Musical Imagery and the Canon in Sighard Gille’s Gewandhaus Mural Gesang vom Leben

Gesang vom Leben in the Leipzig Gewandhaus

Gille painted his 7,664 sq.-ft. mural on the large back wall of the main concert hall of the Gewandhaus in Leipzig, visible in the foyer of the building as well as from the outside through the building’s glass façade. This third Gewandhaus was the only newly built concert hall in the GDR and gave the Gewandhaus Orchestra, established in 1743, its East German home in 1981.⁵ The orchestra’s first concert hall was located in a building for Gewänder (garments) in Leipzig, constructed in 1498, from which the orchestra took its name. The second Gewandhaus was opened as an exclusive concert hall in 1884 at a different location in the city. After this building was heavily damaged during the Second World War, the third, and current, Gewandhaus was completed between 1977 and 1981 and functioned as a flagship of musical and architectural excellence in the GDR.

Due to the Gewandhaus Orchestra’s significance, the architectural and cultural decisions for this project lay jointly with the Leipzig Department of Culture, the Leipzig County and City Councils, the GDR’s Ministry of Culture, and the Committee of the Union of Visual Artists. Official documents about the planning of the building between 1967 and 1981 urged the architects to indicate already during the architectural planning process “Standorte für monumentalen Bildschmuck” (Gewandhaus zu Leipzig 18).⁶ The new building was supposed to illustrate the historical mission of the working class, and manifest the high level of artistic and cultural conservation in the GDR. From the beginning, the building directive intended to connect the arts with each other and with their social environment. At the time of the completion of Gille’s painting, however, the expectations of artistic commissions in the GDR had increasingly been interpreted arbitrarily as part of a relative liberalization of cultural policies (Mann 585f.), which affected Gille’s work as well. In the late 1970s and 1980s, politicians exerted less ideological control over artists who were undertaking state commissions, giving them license to implement their own artistic visions more easily. None of the documents consulted for this project indicated direct censorship by the officials to limit Gille’s vision for his painting.

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Figure 1.

Bernhard Heisig, Gille’s teacher and a leading figure in East Germany’s “Leipzig School,”⁷ and head architect Rudolf Skoda were responsible for the artistic directive of the Gewandhaus. This directive combined architecture, the fine arts, sculpture, craft, and industrial design to express the building’s motto “Leipzig—ein bedeutendes Zentrum der Musik” (Skoda 146).⁸ The Gewandhaus was also to be used as an exhibition space for contemporary art in compensation for the art museum that had previously stood on the Gewandhaus’s site.⁹ In 1978, the Secretary of the Leipzig County Council of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (Socialist Unity Party of Germany, SED) had resolved to support artistic projects in the Gewandhaus displaying representations of humanistic and socialist musical creativity and their traditions in an attempt to bolster the GDR’s international appeal of musical creativity (Mann, Schütrumpf 296). Accordingly, the artistic design of the whole building was supposed to be an expression of the socialist society’s understanding of the arts in their “Systemzusammenhang” and its openness to “echte und vollkommene Synthese aller Künste untereinander und miteinander.”¹⁰ The artistic directive called such a synthesis Komplexkunstwerk (complex work of art), instead of using the more familiar term Gesamtkunstwerk.¹¹ This directive did not explicitly mention a wall painting in the building’s foyer, but it detailed motifs and themes that possible artworks could feature or allude to: among them were the figure of Arthur Nikisch conducting Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony for an audience of workers in Leipzig, Chopin’s Revolutionary Étude, “Beethovens Gedanke ‘Alle Menschen werden Bruder’,” as well as broader themes such as the humanist and militant functions of music, the pictorial representation of music, and the history of music from its beginnings to the present (Gewandhaus zu Leipzig 19).¹² Many of these themes were picked up by Gille and by other artists who created smaller paintings for the upstairs hallways and the second foyer of the building.

Originally, Heisig was assigned to cover the large wall in the foyer, but he passed this task on to Gille and the local painter Wolfgang Peuker.¹³ On March 5, 1979, officials agreed on a ceiling painting draft for that wall with a fee distributed equally between Peuker and Gille (Rektorat). The two did not, however, paint this mural together. Conflicts led to a division of the wall, with Peuker relegated to the lower part on the main floor where he produced his Welttheater (World Theater), which would eventually be covered up (and has remained covered until today). Gille became solely responsible for the 7,664 square feet above the lowest wall. The editors of the 2016 catalogue of Gille’s works, Hans-Werner Schmidt and Frédéric Bußmann, argued that this was a sign of the painter’s privileged proximity to the state (Schmidt, Bußmann 45), but the fact that Heisig had delegated the project to Gille also clearly played a significant role.

Gille’s painting expresses connections to three broader existing spatial realms—the Gewandhaus, the city of Leipzig, and the wider musical environment of the GDR. Gille divided his mural into four panels with connecting friezes. The mural’s first panel, “Orchestra,” is most closely related to the Gewandhaus and shows scenes from a concert hall with Kurt Masur, Gewandhauskapellmeister (music director of the Gewandhaus) between 1970 and 1996, in the middle, absorbed in his conducting and facing the viewer. Both hands are lifted—baton in the right¹⁴—and his mouth is perhaps voicing words sung by the three depicted choirs, among them the famous Leipzig St. Thomas Choir, recognizable by their blue uniforms.

The second wall, “Powers of Darkness,” sits directly above and depicts a dark pandemonium of grotesque creatures. The river Styx, dividing earth and the underworld, separates this wall from the orchestra below. As in the first panel, there is a crowd of people, but the atmosphere is nightmarish, with distorted faces and a darkened sun. Death sits in one of two broken boats— a slave driver among mad creatures—competing with Masur’s orchestral sound by playing a rattle to keep his grotesque beings sufficiently agitated to push forward. The third wall, “Song of the City,” is demarcated from the frenzy below by a “Hexenfries” (Frieze of the Witches) portraying the Dance of Death. This third panel depicts an almost chaotic cityscape. Gille defined the city as Leipzig by placing the Gewandhaus on top of a high-rise and by including the local swimming stadium, some of Leipzig’s newly built apartments, as well as his own cat looking out a window. People are dancing, swimmers are competing, cars are driving bumper to bumper, and workers are erecting a pole to the music of a jazz band. A red tower extends upwards into the fourth and last wall, “Song of Fortune.” A man and a woman are standing on a red globe in the “golden ratio” section, tightly embracing each other and kissing—oblivious to the commotion below. To the right, a chamber orchestra is playing in a wooded area. A satyr is resting on what is actually the heating vent for the Gewandhaus’s foyer. He is playing a fanfare trumpet, usually used for ceremonial purposes to announce special festivities—quite fitting for the opening of the concert hall in 1981.¹⁵

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Figure 2.

