Walls
On living in Berlin during the German Reunification, and my thoughts on Ovid's myth about tortured lovers.
This article was written as program notes for the Suite from Pyramus and Thisbe
In the early part of the twentieth century Germany became the most liberal (if also the most unstable) democracy the world has known. In almost an instant this gave way to a regime so corrupt and lawless that not only Germany but much of the rest of Europe was destroyed by it. For the latter half of the twentieth century Germany was home to one of the most affluent capitalist societies in Western Europe and the strictest communist dictatorship of the Eastern Bloc. Where these two opposites touched, a wall was built, two modern cultures divided by a medieval contrivance. The Wall surrounded West Berlin, but those it was intended to contain were on the outside, and many of them died trying to get in. Given that such dichotomies and inversions of logic are at the heart of Germany’s history, the Berlin Wall has always made perfect sense to me.
The first time I visited Berlin and saw the Wall, I was amazed less by its size, its cynicism, even its contempt for human life, as by its power as a metaphor. Walls everywhere began to leap out at me, real ones, political ones, psychological ones: around gardens, in stores, in other people, in myself, between families, between lovers. I realized the Berlin Wall was not just a German metaphor, but a human one, and at that moment I knew I wanted to create a work that dealt in some way with Berlin and its Wall.
The story of Pyramus and Thisbe is familiar: they are young lovers who live in ancient Babylon. Their families forbid them to see one another, so one night they plan to steal away. Through misinterpreted signals and premature martyrdom, both end up dead and their families devastated. In the two thousand years since Ovid wrote Pyramus and Thisbe, there have been many retellings of it, most notably by Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet. Other than Romeo and Juliet, most adaptations of the poem have been unsympathetic to the tragic pair. Even Shakespeare could not resist and openly spoofed Ovid’s characters in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But when I read Ovid’s original parable for the first time I found a compelling detail: the two lovers live as neighbors, and their houses share a common wall. The wall separates them, and so they despise it. But they find a small crack through which they can whisper their devotion to one another, and make their fatal plans.
My ballet Pyramus and Thisbe had a providential beginning. A welltimed application to the Guggenheim Foundation in the summer of 1989, to “write an opera [sic] about the construction of the Berlin Wall, based on the myth of Pyramus and Thisbe,” allowed me to move to Berlin in April of 1990, six months after the Wall first opened. I knew Berlin well by then, and was anxious to visit Checkpoint Charlie, the Brandenburg Gate, and other Cold War landmarks to see what was new. But I quickly discovered that the most interesting changes were in the nooks and niches of the city.
One part of Berlin that had always fascinated me was Bernauerstrasse, a long, straight street in a section of the city known as Wedding. Bernauerstrasse defined the border between the French and Soviet sectors of occupied Berlin, and so the Wall ran the entire length of it on one side. Before 1990, as you walked north along Bernauerstrasse, the cross streets simply ended to your right, cut off by the Wall. A signpost at each intersection warned that “You are leaving the French Sector”, even though you could go no more than ten feet. One of these cross streets still had old trolley tracks imbedded in it, now amputated by the Wall. It seemed at times as if this fifteenfoothigh concrete slab had fallen out of the sky.
In 1990 I again went to Wedding, but this time, as I came out of the subway station near Bernauerstrasse and turned the corner, I saw a jagged tear in the Wall where one of the cross streets was now reconnected to its Eastern half by a ribbon of fresh asphalt. A border guard stood in front of a small, listing hut on one side, while cars and pedestrians passed through unhindered. I was seeing nothing more than people going about their business, running errands, paying visits. But it was something that had not happened here in over thirty years. I bought a beer and a sausage from a street vendor, sat down on the curb, and watched.
I was finding unexpected passageways not only in the Wall but in the ground. West Berlin subway lines had always passed beneath parts of East Berlin, but before 1990 the trains crept through the closed up stations without stopping – armed guards on the platforms made sure of this. Now the guards were gone and the trains stopped. Curious, I got off at one such station and climbed the stairs to the street to find myself in the middle of an intersection. The Communists had paved over the station entrance, but a jackhammer had uncovered it again easily enough. The entrance was now a rough hewn hole in the middle of the street, circled by pylons and yellow police tape to warn drivers around it.
