wrote:And because I was born under the yellow starIn GermanyThat is why we took the English bombsLike gifts from heaven.His father, Dagobert Biermann, a labor organizer, was murdered in Auschwitz by the Nazis when Biermann was 6.In 1953, swimming against the historical tide, the 16-year-old Biermann moved, alone, from West Germany to the East, just as thousands were fleeing in the other direction in search of a better life. But as a convinced Communist, Biermann thought it was the G.D.R., not the capitalist West, that offered a more just and moral vision.Right from his childhood, Biermann said, he did the opposite of everyone around him.Gordon Welters for The New York TimesA talent for music was recognized during his tenure as a production assistant at Berthold Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble theater, where he had been hired by Brecht’s widow. Supported by politically connected sponsors, Biermann had gained minor notice as a singer-songwriter by 1960. If his lyrics offended some, he got away with it because of his communist bone fides, including the fact that his father was killed by fascists.But soon his lyrics and texts became too critical of the government and, in 1965, the authorities — which had tight control over cultural life — de facto banned Biermann from performing, recording or publishing in East Germany.During the 11 years in which he was also not allowed to leave the country, Biermann’s apartment became his stage and recording studio, and he was under constant watch. Over the decades, the East German state security services, known as the Stasi, watched and bugged his home, followed his car, listened to his phone calls and tried to recruit his friends and lovers.“You could say he was in the champion league — such a level of surveillance was atypical,” said Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, a historian who has studied Biermann’s Stasi file.Biermann responded ironically with “The Ballad of the Stasi,” in which he commiserates with the poor “Stasi dogs” monitoring him, who would probably end up singing his songs in bed.East German fans who were caught with Biermann’s music on bootleg cassette tapes or handbills of his verse could be arrested and locked away for years. But his apartment, which was close to the main border crossing point into West Berlin, still became a gathering place for dissident artists and thinkers. American stars, like Joan Baez and Allen Ginsburg, also visited him there.A turning point in Biermann’s career came in 1976, with a three-and-half-hour concert he gave to a sold-out hall in Cologne, on a rare visit to West Germany. He came out swinging against the “old comrades” who ran East Germany, and painted a bleak picture of life behind the wall. Three days later, while watching the news on television, he learned that he had been permanently barred from re-entry to East Germany.Demonstrators in Leipzig, East Germany, in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall Fell. The placard, in German, reads, “We want our old singer Biermann back!”Archiv Wolf Biermann; Staatsbibliothek–PK/Abteilung Handschriften und historische Drucke Biermann said he was crestfallen to be shut out of the country he held so dear, despite all its shortcomings. While hundreds of people were risking their lives crossing illegally to the West, Biermann’s heart pined for the East. “With me, everything was always the other way around — that’s almost the fundamental law,” he said.Biermann’s expulsion led to protests by East Germany’s most famous artists, writers and actors, and the government reacted with further repressions on artistic expression that remained in place until the fall of the Berlin Wall, 13 years later.After Germany’s 1990 reunification — in which he played an important role — Biermann remained active, though less in the spotlight. He continued to be a respected figure on the German left, even as he voiced unpopular opinions among his comrades: He supported the American-led war in Iraq, and criticized the peace movement that grew against it.Standing in front of the bridge’s wrought iron eagle in Berlin, Biermann recalled writing one of his most popular songs, “The Ballad of the Prussian Icarus,” after he and Ginsburg crossed the bridge in 1976 and took pictures in front of the bird. They made a bet over which of them would bring the iron creature into verse, Biermann recalled.That song, which became one of his best known, is typical Biermann, a lyrical critique of the East German state that notes:The barbed wire slowly grows deepInto the skin, the chest and boneInto the brain’s gray cellsAs tourist boats passed under its perch on the bridge, the same eagle looked out on a very different world. If Biermann now has an official place in German history, it’s because of the part he played in shaping it.Wolf Biermann: A Poet and Songwriter From GermanyThrough Jan. 14, 2024, at the German Historical Museum, in Berlin; dhm.de. More

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Stalin Once Banned This Opera in Russia, but Audiences Still Enjoy It
by Aurelia Butler 25 September 2022, 09:02
“Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” by Dmitri Shostakovich, a tale of love and betrayal once banned in Soviet Russia, is returning to the Metropolitan Opera.When Joseph Stalin gives your opera a scathing review in Pravda, history is bound to find a spot for you.Such was the case for Dmitri Shostakovich, whose “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” has certainly taken its place in the history books as a classic modern opera, but also as an infamous moment in opera history. In 1934, it was the toast of Leningrad, as St. Petersburg was known then, before setting off on a tour of the Soviet Union for nearly two years. But it was turned into a reviled piece of music after Stalin, wanting to see what all the fuss was about, attended a performance in January 1936 in Moscow.The Soviet leader called it “muddle instead of music, an ugly flood of confusing sound” and “a pandemonium of creaking, shrieking and crashes” in a review attributed to him in Pravda, then the official newspaper of the Communist Party. The opera was banned for decades in the Soviet Union, and Shostakovich feared being arrested. It returned to Russian stages, in a revised version, in 1962 under Nikita S. Khrushchev (though Shostakovich’s original opera is the standard now).As “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” returns after eight years to the Metropolitan Opera on Sept. 29 (for six performances through Oct. 21), the timing feels suddenly urgent against the backdrop of Russia’s war in Ukraine. This production, which premiered in 1994, was first directed by Graham Vick, who died in 2021, with sets and costumes by Paul Brown in a vaguely 1950s setting. For some, the opera stands as testament to one composer’s patriotism, but also to his disdain for the ruling party, all wrapped up in dissonant, volatile music and a raw depiction of lust, violence and the struggle for truth and freedom.“I think every single note he wrote was about him and how he saw the world he was living in, and in that context ‘Lady Macbeth’ is an absolutely seminal work,” said the British director Tony Palmer, whose film “Testimony” in 1988 starred Ben Kingsley as Shostakovich. “Most of the Russians knew instinctively that Shostakovich spoke for them, which says a lot about the power of his music. That’s why it will always resonate, particularly at this moment.”Keri-Lynn Wilson, the conductor, leading a rehearsal. This production will be her Metropolitan Opera debut.Evan Zimmerman/Met OperaThat resonance feels particularly strong for the conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson, who is making her Metropolitan Opera debut with this production.“The parallel right now is that Putin is trying to destroy artistic expression just as Stalin did,” Ms. Wilson said, referring to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. “This opera, to me, feels like a direct affront to that, so this is a vehicle for me to channel this incredible anger that I have toward Putin.”Ms. Wilson, who is Canadian with Ukrainian roots, for the past several months has been conducting the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, which she conceived this spring, and organizing with her husband, Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera. They helped line up the Ukrainian musicians, as well as performance dates and funding, with the assistance of the Ukrainian government, for a tour across Europe (and in Washington and New York), so moving from that experience to “Lady Macbeth” felt like a natural segue, she said.“I have cousins who are fighting, and they are writing to me and thanking me for what I’m doing with the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra,” Ms. Wilson said. “What it is for me is the feeling of doing justice to show that we can really perform Russian music while shouting at Putin.”Anger is a theme that runs throughout “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.” Based on the novella “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” by Nikolai Leskov, it tells the story of Katerina, a woman trapped in a loveless marriage who falls in love with a village worker named Sergei. The opera’s depiction of their affair is highly sexual, and after a couple of heat-of-the-moment murders gone wrong, the lovers are exiled to a Siberian labor camp and Sergei takes a new lover. The tragic ending, on an icy river, has some of Shostakovich’s most jarring and riveting music. It was a huge success — for a brief spell.