Gille’s mural incorporates the architecture around it by including heating vents as elements in the painting itself and by using the slant of the wall to simulate a motion effect: when viewers walk from one side to the other and pay attention to the depicted traffic jam or to the swimming lanes, they will notice that these objects seem to be moving with them, changing position and length. Through this effect the painting becomes ephemeral, like music itself. Characteristics of music are thus part of the painting as well as its theme. Actual music is also being performed around it—either in the foyer during special events or directly behind its “canvas” in the main orchestra hall, so that the musical imagery in the painting and actually performed music are constantly referring to each other. Gille alluded to the arts of dance and poetry in his painting as well by including dancing figures and poetic text passages of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde. Collectively, the addressed arts communicate Gille’s vision.¹⁶

Analysis of Musical Imagery

Writing about his work, Gille said that he found inspiration for this four-tier structure in Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (1908–09), opting for four large “Themenkreise” (thematic areas) (Gille and Gille), however, instead of six that would parallel Mahler’s six songs in the piece. Das Lied von der Erde as a “synthesis of symphony and song” (Hefling 293) is referenced in Gille’s work through orchestral forces, textual elements, and contextual associations that strengthen the intermediality of Gille’s work: the painter conjures connections to Romantic art, its large-scale orchestral works and program music, underlines the painting’s narrative character, and adds references to poetry and the human voice to his mural. One can also see the piece’s title-page and Mahler’s portrait in the group of strings on the bottom far-left side.¹⁷ Gille chose Mahler as an inspiration because he was so “gebrochen […] in seiner Musikalität, diese harmonischen und sehr gefühlvollen Stellen, die werden ja mitunter richtig abgerissen, durchschnitten, durch Disharmonien, durch ziemlich grelle Momente” (Gille).¹⁸ Gille used such “Unstimmigkeiten” (disparities) not only to portray both idyllic and gruesome moments, but also as a comparison to his painting style: “Ich male eigentlich auch so. Das heißt, ich habe harmonische Stellen und durchgearbeitete Stellen und dann wieder Skizzenhaftes und fast abstrahiert Abstraktes” (Gille).¹⁹ At least one other piece by Mahler is invoked in the mural as well: associations to the Eighth Symphony (1906) can be found in Gille’s large body of musicians and singers. Mahler’s symphony received its nickname “Symphony of a Thousand” by Emil Gutmann who prepared the premiere of the piece in Munich, featuring 1,028 instrumentalists and singers, including multiple adult and children’s choirs—similar to Gille’s depicted musical forces.

Gille’s attention to Mahler and his music seems consistent with the artistic history of Leipzig. The Gewandhaus had close relations with the composer, who lived and worked in Leipzig between July 1886 and June 1888. He was Second Kapellmeister (conductor) under Arthur Nikisch at what was then called the New Theater (now the Leipzig Opera). During this time, Mahler started work on his first symphonies. His music has been prominent and well-liked among Leipzig audiences and East German critics; Gille’s inclusion of Mahler paralleled the musicological developments of the time, as GDR Mahler scholarship picked up in the late 1970s and 1980s.²⁰

While Gille included references to Mahler in a painting that culminated in a “Song of Fortune,” thus invoking a positive conclusion, representatives of the GDR alternative art scene that started to become more prominent in the 1980s also used Mahler, albeit to conjure darker scenarios. One of the last films of this type produced under the GDR regime was Das Land hinter dem Regenbogen (The Land Beyond the Rainbow) (1991, dir. Herwig Kipping), on which work began in 1986. The soundtrack of this surreal and dystopian critique of actually existing socialism included Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder (1901–04). Gille was inspired by Mahler’s music because of its division between harmonious and dissonant moments, which he resolved in the last panel that strives toward Arcadian heights. Kipping felt that Mahler’s music had something to say about his own personal, as well as Germany’s wider, history: “Ein Gefühl, daß man vielleicht nicht mit sich zurecht kommt, mit seiner eigenen Produktivität, mit seinem eigenen Dogmatismus, mit seiner eigenen Kraft, mit den eigenen Wahnvorstellungen, seiner eigenen Identität, seinen eigenen Ge- und Verbrechen.”²¹ While Gille used Mahler to try to overcome darkness, Kipping chose the same composer to explore this darkness further. That Mahler can be present in Gille’s rather utopian vision of socialism and Kipping’s apocalyptic conception shows just how complex representations and critical assessments of the GDR—not to mention Mahler— were.

