Opera has always tended toward grandeur. Berlin, home to three world-class opera houses, regularly takes things to the next level.
This week, for example, each of those houses is putting on a different production of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.” At one, larger-than-life serpents slither across the stage, spurting real fire from their nostrils. At another, animated pink elephants flying across a giant screen deliver a character to his salvation.
But with cuts to the city arts budget looming, this looks increasingly like a last hurrah for a system of largess under threat.
Next week, Berlin’s Senate looks set to pass a 2025 budget that will slash funding to the arts scene, which relies heavily on public money. Institutions large and small have warned that these cuts put Berlin’s identity as a cultural capital on the chopping block.
According to a plan released last month, culture funding, which makes up just over 2 percent of the municipal budget, will be reduced by around 13 percent, or about 130 million euros (roughly $136 million).
The cuts are part of a plan to shrink overall expenditure and claw back €3 billion from a multibillion euro public debt that has been growing since the 1990s. Heavy spending during the coronavirus pandemic, a downturn in the economy and an inflation-driven cost explosion in recent years only piled on more debt.
The cuts will apply across the arts — to museums, theaters, orchestras and the Berlin Film Festival — but opera is taking one of the biggest hits.
Berlin’s three opera houses — the Staatsoper, Deutsche Oper and Komische Oper — will have to scale back. That will likely mean fewer productions, slimmed down educational programs and laid-off employees. And one opera house has even raised the alarm that it might not withstand the cuts.
“For our institution, the Komische Oper, this is seriously dangerous,” said Susanne Moser, one of the company’s two artistic directors. “It could be that the Komische Oper won’t survive.”
The Komische, which was named company of the year at the International Opera Awards in October, is in the midst of a multiyear, multimillion euro renovation to its home theater, which closed in 2023. The city’s budget plan, however, will put construction on ice, cutting the Komische Oper’s renovation funds for 2025 from €10 million to zero.
Philip Bröking, the Komische’s other artistic director, said that with the added financial burden of renting temporary theaters during the closure, the company could run out of savings by summer 2026.
“This is the worst case scenario,” Bröking said. “We don’t know that for sure, but it isn’t unrealistic either.”
Berlin’s culture senator, Joe Chialo, a member of the governing center-right Christian Democratic Union party, said that the Komische Oper wouldn’t close. “In my world, it’s a must that Berlin has three operas, because it has to do with the identification of the city,” he said.
But the Komische Oper’s leaders are skeptical. Over the summer, when rumors of upcoming cuts were bubbling, Chialo said on German radio that construction at the Komische would not be halted. The 2025 budget proposal says otherwise.
On Tuesday evening at Schiller Theater, where the company is temporarily based, school children with pretzels in hand flitted between groups of gray-haired seniors sipping wine in the foyer, waiting to see “The Magic Flute.”
This production of Mozart’s classic, which uses animation to tell a whimsical love story, has become a Berlin mainstay, and is particularly well regarded as an introduction to opera for children and neophytes. (In 2019, the production toured to New York and played at Lincoln Center.)
Konrad Winckler, 42, a longtime opera fan who had brought his two godchildren, ages 10 and 8, to see their first opera, said it would be a huge mistake to stop the renovations. “You just need to renovate it then later, and it will be more costly,” he said.
Two days later, when the Staatsoper performed a more traditional version of “The Magic Flute” to a sold-out house, Berlin’s budget drama made a surprise onstage intrusion in Mozart’s piece.
In the first act, the bird catcher Papageno, sung by the baritone Carles Pachon, broke from the libretto to add some commentary. “I heard from a bird that money is low and the arts must go,” he sang in German to Mozart’s melody. Criticizing the politicians responsible for the cuts, he ended his political interlude to great applause, singing, “I ask myself, who has the bird brains in this town?”
Elisabeth Sobotka, the Staatsoper’s artistic director, acknowledged in an interview that three productions of the same opera in a week might look excessive. But the public demand was there, she said. “As long as there is an audience,” she said, “we all three will play ‘Magic Flute.’”
The Deutsche Oper’s Sunday performance of the opera, in a spectacular staging by Günter Krämer, is also sold out.
Dietmar Schwartz, the Deutsche Oper’s artistic director, said that, with cuts looming, the city’s arts scene would need structural changes. In an earlier round of culture cuts, in 2004, the government merged some backstage functions at the three opera houses to save money. This time, Schwartz said, “One must consider whether all the orchestras, opera houses and theaters really can remain.”
Thomas Flierl, a former Berlin culture senator from the Left party who oversaw the 10 percent cut in 2004, said that if the current city government had reached out to more arts leaders, it could have found collaborative ways to save money rather than leaving institutions to deal with the cuts on their own.
Chialo, the current culture senator, rejected this criticism in an interview. He said that the city government’s priority “was to cut the 3 billion.” With the 2025 budget nearly finalized, he said, it was time to start involving arts administrators in developing systemic changes, like institution mergers, that could come into effect in 2026.
But for Berlin’s “freie Szene,” or “free scene” — the 120 performance spaces and about 50,000 arts workers who work outside the major institutions — this might be too little too late.
Unlike the big opera houses, which have enough savings to last them through a year or two of economic hardship, these independents rely on short-term project funding to stay afloat. Some independent theaters, like the Schaubühne, have announced that they will face bankruptcy by the end of next year, and others will likely follow, said Julia Schell, a spokeswoman for Coalition of the Independent Arts Berlin.
The Neuköllner Oper, an independent theater, is one of the many smaller outfits unsure how it will make ends meet. Andreas Altenhof, a spokesman for the theater, said that with more notice about impending cuts, the Neuköllner Oper could have adjusted in time. But with the season in full swing, it was too late to pivot, he said.
The Neuköllner Oper signed contracts with performers for next year long in advance, and it will have to pay these artists whether or not the show goes on. Altenhof said this leaves the company with little choice but to plow on in the short-term and try to make a little money back on ticket sales, even if that jeopardizes the theater in the long run.
On Wednesday night, the Neuköllner Oper put on a surreal musical theater production called “The Devil in the Elevator.” In it, a devil, sung by a countertenor, leads a few unfortunate souls through a set of macabre dreamscapes, all while singing about drugs, sex and death to tunes by J.S. Bach.
While the production was slick, the amenities you’d find at a big opera house were in short supply. The coat check was self-service and there was a gaping hole in the wall near the bathrooms.
Yet the scrappy venue in the trendy Neukölln district felt like the epitome of what a former mayor famously described as Berlin’s charm: “poor but sexy.”
That vibe was at risk, Altenhof said. Without an experimental and vibrant cultural scene, Berlin would lose its appeal. It would, he said, be “poor and unsexy.”
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