“What a lot of people don’t realize is that there was an 18-month gap between opening night of this opera and when Stalin went to see it,” Mr. Palmer said. “There were more performances of this opera in Russia those 18 months than operas of Wagner, Puccini or Verdi.”Shostakovich in the early 1940s. He feared being arrested after “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” was banned in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin.Sovfoto/Universal Images Group, via Getty ImagesDespite his fear of backlash after Stalin’s review, Shostakovich continued to be incredibly prolific. In 1937, he unveiled his Fifth Symphony, which was a triumph both with the Communist Party apparatchiks, who saw it as the composer honoring the roots of classical Russian music, and with the intelligentsia of Russian culture who saw it as a requiem for the Great Purge, which Stalin had unleashed the year before.“Shostakovich put everything that he defends as a human and a composer into ‘Lady Macbeth,’ but his genius is that he found a way to compromise and exist in that world after that,” said Kirill Karabits, the Ukrainian-born chief conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra in England. “He wanted to remain true to himself but write in a way that satisfied the authorities.”“His music after ‘Lady Macbeth’ is different because it has so many layers,” he added. “He was hiding his criticism. Are his finales happy endings? Or are they happy endings through struggle?”Ms. Sozdateleva in rehearsal. She will make her Metropolitan Opera debut with “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.”Evan Zimmerman/Met OperaFor the Russian soprano Svetlana Sozdateleva, making her Metropolitan Opera debut in a role she has sung several times in Europe, the opera stands on its own for what Shostakovich intended as an artist and a human being: the power of love and betrayal.“The most important thing for me is the theme of all-consuming powerful love and how important it was for Shostakovich to portray such deep feelings and create such a complex character,” Ms. Sozdateleva said. “What’s remarkable is that by the end of the opera, she is a murderer, but the audience is sympathetic to her.”Shostakovich’s understanding of his heroine — and his own reality in the Stalin era — plays into the opera’s rocky history, not to mention its legacy as bold art full of messages and even musical notes that are still being deciphered.“If you wrote a line of poetry that said, ‘Stalin was a bad man,’ then you were dead,” said Mr. Palmer, the director of the Shostakovich film. “But if you wrote a harsh tune that says it, it was a lot harder to prove.” More
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Reckoning With Memories of Budapest
by Aurelia Butler 15 August 2022, 09:00
In early April, when my flight arrived at Ferenc Liszt International Airport, László Borsos was waiting for me at the arrivals gate. I hadn’t seen the man in 28 years. I scanned the crowd and found him standing there with a wild grin on his face, his glasses dangling elegantly over a white collared shirt.After a quick hug, and with a wave of his hand, he gestured for me to hurry along; he was parked just beyond the sliding glass doors. And so, feeling myself slip back into an old habit, I threw my duffel bag over my shoulder, shook my head in disbelief and did what for four years as a child had been part of my daily routine: I followed him outside for a ride through Budapest.Budapest’s Castle District, in the distance, framed through a stained-glass window in the Parliament building.A university student peruses the selection at a small bookshop near the Metropolitan Ervin Szabó Library.St. Stephen’s Basilica, named after the first King of Hungary.It would be nearly impossible to overstate how dramatically the course of my life changed when my family moved to Hungary in the early 1990s. Both of my parents grew up in Ohio — my mother in a poor corner of Youngstown, and my father in a middle-class neighborhood in the sleepy town of Dover. When I was born in 1985, the last of three children, we lived in a small split-level house in Austintown, a suburb of Youngstown. My dad, one of the few people in my extended family with a college degree, was 11 years into a promising but as-yet unexceptional career as a finance manager at General Electric. Neither of my parents had ventured far from their childhood circumstances.In 1989, though, as political reforms swept through Central and Eastern Europe, General Electric strode into Hungary and purchased a light-bulb manufacturer, Tungsram, then one of the country’s largest and most iconic brands. The acquisition, orchestrated by Jack Welch, made for front-page news — and my dad, riding the wave of a stunning historical moment, accepted an overseas assignment to help introduce capitalist practices to a business with a long-running communist past.My dad, Karl, on the right, with Ferenc Musits, the chief accountant at the Tungsram factory in the city of Nagykanizsa, in the early ’90s.Seated in between my elder siblings, Nicholas and Emelia, in 1994. My mom, Sophia, ever busy behind the scenes (and as a result rarely in front of the camera), took the photo.We arrived in Budapest in the summer of 1990 — with my grandmother improbably in tow — to find our reality entirely transformed. My brother, sister and I were enrolled in an international school, where, unlike in suburban Ohio, our classmates’ nationalities spanned the globe. My parents, who until then had barely left the United States, were soon shepherding us on trips to Krakow, Madrid, Rome. We bought a brand-new Volvo station wagon. And perhaps most lavish of all, which to my parents must have been a comically unfathomable luxury: General Electric hired us a driver — a man named László, who arrived each morning in his impeccably clean Opel Kadett to ferry my siblings and me across the city to our school.László Borsos in April. Hired by General Electric as our private driver in 1990, he now owns and operates his own taxi business. When he learned from my mom that I was traveling to Budapest, he insisted on picking me up at the airport.In the 32 years since then, Hungary has undergone its own dramatic transformation. Once considered the most entrepreneurial and Western-friendly of the former Eastern Bloc nations, it has, of late, become a poster child of nationalism, illiberalism and the erosion of democratic values, offering a political vision that has been emulated in Poland and admired by populist figures in France, Italy and the United States.Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, now the longest serving elected leader in Europe, has steadily consolidated power by rewriting the Constitution, overhauling election laws to favor his Fidesz party, undermining the independence of the courts and bringing most of the country’s media under the control of his political allies. The influence of his autocratic tendencies has also seeped into the country’s civic and cultural life, leading to the expulsion of a liberal university and affecting the leadership and offerings at theaters and museums.I sensed some of the troubling undercurrents within minutes of my arrival, when László, on our drive from the airport, began echoing Kremlin-friendly conspiracies about the war in Ukraine, which have been widely disseminated via the state-owned media and pro-government news outlets.A pro-Ukraine rally, held in late April near the Parliament, drew many hundreds of supporters.A nearby pro-Russia rally, held the same day in Szabadság tér, or Liberty Square, a few hundred feet away, drew a much smaller and less lively crowd — and an unexpected array of flags.Supporters of Mi Hazánk Mozgalom, or Our Homeland Movement, a far-right political party that campaigns on conspiracy theories, homophobia and anti-Roma racism, gathered outside the Ukrainian Embassy in early June. Once a fringe group, the party won parliamentary representation in the national elections held in April.Despite its modest size and economic output (its population, under 10 million, is roughly that of Michigan, and its G.D.P. roughly that of Kansas), Hungary has garnered outsize media attention in recent years because of Mr. Orbán’s self-described illiberal agenda. A number of Western journalists have descended on its capital and returned either with ominous reports about the country’s lurch toward autocracy or with obsequious interviews extolling Mr. Orbán’s conservative values. Meanwhile, amid the steady stream of polarized dispatches, I felt as though my increasingly distant memories and personal impressions of the place were being supplanted by a series of politicized caricatures.And so, earlier this year, after spending much of the pandemic traveling around the United States, I opted to push the limits of remote work and settle for a while in the city where I formed my earliest lasting memories. My hope was that I could retrace certain elements of my childhood, dust off my long-dormant language skills, reconnect with old family friends, assess the city’s political reality and, perhaps most important, get to know the place — learn its rhythms, appreciate its culture, observe the life of everyday Hungarians — from the loftier perch of adulthood.Tram 49 passes in front of the Great Market Hall. Like many of Budapest’s well-known buildings, the hall was built around the time of the country’s millennial celebration in 1896.Inside, customers line up in front of a meat vendor.The market’s airy interior.If Hungary has become the European Union’s most defiant state, then Budapest has become Hungary’s most defiantly liberal enclave — to the extent that short-term visitors to the city might easily miss the signs of a tense political environment.The opposition parties are noisy. Protests are commonplace. In part as a response to the passage of recent anti-L.G.B.T.Q. legislation, the Budapest Pride march has drawn huge crowds in recent years, and L.G.B.T.Q.