2023-07-19 12:58:49
Jonny “Tarzan” Weismüller and the unfortunate romantic Nikolaus Lenau, Ferenc Illy, who founded the coffee brand of the same name, Stefan Hell, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the writer Hertha Müller and the writer Richard Wagner. They are all connected to what is now Romanian Timișoara, through birth or school attendance. The recently deceased Wagner is the ex-husband of the Nobel Prize winner for literature Müller, who now lives in Berlin.
The conductor Cristian Măcelaru and the pianist Herbert Schuch were also born in the early 1980s in the city of 300,000, the metropolis of the Banat, where since the 13th century Germans, then Hungarians, Ottomans, Habsburgs, Serbs, Roma, Czechs, Slovaks, Bulgarians, Romanians settled.
So the place in the flat border triangle of Romania, Hungary and Serbia seems predestined to be one of three European Capitals of Culture 2023 to get a little more exposure to the public. The others are Veszprém in Hungary, only 400 kilometers away, and Elefsina in Greece. But the Romanian government was slow to release funds for this in Timișoara. After the festival fireworks of the earlier decades of the Capital of Culture, which quickly burned down, they have long since preferred to invest sustainably in renovations and infrastructure optimization.
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But the city, where the bloody departure from communism in the brutal Ceauşescu variant began in 1989, has always been a bit more rebellious and turned towards Central Europe than the rest of the country. And so there is still scaffolding everywhere, pointing to a better future.
Timișoara, formerly Temeswar, belongs – together with cities like Cluj-Napoca (Klausenburg) and Sibiu (Hermannstadt) in Transylvania – to the easternmost outposts of German. Until 1944 they make up the largest population group. And since 2020 there has even been a German mayor, Dominic Samuel Fritz, who was born in Lörrach in 1983 and is active there with the Greens. He was the speechwriter for former Federal President Horst Köhler, has been involved in the city for a long time and has a big heart for culture. “Europe lived and breathed here long before the European Union existed,” says Fritz.
Schwabenfestzug in Timisoara, 1923
Quelle: picture alliance / Arkivi/akpool GmbH
Today, 2.25 percent Germans still live here. And yet the tingling mixture of peoples can be felt, also in the diverse architecture between baroque, Austrian bastion remains, Viennese Art Nouveau and neo-Byzantine fantasy churches. Herbert Schuch and Cristian Măcelaru, once at the same school, only recently met in Cologne. One, a Romanian-German, left Timișoara at the age of eight and lives on the Rhine, the other, who traveled to the USA to study violin at an early age and earned his first laurels there, has been head of the WDR Symphony Orchestra since 2019. They want to work together in the future: It happened in Timișoara.
Properly refurbished, however, stands on Unionsplatz with its very colorful facades, where the baroque Catholic Cathedral of St. George rises, in which work is still being done, the art museum in a huge, historic city palace. There – for the first time in Romania – a Victor Brauner exhibition conceived together with the Center Pompidou in Paris can be seen. This important Surrealist, who is still to be discovered, was born in Kreuzburg an der Bistritz in 1903, studied in Bucharest and went to Paris in 1930. A year later he painted a foreboding self-portrait there – with a leaking eye. In fact, seven years later he had an accident that cost him his left eye.
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Brauner, who had already created a grotesque picture of Hitler in 1934, fled to the Nazi-free South in 1940 and died in Paris in 1966. He was ostracized in Romania, but the Ceaușescu clan still did business with the remaining paintings. Now they shine from the walls, empty cities, twisted women, staring men, bird bodies, erotic landscapes, the well-known, surreal pattern book; dark, often earthy, embellished with folklore motifs. And in autumn, another Romanian refugee from Paris will return here: the sculptor Constantin Brancusi.
On the Opera Square of Timișoara, today Siegerplatz, where the opera house and the orthodox cathedral of the three hierarchs face each other, this multicultural mix containing paprika is particularly eye-catching. The opera is an early Fellner & Hellmer historicist building that was redecorated in a pseudo-folkloric style in the nationalist 1920s and half a neo-Byzantine brutalist facade was glued in front of it. Inside, in addition to the music theater, the German National Theater resides in the preserved Redoutensaal; Entrance is from the side.
Timișoara was one of the first cities in Europe to have electric street lighting – 100 years later it was switched off due to a lack of electricity: This is one of the reasons why the riots began on Opernplatz in 1989. “Shine your light, be present!” are now optimistically proclaiming the Capital of Culture slogans.
Siegesplatz in Timisoara
What: picture alliance / Yvan Travert / akg-images
The cathedral, inaugurated in 1940, with its eleven morel-like domes in Neo-Brâncoveanu style towers on the other narrow side of the square. Both buildings are surrounded by idiosyncratic apartment buildings and city palaces, almost all of which were designed by the Hungarian architect László Székely in a Viennese secession style with medieval elements. A Roman she-wolf was placed here in 1926 as a guest gift from fascist Rome, and the elegant Lloyd café-restaurant presents itself as a sample of the Wiener Werkstätte. A scaffolding-like iron tower with greenery is a Capital of Culture installation; their posters hang on many real building claddings.
Next to the cathedral is the building of the Filarmonica Banatul, an old art deco cinema, pleasant but small; behind the building there is another open-air screen. The nearby historic synagogue has also been regularly used for concerts, but Jewish life is now supposed to move back into it. In the concert hall you can hear Johannes Brahms, the dynamic 2nd piano concerto with the Macedonian soloist Simon Trpčeski and the glowing 4th symphony, which frame a short orchestral piece by Klaus Lang.
Capital of Culture concert in Timișoara
What: Dana Moica
With this concert, Cristian Măcelaru and the WDR Symphony Orchestra want to commemorate a historic Brahms tour that Brahms undertook in 1879 through six Transylvanian cities, including the redoubt of Timișoara, in order to perform with the Hungarian Joseph Joachim, among other things, the song written for him in the to promote the violin concerto premiered in the same year. Half the orchestra is gone the next day. But after hours spent in the conservatory in the old town hall on Freedom Square, which is in dire need of renovation, with master classes for students and a chamber concert, there is another memorable concert: the Cologne musicians merge with the musicians from Timișoara, who also maintain a regular partnership with the Altenburg Gera Philharmonic Orchestra to perform Gustav Mahler’s 3rd Symphony together.
So Cristian Măcelaru, currently the best-known Romanian conductor, is returning to his hometown for what is only his second concert. The only brother of ten sisters, two of whom also play in the orchestra, he also unleashes a special Mahler sound, the foundation of which is the tonal tradition cultivated here by the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, which also includes Mahler’s native Moravia. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a post horn solo, children’s choir “Bim-Bam”, Ländler, a funeral march rising up or a gentle Adagio calm, it sounds very synchronous, warm, familiar. Mahler, all by himself. From Cologne. In Timisoara.
Not only Cristian Măcelaru wants to come back to conduct. Romania’s gateway to the west should finally be open again. Not only for direct flights to Frankfurt and Munich. Central Europe – so close.
More information: timisoara2023.eu
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