As a foreigner living in Berlin in 1990 it was easy to feel the world was standing on its head. After a day’s visit with some new musician friends in East Berlin, I tried to convince the guard at a nearby border crossing to let me return to West
Berlin there, rather than make the trek back to Checkpoint Charlie, the required crossing point for all foreigners. As I pleaded with the guard, East Germans streamed past me into the West, flashing their passports at him without ever breaking stride.
Looking back on such images it is easy to understand why Germans became intoxicated by the rhetoric of reunification that flowed from every commentary and political speech. As recently as 1989 a reunited Germany had seemed an absurd fantasy, but now streets were being reconnected and subway stations reopened in a headlong rush to make Berlin one city again, never mind that an international border still cut through its center. In spite of queasy neighbors not anxious to see Germany reemerge as the greatest power in Europe, by October 3rd, 1990 reunification had been achieved, less than one year after that remarkable night the previous November when the Wall was opened. But for my East German friends, who watched as their country gave way to everything Western – government, currency, commerce, advertising – there was little about the process that felt like “reunification”.
Common wisdom now said that everything “Ossi” – a derogatory adjective meaning “East German” – had to go. My friends pointed out how perfectly serviceable street signs in East Berlin had suddenly been replaced, with identical text, by Western-made signs. Berlin now had duplicate museum administrations, library systems, art and music academies. In every case, it was the East German entity that got shut down. East Germans were deeply frustrated and offended by the assumption they had nothing to offer in the process of reunification. West Germans, on the other hand, were alarmed by the rising taxes needed to rebuild the Eastern infrastructure, to close down and clean up factories that had polluted the air and soil unchecked for fortyfive years. Germany was reunited, but it was a long way from being one country, and resentment on both sides was growing.
So there I was, up to my neck in the panicked energy of this new Berlin, and I began composing. It didn’t take long to realize that the musical ideas I was sketching were not very operatic. The brisk rhythms and busy melodies suggested a different treatment. But this didn’t seem in keeping with the somber tone of the myth, nor was it appropriate for the very important metaphor I wanted to render. The sketches went into a drawer and remained there for ten years. In 2001 I looked at those sketches for the first time since writing them, and realized they reflected exactly my experiences of Berlin. I decided then to resurrect them as a ballet.
My Pyramus and my Thisbe are just as singleminded and reckless as Ovid’s characters, but in this modernized telling these are also people with an agenda. The music that accompanies Thisbe’s dream about Pyramus, for example (second movement, Pas de Deux I), portrays her sentimental fantasies about him. Her emotions are fluid, she is ravished and also wary. But she ultimately sees him as a magnificent, powerful, seductive animal, ready to protect and love her and give her the life she deserves. The reality of Pyramus is less noble than Thisbe imagines, as portrayed in the second pas de deux (fourth movement). The seduction music from the first pas de deux returns, but is here violent and frantic. He wants to take her, own her, but as he does so he wonders what price he’ll pay later on.
This ballet also has a satirical side, but instead of mocking the lovers, as Shakespeare and other have done, I’ve decided to turn the tables and mock those around them: the Divertissement I depicts the citizens of Babylon doing their civic duty, engaging in a frenetic buying spree, spending money, consuming, just as we were all told to do in the days following September 11th (another “wall” that fell out of the sky, existing in this case in time rather than space, perhaps, but separating us just as permanently from everything that came before it).
Ovid’s parable is seen as a dissertation on love and devotion. The lovers communicate through the wall that divides them, whispering their desire for one another, until they can stand it no longer, and plan to escape. But at the end of the poem Ovid puts a different spin on things. Their rendezvous goes very wrong, and Pyramus is falsely led to believe that Thisbe is dead. He plunges his sword into his side, not wanting to live if he cannot be with her. But when Thisbe arrives moments later and tries to rouse Pyramus, Ovid plays a cruel trick:
He heard the name of Thisbe,
and he lifted His eyes,
with the weight of death heavy upon them, And saw her face, and closed his eyes.*
Thus Ovid forces Pyramus to realize, at the moment of death, that he is not the tragic lover, but a fool.
The characters Pyramus and Thisbe may represent a divided Germany here, but more importantly they represent the divided German Geist. In its power as a metaphor, the Wall, in any case, is the true main character of the tale. In fact, Ovid seems to be saying that the wall is inescapable – you can run away from it, or tear it down, but it will return. At your worst moment, it will fall out of the sky.
*Metamorphoses, Book 4, lines 143145. Translation by Rolf Humphries, Indiana University Press, 1955.