Dhe bold child, only with Wagner. Valkyrie, Brünnhilde by name. The bold Kühne, Klaus-Michael by his first name, lives in Hamburg (or rather at his tax residence in Switzerland) and now – he is 85 years old – he would like to set up a memorial in the city of his birth. There, the billionaire and freight forwarder has already mixed up a lot, asked and unasked.
At HSV, Kühne’s noisy commitment left smoking rubble in the second division. His snazzy glass-fronted luxury hotel, which he parked on the Outer Alster instead of the Interconti, works like this.
In return, he is happy to give money to the State Opera, the Elbphilharmonie and its music festival, or the Harbor Front Literature Festival. The Salzburg Festival, the Lucerne Festival and the Zurich Opera House also receive monetary support from his foundation.
So in the Kühne way: It should be beautiful, representative, with a glittering name, and he creates. For example, it never occurs to him to bravely grab Teodor Currentzis and his MusicAeterna Orchestra under the armpits in their precarious financial situation.
Kühne doesn’t talk operas, he wants to build an opera house. As a present. The old Hamburg State Opera, which has existed almost continuously since 1678 on Gänsemarkt and nearby as Germany’s oldest civic music theater, is said to be acoustically poor, contaminated with asbestos and no longer at all on the former “world level”.
Also here only second division? At least that’s what Kühne claims in “Spiegel”. And he was put on the track by their general music director Kent Nagano, who scored a proper own goal with it.
Kühne’s opera house has a Copenhagen model
The logistics company, who otherwise likes to sweep everyone out of the running, wants to put a new opera house on the waterfront in Hafencity as a deceptively dazzling fantasy product. Even if he, since he is a realist, will probably not live to see its opening. He promises 300 to 400 million euros for this.
His great role model, of course: the new opera house in Copenhagen, opposite the Old Harbour, right in the line of sight of the royal residence, Amalienborg Palace. In 2005, Arnold Peter Møller, head of the world’s largest container shipping company, gave it to the Danes, who urgently needed an extension to the old, small Royal Theater, for 370 million dollars.
Of course, the consequential costs of the double operation (the historical stage continues to play) weighed heavily. Kühne, who also has the Austrian real estate entrepreneur René Benko on board, wants to avoid this as much as possible. By building a high-yield tower on the prime property in the inner city that had become free.
The polite Hanseatic city has had this certainly photogenic Danaergenschenk presented, but the whole thing should quickly burst as the bubble that it is. You can’t even get an empty house shell for 400 million, let alone the necessary technology.
The renovations/new buildings, which are currently being hotly discussed in Stuttgart or Frankfurt for the local opera houses, both probably tear the billion mark. How the 77 million building price for the Elbphilharmonie became 870 is now burned into the DNA of the people of Hamburg.
And by the way: does the State Opera automatically get better with a new shell? Asbestos is not an issue there, the technology has been properly renovated, the front building has been prettied up. You can’t hear that badly there, in the typical post-war auditorium from 1955 with its ascending rows of parquet floors, the honeycomb boxes and the very democratic lines of sight – the rear building even survived the war.
A memorial at the port
Yes, it’s true, when it comes to opera, Hamburg hasn’t been in the top league for a long time, but that’s due to both the subsidies for ongoing operations and the artistic direction. Kühne’s shiny game box as a dream of the future will not change that.
Art is primarily content, he should have learned that as a freight forwarder in his decades of commitment to the same. And of course he also saw how ballet director and honorary citizen John Neumeier, whose foundation, including the dance memorabilia collection and performance rights, is currently being tightened, is being charmed by the people of Hamburg.
The billionaire apparently wants something like this too: the Kühne Opera, to go with the Laeiszhalle, which the Hamburg shipowner of the same name had financed to a large extent in 1908. As a monument, at least as big as the stone Bismarck in the Old Elbe Park above the port. But it is currently very controversial in its martial continued existence…