Beyond Mahler, Gille’s mural more generally invokes the everexpanding forces of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century symphonic music. The three depicted choirs on the bottom of the painting in particular conjure Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (1822–24)—at its time a revolutionary representative of the symphonic genre because of its inclusion of the voice. It has traditionally been played at the Gewandhaus for New Year’s Eve since 1918, debuted by Arthur Nikisch, and was also performed during the New Gewandhaus’s opening in 1981. Amateur choirs have often been chosen to perform Friedrich Schiller’s lyrics in the Ninth’s last movement, especially for East German government events and celebrations for public holidays, which turned the piece into an event for the Volk. To reclaim Beethoven and his music for the new socialist country, musicological discourse had to remove them from the ideological uses especially during the Nazi regime.²² The Ninth was part of “key moments” (Rehding 199) in German history—celebratory and controversial—for example at the 1872 cornerstone ceremony of the Bayreuth Festival Theater, but also at its 1933 season opener during the Nazi regime, at Adolf Hitler’s 1942 birthday in Berlin, as European Anthem, and, a month after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in both East and West Germany to celebrate the end of the German-German division. The Ninth is a “complex blend of sound world and cultural memory” (Rehding 199), exploited by various regimes to cater to their needs. In the 1950s, the symphony’s ideal of “All men shall become brothers” (from the poem’s second version, published 1808 posthumously) was both used in the GDR to evoke images of a united German Volk (Stahl 57)—or even a global, united, human race—as well as sentiments against “imperialist” threats from the United States and West Germany that apparently aimed at destroying “die deutsche Kultur und unser nationales Kulturerbe.”²³ The more the GDR moved away from the ideal of a united Germany, however, the more the piece’s message of “Brüderlichkeit—Bruderliebe—Menschenliebe—Frieden” was exploited by party discourse to portray the GDR as a country of peace and West Germany as the “Kriegstreiber(in).”²⁴ The usage of Beethoven as a symbol of German unity began to fade the more the GDR’s “hopes of a single German nation rescinded” (Kelly, Composing 104). Beethoven’s image became more complex in the late 1970s—moving away from the heroic picture of Beethoven as one of the “precursors of socialism” (Kelly, Composing 198) to one that was more conflicted, revealing in particular individualistic tendencies. But Beethoven’s music remained “the soundtrack for the GDR’s triumphant journey to actually existing socialism” (Kelly, Composing 104). Gille alluded to Beethoven in his mural, thus claiming the composer for the Gewandhaus, but he also pointed to his complex reception in the GDR and the broader discourse around him.

Mahler and Beethoven are closely connected in their musical output. Beethoven extended the length of the symphony from approximately thirty minutes to closer to one hour, while Mahler took this to an extreme with the approximately one hundred minutes of his Third Symphony (1896). The painting’s giant proportions symbolize this expansiveness. Beethoven and Mahler both worked with larger orchestras and featured choirs and soloists in their symphonies. Gille’s first panel (see figure 2) includes an orchestra of enormous numbers and multiple choirs. One violinist sitting on the lower left in this orchestra is playing from sheet music showing the text from the first movement of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, “The Drinking Song of Earth’s Misery.” Drawing further connections between Beethoven, Mahler, and the GDR, Gille depicted sheet music from the first movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony (1811–12), probably the most popular of his symphonies in the nineteenth century (Larue et al.), which a violinist is playing right next to another playing Mahler. The Seventh belongs to Beethoven’s “heroic” phase, an era that early GDR musicologists lauded as evidence of Beethoven as a “proactive supporter of social reform” (Kelly, Composing 198). By contrast, Clara Schumann’s father allegedly commented that Beethoven must have composed the piece in a drunken state (Meltzer)—how fitting then to position it right next to Mahler’s drinking song. Both of these pieces underline the Gewandhaus’s motto “Res Severa Verum Gaudium”—true pleasure is a serious affair—connecting classical music (the “serious affair”) with worldly joy. While Gille’s three choirs conjure Beethoven’s Ninth (and Mahler’s Eighth), they also reflect the strong singing tradition in the GDR, which found expression on many levels—for example, the Singebewegung (singing movement), lay choirs, and professional ensembles (such as the Leipzig St. Thomas Choir portrayed in the mural).²⁵ Through the inclusion of solo singers, Gille was not only referencing Das Lied von der Erde and Beethoven’s Ninth, but also the Leipzig Opera, which stands just across the street, as the Gewandhaus Orchestra’s second venue.

Though symphonies during Beethoven’s and Mahler’s times were not following a uniform style, they derived from a traditional model that involves a fast opening movement, a slower second movement, a dance-like third, and a fast, more triumphant movement at the end. Whereas the first of Gille’s panels could generally “sound” like any of these movement types if it came to life—possibly a fast, triumphant movement in a major mood—the dark and gruesome second panel expresses a minor, more somber mood through its dark colors and grotesque figures. It could represent a second movement that is slower, featuring the first movement’s relative minor key, which could stand for the orchestral masses from the first panel turning into the grotesque figures of the second. The third panel shows many dancing figures so that a scherzo is easily imaginable. The last panel with its Arcadian scene tries to triumph over the darker panels below and could represent an exultant, grand symphonic fourth movement in a major mood.

Through such allusions to symphonic music, Gille evoked the collective experience of a nineteenth-century bourgeois public concert and other symphonic traditions of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Common among music critics of the early twentieth century was the belief that “visiting the symphony hall fostered in the audience an image of itself as a national community” which “created social meaning” (Ziemer 33). Unlike concerts for the aristocracy before, concerts for the bourgeoisie were public and (theoretically) accessible to “anyone who can afford a ticket” (Cressman 69), thus presuming a democratic and egalitarian character. Leipzig in particular played a significant role in developing this bourgeois musical culture as the city where the public concert became firmly established (Cressman 72). The symphony itself evokes democratic and egalitarian ideas as well, through its ability “to unite the widest possible range of instruments in such a way that no one voice predominates and all contribute to the whole” (Larue et al.). It was “understood to represent the emotions or ideas not merely of the individual composer but of an entire community, be it a city, a state, or the whole of humanity” (Larue et al.). By building on these old, bourgeois, musical traditions, and by foregrounding labels such as “democratic” and “egalitarian” in official discourse, the SED hoped to employ the classical musical sector to legitimize the East German state in a political climate where, for example, the Federal Republic of Germany seized the Alleinvertretungsanspruch (exclusive mandate) of the “true” Germany until 1972. SED Party officials considered the GDR as the “exclusive heir” to those traditions in contrast to the West that had “supposedly inherited the decadent and destructive tendencies of late Romanticism and early German modernism” (Silverberg, “The East German” 281), which were responsible for the spread of fascism and imperialism.

