Hovering between fact and fantasy
Natalie Wheen is thrilled by the sights and sounds of a largely reconstructed Dresden
1 had the strangest experience at the ballet in Dresden: all perfectly pretty onstage, the company well schooled but I couldn't believe the orchestra. I've never heard a ballet orchestra playing with such love for the music — beautiful phrasing, elegantly balanced winds, seamless ensemble, the right notes all the time, in tune ... I had to pinch myself.
Of course, this was no ordinary ballet band; at the Semper Oper in Dresden, the Staatskapelle, with a 455-year-old reputation to guard, has the longest record of continuous work of any bunch of musicians. The orchestra did first performances for Wagner and Weber, nine premieres for Richard Strauss, his dream team. It was Beethoven's super band. No wonder it has this rich sound, the depth to it from years of fine polishing the ensemble — and not least from working every day with singers for something like 300 years. Heinrich Schutz, who arrived in Dresden in 1612, made the court music the most famous in Germany by bringing in the rich sounds of Monteverdi and writing the first German opera. And Gottfried Semper's late 19thcentury building for the Saxon State Opera is the eighth theatre on the site.
Being in Dresden brings an unnerving sensation that the city is hovering in some middle ground between fact and fantasy. Come Out of the Sarver opera building and you step into a painting, one of those 1750s cityscapes by Bellotto: the Zwinger to the right, once pleasure gardens designed as a Baroque setting for sensational parties for Elector Augustus the Strong, and now home to his and his son's art collections, the cultural heartbeat of Dresden today. Across the square is the Catholic Hofkirche, with the Residenzschloss just behind, with its famous tiled frieze showing the stately progress of the Saxon rulers over 800 years. You know that further on is Brat's magnificent promenade breasting the river bank, the delicious palace of the Secundogenitor and, beyond that, the new phoenix of the Frauenkirche's great 18th-century dome, slowly reforming under its scaffolding wrap.
It's a strange dislocation to be physically in the city, with your mind's eye unerringly full of images created for the 18th-century Electors Augustus — orientating yourself in the physical space through the experience of the painted space. A curiously T.S. Eliot experience of collapsed time.
Dresden's stately heart is, of course, almost entirely a careful reconstruction after the war. And even those repairs have already been changed from a brash sandstone into a semblance of weathered age thanks to the pollution of old East German technology, perhaps even the valiant Trabant had its part to play in softening the plastic surgery. It's beautiful and velvety and elegant.
When the scaffolding comes off the Frauenkirche — planned for Dresden's 800th anniversary in 2006 — we shall understand more just how much is reconstruction. Under the wraps it looks to be a golden building spattered with blackened attacks of acne from those stones that survived the Allied bombs of 1945 ... from 805 RAF planes on the night of 13 February, followed by 311 USAF the night after, leaving about 41 cubic metres of rubble for every survivor and unknown tens of thousand of bodies.
The Frauenkirche literally exploded as the stones cooled down from the heat of the firestorm, sending the huge bell-shaped dome crashing down. The heap of rubble stayed untouched at the heart of the city in the Neumarkt until 1993: debate still rages as to whether it shouldn't have been left as the war memorial it had become.
The journey in from the station takes you through a grim series of socialist housing projects, built with the rubble from the war, and you discover immediately how little of old Dresden is left. Even if you arrive via the river (recommended) a faceless new town starts just around the corner from the Zwinger. With 15 square kilometres bombed into smandereens, quick utilitarian solutions were more pressing than recreating times lost by tacking on reassuring olde-worlde façades. The city bus tour spends its 90 minutes mostly in the suburbs where late-19th century and Jugendstil villas are protected from rash development and are still reassuringly intact.
I found Dresden itself mesmerising, one of those wellkept secrets, probably thanks to the old German divide and British squeamishness over our doubtful war record of destruction. The shortest visit is an experience out of proportion to the sum of its individual parts.
For example, at the Kreuzkirche, dating back to 1170, they stopped short of a complete reconstruction, leaving the interior only roughly plastered. I went to look because it was Schutz's church, the choir one of the oldest institutions in the world. After the gleaming white of the Hofkirche, it was sobering to contemplate the severe gaunt interior of the Kreuzkirche: every day there is communion with other victim cities of the war under a cross of nails from the ruins of Coventry cathedral.
And, yet again, you walk out of the building and into a painting — another Bellotto, recording the church's wrecked state after Prussian bombing in the Seven Years War. This was when the art lover Elector Augustus III had to stop his enthusiasm for buying art.
The reference points always take you back to the art and the galleries, which are so close together that they constantly cross reference each other. In the Zwinger, go from the Old Masters across to the Rustkammer, full of sensational armour. Admire the French works — Watteau and Poussin and Claude — and make the connections with the Meissen porcelain shown alongside Chinese and Japanese treasures on the other side of the courtyard.
Just a short walk away, in the Albertinum, can be found post-18th-century and contemporary work, sculptures from the Renaissance and the Antiquities — and the most outrageous treasures in the so-called Green Vault, where the idea of an art collection began as the private pleasure of the ruling electors. Eye watering fantasies of gold and ebony, strewn with jewels. . .
And then you go on to the opera and to a restaurant after and you wonder again if you're in or out of the artwork. It's a hugely attractive proposition.
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