-friendly venues are on the rise. Even the existence of progressive community centers — like Auróra, a social hub that offers a bar and a concert venue and has rented office space to N.G.O.s that focus on marginalized groups — suggests a kind of political and intellectual tolerance.And yet behind many of the organizations that are out of step with the ruling party’s politics is a story of instability — regarding funding, legal protection, reputation. According to a 2022 report by the Artistic Freedom Initiative, Hungarian artists and institutions that oppose Fidesz “find it increasingly difficult — and some speculate even futile — to earn state support without yielding to governmental demands and thus compromising their artistic or personal integrity.”Mikszáth Kálmán Square, in District 8, is often crowded with university students in the afternoons and evenings.Kolibri Kávézó, a small artisanal cafe. Famous for its fin-de-siècle coffee houses, Budapest is now home to dozens of trendy third-wave shops.The underground concert venue at Auróra, a social hub that has rented office space to N.G.O.s that focus on marginalized groups.No contemporary portrait of Budapest could overlook its grandeur: its opulent architecture, its stirring public spaces, its many richly appointed interiors. The bathhouses — Gellért in particular, with its Art Nouveau ornamentation and stunningly beautiful tiles — are among the city’s most treasured attractions. (Hungary is rich with thermal water springs; there are 123 in Budapest alone.)Other highlights include the Hungarian State Opera House, which reopened this year after an extensive restoration, and the newly minted Museum of Ethnography, part of an ambitious development project — opposed by local politicians — to transform Budapest’s main park into a must-visit cultural hub for tourists and locals.Two of the thermal pools at Gellért. To the right, just through the archway, is a cold plunge pool and a steam room.The main hall of the opera house during a performance of “Mefistofele” in late April. The chandelier, which weighs more than three tons, illuminates a fresco by the German-Hungarian painter Károly Lotz.Concertgoers during an intermission.The swooping lines of the new Museum of Ethnography, which opened in May. (The museum was previously housed in a building opposite the Parliament.)Working New York hours in Central Europe meant that my days were largely free until 3 p.m. (after which I worked until around 11 p.m.), leaving me with an abundance of time in the mornings and early afternoons to explore the city.Some days I spent in single-minded pursuit of specific artists: the architectural splendors of Ödön Lechner, whose work has come to define the Hungarian Secession movement, a localized expression of Art Nouveau; or the mosaics and stained-glass art of Miksa Róth, whose legacy is scattered throughout the city.The Royal Postal Savings Bank, which opened in the early 1900s, is one of Ödön Lechner’s masterworks. Now home to the Hungarian State Treasury, the building showcases a range of Hungarian folk motifs — though the striking details on the roof are largely hidden from view at street level. (When a contemporary pointed this out, Lechner is rumored to have said, “The birds will see them.”)The Hungarian Institute of Geology, another of Lechner’s designs.Inside the Institute of Geology. The mosaics and fossil-like sculptural forms were designed to evoke the interior of a cave.Other days I spent roaming more freely, poking my head into the charming courtyards of unassuming residential buildings or visiting with former teachers and old family friends.Exploring America’s National ParksThe glories of the U.S. national park system draw hundreds of millions of visitors each year.Hidden Gems: These days, serenity in nature can be elusive. But even the most popular parks have overlooked treasures.The Less-Traveled Road: When it comes to America’s national parks, it’s not all about Yosemite and the Grand Canyon. Try these lesser-known options.Ready for an Adventure: Not sure what to bring with you on your trip to a national park? Here is a list of essential gear, and these are the best apps to download.National Park Booking App: Traveler and travel industry frustration is growing with Recreation.gov, the online portal to book federal land accommodations and access.On rambles through familiar places, I felt the nostalgic potency of long-ago memories bubbling up to the surface: Here was the apartment building where Balázs Szokolay, our beloved piano teacher, lived with his mother, a sculptor. Here was our school, where, during the Persian Gulf war, the Hungarian police stationed armed guards at the gate. Here was the park where, when curiosity got the best of him, my brother ignited his shoelace with a match.In the afternoons, my feet sore from walking, I often settled in to work at a cafe or at one of the city’s many publicly accessible (and unexpectedly resplendent) libraries.Two neighbors chat in the interior of a residential building in District 8.The interior courtyard of a residential building in District 5, near Szabadság tér, or Liberty Square.A study room inside the Metropolitan Ervin Szabó Library.The library inside the Hungarian Parliament building.My favorite pastime, though, was meandering through Budapest’s grand cemeteries: Kerepesi in District 8, Farkasréti in District 12, Kozma Street in District 10. All three lie outside the popular tourist zones, which meant that, coming and going, I came to appreciate a broader swath of the city.I found that the cemeteries, filled with gorgeous statues from a range of eras, some exhibiting elements of Socialist Realism and others classically suggestive of the life’s work of the people buried beneath them, were microcosms of Budapest itself: trimmed and stately in their well-trafficked stretches, and unkempt at their fringes.The grave of Lujza Blaha, a Hungarian actress known as “the nation’s nightingale,” at Kerepesi Cemetery, the burial grounds for some of Hungary’s most famous figures — from sculptors and scientists to poets and politicians.An ill-kept grave in the far reaches of Kerepesi. The cemetery is a microcosm of Budapest: trimmed and stately in its well-trafficked stretches, and unkempt at its fringes.The Schmidl Mausoleum, built in the early 1900s for Sándor and Róza Schmidl, is a magnificent example of Hungary’s Jewish funerary art.It was the small, quiet moments that I savored the most: at first strolling past, then waving at, then eventually stopping to meet Erika Bajkó, who ran a small dog-grooming business around the corner from my apartment near Rákóczi Square; glancing up at the domed ceiling inside the entranceway to Széchenyi Baths; making an emotionally charged pilgrimage to my old home in Törökvész, a neighborhood in the Buda hills; joining the evening crowds at the middle of the Szabadság híd, or Liberty Bridge, where the heavy winds over the Danube helped wash away the late-spring and early-summer heat; studying the poetry of Miklós Radnóti, a celebrated Hungarian writer who was murdered in the Holocaust, as I wandered through the neighborhood where he lived.A woman walks two dogs past a groomer, Dog Diva, near Rákóczi Square.The dome in the entrance hall at Széchenyi Baths.An evening crowd gathers at the middle of the Szabadság híd, or Liberty Bridge.“I cannot know what this landscape means to others,” begins what is perhaps Mr. Radnóti’s most famous poem, completed less than a year before his death in 1944. Touching on themes of patriotism, foreign perception and national identity, it offers an instructive comparison of the appreciations of the land by the native-born poet and a passing enemy airman:Through his binoculars he sees the factory and the fields,but I see the worker who trembles for his toil,the forest, the whistling orchard, the grapes and graves,among the graves a grandma, weeping softly,and what from above is a railway or factory to be destroyedis just a watchman’s house; the watchman stands outsideholding a red flag, surrounded by several children,and in the courtyard of the factories a sheepdog frolics;and there’s the park with footprints of past loves …If you want to truly know this place, he seems to be telling us, then be attuned to its details, its people, the joy and suffering hidden in its everyday moments.A statue of Miklós Radnóti in Újlipótváros, or New Leopold Town.The Memorial of the Hungarian Jewish Martyrs, in the courtyard behind the the Dohány Street Synagogue. By the end of the Holocaust, some 565,000 Hungarian Jews had been murdered.A small crowd of tourists watches the sun set over the Danube River from an overlook on Gellért Hill.At Öcsi Étkezde, a small restaurant recommended to me by Tas Tobias, whose website, Offbeat Budapest, highlights the city from a local’s perspective, I earned my first Magyar nickname: Pityu, a diminutive of István, the Hungarian form of Stephen.Charmed by my attempts to order from a menu that lacked any hint of English, Erzsébet Varga, the chef, balked at my choice of two dishes containing pickled vegetables — they wouldn’t sit well in my stomach, one of the regulars explained with a laugh — and instead delivered the most delicious bowl of goulash I’d find anywhere on my trip.A group of regulars gathers for lunch at Öcsi Étkezde, a small restaurant in the outer part of District 8.A bowl of goulash sits beside a basket of bread and a handwritten menu, which changes daily.Ferenc Oláh, who runs the restaurant with Erzsébet Varga, his wife, holds up a picture of him and his father, who was also a restaurateur.Ferenc and Erzsébet in the restaurant’s kitchen. As with traditional diners in America, Budapest’s authentic étkezdes, once ubiquitous, are slowly vanishing, giving way to trendier cafes that cater to younger crowds.And yet, as the weeks went by, I found it increasingly