Fully. The Isarphilharmonie in Munich is sold out, which doesn’t mean that all seats are taken, because there are also seats behind the podium. But they are only sold in concerts, not when a person is alone on the stage. A person, a table, a piano stool and at least 1600 listeners. On the table two books that will never be opened in two and a half hours, that only serve as a support for the notebook he is reading from. He, who has been a castle actor for ages, who became a film star in István Szabó’s “Mephisto” or in the Bond film “Never Say Never Again” or in “Out Of Africa” or or or, he who played all the major roles in the classic repertoires embodied on the theater stage. Klaus Maria Brandauer will be 80 on June 22 of this year. He fills the halls effortlessly, alone with himself.
The Munich appearance is the beginning of a reading tour through various cities, which bears the strange title: “Almost a Hamlet my Mephisto, an Oedipus for everyone”. Four roles he embodied. In addition, it is not possible to find out in advance what the evening will be about. The hope of the many who paid up to 75 euros to be there probably lies in a happy, witty, perhaps a bit spiteful collection of funny anecdotes from almost 60 years of stage life, at the celebration of an anniversary. Some of those present could easily have seen him as Hamlet 38 years ago, some were not even born when “Mephisto” came out. And almost everyone seems slightly disturbed during the break.
The 1600 had expected anecdotes from a star – and got Dostoyevsky
You have experienced great things. But the unexpected. No introduction. Brandauer, well wired with two microphones, sits down, opens the notebook and reads out a dream. Hawk and owl fight in the air, pounce on each other, eat each other. From there, thoughts meander to Macbeth and his lady, who acts like a man and wants power. While one is still thinking about whether the falcon dream appears in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”, Brandauer is already talking about Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, about a Siberian penal camp, execution prevented at the last moment, about pardon. And Archangel Michael. This puts you in the center of what Brandauer reads without saying what it is. This is exactly what follows: an hour of Dostoyevsky, the chapter “The Grand Inquisitor” from the novel “The Brothers Karamazov”, an hour of ethics, religion, philosophy and – not very optimistic – reflections on being human as such. No anecdote anywhere.
But of course: an hour of Brandauer sound. Ageless in sound. It’s reading like singing, although withdrawn, although very concentrated. Only a little drama, three or four times a character chiseled out of the text, just a hint, then continue with this crazy fantasy: Jesus meets in Seville at the height of the Inquisition, when people who were considered heretics were burned every day, and it was easy to be a heretic back then, to the Grand Inquisitor. He has him arrested and thrown in the dungeon, the people look on without doing anything.
A conversation in the dungeon follows between, as it were, a worldly devil in priestly robes and the divine principle, whereby the principle only listens to what the Grand Inquisitor has to say: Jesus is disturbing. One has already settled well in the world, the people cannot do anything with freedom, it would do well to hand it over to the church. With lies and deceit and in the name of Jesus, but contrary to his request, the church creates, i.e. the power, that poor people consider themselves happy: prefer to enslave us, but feed us.
At the end, Jesus kisses the Grand Inquisitor, who lets him go powerless. But what hope that would be! One has the strong feeling that Brandauer originally wanted to read something completely different, not this text that he read in Cologne Cathedral in 2018. But since the world is the way it is, he reads Dostoyevsky and one thinks of Putin, Russia and how all this can be possible, the horror.
Brandauer lifts the notebook, slams it down on the table, promises, implicitly, that things will be happier after the break. But there must be a break, even if you are ageless.
“Schnips-Schnaps-Earthworm”: The audience rages freely because it’s getting juicier now
After that, the flow of thoughts continues without reference to sources, Goethe’s “wavering figures” approach, the Grand Inquisitor is extended into the figure of Mephisto, alongside Faust, the Promethean principle of making, doing – Marx saw Prometheus as a saint in the mythical calendar – and boom, theatre. Goethe’s “Faust” puppet show from student days, wonderfully fleshed out by Brandauer, even the names of the characters, all of them Hanswurstiads, “Schnips-Schnaps-Earthworm”, the audience rages free for the first time. Because now it’s going to be juicy. Brandauer recites the “Erlkönig”, the “Prometheus” – “Cover your sky, Zeus!” -, thus following the first part: “I know nothing poorer under the sun than you, gods.” So we continue with the discussion of freedom and human self-determination, the Faust returns as a topic, because Hiroshima, that was also a belief in progress, the horrible side of it.
Brandauer’s substantive concern is enormous, sometimes it sounds like a pulpit, at least like morality. Morality is when one is moral, so his closing greeting: “There is nothing good” – audience response: “Unless you do it.” Since the great preacher, the wonderful storyteller has long since all in the bag, before that, quite professionally, lined up encore after encore, including the wondrous, 100-year-old story of “Halifax and Biwifax” by Fritz Müller, in which the problem in an imaginative way solved when the boy next door gets great ice skates for Christmas and you only get stockings yourself.