Gille placed Kurt Masur in the bottom center of the mural, which reflected the conductor’s formative relationship to the Gewandhaus, Leipzig, and the GDR. Masur had what one could call a desirable background for an East German artist: he was born into a family of workers and trained as an electrician before studying conducting and piano in Leipzig. He worked as first conductor at the Leipzig Theater (1953–55), led the Dresden Philharmonic and the Berlin Komische Oper, and arguably reached his professional pinnacle as Gewandhauskapellmeister. As a public figure in the GDR, Masur gave interviews, was broadcast on the radio, and served as a figurehead for the GDR abroad. His artistic vision determined the concert programs in the Gewandhaus as well as the artistic directive of the newly built concert hall. By grounding his mural in Masur, Gille defined the Gewandhaus as “Masur’s house,” which reflects the sentiments of the 1980s: many students had called the building the “(Auditorium) Masurium,” since Masur had put so much effort into its realization (Weinkauf, Große 29). Because Masur is at the center of the orchestra as well as at the bottom of Gille’s whole painting, he is the moving force of not only the music, but also the metaphorical city of Leipzig. In 1989, he became a particularly important figure during the Monday demonstrations and the “Appeal of the Leipzig Six.”²⁶ His leadership was pivotal for the peaceful outcome of the demonstrations in the city, as it had been for the Gewandhaus’s development in the GDR.²⁷

While Gille’s conductor and orchestra represent Masur and the Gewandhaus’s musical body, the scene offers associations to Max Oppenheimer’s triptych Die Philharmoniker (The Orchestra) (1926/1952), and, again, Gustav Mahler, who is standing in the middle of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in that painting. This connection opens up a broader cultural frame that transcends Leipzig and the GDR. Both Mahler and Masur are positioned centrally in their respective orchestras, their arms raised, giving an important cue to the players. In both paintings, the brass players on the right side are oversized. Neither Mahler nor Masur is producing sound, but they are both guiding the musicians to perform under their respective leadership.

By alluding to Oppenheimer’s work, Gille connected the Gewandhaus with Viennese fin-de-siècle modernism, evoking the painter’s involvement with the Second Vienna Secession, Mahler’s musical heritage, and perhaps even the Second Viennese School with Arnold Schoenberg and his students. He referred to such complex musical traditions to point out that a purely East German (classical) music tradition was not only an illusion, but that its roots were found in musical movements that had a complicated history in the GDR. During the founding conference of the Verband Deutscher Komponisten und Musikwissenschaftler (Union of German Composers and Musicologists) in 1951, for example, musical modernism of the whole first half of the twentieth century had been condemned, which in turn led to the notorious formalism debate that included the Second Viennese School. The works of Mahler had already been considered “krankhafte Verirrungen” (sick aberrations), while the whole of the Second Viennese School was repudiated because of its supposedly psychopathological vocabulary that was considered unusable in GDR music (Schneider 206). In the mid-1950s, GDR musicology officially acknowledged Alban Berg because of, what they defined as, his “plebejischnostalgischen Sozialthematik und seiner zögernden Annäherung an die Dodekaphonie”, but scholars kept voicing their reservations toward Schoenberg.²⁸ Until the 1970s, Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music “remained unacceptable,” while his Romantic and late works had gained acceptance (Calico 87).²⁹ Such attitudes most certainly also expressed the GDR’s relationship with Anti-Semitism and the country’s problematic Aufarbeitung (reappraisal) of the Nazi regime and the Holocaust. Composers formerly dismissed as “formalist” were rehabilitated in the late 1960s and 1970s, their modernist techniques being redefined as justified expressions of anti-imperialist tendencies such as “danger, fear, catastrophe, the bizarre and terrifying” (Calico 87).

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Figure 3.

Interpreting music through a socialist lens was typical of many East German musicologists, particularly in the early years of the country’s existence. They aimed to define their own classical music canon and periodization as distinct from the West, highlighting democratic, anti-imperialist, antifascist, secular, and collective tendencies over stylistic similarities or temporal borders. Party-loyal GDR musicologist Ernst Hermann Meyer stated as late as 1971 that music was supposed to develop a “kämpferischen Charakter” conveying a sense of “Kraft, Zukunftsbewußtsein, Liebe zum Leben, zum Frieden […].”³⁰ But he, along with other GDR musicologists such as Georg Knepler and Nathan Notowicz, struggled to define a strictly East German canon after the Second World War. Both Germanys shared not only a common musical past, including their European neighbors and those music traditions of a broader geographical scale, which made defining an exclusively East German canon and Erbe (musical heritage) impossible;³¹ they also shared a wider common artistic, historical, political, and economic heritage that complicated the specification of an exclusively East German approach. But since the GDR lacked “political legitimacy and economic strength of its western sibling, the SED relied on culture to bolster its claims that the GDR was the only ‘real’ Germany” and thus promulgated its image as the “exclusive heir to the German musical heritage” (Silverberg, “(Re)Defining” 125). Through his depiction of musical imagery in the mural, Gille objected to this claim.

Musical Aesthetics of the Gewandhaus Mural

By seeking to claim German musical heritage for the GDR, officials hoped to raise the country’s position in the global cultural environment through the arts. GDR musicologists and critics wanted to reframe the pre-existing canon based on socialist criteria. By definition, a canon places value on certain pieces and composers, but does not necessarily dictate actual performances. By contrast, the repertoire—or “repertories” (Kerman 107)—consists of those works frequently played in the concert hall, as determined by performers, in particular conductors. Gille portrayed a mixture of canon and repertoire in his mural. He adhered to the Gewandhaus’s building directive of “Leipzig— an Important Center of Music,” and commented on the performing and musical canon of the locality through past and present. He included neither Nikisch nor Chopin’s étude from the artistic directive (only a portrait of Chopin was included), but he did feature Masur, Beethoven, and Mahler, as well as portraits of other composers. All of the other broad themes mentioned in the planning documents were included to some extent. Gille referred in his work to his social surroundings in Leipzig as well as a broader geographical context that included the European classical musical canon.³²