difficult to overlook Hungary’s political backdrop. Nearly all of the young people I met in Budapest expressed a nagging malaise about their country’s future. A few, of course, supported the ruling party, but most were vehemently opposed. Many had friends who, noting the political headwinds and a relative lack of economic opportunity, had departed for Paris, London, Vienna. Others were sticking it out, though the landslide victory by Fidesz in the elections in April — despite an unlikely coalition made up of wildly divergent opposition parties — left them with a gnawing sense of hopelessness.Heroes’ Square, which serves as a gateway to Városliget, or City Park, seen before, during and after sunset. (I learned to roller-blade here in the early ’90s.)In mid-May I met András Török, a Budapest-born writer and city historian, at a colorful cafe in Lipótváros, or Leopold Town, a historic neighborhood in the center of the city. His guidebook, “Budapest: A Critical Guide,” updated regularly since it was first published in 1989, is as playful as it is insightful and had helped me reacquaint myself with the city. (Another project he manages, Fortepan, which was founded by Miklós Tamási, offers a staggeringly rich collection of old Hungarian photographs.)We spoke briefly about the optimism many locals had experienced in the late ’80s and early ’90s — “Suddenly the color of ink I used in my fountain pen, which I ceremoniously bought in Vienna every year, was available in the corner shop,” he said wistfully — before turning to present-day concerns.“The victory by Fidesz was so devastating that it’s obvious people want this system,” he said. “It’s an epoch in Hungarian history now,” he added, referring to Mr. Orbán’s tenure.As a response, he said, many of those disheartened by the ruling party have taken an inward turn. “I cultivate my own garden; I write my books,” Mr. Török, who is 68, said. “I talk to my grandchildren and to my friends — and I try to enjoy my life.”“And,” he added, “I accept that I will never in my lifetime see the Hungary I’d like to see.”András Török near a park in Lipótváros, or Leopold Town. His guidebook, “Budapest: A Critical Guide,” is a playful and insightful introduction to the city.Of course, supporters of Mr. Orbán’s, a minority in Budapest but a majority in Hungary overall, don’t express the same pessimism. At the Ecseri Piac, a flea market in the city’s Kispest district — where, during my childhood, I marveled at the overwhelming assemblage of Soviet memorabilia — I met Erika Román, who was selling a range of textiles. Declaring her ardent support for Mr. Orbán, she explained that “Hungary is a little country,” and that “Hungary is for Hungarians.”Behind that sentiment, which is widely popular throughout the country, lies the belief that true Hungarian identity — threatened by globalist progressives and immigrants from the Middle East and Africa, whom Mr. Orbán considers to be existential threats to the European way of life — is inextricably bound with race and religion.“There are more people living in New York City than in the entire country of Hungary,” the conservative writer Rod Dreher points out in a recent article, “which is partly why the Hungarians are so anxious about being assimilated out of existence.”A row of shops at Ecseri Piac, a flea market in the city’s Kispest district.Erika Román, a vendor at the market. “Hungary is a little country,” she told me after expressing her support for Viktor Orbán. “And Hungary is for Hungarians.”The more I reflected on Hungary’s autocratic turn, the more I was haunted by something Mr. Török mentioned during our digressive conversation in May.To experience Hungary’s transformation from totalitarianism to free democracy in the late ’80s and early ’90s, he said, was a wonderful thing. “Earlier I’d thought that I had been born at the wrong time,” he said. “But then I realized: Oh! I was born at the right time after all!”A home video taken in 1992 shows the condition of Mátyás-templom, or Matthias Church, in the heart of the Castle District.And yet he had “a sort of secret fear in the back of my mind,” he said, that the transformation had happened entirely too quickly — so quickly, as others have argued, that Hungarians, having lived for 40 years behind the Iron Curtain, weren’t given enough time to appreciate or internalize their rights and responsibilities as citizens of a democracy.“We seemed to have been given a free lunch by Gorbachev and Reagan,” he said. “And I think we are learning now, somehow, that there is no such thing as a free lunch.”Matthias Church in early May. Over the course of its eclectic history, the building has seen the crowning of Hungarian kings and served for 150 years — during the Ottoman occupation — as a mosque.A building project in the Castle District. Efforts to restore and reconstruct certain historic buildings are aimed at drawing more tourists and creating an expression of Mr. Orbán’s brand of nationalism.The roof of Matthias Church. The tiles were made by Hungary’s celebrated Zsolnay porcelain factory, which also supplied tiles for the Parliament building, the Gellért baths and several buildings designed by the renowned Hungarian architect Ödön Lechner — including the two buildings, the Royal Postal Savings Bank and the Hungarian Institute of Geology, shown earlier in this essay.How much, I began to wonder, had General Electric’s quick entry into Eastern Bloc markets — which, despite high hopes, quickly led to labor tensions and slashed payrolls and ultimately proved to be more fraught than expected — helped hasten Hungary’s too-rapid transformation? How much had the frenzied reach of American capitalism helped set the stage for Mr. Orbán’s rise?How much, I wondered, had that earlier tide of history helped shape today’s?The crumbling entrance to a Tungsram site in Budapest, photographed in late May. Tungsram, which was finally sold by General Electric in 2018, filed for bankruptcy protection earlier this year.In late May, I caught wind — through 444.hu, a self-consciously edgy news site, and, alongside Telex and HVG, one of Hungary’s few remaining independent outlets — that a sprawling field of poppies had bloomed in District 15, near the edge of the city. I hopped on a bus for the 40-minute ride, gazing out the window as we wended our way through timeworn residential areas and past Soviet-era panel housing estates.Exiting the bus near a discount grocery store, I looked out across its parking lot and saw a vast sea of brilliant red petals that stretched for half a mile toward the M3 motorway.A field of poppies that bloomed on the outskirts of Budapest, at the edge of in District 15, in May.The immense field, within city limits, sat just beside a set of residential towers.A bee drifts toward a flower to collect pollen.The flowers, of course, weren’t long for this world — merely a momentary splash of vibrancy in Budapest’s weary periphery. Nor was the field itself destined to last: It would soon be paved to make room for a housing development.How fitting, I thought, since transience, in the end, was one of Hungary’s abiding lessons. After my family moved back to Ohio, where the homogeneous suburban scene accentuated the richness of the culture we’d left behind, I learned that the only constant I could rely on was the promise of constant change. So much simply faded away. My parents divorced. My international-school friends scattered like seeds. My grandmother was withered by cancer. In time, Tungsram would decay, as would General Electric, as would the influence of Western liberalism.But Budapest, in my memory, stands like a land before time. No doubt that’s why I feel such a connection to the place. No doubt that’s why it feels like home.With my grandmother, Natalie Faunda, on Margaret Island — which sits in the middle of the Danube River, between Buda and Pest — in 1990.My family at an overlook on Gellért Hill in ’92 or ’93.Standing on the outskirts of Budapest, watching the poppies dance in the wind and contemplating the ephemerality of this age-old city, I was reminded of a quote from Péter Molnár Gál, a Hungarian critic, that I’d read in Mr. Török’s guidebook.“In Budapest,” he writes, “you can’t dunk your bread in the same sauce twice. The city is going through a time of transition. As it has been doing for five hundred years.”By then, I think, wrestling with the past and the present, I’d begun to see the central question about Hungary’s future as one that posits pessimism and optimism as equally naïve: If the historical tides of the last 30 years are anything of a guide, then how could we ever hope to know what the next tide will bring?The Buda Castle after nightfall.Stephen Hiltner is an editor and photojournalist on The New York Times’s Travel desk, where he edits and contributes to the weekly World Through a Lens column. His last essay was about a kayaking trip through Florida’s Everglades. You can follow his work on Instagram and Twitter.Got a question, comment or tip? Send him an email or drop a note in the comments section.Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places list for 2022. More
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Marina Goldovskaya, 80, Dies; Filmmaker Documented Russian Life
by Aurelia Butler 29 March 2022, 22:24
