Ich bin ein [Texas-Born] Berliner

As a reputable musical journalist of several decades’ high-level experience, I almost invariably avoid even mentioning sources I feel I must, for whatever reason, leave anonymous, but I feel strongly that this present instance justifies such an exception.

On October 8th, a New York Times article under James R. Oestreich’s byline led off with this:

“Opening the Carnegie Hall season, the [Lucerne Festival Orchestra] had come to New York as an exclusive creature of Claudio Abbado, but a seriously ill Mr. Abbado had to stay behind….”

Yeah, sure…. 

Experienced practitioners of journalism instinctively recognize at least two kinds of illness, one of them “diplomatic” – i.e., their promulgators knowingly lie in their teeth, for various reasons, paramount among them legal: cancellations invariably mean emergency additional expenses, so contracts customarily include an escape clause excusing such “acts of God” as serious illness – and my own personal physician (also Abbado’s during his tenure as conductor of Berlin’s mighty Philharmonic), who ordinarily maintains total confidentiality, once confirmed for me the medical feasibility of widely published reports that Abbado’s emergency operation for stomach cancer had left him with literally no stomach whatever, with a stretch of mere intestine skilfully pressed into duty as an emergency substitute, forcing Abbado at least for a period of adjustment to subsist on tiny feedings at accelerated intervals.  Abbado canceled this Carnegie Hall obligation, the press reported, because of illness – which especially under his circumstances hardly surprised anyone.

Earlier this week, empathetically outraged by the treatment accorded the same unboundedly esteemed physician friend, I privately broadcast that outrage to a few personal friends it affected at least peripherally, and one of them who responded I sincerely regret I must leave anonymous here.  I’ll also, for reasons of auxiliary camouflage, edit his personal communication to me, which with European courtesy he wrote me in his rather picturesque acquired English.

Anyone in his right mind has to understand that 9/11 radically changed a long list of things, high among them airport security.  Months ago, bound from Berlin’s Tegel Airport for Helsinki, I had in my leather handbag a tiny keepsake gift less than two inches in overall length: probably the tiniest Swiss Army knife in history, containing one itty-bitty blade, a similar (almost useless) nail-file, and, in lateral slots, itty-bitty tweezers and an incongruously elegant toothpick made of apparently genuine ivory – end of inventory.

However, for the punctilious German official who examined me (and I can recall only one such physical once-over even more thorough than this: at the airport in Tel-Aviv, where the young Israeli soldier going over my person skilfully kept up a line of chatter obviously intended to distract me from such momentary intimacies as his making certain I had absolutely nothing taped between my legs or above my penis) had me open and empty every nook and cranny of that handbag – and he took inexorable exception to my cute little knife.  To his way of thinking – which I totally understand and approve – knife meant knife, and some of those Al-Qaida villains who mass-murdered all those airline passengers on 9/11 had managed to commit that unprecedented crime armed with nothing apparently more sinister than the sort of harmless-looking cutter used on plain ordinary household carpeting.  (In passing, the back of my hand to Finnair’s Tegel Airport staff: not only did they manage to lose that gift knife, not only useful but also cherished for sentimental reasons, but when I pressed them after my return to track it down, an egregiously rude German employee there simply brushed me completely off.)

Getting back to Claudio Abbado’s cancellation of his Carnegie Hall date – and every musician and musical organization naturally accords any Carnegie Hall date pinnacle importance – here you have the explanation provided by a trusted, totally reliable person definitely in a position to know for sure but whom I must, unfortunately, leave anonymous here. 

Apparently in connection with Lucerne’s location in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, Abbado evidently had to go – for the personal interview inflexibly demanded of all such post-9/11 visa applicants – to the Embassy of the United States of America in Bern, the Swiss capital.  The totally reliable and trusted musician friend of mine who’s blown this particular whistle sums up what he reliably (and in my opinion justifiably) regards as Abbado’s real reason for canceling in these few unequivocal words:

“His visit to the U.S. Embassy in Bern.”

He writes from repeated personal experience as a rising musical star already with plenty of experience with major orchestras on several continents when he goes on:

“Everyone who at least once has gone through this procedure knows what it looks like: lines, waiting-list, checking of your files, fingerprints, SPECIAL (!) photos [and I have to admit I have no idea of what he means by "SPECIAL (!)"], another line (inside), discussion with the person behind a glass wall, with you standing and her (him) comfortably sitting, etc., etc.  Why should Maestro Claudio Abbado go through all that hell?”

Let my European friend round off his own contribution with this personal opinion of what he calls the good news:

“Maestro Abbado feels good – and the bad news is: American music fans didn’t get a chance this time to see him conducting his excellent orchestra.  And I am afraid  he’s not the first and not the last European musician who will cancel their U.S. appearances because of  new U.S. visa-regulations.”

Prior to composing this bloggery, I sought opinions from several informed colleagues and friends.  Another response, from the distinguished retired editor of an impressive list of major American musical publications: “As if I weren’t already ashamed enough these days to be an American.”

And from a fellow Berliner-by-choice, with pre-unification experience of Soviet-dominated eastern Europe: “I know of many people who will not even take a plane which stops over in the U.S. nowadays, because non-citizens are treated in such a demeaning manner.  It’s a bit like the procedures behind the old Iron Curtain nowadays, although even before 2001 it was hardly cordial.  How sad.”

For understandable pragmatic reasons, all kinds of people, in various categories and for various reasons, regard this particular potato as far too hot to handle.  Any and every foreign orchestra allots top priority to any American gig, and none of the orchestral officials I approached would talk to me about this.  Thanks entirely to adventitious geography, our Berlin Philharmoniker (who’ll play four Carnegie Hall concerts later this month) at least have it comparatively easy, thanks to the U.S. Embassy’s location here in the capital: their Leipzig colleagues in the great old Gewandhausorchester, for instance, before any such American tour have to make a special trip all the way over to Frankfurt to make nice in person for the people in charge of the Consulate there.

The originally military abbreviation V.I.P. (for “very important person”) has long since become virtual Esperanto, and also a pragmatic aspect of international diplomacy.  Can you imagine any even moderately important official of any foreign equivalent of, for example, The National Association of Manufacturers ever getting subjected to such indignity in order to obtain an American visa? 

I certainly can’t. 

Can anyone seriously wonder why so many Europeans tend to echo the expression a German visitor whipped me with during my years as a San Franciscan?  He summarized his overall opinion after a considerable swing through the country’s most important capitals in the term Kulturlosigkeit – lack of what that catch-all German noun Kultur includes.

Years ago, the wife of a Berlin-based State Department official stoutly proclaimed to me that “An American passport is a privilege!”  She seemed sincerely taken aback when I told her that every other democratic country I know even of regards its passport as automatically an identification document for all its citizens.

During my earlier more or less annual returns to my original homeland, it invariably abashed and shamed me to behold one particular bit of peculiarly American arrogance rise up by way of welcome and slap smack in the face every poor second-class mere foreigner by way of greeting: two parallel waiting lines for arriving travelers, one for the manifestly privileged American nationals, the other – always much longer, always moving much more slowly – for those poor second-class mere foreigners.

Such aspects of my present-day original homeland obviously had a direct bearing on my becoming a naturalized citizen last month of today’s truly democratic Federal Republic of Germany, automatically in proud possession of its Personalausweis (identification card) plus its passport additionally proclaiming me a citizen of the European Union that includes Germany.