Hamburg hedges billionaire’s $300 million opera-house gift
OperaThe billionaire Klaus-Michael Kühne has promised to give 300 million euros to build a new opera house. The city has allocated a site. But the bureaucrats are dithering over small print and the donor, 87, is getting impatient.
‘What happens if it costs more?’ is one objection.
Read here.
“What happens if it costs more?”
It will. They always do.
Bureaucats are a cancer.
and usually inoperable
What’s wrong with the current place?
It is utterly and desperately stupid to build a new opera in Hamburg where there is already one house which finds it hard to sell out. According to my knowledge they are still battling with almost 30% reduction of sales since 2020. The official version is that it is COVID induced reduction, but I have a strong feeling it is because the local audience is absolutely sick and tired of seeing unrehearsed shitty productions not offering any matching quality for the ticket prices (yes, they usually don’t have proper rehearsals and almost always singers who debut on that stage in new roles see the orchestra, the conductor, wear the costumes and walk on the set on the opening night(!!!), just like in state opera of Vienna! Go figure why they don’t sell well).
At this rate this opera is unsustainable and grow irrelevant with each day, however, if this chap in topic wants to build a vanity project, who’s going to end up sustaining the costs of it, the German taxpayer? …! Let me remind the reader that they have a new growing bill to cover for NATO, there is no time to “play” with luxury aspects of life.
Wouldn’t it be more logical to donate that money to an already existing top institution and sustain/ease their life.
P.S. I hear the new concert hall also battles with low ticket sales.
You are quite right with what you say. Yes, they do rehearse, but less
than they should. It is not very common for a singer to sing with the orchestra for the first time during a performance, that only happens in case of illness. But it is true that as big as Hamburg is, its opera should do better. But in any case there is no need for a new opera.
You heard wrong. The Elphi is sold out all the time.
A damning indictment of Klaus-Michael Kühne and his high-ranking Nazi industrialist father Alfred who he reveres and who built his “family business profiting from the Nazi regime’s persecution and genocide of European Jews” – see September 2024 Vanity Fair feature:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/richest-german-nazi-billions
Frank Bajohr, head of the Center for Holocaust Studies in Munich:
‘Kuehne + Nagel is in the same category of firms like the ones that sold Zyklon B for use in the gas chambers or that built the crematoria in the extermination camps. Transporting the stolen goods of people after they were deported,’ he adds, ‘is a kind of dirty business far beyond anything I can comprehend.’ Yet the role of Klaus-Michael Kuehne’s firm and family in the Third Reich is little known to the outside world….
Kuehne’s stance places him in the ranks of those who want to ‘exonerate’ German history from its Nazi past.”
So? Is there no atonement possible for the descendants of people who committed atrocities? If Klaus-Michael Kühne himself is guilty of something, please tell us. Perhaps by giving a massive gift towards high culture, he is acting in good faith as a citizen.
That Hamburg might not exactly be in need of a new opera house is a different matter.
It is just good business…