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A similar blend of brilliance and controversy could be found in Berlin’s city-owned opera facility, the Municipal Opera House, where Jonny had its Berlin premier. It occupied the precincts of the former Deutsches Opernhaus in Charlotten-burg, which had gone bankrupt in 1924. Mayor Böss played a key role in getting the city to take it over in 1925. The great Bruno Walter became its first principal conductor, holding that post until 1929. He had established his reputation in Munich but could not abide that city’s growing anti-Semitism, its insistence that he, as a Jew, was unfit to conduct the works of German masters like Beethoven and Wagner. He felt much more at home in Berlin during the Stresemann years, which he recalled in his memoirs as “an epoch of hope, hope for the new Europe.” Berlin’s cultural milieu in this period impressed the conductor for its incredible richness and, again in retrospect, for its precariousness: “It was indeed as if all the eminent artistic forces were shining forth once more, imparting to the last festive symposium of the minds a many-hued brilliance before the night of barbarism closed in.”

Although Walter loved being in Berlin and participating in its “symposium of the minds,” his brief tenure at the Municipal Opera was by no means harmonious. He found the facility itself to be “the most uninspiring and unmagical of theaters,” blighted both by physical ugliness and a lack of history. While he managed to inject some new life into the place, he fought from the outset with the institution’s general director, Heinz Tietjen, who also directed the Prussian State Theaters. Tietjen, a competent but ruthlessly ambitious administrator, wanted to fuse the Municipal Opera with the Berlin State Opera on Unter den Linden, and to this end he often shortchanged the former house. For example, he obligated talented young singers, some of whom Walter had discovered, to perform exclusively at the Linden house. Unwilling to tolerate this arrangement, Walter left the Municipal in 1929, though he stayed on in Berlin until 1933, conducting a subscription series at the Philharmonic.

In his short time at the Municipal Opera Walter managed to put it on Berlin’s musical map, but it was never as experimental—never as “Weimar,” one might say—as the so-called Kroll Opera under Otto Klemperer. This was the primary venue for new opera, as well as for older works performed in new ways. The “Kroll” (thus called because it occupied the old Kroll Theater next to the Reichstag—its official name was Theater am Platz der Republik) opened as a second branch of the Prussian State Opera on January 1, 1924. After the war the facility had been taken over by the Berlin Volksblihne, which hoped to produce socially progressive opera there. But the Volksbühne had run out of money for the project during the inflation era and transferred the property to the state, while holding rights to one-half of the seats. Architectural renovations had produced a technically up-to-date but physically unattractive house. From the beginning the Kroll suffered from a lack of adequate financing (Prussia could not really afford two operas in Berlin) and from the requirement to reserve seats for the Volksbühne, which had become little more than a cut-rate ticket agency with a middle-of-the-road clientele.

The appointment of Otto Klemperer to be principal conductor at the Kroll in 1926 gave the house its moment of brilliance but also added to its problems. Always a risk-taker, Klemperer set the tone for his tenure at the Kroll by including Leoš Janáček’s Sinfonietta in his opening program. He followed this with a totally new Fidelio, replete with cubist sets. This caused an outcry from conservative critics, who regarded Beethoven as sacrosanct. One of them spoke of “German shame everywhere one looks.” From Munich, the Nazis’ Völkischer Beobachter denounced Klemperer as an Obermusikjude who could never understand a German genius like Beethoven. Undaunted, the conductor mounted an all-Stravinsky program on an evening when the entire stalls section had been sold to the Association of Berlin Businessmen and Industrialists, who had expected some familiar music and a big-breasted diva. Not surprisingly, they hissed and booed.