In about 30 documentaries she looked at the people and history of her homeland, some of it brutally dark.Marina Goldovskaya, an acclaimed documentary filmmaker who exposed the harsh underbelly of the Soviet Union’s labor camps and later chronicled the heady days that followed the state’s collapse — days that promised democracy but bordered on anarchy — died on March 20 in Jurmala, Latvia. She was 80.Her death was confirmed by her son, Sergei Livnev, who said she died at his home after a long illness.Ms. Goldovskaya, who often operated as a one-woman band, made some 30 documentaries — as writer, director, cinematographer and producer — and was a film professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, for two decades. Her wide-ranging films include a portrait of a Russian circus aerialist (“Raisa Nemchinskaya: Circus Actress,” 1970); a chronicle of six weeks in the life of a television journalist during the Soviet thaw known as perestroika (“A Taste of Freedom,” 1991); and the story of a Russian prince who returns to live in his family’s former estate, now in ruins (“The Prince Is Back,” 2000).In a review of “Solovki Power,” her 1988 film about a Soviet labor camp in northern Russia, Vincent Canby of The New York Times called the work “first-rate film journalism” and “a remarkable documentary about the prison camp said to have been the prototype for all of the gulags that came after.”With a style that calls to mind the films of Ken Burns, “Solovki Power” juxtaposes the cold, white beauty of the gulag’s remote White Sea location with the memories of eight survivors and an official 1928 propaganda film that touted the camp’s clean linens and enlightened teachings. Theologians, historians, poets, mathematicians and economists were among those who were sent to the camp, which operated from 1923 to 1939.In the film, an economist recalls the night she had to wake up her children, ages 4 and 6, to tell them that she was going “away to work.” Her son told her that his papa had already gone away. If they took her, “Who will stay with us?” he asked.And then there was the night, recalled by an academician, when 300 shots were fired in a botched execution — the executioners were too drunk to aim properly — leaving bodies squirming in a dirt pit the next morning.Ms. Goldovskaya began making “Solovki Power” in 1986, when it still could be dangerous to examine the dark side of the Soviet past, since her film would expose the camps as an integral part of the Soviet system, not as an aberration created during the Stalin era.Ms. Goldovskaya in 1990 shooting “Taste of Freedom,” a documentary about six weeks in the life of a television journalist during perestroika.When she told her mother what she was planning to do, “she started crying,” Ms. Goldovskaya recalled in a 1998 interview. “‘You are committing suicide,’ she said. ‘Don’t you remember what happened to your father?’”In 1938, her father, then a deputy minister of film, had been overseeing construction of the Kremlin’s movie theater when a lamp exploded. Stalin believed it was an assassination attempt and sentenced him to five months in prison.Speaking from Latvia, her son, Mr. Livnev, who is also a film director and producer, said: “The film really became very important not just as a film, but as an event in the life of a country. For many, many people it opened up so many unknowns, about how terrible our past was.”Another Goldovskaya film, “A Bitter Taste of Freedom” (2011), was about her friend Anna Politkovskaya, an investigative journalist and fierce critic of Vladimir V. Putin who was shot at point blank range in her Moscow apartment block in 2006. The film included diaristic footage that the filmmaker took in Ms. Politkovskaya’s home over many years.There is “a scene in the kitchen with Anna and her husband, where you can almost smell the food and the coffee, and they’re talking about how they’re afraid,” said Maja Manojlovic, who worked with Ms. Goldovskaya as a teaching assistant and now teaches at U.C.L.A. “Boy, did Marina capture the energy of this fear, the fear of repercussions for her criticism of Putin.”Marina Evseevna Goldovskaya was born on July 15, 1941, in Moscow. Her father, Evsey Michailovich Goldovksy, was a film engineer who helped found, and taught at, VGIK, the All-Union State Institute of Film. Her mother, Nina Veniaminovna Mintz, studied actors’ interpretations of Shakespeare and helped develop and curate theater museums.The family lived in an apartment building built by Stalin in the 1930s to house filmmakers “so that he could keep an eye on them,” Ms. Goldovskaya said in a 2001 interview. She attended VGIK, one of only a few women to study cinematography there. After graduating in 1963, she began working for state television. She became a member of the Communist Party in 1967 and remained one for 20 years.Otherwise, “I would not have gotten ahead in television,” she wrote in her 2006 autobiography, “Woman With a Movie Camera: My Life as a Russian Filmmaker.” “In an ideological organization like television, a camera operator who was not a Party member could never be promoted.”She made close to a dozen films for state television before leaving her job to make “Solovki Power.”“I grew up in a house filled with filmmakers and cinematographers,” she said in the 1998 interview. “Many cameramen died during the war; it was so romantic to die for your country. There were so few women in the profession. My father told me that if I went into it, I would never have a family, that I would be unhappy all my life. But I was young, it was romantic, and I loved to push the button.”In addition to her son, Ms. Goldovskaya is survived by two stepdaughters, Jill Smolin and Beth Herzfeld; two grandsons; and three step-grandchildren. Her first marriage, to David Livnev, a theater director, ended in divorce, as did her second, to Alexander Lipkov, a film critic. Her third husband, Georg Herzfeld, died in 2012.Mr. Livnev recalled his mother “always with a camera.”“She was shooting all the time,” he said. “I can hardly remember her face without the camera in front of her.”In 1991, the year the Soviet Union collapsed, Ms. Goldovskaya was a visiting professor at the University of California, San Diego, when she was introduced to Mr. Herzfeld, an Austrian engineer and businessman. Six days later, he proposed.Ms. Goldovskaya moved to Los Angeles in 1994 and began teaching at U.C.L.A., returning to Moscow in summers to work on her films. Guests to her classes, and then to her sunny, sprawling home nearby, often included noted documentary filmmakers like Albert Maysles, D.A. Pennebaker and Richard Leacock. And she was closely engaged with her students.“She opened up her classes to anthropology students and students from other disciplines,” said Gyula Gazdag, a Hungarian-born filmmaker who was on the U.C.L.A. faculty and teamed up with Ms. Goldovskaya to make a documentary about Allen Ginsberg, “A Poet on the Lower East Side” (1997). “She felt they would bring a new perspective to documentaries,” he added, in a phone interview. “She knew all her students by name, what their motivation for making a particular documentary was.”Ms. Goldovskaya in 2011. “She was shooting all the time,” her son said. “I can hardly remember her face without the camera in front of her.” via Getty ImagesMs. Goldovskaya’s film “Raisa Nemchinskaya: Circus Actress” featured an aerialist who “was in a way very similar to my mother,” Mr. Livnev said. The aerialist died of a heart attack as she was taking her bow after a performance.“She never used a rope for protection,” Mr. Livnev said. “My mom loved this woman, she was a role model, and all her life she lived like this. She would work, work, work all the time. Her dream was to die with the camera rolling, and she would never use this security rope in her life.” More
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‘The Jump’ Review: A Seaman’s Story of a Daring Escape
by Aurelia Butler 1 March 2022, 11:00
This documentary looks back at a Cold War defection drama that took place off the coast of Massachusetts.In its first half-hour, the documentary “The Jump” brings a bracing immediacy to a 50-year-old Cold War incident. In 1970, a Lithuanian sailor, Simas Kudirka, jumped from a Soviet trawler onto a U.S. Coast Guard vessel off Martha’s Vineyard in an effort to defect from the Soviet Union. (The boats were moored alongside each other for talks on fishing rights.)The Soviet crewmen were allowed to forcibly remove Kudirka from the Coast Guard ship and take him home, where he would presumably meet a chilling fate. The episode led to protests in the United States.To lay out these events, the early scenes principally crosscut among three people. Kudirka revisits the Coast Guard vessel he had jumped to a half-century earlier and energetically points out what happened and where.The director, Giedre Zickyte, interweaves Kudirka’s recollections with testimony from the ship’s captain, Cmdr. Ralph W. Eustis, and Lt. Cmdr. Paul E. Pakos, its executive officer, to create a fluid account that shows how the day unfolded from multiple perspectives.When the story shifts to the Soviet Union, Zickyte introduces a K.G.B. interrogator who recalls questioning Kudirka. The sailor received a 10-year sentence but was freed in 1974. In the film, Kudirka revisits a prison where he was held.“The Jump” grows less exciting after that, partly because Kudirka, its most engaging storyteller, was necessarily in the background of efforts to secure his freedom, and partly because his eventual release owed more to incredible luck than to a political breakthrough. In the film, Henry Kissinger recalls that President Gerald R. Ford directly intervened on Kudirka’s behalf. “No professional diplomat would ever have done that,” he says.The JumpNot rated. In Lithuanian and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. Rent or buy on Amazon, Apple TV and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More
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Michael Gargiulo Dies at 95; Documented the Moscow ‘Kitchen Debate’
by Eliana Willis 14 December 2021, 22:07
