Читать книгу Fritz Perls in Berlin 1893 - 1933 - Bernd Bocian - Страница 28

As the daughter of a tailor, Amalie Perls, Fritz’s mother, had not enjoyed any higher secondary education, but as a typical middle-class housewife she sought a home in beauty, in art. She passed this love of hers along as a present to her son who maintained a connection with classical music, opera, painting, and the theater for his entire life. Perls recalled that his first visit to the Berlin National Gallery had been at approximately age eight, when he had embarrassed his mother by his particular fascination with paintings of naked women and had perceived the religious pictures as »propaganda for Jesus Christ« (see Perls 1977, 131).³³ Mother and son visited the theater and took in opera performances together in Berlin, and Amalie would put money aside so she could pay for the tickets. In Berlin, Perls took acting classes, sang Bach cantatas, and wrote poems. Later on, he began to paint in the USA, took painting instruction in Israel on one of his world tours, and regularly returned to Europe after 1945 to visit museums and the opera (Vienna and Verona, for example).³⁴ Unlike Freud, he was a great music lover. During the memorial service that was organized in San Francisco after his death in March 1970, dancer Anna Halprin performed an improvisation to music by Gustav Mahler, who, according to Taylor Stoehr, was Perls’s favored composer (see Stoehr 1994, 282). Perls’s love of Mahler’s music predated the Mahler Renaissance in the record market. As a Jew, Mahler felt homeless and inwardly torn in the German cultural environment. His music – often described as an expression of »brokenness« – is interwoven with diverse and apparently contradictory musical elements (see Adorno 1960; Hermand 1996, 71 f.). Mahler’s music is characterized by paradoxes, and Mahler himself emphasized that his symphonies cannot be interpreted »with elegance« (see Müller 1988, 609). Referring to Mahler’s music, conductor Eliahu Inbal stresses that »when beauty is present, ugliness is present as well« (Inbal in Müller 1988, 604) and that one musical passage must be understood through the other. Inbal views the seemingly contradictory tones as elements of a large symphonic Gestalt that can only be understood in context: »Being torn implies both disruption as well as cohesion!« (Inbal in ibid., 614) As I will subsequently demonstrate, similar themes can be identified in Perls’s life and work.