{"id":375424,"date":"2025-08-26T16:56:11","date_gmt":"2025-08-26T16:56:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/375424\/"},"modified":"2025-08-26T16:56:11","modified_gmt":"2025-08-26T16:56:11","slug":"radio-review-a-mass-of-life-and-germany-united-and-divided","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/375424\/","title":{"rendered":"Radio review: A Mass of Life and Germany: United and divided"},"content":{"rendered":"

THE annual rite of the Proms is perhaps the most singularly impressive BBC<\/a> production. The Beeb merely piggybacks on a Glastonbury run by its own commercially driven management; the Proms, in contrast, exists only because of the scale of resources that the BBC can throw at it, and a commitment to programming rarely performed works that need large \u2014 and expensive \u2014 musical<\/a> forces.<\/p>\n

One such example was the first Proms performance since 1988 of Frederick Delius\u2019s A<\/a><\/strong> Mass of Life<\/a><\/strong> (Radio 3, 18 August), by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and LPO Chorus, under the baton of Sir Mark Elder. There is a \u201cdiffidence\u201d, even among professionals, about Delius\u2019s music, with its reluctance to resolve quickly or simply. Written in 1905, the Mass sits lightly to conventional musical syntax, a herald of the wholescale abandonment of tonality that would erupt soon afterwards.<\/p>\n

This is not a Christian mass but a setting of texts from Nietzsche\u2019s Also sprach Zarathustra. Delius responded to Nietzsche the ideologue more than the poet, and, in contrast with Mahler, who still sought a path to redemption through the writings of the great anti-Christian, Delius saw Nietzsche as a path to embracing mortality \u2014 or, at least, the musicologist Daniel Grimley taught me in the interval feature, which can, on a good day such as this, be one of the best things about Proms coverage.<\/p>\n

Katja Hojer, an East German transplanted to Britain, returned to her home town on the Polish border for Germany: United and divided<\/a><\/strong> (Radio 4, Sunday).<\/p>\n

Communist East Germany<\/a> suffered from profound mutual distrust between people and politicians<\/a>; that seems to have carried over into the democracy of reunified Germany, fuelled by bitter memories of a reunification process that amounted to a western takeover.<\/p>\n

Eastern industry and institutions were destroyed, leading both to a sense of being colonised and to years of mass unemployment and depopulation, as young adults streamed westward. Even the Ascension Day public holiday that provided the programme\u2019s first cameo was a Western import into a region once overwhelmingly Protestant, and now with one of the world\u2019s lowest rates of religious identification.<\/p>\n

Wages remain lower, and Easterners are represented in national institutions at one tenth of their population share. All this has driven the rise of the Right-populist AfD, in a region where political correctness reminds many of Communist-era censorship.<\/p>\n

Yet there is now net internal migration from west to east. Young people<\/a> are lured by cheaper property, including a Vietnamese German musician who rapped about the beauties of the small AfD-voting city that he had moved to. By global standards, eastern Germany is a prosperous, attractive, and stable place. Eastern German alienation is about a less tangible sense of disrespect and rootlessness. The loss of Christianity can hardly help.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"THE annual rite of the Proms is perhaps the most singularly impressive BBC production. The Beeb merely piggybacks…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":375425,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5310],"tags":[2000,299,1824],"class_list":{"0":"post-375424","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-germany","8":"tag-eu","9":"tag-europe","10":"tag-germany"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115096124389479779","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375424","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=375424"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375424\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/375425"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=375424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=375424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=375424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}