Sent to the Soviet Union in 1959 to promote color television, he ended up taping what he later called a “turning point” in U.S.-Soviet relations.Michael Gargiulo, an Emmy Award-winning television director and producer who immortalized the impromptu 1959 “kitchen debate” between Vice President Richard M. Nixon and the Soviet leader, Nikita S. Khrushchev, in Moscow, died on Nov. 30 at his home in Manhattan. He was 95.His son, Michael, an anchor for “Today in New York” on NBC, said the cause was congestive heart failure.The made-for-television moment took place during a brief thaw in the Cold War, with the finger-wagging performances by Nixon, on the eve of his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, and the pugnacious Khrushchev starting in the kitchen of a model home at an American trade fair in Sokolniki Park.The two world leaders had been steered to the $14,000 “typical American house” by William Safire, who would later become a speechwriter for Nixon and an opinion columnist for The New York Times, but who at the time was handling public relations for a Long Island homebuilder. (It was Mr. Safire who gave the house the name “Splitnik,” because it was bisected by a walkway for spectators.)The largely good-natured tit-for-tat escalated as Nixon and Khrushchev wended their way through the exhibition hall. They were headed for the studio and control room that Mr. Gargiulo (pronounced gar-JOOL-oh) and his team had assembled for RCA at the invitation of the State Department to promote American technological superiority in color television.“As they were walking in, we were already recording,” Mr. Gargiulo recalled in an interview with his son in 2019. “They didn’t even know we were rolling.”Through interpreters, the U.S. vice president and the Soviet leader conducted a guns-and-butter debate on the merits of capitalism versus Communism, which Mr. Gargiulo and his team shot, ostensibly so they could immediately replay it to demonstrate the wonders of color TV.But while Nixon had been warned to be on his best behavior (so Khrushchev would accept an invitation to a subsequent summit meeting), neither official could resist a microphone and a camera.Nixon acknowledged Soviet advances in outer space; Khrushchev, sporting an incompatible Panama hat and oversize suit, conceded nothing.“In another seven years we will be on the same level as America,” he said. “In passing you by, we will wave to you.”Mr. Gargiulo said the two men had promised that the debate would be broadcast in both Russia and the United States. But a few hours after it ended, he said, Kremlin aides demanded that he turn the original tape over to them.By then, it had already been spirited out of the Soviet Union by NBC (which was part of RCA at the time) to be shared with CBS and ABC, but Mr. Gargiulo offered to share a copy with the Soviets. As a result, the debate was seen on both sides of the Iron Curtain that evening.“It was what we call a virtual draw,” Mr. Gargiulo said of the confrontation.The Moscow trip — on which he was accompanied by his wife, who was pregnant with their son — left him with warm memories as well as accolades.“I never felt more patriotic,” he said. “This was world leaders taping on the sly and slipping it out of the country.”“I can’t imagine anybody thinking that was not a turning point in both of our relationships,” he added.Things ended up better for Mr. Gargiulo than they did for the debaters, at least in the short term. Nixon lost the 1960 presidential race, and Khrushchev was deposed in 1964.Mr. Gargiulo accepted a Daytime Emmy Award from the actor John Gabriel and the model Cheryl Tiegs in 1978. He won 10 Emmys in his career, including a lifetime achievement award in 2015.Disney via Getty ImagesHe began his career by directing stage shows in the Catskills, then joined NBC in New York, where he became staff director of local programming. He directed the game shows “To Tell the Truth,” “The Price Is Right,” “Match Game,” “Password” and “The $10,000 Pyramid.” He also directed special events for CBS, including “All-American Thanksgiving Day Parade,” a pastiche of parade coverage from New York and other cities.His final directing credit was the Tournament of Roses Parade on CBS in 2003.He won 10 Daytime Emmys in his career, including a lifetime achievement award in 2015.Michael Ralph Gargiulo was born on Sept. 23, 1926, in Brooklyn to Louis and Josephine (Talamo) Gargiulo. He grew up above his father’s restaurant, a Coney Island landmark.He attended St. Augustine’s High School in Brooklyn and completed high school while serving in the Caribbean Defense Command of the Army Air Forces at the end of World War II. He graduated from the University of Missouri on the G.I. Bill.In 1958, he married Dorothy Rosato. In addition to their son, she survives him, as do their daughter, Susan, who works for Nickelodeon, and three grandchildren. More
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Igor Oistrakh, Soviet-Era Violinist (and a Son of One), Dies at 90
by Aurelia Butler 7 September 2021, 22:42
His father, David, was one of the 20th century’s finest violinists, but Igor more than held his own as a musician and interpreter performing throughout the West.Igor Oistrakh, a noted violinist who was part of a violin-playing family that included his father, David, one of the 20th century’s finest exponents of the instrument, died on Aug. 14 in Moscow. He was 90.His son, the violinist Valery Oistrakh, said the causes were pneumonia and heart problems.Though much of his career coincided with the Cold War, Mr. Oistrakh was well known in New York and elsewhere in the West, since the Soviet Union sent its best musicians on tour. He made his New York debut at Carnegie Hall in February 1962 performing with Symphony of the Air under Alfred Wallenstein. Harold C. Schonberg, reviewing the concert in The New York Times, noted that few could measure up to David Oistrakh and pronounced Igor “a good violinist, though far from a great one.”But by December 1963, Mr. Oistrakh had performed several more times in New York and had established himself as an admirable musician independent of his father.“Little can be said about the 32-year-old Soviet musician’s superb artistry that has not already been said again and again,” Howard Klein wrote in The Times in a review of a Carnegie Hall recital that month. “His beautiful, silky tone, his effortless execution in devilish passages, his restrained yet powerful emotional thrust, were in evidence and were as stunningly projected as ever.”Father and son frequently played together. When David Oistrakh made his American debut as a conductor, leading the Moscow Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall in 1965, Igor was the soloist for the Tchaikovsky violin concerto.“David Oistrakh conducted like a proud father,” Theodore Strongin wrote in The Times, “giving his son all the leeway in the world and pacing the last movement up into a mad virtuoso fling. The sold-out audience loved it.”After his father’s death in 1974, Igor Oistrakh sometimes performed with his son. He was often accompanied in performances by his wife, the pianist Natalia Zertsalova, and critics often remarked on their like-mindedness.“One can sense them weighing every phrase,” James Allen wrote in The Scotsman, reviewing a 1999 performance at the Music Hall in Aberdeen, Scotland, “making minute adjustments, effortlessly setting up contrasts of tone and texture.”The Oistrakhs, father and son, in the United Kingdom in 1966. David Oistrakh died in 1974.Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesIgor Davidovich Oistrakh was born to David and Tamara Ivanovna Oistrakh on April 27, 1931, in Odessa, Ukraine. He was studying violin by the age of 6. The household was, of course, immersed in music, and young Igor witnessed bits of history, including the time the composer Aram Khachaturian dropped by in 1940 to unveil the violin concerto he had written for David Oistrakh.“He came to play it on our piano,” Igor Oistrakh told The Times in 2001. “He did not take his overcoat off. He did not even sit at the piano. He just played, very vigorously. He was so loud that my great-great-grandmother, my father’s grandmother, was scared awake from her nap.”Mr. Oistrakh studied at the Central Music School and then at the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory. In 1949 he won top prize at an international youth violin competition in Budapest, and in 1952 he won the International Henryk Wieniawski Violin Competition in Poland.He made his Western debut at Royal Albert Hall in London in 1953 and continued to perform all over the world in the Cold War era. International tensions occasionally intruded on his concerts, as they did in 1971 when, The Times wrote, a performance at Philharmonic Hall in Manhattan “was interrupted after the first piece by an unscheduled intermission during which security forces searched the hall for harassment devices that might have been planted by the groups that have been protesting the treatment of Jews in the Soviet Union.”Mr. Oistrakh made many recordings and was a conductor and teacher, taking a post at the Moscow Conservatory in 1958. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, he became a professor at the Royal Conservatory in Brussels for a time. At his death, he lived in Moscow.His wife died in 2017. In addition to his son, he is survived by a grandson.Mr. Oistrakh’s physical resemblance to his father was striking, so much so that Tamara Bernstein, reviewing a 1992 performance with the Toronto Philharmonic for The Globe and Mail of Canada, began by saying, “It is unnerving, to say the least, to see a late lamented violinist stride on stage to wild applause.”In 1998 The Miami Herald asked him a question he must have confronted frequently: Did he feel overshadowed by his father?“I think I’ve had a wonderful career of my own, playing with the best orchestras and conductors in the world,” he answered diplomatically, “and that I was lucky to have had such a great and wonderful father.” More