Gille expressed the musical complexity of canons in his painting when he placed small images of composers’ heads and their name plates in the bottom right corner of the painting—as if they were sitting in theater boxes. He seated them in multiple rows, but did not categorize them according to musical eras, regions, or output. Recognizable composers in the first upper row are all European, coming from modern Hungary, Austria, Germany, and Russia, and representing the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.³³ They are Franz Liszt, Richard Strauss, Carl Maria von Weber, Franz Schubert, and Modest Mussorgsky. The next row below features Frédéric Chopin, Antonín Dvořák, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Robert Schumann, Clara Schumann, and Felix Mendelssohn, from present-day Poland, Czech Republic, Russia, and Germany, all composing during the mid- and late nineteenth century. The third row shows Ludwig van Beethoven, Johann Sebastian Bach, Hector Berlioz, Johannes Brahms, Richard Wagner, Edvard Grieg, and Arnold Schoenberg (with glowing eyes reminiscent of Schoenberg’s own paintings), hailing from present-day Germany, France, Norway, and Austria, and belonging to eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century musical movements.³⁴ Many of these composers enjoyed personal connections with one another. Schubert and Weber in the first row corresponded with each other, as did Chopin with the Schumanns and Mendelssohn. Berlioz maintained relations with Wagner in the same row. Gille did not pair Liszt with Wagner, nor Brahms with the Schumanns, thus not evoking the close relationships between their families. He did, however, place Brahms underneath Clara Schumann, thereby alluding to their intimate personal relations. Gille’s mixed categorization of classical composers aligns with the opposition East German musicologists had to the periodization of music “on the basis of stylistic and temporal criteria” (Kelly, Composing 41).

Through his choice of identifiable composers’ heads, Gille defined the Gewandhaus as mainly a space for large-scale orchestral music of the nineteenth century, which matches his allusions to the symphonic genre. By emphasizing Romantic music through his portrayals of composers such as Brahms, Mendelssohn, and Schubert as well as his focus on Beethoven and Mahler in the rest of the painting, Gille joined other artists and scholars who, starting in the mid-1970s, were increasingly concerned with Romanticism.³⁵ Such “romantic revival” was “essentially a manifesto for change” that, through its “fragmented structures offered the potential to illuminate the problems inherent in the political status quo” (Kelly, Composing 139). Gille had already pointed out such fragmentation in Mahler’s works that inspired him to paint his mural.

Gille’s painted canon also corresponded mostly with the actual repertoire performed at the Gewandhaus at that time. I compiled the data for this section using lists from Johannes Forner’s edited volume Die Gewandhauskonzerte zu Leipzig. 1781–1981 (1981).³⁶ Between 1970 and 1980, Beethoven and Bach were most frequently heard by Gewandhaus audiences— accounting for 104 (14.4%)³⁷ and sixty-nine performances (9.6%)³⁸ out of a total 722 pieces. Brahms, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Shostakovich, and Tchaikovsky were performed between thirty-five and thirty times each; Dvořák, Schubert, and Bruckner between twenty-five and twenty-one times, and Mahler eleven times (1.5%). The repertoire of most GDR orchestras in the mid-1970s comprised 30% contemporary music and 70% Erbe. Including composers who were still alive in 1970, contemporary music accounted for 36.9% of the Gewandhaus’s repertoire, thus placing it among the “traditional” orchestras (as compared to the Radio Symphony Orchestra of Leipzig with 48.7% contemporary music and 51.3% Erbe). Nevertheless, between 1970 and 1980 Masur programmed a significant number of twentieth-century composers—forty-five in all. Foremost among these (as shown above) was Shostakovich, followed by Stravinsky and the GDR composers Siegfried Matthus and Fritz Geißler. The Second Viennese School was represented by Berg and Schoenberg with three and two performances, respectively. The four most frequently performed GDR composers were Matthus, Geißler, Siegfried Thiele (four performances each, 0.5%), and Paul Dessau (three, 0.4%). The only female composer represented was Ruth Zechlin from the GDR with one performance.

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Figure 4.

Gille made some noteworthy choices that express both a merging of and a deviation from repertoire and canon to reflect the mural’s location inside a historical monument intended to represent cultural tradition instead of the fashion of the day. Even though pieces by Mozart, Shostakovich, and Bruckner were fairly frequently performed on the Gewandhaus stage and discussed in the musicological literature of the time, Gille omitted them from his recognizable crowd. Representing the Gewandhaus’s performing canon, he included Strauss, Wagner, and Schoenberg, despite them having been controversial figures in musicological discourse before the 1980s. By contrast, Gille portrayed Liszt, Weber, Mussorgsky, Clara Schumann, Berlioz, and Grieg, although they were rarely featured in musicological journals and performed infrequently at the Gewandhaus. He withheld any references to such established GDR composers as Hanns Eisler, Paul Dessau, or Ernst Hermann Meyer, even though they were already canonical and their presence in an East German concert hall would have been musically justified.³⁹ Gille may have wanted to avoid a premature assessment of their œuvre. Instead of following the written or performed canon, Gille focused on the musical heritage of Leipzig and its surrounding areas by portraying many composers who had been born or were active there, emphasizing the Gewandhaus’s connection to its location. Bach, Weber, Mendelssohn, Strauss, and Mahler worked in Leipzig; Bach was born in Eisenach; Chopin and Tchaikovsky traveled through Leipzig; Robert Schumann was born close to Leipzig in Zwickau; and Clara Schumann and Wagner were both born in Leipzig. Mussorgsky, Dvořák, Schubert, and Beethoven, however, never spent time in the city, though the latter three published there. They probably earned their place in Gille’s painting by belonging to the general classical music canon.

The symphonic genre, the oversized orchestra, and the size of the mural refer to art on a grandiose scale, thus conforming to the socialist realist appeal to monumentality, which Laura Silverberg has characterized in the context of music using Paul Dessau’s cantata Appell der Arbeiterklasse (Appeal to the Working Class) (Silverberg, “Between” 62). Musical monumentality not only refers to “bigness and greatness” (Rehding 9) in a piece as monumental music does not need to be big or loud, but especially to its “task of both celebrating the loftiest achievements of a culture and presenting them in an immediately appreciable form” to the masses (Rehding 40). A monumental piece would thus communicate something meaningful about the collective which cannot be separated from its past. Associations of Gille’s mural with Beethoven’s Ninth, for example, did convey certain aspirations of the SED party and the performing musical body, but they also included connotations beyond their immediate “purpose,” which were connected to Beethoven, Schiller, their times, and the performance history of the pieces themselves. Thus, monumentality in Gille’s work also means the presence of a long history to which the music bears witness as some kind of monument—a function similar to that of a musical canon.

