Fire theater (André Heller)

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The Fire Theater was one of André Heller designed musical fireworks , the 1983 in Lisbon and 1984 in Berlin took place. A fireworks display was underlaid with classical music . The fireworks consisted of static and moving fire images, which were formed from ground fireworks on specially made frames. The classical music - common repertoire pieces and commissioned compositions - was played " from the tape " over loudspeakers . In Lisbon the fireworks ( Portuguese Teatro de Fogo ) was over theTejo fired, the spectators stood on the Praça do Comércio . Half a million spectators were gathered in front of the Reichstag at the Berlin Fire Theater with Klangwolke .

Theater of Fire in Lisbon

Even as a child, when he saw fireworks , Heller asked himself whether it could be used to “tell a story” and combine it with music. In 1983 in Lisbon he wanted to “tell the story of the origins of mankind”. A letter of recommendation from Bruno Kreisky helped . The fireworks took place as part of a Council of Europe exhibition on the theme of "Portugal and the Age of Discovery".

Hellers Theater des Feuers ("Teatro de Fogo") took place on June 11, 1983, in the night from Saturday to Sunday. Those involved included the fireworks dynasty Ruggieri and the set designer Georg Resetschnig , who had already helped design Heller's variety theater Flic Flac . On the Tejo in the port of Lisbon, at a distance of 150 meters from the shore, there were three interconnected barges , on which stood 30-meter-high tubular steel scaffolding, with a width of 160 meters over the barges. On the steel frame there were wooden frames equipped with fireworks, a total of 25,000 bang and flares with a total weight of 11 tons. The spectators watched the spectacle with a duration of 45 minutes from Praça do Comércio . In sync with the fireworks, music was played from the tape, including works by Handel .

The cost of the fireworks alone was 700,000 DM , the total cost of the event was 1.5 million DM. Entrance fees were not charged. This was made possible by two sponsors, and Heller also vouched for with his private fortune. Portuguese television broadcast live, and camera teams from Austrian and Bavarian television also filmed (director: Gérard Vandenberg ).

Fire theater in Berlin

Emergence

In Berlin, Heller wanted to "stage a plea for fantasy and against war". The arrangement in front of a historically charged backdrop enabled him to arouse associations with the Reichstag fire , war or National Socialist mass gatherings.

With the fire theater, Heller wanted, among other things, to bring classical music closer to young people who are usually used to listening to other music. He assumed that some viewers heard such music for the first time in their lives. That is important to him, but whether the audience “could decipher all of his messages” was less important to him, according to Regina Kusch.

Fireworks

The Berlin Midsummer Night's Dream 1984, set up specifically for the summer break from art and culture, gave Heller's fire theater the organizational framework in which the Düsseldorf laser specialist Horst Baumann presented his laser show a few weeks later - on August 18 - in the Wannsee lido in Berlin . The news magazine Der Spiegel spoke of Sky Art in this context . Heller's fire theater with Klangwolke took place on the evening of July 7, 1984 in front of the Reichstag building .

The journalist Regina Kusch took a look back at the Berlin fire theater on the occasion of the 25th anniversary on Deutschlandfunk . She quoted Heller, who wanted to create a "moment with a touch of eternity" and thus fulfilled a childhood dream. A team of 250 pyrotechnicians arranged 15 tons of fireworks and pyrotechnic objects for the fire theater according to a "sophisticated plan" in such a way that ten large pictures were created one after the other, "composed of 150 segments". A total of "30,000 powder-filled cardboard rolls" were used. On the occasion of its 50th anniversary in July 2008, the Berliner Abendschau reported on "eleven tons of fireworks and 4,000 rockets". In order to achieve additional effects, Heller had the trees on the Platz der Republik prepared with mirrors. On his website he presents some photos from Lisbon and Berlin.

