Babel

“Bessyhoizzmahywummin.” If you can tell me what that means, you win a prize. Click here to redeem it. Charlottenberg is not the center of Berlin nightlife that it once was. “Kreuzberg über alles,” my friend Jesse told me when I said we were living out here. Yes, if you want to go out it usually means going East. But when we saw the posters announcing Porgy and Bess opening in July at the Deutsche Oper, we jumped at the chance to sample some high culture right in our own backyard. The biggest draw besides location was that the opera would be performed in the original English Ira Gershwin penned back in 1935.

The Deutsche Oper has taken a back seat to the Staats Oper since Reunification, with the latter housed in a neoclassical palace built in the 18th century on Unter dem Linden, while the former still holds court in the same Bauhaus modernist building it has occupied since it went up in 1961 in Charlottenberg-Wilmersdorf. We thought we would be especially “Berliner” and make dinner reservations in nearby Savigny Platz for after the opera, which at a running time of three hours would not be letting out until after 11.


(Deutches Oper, view from the stage)

Our “date” was set to begin at 7:30 in front of the lobby. With Julie otherwise occupied with her other husband (AKA – the Book Manuscript), I spent the afternoon crossing another “must” off of my To Do list at the Pergamon Museum. In addition to all those Porgy and Bess posters around town we’ve been seeing a lot of the advertisement for the current temporary exhibit on display there – Babylon: Myth and Truth. If you sense a little foreshadowing here, you win another prize. Click here to claim it.

The Pergamon is home to some really great artifacts from Ancient Babylon like the enormous Pergamon Altar and the Ishtar Gate**, and the current exhibit expands on that theme with two floors, one dedicated to “truth” – Babylonian artifacts like stiles, a plinth inscribed with Hammurabi’s Code, and ceramic burial urns, and one dedicated to “myth” – tracing the story of Babylon through Western Art into the 21st century. Its highlights include a Lego Auschwitz, a video art display of 64 mouths in a grid all speaking at once (in different languages), and a display of NY Post front pages drawing parallels between Saddam Hussein and the fall of Babylon (which was located in present-day Iraq if you were absent that day in Geography class).


(Pergamon Altar)

This is starting to become more of a digression rather than a foreshadowing, so fast forward to 7:59pm, just before the curtain rises for Porgy and Bess, as presented by the Cape Town Opera Company. I’ll say that again – the Cape Town Opera Company. Here’s where we get to the Babel. If you’ve seen Porgy and Bess before you know that it opens with "Summertime". My ignorant ass did not know this, but I recognized the music right away. Then Clara started singing “Ihhtzuhmmyertaimannnnthulfdgjhjk…” Take a George Gershwin tune, make it an Ira Gershwin opera tune, combine it with the acoustics and sound system of a faded concert hall, multiply by the distance our third balcony seats were from the stage, and add a heavy dose of South African accent trying to mimic a Southern drawl and you get the nonsense word above. I quickly went from the smug American who had breezed by the German program and libretto to vainly trying to decipher the overtitles projected above the stage. By the end of the first act I found a rhythm that provided about 50% comprehension, but even now I am not quite sure what happened to Clara and Jake in the hurricane, or if it really was a hurricane, or how Porgy became a cripple, or who got Bess started on the Happy Dust. I still enjoyed the show – the music was great, most of the performers had excellent voices (even if they were impossible to understand), and the staging was impressive. Honestly, the sheer fun of dressing up and rubbing elbows with well-heeled Berliners was worth the price of admission.

Our Babel-evening didn’t end when the cast made its second curtain-call. We walked to Savignyplatz and Restaurant Florian – much like the Deutsches Oper, a bit of a relic from the mod 60s of West Berlin, but still a place to see and be seen. Unfortunately, I had left my German-English dictionary behind in an attempt to look more like a native. Florian features a different menu each week, with selections presented on one hand-written page. German is hard enough to read when it is typed. Scrawled in a fancy cursive script it is nearly cryptic. We thought we recognized some words like Hänhchen (chicken), Schwein (pork) and entre cote (entre cote), but most dishes were an enigma. We decided on the Garnelen Marinieren to start, a Lammhaxe (I hoped lamb shank) for me and the Kalbstafelspitz (Kalb = calf = veal, right?) for Julie. I couldn’t swear to any of the above spellings, but I can say that the food, when it came, was delicious. Our appetizer turned out to be marinated shrimp served over a spicy tomato salsa and avocado wedges. Julie had the veal something-or-other: cutlets in a light spinach cream sauce. I had a leg of lamb, presented in a puttanseca dressing of capers and olives. We finished up at the fashionable hour of about one in the morning and hopped in a cab for home. “En di ecke der Wiesbadener Strasse und Sudwest Korso,” I knew to tell the driver. Thank goodness he didn’t ask me my preferred route, and thank goodness the German word for here is “hier,” which is where he stopped and bid us a good night.

** Ishtar Gate