In this context, the Gewandhaus itself can be considered monumental in scale and content: as the first and only newly built concert hall of the GDR, it stood in for progress and success, representing the GDR’s achievements not only in architecture and the arts, but also in international relations. The building is memorable and impossible to miss for anyone passing: its muffin shape looms over Augustus Square and gives the impression of the painting expanding at the top into the sky. The mural and its figures appear larger than life; Masur, in particular, at the center of the mural, attains an almost heroic character. Even though Mahler and Beethoven—as “giants” of classical music—would fit this monumental character well, Gille portrayed them here as two among many, seated next to fellow musicians to listen to, or participate in, a concert. He thereby weakened the monumentality and prominent position of both composers in the canon. Gille’s depiction of Mahler as equally important to Beethoven, and as one artist among many, contrasted the strong emphasis on Beethoven inside the Gewandhaus (and GDR music) in the 1970s and 1980s. This contrast was reinforced by the display of Max Klinger’s statue of Beethoven, which was displayed in the Gewandhaus’s chamber hall foyer until 2004.⁴⁰ Thus, Gewandhaus visitors of the time experienced a complex view of Mahler and Beethoven, a sentiment GDR musicological research mirrored in the 1980s: while Mahler research was increasing, Beethoven’s position in GDR musicology was being redefined.⁴¹

While Gille complicated musicological views of classical music of the time, he also paralleled East German musical aesthetics that accepted a work formerly decried as “formalist” if its modernist techniques could be reinterpreted as expressions of socialist tendencies. On the left side of the orchestra panel, a bare-chested woman vocalist in a red dress is singing.⁴² The podium tag labels her as “Electra.”⁴³ Here, Gille was alluding not only to ancient Greek mythology (as with other figures in the painting), but also to Richard Strauss’s 1909-premiered opera Elektra. In this work, Strauss used atonality and other modernist techniques to express the “exacerbated spiritual condition” (Murray) of the female protagonist whom he portrays as a femme fatale. In her soloist position, Gille’s Electra could also represent one of the female vocalists of Beethoven’s Ninth, Mahler’s Eighth, or the alto in Das Lied von der Erde. She is also strongly suggestive of the soloist in the fourth movement of Mahler’s Third Symphony, who sings Nietzsche’s dark, rhapsodic “Drunken Song of Midnight” from his Thus Spake Zarathustra. Through Electra, Gille conjured the complicated relationship between Mahler and Strauss, who both enjoyed a respectful friendship with each other but had “sharp, interesting disagreements” (Youmans ix), while Strauss was not particularly well-received in GDR musicological discourse. Gille’s spelling of the name (Electra vs. Elektra) also invokes associations with the East German rock-pop band Electra from Dresden who, in their 1976 album Adaptionen, adapted classical music electronically. Seriousness and joy are juxtaposed once more through so-called E-Musik and U-Musik.⁴⁴

In general, Gille portrayed E-Musik as somewhat removed from its audience and the rest of the action in the painting. The first panel with Masur’s orchestra lies detached from the second panel with its adjacent frieze. In contrast, the other panels are connected by content that is visible on more than one panel (such as the red cathedral-like structure that connects the third and fourth panels, moving through the contiguous frieze). Gille placed the Gewandhaus on top of a tall building in his third panel. Its elevated location among traffic jams and crowded houses presents it as almost aloof, like a stranded ship amidst its chaotic surroundings. This setting invokes an elitist status of classical music and suggests that it only comments on, and coexists with, society rather than actually engaging with it. At the same time, however, it represents lofty—even utopian—ideas and leaves space for the audience to contemplate. A scattered chamber orchestra with only a few listeners lying in the woods of the fourth panel supports this notion of detachment.

In contrast to classical music’s “remoteness,” the third and fourth panels express active reactions to performed U-Musik, symbolized, for example, through a jazz combo. In the third panel, children are dancing, while workers are seen erecting a pole to the music of just such a band. As East German jazz musician Günter Sommer asserts, jazz has always “been put under suspicion in eastern Europe, as jazz musicians were alleged to be ‘conspiring with the class enemy’” by promoting American “values,” such as commercialism and sexual transgression (Sommer 20). The East German Ministry of Culture rejected any forms of jazz (and forbade formations of jazz clubs) in 1955, referring to negative associations including formalism and decadence, also using anti-Semitic undertones through terms such as “cosmopolitan” (Poiger 153). West Germany and the United States actually used jazz as a Cold War weapon, for example as a messenger for American democracy (Poiger 164). Many GDR officials, however, tried to use especially Dixieland, spirituals, swing, and blues—the “true” jazz—to “attract people to the socialist cause” (Poiger 159). Thus, discussions about jazz were closely linked with complex socio-political issues in and between East and West. In the 1970s, jazz in the GDR—particularly in its above-mentioned forms—was officially accepted as the music “of a progressive American proletariat” (Sommer 23), and around this time, an independent East German jazz culture developed. However, jazz never reached the majority of East Germans and attracted mostly young listeners.⁴⁵

By including jazz combos in his painting, Gille indicated that this genre—just like classical music—is not only associated with socio-political debates in the GDR, but that it also belongs closely to the musical cityscape of Leipzig. Leipzig, in turn, is then defined as a city where socio-political debates are happening—not only in the 1980s after the mural was finished (especially with the Monday demonstrations) but already in the years (even decades) before. Contrasting the reception of classical music, however, Gille portrayed jazz performers energizing people receptive to their music during work and leisure activities—a realm much closer to personal lives than a concert hall. Jazz is not removed from the audience like the large orchestra in the lower panel or relegated to a seemingly heavenly realm like the smaller orchestra on the fourth wall.