In Berlin, the fire theater attracted 500,000 spectators, half paying and half “ onlookers ” , according to Tagesspiegel . The weekly newspaper der Freitag mentioned police information, which also included "half a million onlookers". Because 60,000 foreign visitors came to Berlin, the Pan Am airline alone had to use 28 additional flights to Tegel Airport . Heller himself speaks of more than a million viewers on his website, which is more likely to refer to the fire theater in Lisbon, because, according to Spiegel Kultur, around 900,000 spectators were there.

Heller chose the venue carefully. In this respect, there was some "excitement" in East Berlin, with the result that the East Berliners were kept away by extensive barriers.

Picasso's dove of peace
André Heller , 1984
Fire theater
Berlin

Link to the picture
(please note copyrights )

“... of course the event artist didn't choose the location on the border between east and west by chance. It was a magical place, he thought, laden with a curse. To banish him, Heller - in a flaming finale to Handel's Messiah - let Picasso's dove of peace soar into heaven. "

- Regina Kusch : Deutschlandfunk

Officially, it was said that the barriers on the East Berlin side were made for fire protection reasons .

Heller turned down an offer from Mama Concerts , which wanted to repeat the fire theater on the Daglfing trotting track , despite an offered fee of one million marks , which, according to his own admission, he would not have succeeded years earlier.

Music and other acoustic accompaniment

In Berlin the fire spectacle was accompanied by classical music . Heller called this acoustic background the sound cloud . Among other things, he used:

Walter Haupt composed a fire theater entrada especially for this event . The sound cloud was transmitted with 136 loudspeakers. The origin of the term cannot be clarified, but it is still used, for example for the Linz Klangwolke , which has been staged since 1979 and for which Haupt is considered the inventor.

In 1984 a record was released with the musical highlights of the fire theater in front of the Reichstag.

In addition to the music, there was another acoustic performance, also from the tape. Therese Giehse performed one of his poems as an interpreter of Bertolt Brecht's works . According to Heller on the occasion of an interview with Elfriede Jelinek , it was “the most impressive moment in Berlin” for him, “when there was ten minutes of silence, no music, no fire, nothing at all, just this poem and the glow of the cities in the background Brecht's anti-war poem To my compatriots was presented , which he, according to Wolfgang Werth , dedicated to Wilhelm Pieck , who had been elected president of the new, provisional republic three weeks earlier, in the expectation that he would “effectively admonish compatriots to adopt a strictly pacifist stance ".

reception

The dctp.tv portal provides short original film recordings by the two cameramen Günther Hörmann and Thomas Mauch . The fire theater was a "sensational success". In a review of 2009, the Tagesspiegel described the fire theater as “a great event”. Despite all the audience enthusiasm, there was also harsh criticism.

"Religious Schmock , end-time jugglers or court fireworkers?" A week before the start of the fire theater in Berlin, Fritz Rumler from Spiegel Heller described him as an "eccentric bird of paradise" who "turns night into day with rockets and Bengali dazzling work". While he still had to guarantee himself in Lisbon , according to Rumler in Berlin he was supposed to “help fill the summer gap” with a “deeply symbolic pyrodrama” for a fee of 50,000 marks . Andre Heller is "on the way to the apostle, if not to the Savior himself". And finally: “The› little Jewish boy with the long nose ‹(Heller) once wanted to› become famous with a huge swing ‹. That's him, but who is he? "

Two years later, under the title Desperate Narcissus, with an apparent typing error, the Spiegel called him certainly not carelessly a “Schlawiener” and harshly criticized Heller and his projects. "Colorful balloons over Europe's big cities" would advertise Austria's tourism, in Venice the "air haunt" barely prevented a disgrace . "Heller's hot air" arrives. He fascinates the masses and is controversial at the same time. His career is an "almost never-ending story of victories and sensations, but also cracks and scandals". At the fire theater in Lisbon “panic broke out because of the crowd” and it ended in chaos. In Berlin, half of those interested would have "got stuck on the approach routes" beforehand. The Munich evening newspaper described the “Kokelei before the Reichstag” as the “flop of the year”, the Austrian news magazine Profil wrote: “Schmock around the Reichstag”. Heller “likes to defend himself with chutzpah and arrogance”, kanzele critics as “generals of banality” and, according to Hans Jürgen Syberberg, is a “desperate narcissus”. He has "fanatical friends and frenetic enemies". At the very least, however, his large-scale events raised doubts as to whether they could "not all too easily end in a catastrophe". That is why Heller is thinking of no longer participating in the “race of superlatives”.

