The Chancellor’s Instrument
You must imagine the oboe!
Quelle: Getty Images/Sean Gallup
Olaf Scholz likes to explain that he played the oboe as a child. But what does that say about the Chancellor’s style of government? A connoisseur explains the psychology of a musical instrument that plays a very unusual role in the orchestra.
Man oboe teacher was a clever man (and a gifted cor anglais player). As we sat side by side listening to Mozart in the Koblenz orchestra pit, he impressed on me that the second oboe (i.e. me) was there so that you couldn’t hear it.
With the first oboe, on the other hand, the situation is completely different. It has to be there from the first second of the concert, actually before it really gets going. Everyone listens to her, agrees with her. She has to be loud, with angelic tongues and a clear voice, she has to be able to speak (actually sing).
What does that have to do with Olaf Scholz? For a good decade now, when he’s been asked about jokes from his youth and because learning music at a young age is proof of the formation of empathy and is therefore ideal as proof of heart formation, he has been telling that he played the oboe as a child.
He usually doesn’t say how long. Puberty was probably over. The legend was just back in the cover story of Time magazine.
Before that he learned to play the recorder. A difficult fate that he shares with his predecessor Angela Merkel, who (Merkel about Merkel) also tried out the piano “with little success”.
Oboe player in the orchestra
Source: Getty Images / Photodisc / Michael Blann
The early end of Olaf Scholz’s oboe career could now be traced back to political uneasiness, to that fact which Albrecht Mayer, the oboe god, is said to have summed up in the sentence that democracy has no place in an orchestra.
However, it would also be possible – and the observation of Scholz’s first hundred days as, so to speak, the first oboe in his government orchestra suggests this – that he never shed a certain two-toboe quality.
But a chancellor is not there to be ignored. It’s there to set the tone loud and clear and penetrating. Because that is missing, it sometimes seems as if the traffic light is playing on at least three concert tones.
By the way, Friedrich Merz is said to have tried his hand at the trombone. That predestines him to be the leader of the opposition. But whether you can be chancellor with it?