Gille juxtaposed reality and utopia in the mural, which blurred the lines between his social vision and the real world around him. The satyr in the third panel lying on the heating vent for the Gewandhaus’s foyer is addressing both architectural reality by resting on the vent and Gille’s utopian world by being a mythical figure. He thereby connects aesthetic and contextual considerations with social environment. The furry god Pan on the very left intertwines utopia and reality as well: through his presence as a mythical creature, he defines this space as utopian, but his surroundings—the red tower and the naked people—nevertheless place him in some kind of shared reality. According to the 2019 Gewandhaus tour guide, Pan was modeled after a worker on the construction site while more than fifty recognizable faces of the construction crew can be found in the crowds of all panels. The oversized Dionysus in the fourth panel was modeled after a tiler of the Gewandhaus, with bald head, squat nose, and almost female breasts (Hametner 70).

Gille presented the journey from reality to such a utopia in his painting from the bottom to the top as a journey “per aspera ad astra” (through darkness to the stars)—Masur’s orchestra is playing music that has to move upward through the realm of dark creatures to reach heavenly heights. This trope is a common musical theme and it aptly characterizes the GDR’s transitional society. Such transition from darkness to light provided an important “parable for the evolution of communism” (Kelly, Composing 47). It demonstrates what the SED envisioned as the symbolic overcoming of Germany’s fascist past through the victory of the “democratic” GDR government. The Party used classical music performances in this context as a means to support their ideology, since the music served the need for representing the GDR as an educated, anti-fascist nation striving for international recognition—no matter if the reality was far from democratic. Those starry heights, however, are not without insecurities: Gille himself asserted for his 1977 painting Die Fähre that the couple in the boat—a precursor of the mural’s couple—represents the “Unklarheit des Kommenden” (uncertainty of the future), a sense of happiness that is “eingeschränkt” (limited) (Bluttke 6). While a pomegranate as the symbol of love is lying next to the couple in the 1977 painting, Gille placed it as a large red ball under his couple in Gesang vom Leben, representing a different form of transportation than the ferry, but with similar connotations of insecurity and instability. Mahler also used the trope of “per aspera ad astra” in his symphonies, often similarly complex and uncertain as Gille’s version. Gille extended the idea of overcoming to that of overcoming the SED-imposed socialism to reach a different, maybe artistically inspired, socialism, but he does so with doubts and insecurities.

Gille also juxtaposed the spatial merging of social realms with that of geographical areas through music. Together with his concurrent blending of reality and utopia as well as musical genres, he invoked a simultaneity that is also found in his display of artists from different eras. This underlines the painting’s scope: by pointing to temporal simultaneity of music, the mural emphasizes the rich musical Erbe of the GDR, which derived from sources beyond the country’s existence. Gille stressed a spatial simultaneity of reality and utopia within one artwork, and thus communicated a vision for Leipzig and the broader GDR that transcended national, temporal, and actually existing limits. He expressed this vision in writing as well, as one of the signatories of the 1989 “Aufruf ‘Für unser Land’” (Appeal “For Our Country”), in which politicians, artists, and others called for a continuing but improved existence of the GDR, where peace, social justice, individual freedoms, and the conservation of the environment were guaranteed (“Aufruf”).⁴⁶ If Gille’s reality can be defined as actually existing socialism, and his utopia as a desired socialism, then he indeed expressed the Dritter Weg in his Gesang vom Leben.

Conclusions

By the time Gille finished Gesang vom Leben, many commissioned paintings had not fulfilled the “utopisch-antizipatorische” (utopian-anticipatory) expectations of cultural officials while still being exhibited (Kaiser 135). As Paul Kaiser argues, this can be ascribed to a politically weary commissioner, who had all but ceased interfering with painters’ visions for artworks in the late 1970s and 1980s (Kaiser 138). In contrast to paintings in the 1950s, Gille’s and other murals at the time did not use socialist symbols such as the hammer, the red flag, the fist, or the peace dove to symbolize the state as the overarching, victorious power. An example of this kind of earlier art is Max Lingner’s 1952 mural on the exterior of the former GDR House of the Ministries in Berlin. Its lengthy title, Die Bedeutung des Friedens für die kulturelle Entwicklung der Menschheit und die Notwendigkeit des kämpferischen Einsatzes für ihn (The Significance of Peace for the Cultural Development of Humanity and the Necessity of the Militant Service for It), guided the viewers’ interpretation of the work toward socialist ideals the SED was propagating. The painting portrayed workers as soldiers of peace (Rehberg 63) and children and teenagers as members of the Freie Deutsche Jugend (Free German Youth) and Junge Pioniere (Young Pioneers) alongside members of the Kasernierte Volkspolizei (Barracked People’s Police).

Gille’s painting portrays such utopian-anticipatory expectations, which have been part of official SED discourse especially during the 1970s and 1980s, albeit with a sense of insecurity. His work participated in a discourse that criticized SED politics but not socialism per se, turning Gille into a proponent of the Dritter Weg. The mural followed a tradition of presenting viewers with “Welt und Gegenwelt, Realität und Arkadien” through the incorporation of musical themes.⁴⁷ In its title and thematic elements, it resembles the 4,843 sq.-ft. indoor relief Lied des Lebens (1976–81) at the House of Culture, now the Culture and Convention Center, in the East German city of Gera. Gera’s mural—a collection of individual works by twenty-six artists under the leadership of Jo Jastram—treats the topic of German musical heritage from medieval Minnesang to worker songs by way of various styles including realism, structuralism, cubism, allegory, and symbolism. Structurally, both Gesang vom Leben and the Gera painting protrude into the city space outside of their respective buildings, and they also have to overcome structural obstacles such as columns, heating vents, and banisters. Another mural from the late 1970s, Ronald Paris’s Triumph des Todes, Triumph des Lebens (1978–82) in the foyer of the theater in Schwedt, deals with similar themes, albeit differently. The title and content of Paris’s work point toward an unusually balanced outcome of the struggle between light and darkness, in contrast to Gille’s rather positive conclusion that corresponded more with the official, uplifting, perspective on art, even with its tentativeness. Paris’s work does not depict the victory of darkness or light, or of social progress, but rather a struggle between equal powers with an ambiguous ending. Like Gille, Paris portrayed death, longing, music, and love, and featured an embracing couple. Paris’s work is also visible from the outside of the theater whose glass foyer it adorns (particularly at night thanks to artificial lighting). It also has to counter various columns that obstruct the visitor’s view.