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7 Podcasts to Binge in a Day
by Aurelia Butler 30 March 2021, 09:00
Whether you’re craving a thriller, a spy documentary or an exploration of an American musical icon, each of these limited series can be enjoyed in one big gulp.One full year into the pandemic, the end is finally in sight. President Biden has promised to make every American adult eligible for vaccination by May, with the goal of a return to some version of normal life by the summer. Until then, though, we still need to find ways to hunker down and pass the time. And if you’ve already exhausted your Netflix queue and made your way through this year’s Oscar contenders, consider making your next binge an audio one.Whether you’re craving a twisty thriller, a quirky spy documentary or an award-winning exploration of an American musical icon, each of these seven limited series can be enjoyed in a single daylong gulp.‘Wind of Change’There’s no shortage of conspiracy theories about the Central Intelligence Agency — including a claim that it actually invented the term “conspiracy theory” — but none quite like the one at the heart of this eight-part nonfiction series. Here’s the premise: The C.I.A. orchestrated the writing of “Wind of Change,” an anthemic power ballad by the German heavy metal band Scorpions. Why? As part of a covert campaign to undermine the Soviet Union during the Cold War, of course. Hosted by Patrick Radden Keefe, a writer for The New Yorker, this podcast from Crooked Media take the listener on a labyrinth of a story, one that encompasses interviews with ex-spies and aging rockers alike, and may change the way you see pop culture forever.Starter episode: “My Friend Michael”‘Dirty John’Wondery, now a podcasting powerhouse that was recently purchased by Amazon, enjoyed its breakout moment in the fall of 2017, when the network (in tandem with The Los Angeles Times) released the first few episodes of its gripping saga about an abusive con artist and the women he almost destroyed. That show, “Dirty John,” takes place in the idyllic oceanfront setting of Orange County, Calif., where Debra Newell is about to go on a first date with a dreamy doctor named John Meehan. Suffice it to say, Meehan is not what he seems. A TV version was released on Bravo in 2018, but nothing matches the raw force of the audio original — particularly the breathtaking finale, in which Meehan’s disturbing behavior reaches its awful zenith.Starter episode: “The Real Thing”‘The Mystery Show’Picture this: you rent a video from a video store, back when those were a thing. The following day, you go to return the video only to discover that the store is gone. You’re not lost or confused — the store has genuinely vanished. This “Twilight Zone”-esque experience is just one of the real life mysteries that Starlee Kine investigates in “The Mystery Show,” an early hit from Gimlet Media. After the murder mystery “Serial” changed podcasting forever in 2014, there was an onslaught of copycat shows trying to cash in on the same formula by re-examining cold cases. Kine, though, focuses on low-stakes puzzles that involve no true crimes, but are nonetheless utterly captivating.Starter episode: “Case #1: Video Store”‘Passenger List’Blending the old-school pleasures of a radio play with a distinctly modern premise, ‘Passenger List’ is one of the best fictional podcasts of recent years. After a flight from London to New York disappears without a trace somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, the twin sister of one of the doomed passengers (played by Kelly Marie Tran) sets out to uncover the truth about what really happened. Playing on timely anxieties surrounding events like the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines 370, the show from PRX’s “Radiotopia” is both an addictive popcorn thriller for your ears, and now an unexpectedly nostalgic treat for those missing air travel.Starter episode: “Traffic”‘Dolly Parton’s America’You don’t have to be into country music in general, or Dolly Parton in particular, to be pulled in by this Peabody-winning exploration of how the multifaceted star became such an enduring icon. Although much of the show from WNYC Studios is taken up with conversations about just how beloved Parton is by everybody who knows her, “Dolly Parton’s America” avoids hagiography by taking its title seriously, exploring the Dollyverse against a broader national backdrop. The host, Jad Abumrad (“Radiolab”), begins the series by explaining his own connection to the star — he hails from Tennessee just like Parton — and the moment in 2016 that made him see her as a unifying force in an otherwise divided nation. Featuring interviews with musicians, historians, fans and with Parton herself, this is the kind of nuanced and intimate profile that audio does best.Starter episode: “Sad Ass Songs”‘Escaping Nxivm’Last year saw the release of two buzzy rival documentaries about the sex trafficking cult Nxivm, whose leader, Keith Raniere, was recently sentenced to 120 years in prison. But long before either show, CBC Radio was the first to delve into the horrifying and deeply peculiar world of Nxivm, whose members famously included the “Smallville” actress Allison Mack and the liquor heiress Clare Bronfman. In “Escaping Nxivm,”, the first season of CBC’s ongoing “Uncover” podcast series, the journalist Josh Bloch interviews Sarah Edmondson, a former key member of Nxivm who has now become its most famous whistle-blower. An actress by trade, Edmonson makes for a compelling central figure, her voice vividly emotional as she recalls the nightmarish ways Raniere and his chosen leaders gradually chipped away at her sense of self. A tough listen that showcases the unique intimacy of podcasting.Starter episode: “The Branding”‘Bag Man’Many podcasts have found success by re-examining well-known political scandals through a fresh lens (most notably Slate’s “Slow Burn”), but this gem from MSNBC pulls off the same trick with a scandal that almost nobody remembers. That’s because Watergate was dominating headlines at the time, but in “Bag Man,” Rachel Maddow pulls back the curtain on an adjacent 1973 investigation that saw vice president Spiro Agnew accused of brazen political corruption. Maddow does not hesitate to point out what she sees as parallels to President Trump — Agnew angrily dismissed the investigation as a “witch hunt” in one example — and for anyone missing the juicy palace intrigue stories that came out of the Trump White House, this is a must-listen.Starter episode: “An Unsettling Secret” More
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Walter Bernstein, Celebrated Screenwriter, Is Dead at 101
by Aurelia Butler 23 January 2021, 22:06
#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyWalter Bernstein, Celebrated Screenwriter, Is Dead at 101His movies included “Fail Safe,” “Paris Blues” and, perhaps most notably, “The Front,” based on his own experience of being blacklisted.The screenwriter Walter Bernstein in 1983. His leftist politics influenced both his life and his art.Credit…Susan Wood/Getty ImagesJan. 23, 2021, 6:06 p.m. ETWalter Bernstein, whose career as a top film and television screenwriter was derailed by the McCarthy-era blacklist, and who decades later turned that experience into one of his best-known films, “The Front,” died on Saturday morning at his home in Manhattan. He was 101.His wife, Gloria Loomis, said the cause was pneumonia.Described in a 2014 Esquire profile as a “human Energizer bunny,” Mr. Bernstein was writing, teaching and generating screenplay ideas well into his 90s. Until recently, he had several projects in various stages of development. He created the BBC mystery mini-series “Hidden” in 2011, and he was an adjunct instructor of dramatic writing at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts until he retired in 2017. “They’ll carry me off writing,” he told Variety.Mr. Bernstein’s politics — he called himself a “secular, self-loving Jew of a leftist persuasion” — influenced both his life and his art.“Fail Safe” (1964), the story of an accidental bombing of Moscow, was a bold rejoinder to the nuclear arms race of the Cold War. “Paris Blues” (1961), which he wrote for the director Martin Ritt, a fellow blacklist victim and frequent collaborator, starred Sidney Poitier and Paul Newman as expatriate American jazz musicians and delivered pointed commentary on racial intolerance. “The Molly Maguires” (1970), also directed by Mr. Ritt, concerned union-busting in the coal mines of 19th-century Pennsylvania, mirroring the social upheavals of the late 1960s and ’70s.Mr. Bernstein with Woody Allen on the set of the 1976 film “The Front,” based on Mr. Bernstein’s experience during the blacklist of the 1950s. Mr. Bernstein’s screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award.Credit…Columbia PicturesThe subject of “The Front” (1976), also directed by Mr. Ritt and the only film for which Mr. Bernstein received an Academy Award nomination (it was also nominated for a Writers Guild of America award), was the blacklist itself: Woody Allen starred as a “front,” a stand-in for a writer who, like Mr. Bernstein, had been blacklisted. (Mr. Bernstein made a cameo appearance for Mr. Allen that same year in “Annie Hall.”)Not all Mr. Bernstein’s subjects were political. The football-themed “Semi-Tough,” starring Burt Reynolds, Jill Clayburgh and Kris Kristofferson and based on a novel by Dan Jenkins, lampooned the New Age spirituality of such ’70s movements as EST; “Yanks,” starring Richard Gere and Vanessa Redgrave, explored the romantic entanglements and cultural differences between American troops and local Englishwomen during World War II. Mr. Bernstein’s lone feature film as a director was a comedy, “Little Miss Marker,” a 1980 version of the oft-filmed Damon