Heller never wanted to create such a large fireworks display again. Three years later he staged “a similar spectacle” at Tempelhof Airport in Berlin, which once again delighted hundreds of thousands.

In 2020, the Austrian President Van der Bellen awarded Heller the Amadeus Prize for his life's work.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Regina Kusch: Art with an explosive effect. 25 years ago the artist André Heller staged a fire theater. In: Deutschlandfunk. July 7, 2009, accessed August 7, 2021 .
  2. ↑ a b c Bohemian nasal radio operator . In: Der Spiegel , No. 23/1983 (June 5, 1983).
  3. ↑ Brigitte Wolter: Berlin: fire theater and Wannsee dream. In: Zeit Online. June 22, 1984. Retrieved August 7, 2021 .
  4. ↑ a b c Sky Art. In: Spiegel Kultur. July 22, 1984. Retrieved August 7, 2021 .
  5. ↑ Christina Rubarth: The year 1984. In: Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg (rbb). July 30, 2008, accessed August 7, 2021 .
  6. ^ A b André Heller: Fire theater. In: Heller's personal website. Retrieved August 7, 2021 .
  7. ↑ a b c fire theater 1984. André Heller's beautiful glow. In: Tagesspiegel. July 9, 2009, accessed August 7, 2021 .
  8. ↑ Karsten Krampitz: 1995. Lots of art. In: Friday. June 17, 2015, accessed August 7, 2021 .
  9. ↑ In: Andre Heller's fire theater with the cloud of sound . With the participation of Alexander Kluge , Hans-Jürgen Syberberg , Heiner Müller . 1985, ISBN 3-85446-112-7 .
  10. ↑ a b c Desperate Narcissus. In: Der Spiegel. August 31, 1986, accessed August 7, 2021 .
  11. ↑ a b Elfriede Jelinek : Interview with André Heller 1985. Retrieved on August 14, 2021 .
  12. ^ Philadelphia Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra: André Hellers Feuertheater. Musical highlights . EMI-Electrola, Cologne 1984, DNB  351463046 .
  13. ↑ Haupt, Dr.hc Walter . In: German Composers Association (Hrsg.): Contemporary composers in the German Composers Association. A manual . 5th edition. ConBrio Verlagsgesellschaft, Regensburg 2000, ISBN 978-3-932581-34-2 ( komponistenlexikon.de [accessed on August 9, 2021]).
  14. ↑ André Heller sees his fireworks. Documentary 1984. Germany. In: Crew United . Retrieved on August 9, 2021 (Director: Hans-Jürgen Syberberg , Production: Ziegler Film ).
  15. ↑ André Heller's Fire Theater - Musical highlights . His Master's Voice , No. 1C 038 29 0186 1, vinyl, LP. ( Entry at Discogs )
  16. ↑ Wolfgang Werth : On Bertolt Brecht's poem "To my countrymen" . In: Hubert Spiegel , Marcel Reich-Ranicki (Ed.): Frankfurter Anthologie. Poems and interpretations . tape  22 . S. Fischer, Frankfurt, M. 1999, ISBN 3-458-16987-3 ( planetlyrik.de [accessed on August 14, 2021]).
  17. ↑ Fireworks over the Reichstag. In: dctp.tv. Retrieved August 7, 2021 (1:47).
  18. ↑ a b Fritz Rumler: Sarabanden from Paganini of the Zeitgeist. In: Der Spiegel. July 1, 1984, accessed August 7, 2021 .
  19. ↑ Isabella Karner: André Heller receives life's work Amadeus from the Federal President. In: Stadlpost. September 7, 2020, accessed August 7, 2021 .