Through his treatment of the Gewandhaus mural, Gille presented himself neither as a dissident artist, nor as a mere Staatskünstler in the pejorative sense of the word. This term had taken on negative connotations in the context of East German artists and their legacy, as Eisman found for Bernhard Heisig. Like Heisig, Gille fulfilled commissions for and represented the GDR state, particularly with his Gewandhaus painting, but he did not seem to have “forfeited artistic integrity in exchange for fame and power” (Eisman, “Reexamining” 120). Gille himself underlined this fact with a rather specific example in a personal interview: before SED officials visited the Gewandhaus construction site to inspect his mural, “ein paar Leute vom Gewandhaus, die da angestellt waren” warned the painter that his bare-chested woman vocalist would not be approved by these officials.⁴⁸ Gille decided to cover the figure’s breast with watercolor that he removed again after the officials’ visit. Ironically, Gille reported that these officials later told him that they would not have objected to the half-naked figure. Nevertheless, Gille did not compromise his artistic vision at the prospect of possible censorship from above, making only a minor and reversible concession.

Both personal conversations and archival documents make clear that political officials rarely interfered with Gille’s vision for the mural before or during the painting process. Leipzig art historian Thomas Topfstedt argues the same for other baubezogene Kunst in the GDR, noting that although the civic commissioner usually set the themes or topics, no one could decide how the guidelines were to be realized in the work on behalf of the artist tasked with executing them (Topfstedt 22). Consequently, artists who fulfilled state commissions were not automatically “executers” of SED politics. Topfstedt reminds his readers that it would be an oversimplification to evaluate buildings-related art produced in the GDR in general as propaganda art of the SED practically without examination (Topfstedt 22). Gille was a Staatskünstler in that he produced his mural for the state, but he did not show blind loyalty to the SED, while the SED seemed to show only little interest in his art at that point in time. Gille followed rather what Leipzig art historian Peter Guth calls a “merkwürdige Melange aus Apologetik und Trotzdem, aus Hoffnung und Enttäuschung, aus gebücktem und aufrechtem Gang” and an attitude that was characterized both as “finsterste[r] Opportunismus des Geldverdienens” and “ehrliche[m] soziale[m] Engagement.”⁴⁹

By portraying the classical music canon of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in his mural, Gille produced a mélange of visual arts, architecture, and music—an intermedial project reminiscent of a Gesamtkunstwerk. If we included contextual connections between Gille’s painting and Max Klinger’s Beethoven statue, then the art of sculpture could be included in this intermediality as well. Wagner used his concept of Gesamtkunstwerk for musical theater to “explore and expound upon notions of society, community, and the role of (German) art” (Steinhoff 57), linked to dramas of ancient Greece— something Gille seems to aspire with his Gesang vom Leben as well.⁵⁰ Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk was a “proposal for the democratic German nation that he imagined for the future” (Koss xiii), so that a unification of the arts would occur alongside the unification of Germany itself. By alluding to such a utopian vision, Gille’s painting conjures issues of East and West German separation and unification. Just as Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk “presents a model of artistic production and aesthetic reception that is active, communal, political, and fundamentally utopian” (Koss xiii), Gesang vom Leben also expressed utopian wishes for socio-political change. Gille combined multiple art forms, and thus forged connections with their respective pasts and reiterated the Romantics’ goal of merging all arts. By joining musical canon with repertoire, Gille suggested an interdependence of scholarship and public opinion. First and foremost, Gille characterized the Gewandhaus as inseparable from its (artistic) community—the city of Leipzig—as well as from its longtime music director Kurt Masur.

Gille illustrated that the artistic history of the country was not unilateral, but complex and tied to traditions that belonged to both East and West Germany and beyond. His painting includes the established figure of Beethoven and the not yet canonical Mahler, as well as classical music from familiar sources and formerly condemned jazz. While the cityscape alludes to the actual city of Leipzig, it also features Greek figures, presenting the landscape as simultaneously real and utopian. The painting portrays the musical tradition of the GDR, but it leaves out GDR composers as if to clarify that their place in the canon had yet to be determined. Gille’s visualization of Leipzig as a city of music reveals a musical history where composers and performers from different time periods coexist, emphasizing the intricacies of artistic historiographies. Gille thus defined the Gewandhaus—and the GDR musical landscape—as a space of simultaneity, where histories, geographies, and art forms converge.

Leipzig visitors can still view Gesang vom Leben today. Even though some baubezogene Kunst of the GDR has been destroyed (often because the building to which it was attached fell to modernization or restructuring measures), a significant number of those artworks still exists. A large problem, according to Topfstedt, is the rather “unbeachtetes Dasein” (unappreciated existence) of such buildings and their art, which often leads to gradual decay and finally to the building’s demolition (Topfstedt 26). Most certainly because of the Gewandhaus’s significance not only in the cityscape of Leipzig but also in connection with its orchestra, Gille’s mural did not have to (and probably will not) face such dismal fate. The painting’s presence that expands to the Augustus Square brings it to the everyday attention of Leipzig’s residents and visitors. While the mural represents a reappraisal of the failed socialist experiment and the reevaluation of social norms through artistic means, it also connects critically with the present and future of Leipzig and Germany. Because of its location, it “participates” in current socio-political debates, for example during demonstrations by the Friday for Future movement or gatherings of the Leipzig chapter of the right-wing and anti-Islamic group Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident, PEGIDA) that have both been held on Augustus Square. Thus, we also have to recognize this artwork in a contemporary environment that deals with open conflict between socialist tendencies, neo-liberalism, the rise of the far-right, and issues of migration. During the forty years of the GDR’s existence, the Gewandhaus already offered a space for musical and socio-political deliberations, and it continues to serve this purpose.⁵¹ With his painting, Gille contributed his vision for East Germany, a vision that, today, resonates with contemporary discussions about national and global questions of history, belonging, politics, and aesthetics.