Runyon story that starred Walter Matthau and Julie Andrews.A Hollywood EducationMr. Bernstein was born in Brooklyn on Aug. 20, 1919, to Louis and Hannah (Bistrong) Bernstein, Eastern European immigrants who were “not really affected by the Depression,” as Mr. Bernstein recalled in his autobiography, “Inside Out” (1996), because his father, a schoolteacher, was protected by civil service employment rules. He attended Erasmus High School in Flatbush, which was so crowded the students were split into three shifts, a boon for the film-loving Walter: When he was on the 6:30-to-noon shift, he could catch matinees next door at the Astor Theater, where admission during the day was a dime.Upon graduation, Mr. Bernstein was offered what he called a “wild, dubious” gift from his father: six months of an intensive language course at the University of Grenoble. His father knew a French family Walter could stay with and “had aspirations for me I did not share,” Mr. Bernstein recalled, adding, “If I had a choice of where to go for six months it would have been Hollywood.”Walter Matthau, Julie Andrews and Sara Stimson in “Little Miss Marker” (1980), the only feature film Mr. Bernstein directed. Credit…Universal PicturesBut the experience broadened him, thrusting him as it did into the midst of young intellectuals, often Communists, living on a continent where Hitler, war and Marxism were the currency of conversation.He then attended Dartmouth College, where he became the film critic of The Daily Dartmouth, a job that came with a pass for the local cinema. “The only catch,” Mr. Bernstein recalled in “Inside Out,” “was that there were no screenings or previews, so you had to write the review before seeing the movie.”“I found this no real impediment,” he added. “Anyone could review a movie after seeing it; that was mere criticism. Doing it this way made it art.”He also became a contributor to The New Yorker, for which he would write during and after the war, and where he eventually became a staff writer.First, however, there was a war to get through. Shortly after graduating from Dartmouth, he was drafted and sent to Fort Benning, Ga., where in 1941, during the relatively relaxed period before Pearl Harbor, soldiers staged a show titled “Grin and Bear It,” written by Mr. Bernstein. (“It wasn’t very good,” he recalled, “but it was a show.”)“Brooks Atkinson was coming down from The Times to see it,” he said, “and John O’Hara, who was the reviewer for Newsweek. It was a big thing. We were supposed to open on Dec. 10.” On Dec. 7, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.“One of the actors said, ‘Now we’re not going to get the critics,’” Mr. Bernstein recalled. “And we didn’t.”Making Wartime NewsWhile contributing military-themed articles to The New Yorker, Mr. Bernstein, who eventually attained the rank of sergeant, became a globe-trotting correspondent for Yank, the Army journal, a job that would last throughout World War II. It was for Yank that he got the scoop that would give him his first taste of fame.“Army Writer Also Sees Tito but Censors Stop His Story” read the May 20, 1944, Associated Press headline: Mr. Bernstein, defying military protocol, had been spirited into war-torn Yugoslavia by anti-German partisans and given the first interview with Marshal Josep Broz, known as Tito, the Communist leader who would head the postwar Yugoslav republic until his death in 1980.“I was the first Western correspondent to see him,” Mr. Bernstein recalled. “The Allies were planning to send in a couple of reporters from the pool and photographers, but the military wanted to delay any news about Tito till after the Second Front opened; the partisans wanted the opposite. They wanted publicity.”Although Mr. Bernstein’s interview with Tito was temporarily quashed, the Associated Press article made it world news.The screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, center, in 1947 after testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee and refusing to say whether he was or had been a member of the Communist Party. Mr. Trumbo, like Mr. Bernstein and a number of other Hollywood writers, was blacklisted.Credit…Henry Griffin/Associated Press“I had an aunt who was a charter member of the Communist Party; she worked for the party as a stenographer or something like that,” Mr. Bernstein said in 2010 in an interview for this obituary. “And when I came back from the war, she asked me if I would talk to some Communist functionaries. I said that was all right with me. They wanted to know about Tito; nobody was telling them anything. And I told them about my adventures.”“I didn’t join the party until after the war,” Mr. Bernstein said, although the events of the ’30s, including the Depression, the Spanish Civil War and the rise of fascism in Europe, made the Communist cause attractive to him. “The Communists,” he said, “seemed like they were doing something.”In 1947, with his Yank and New Yorker experience under his belt, a well-received collection of his war stories (“Keep Your Head Down”) on the bookshelves and a hankering to get into movies, Mr. Bernstein went to Hollywood. He had been offered a contract with the writer-producer Robert Rossen at Columbia Pictures, where he did uncredited work on “All the King’s Men.”Mr. Bernstein ended up staying in Hollywood for six months: His agent, Harold Hecht, had formed what would be a prolific production partnership with the actor Burt Lancaster and “offered me a job for twice what I was getting,” Mr. Bernstein recalled, “which still wasn’t much.”That led to his first Hollywood credit, “Kiss the Blood Off My Hands” (1948), a crime drama starring Mr. Lancaster and Joan Fontaine. But by this time the blacklist was starting to make itself felt within an industry where left-wing political sentiments had previously been both common and tolerated.Suddenly Untouchable“I was still in Hollywood in 1947, during the Hollywood Ten,” Mr. Bernstein said, referring to the prosecution of writers, producers and directors who had appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee and refused to answer questions about their Communist affiliation. “I was working for Rossen, who was a Communist. At first it was the Hollywood 19, then it was cut down to 10. I don’t know why. Rossen was very upset that he hadn’t made the cut.”No one took the hearings seriously at first, but they soon would. Mr. Bernstein was considered untouchable both in Hollywood and in the fledgling television industry in New York once his name appeared in “Red Channels,” an anti-Communist tract published in 1950 by the right-wing journal Counterattack.“I was listed right after Lenny Bernstein,” Mr. Bernstein recalled. “There were about eight listings for me, and they were all true.” He had indeed written for the leftist New Masses, been a member of the Communist Party and supported Soviet relief, the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War and civil rights.Mr. Bernstein at his apartment in Manhattan in 2000. He continued to write, teach and generate screenplay ideas well into his 90s.Credit…Jim Cooper/Associated PressMr. Bernstein and other blacklisted writers were forced to work under assumed names for sympathetic filmmakers like Sidney Lumet, who used Mr. Bernstein, now back in New York, throughout the ’50s on “You Are There,” the CBS program hosted by Walter Cronkite that re-enacted great moments in history.It was during this period that Mr. Bernstein and his colleagues, notably the writers Abraham Polonsky and Arnold Manoff, began the ruse of protecting their anonymity by sending stand-ins to represent them at meetings with producers, a ploy later dramatized in “The Front.” (In addition to Mr. Allen, the movie starred Zero Mostel, who, like the film’s director, Mr. Ritt, had also been blacklisted.)“Suddenly, the blacklist had achieved for the writer what he had previously only aspired to,” Mr. Bernstein joked in “Inside Out.” “He was considered necessary.”It was the now largely forgotten “That Kind of Woman” (1959), with Sophia Loren, that restarted Mr. Bernstein’s “official” career. The film’s director was Mr. Lumet, who hired Mr. Bernstein under his own name, thus effectively restoring him to the ranks of the employable.In the years following the blacklist, Mr. Bernstein worked regularly for Hollywood, although he continued to live in New York. Among his film credits were the westerns “The Wonderful Country” (1959) and “Heller in Pink Tights” (1960), the Harold Robbins adaptation “The Betsy” (1978) and the Dan Aykroyd-Walter Matthau comedy “The Couch Trip” (1988). He received an Emmy nomination for the television drama “Miss Evers’ Boys” (1997), based on the true story of a 1932 government experiment in which Black test subjects were allowed to die of syphilis, and wrote the teleplay for the live broadcast of “Fail Safe” in 2000.In addition to his wife, a literary agent, Mr. Bernstein is survived by a daughter, Joan Bernstein, and a son, Peter Spelman, from his first marriage, to Marva Spelman, which ended in divorce; three sons, Nicholas, Andrew and Jake, from his third marriage, to Judith Braun, which also ended in divorce, as did a brief second marriage; his stepdaughter, Diana Loomis; five grandchildren; two great-grandchildren; and a sister, Marilyn Seide.Six decades after the fact, Mr. Bernstein voiced a warmly nostalgic view of the Red Scare period, an era that has become synonymous with intolerance and fear.“I don’t know if it’s true of other people getting older,” he said, “but I look back on that period with some fondness in a way, in terms of the relationships and support and friendships. We helped each other during that period. And in a dog-eat-dog business, it was quite rare.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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