Enno Schmidt talks with conductor Anna-Sophie Brüning about the love of music, leadership, the feeling of flying a jumbo jet, the void in theater, and the dive into life.
Enno Schmidt: Why the love of music? How did you get here?
Anna-Sophie Brüning: My parents and my grandfather were musicians. Music was always around me. Of course, I wanted to learn, too, so at the age of three, I started a very intensive practice of the violin and later, the piano. When I was 15, I put the piano aside and concentrated everything on the violin. Then, I studied violin in Freiburg with Rainer Kussmaul and in Chicago, where I studied with the fantastic violinist Shmuel Ashkenasi. My father, my uncle, and several others around me were concertmasters [first chair or leader]. So that was the level I wanted to reach and did reach.
Your father was the concertmaster, meaning he played first violin in the orchestra, the highest position in the orchestra after the conductor?
Yes, he was the concertmaster in the NDR orchestra in Hamburg [Norddeutscher Rundfunk, North German Broadcaster of public radio and television]. My mother was a violinist in the NDR orchestra in Hanover. Sometimes my father went to Hanover as a guest. To tune the instruments, the concertmaster takes the A from the oboe and passes it on to the rest of the orchestra. My mother sat in my father’s line of sight to the oboist. He smiled at her, and she smiled back.
And then came you.
Well, yes, I’m a child of NDR, so to speak.
A child of music.
At the age of 25, I got a position as concertmaster at the Philharmonic Orchestra in Lübeck. But this was a short-lived pleasure; after two years, I developed a mysterious shoulder condition that no one was ever able to diagnose. After a few weeks, an expert in music medicine told me I had to hang up the violin. I couldn’t believe it and wouldn’t accept it; this beautiful piece of wood had been my greatest love since I was three years old and had grown together with my body. For two years, I traveled around Europe seeing doctors and therapists and had several operations. It was no use. It was two years of tears. I felt that anything outside of music was out of the question for me.
And for you, music meant playing the violin in an orchestra?
Yes, I had no plan B. One day, I received a call from a conductor friend of mine who had suffered a similar destiny but had gone on to build a legendary youth orchestra. He said, “Now you stop crying, take conducting lessons, come here and assist me.” I hadn’t thought about conducting at all! But I had a great love for movement. It was my second love, next to music. Conducting is non-verbal speech. A conductor in Hamburg gave me private lessons and helped me more than any therapy. He showed me that my violin part is just one of twenty parts on the whole score. That broadened my view of the score in general. Then, I began to study conducting properly. I didn’t just want to side-step into this profession; I wanted to master it, so I could even conduct operas one day. When I got my job as concertmaster and began getting to know opera, it was like wildfire for me. All of a sudden, here was the abundance of life—stage, singers, dancers, the most wonderful music! I needed that again after my illness. The feeling of doing an opera is like taking off in a jumbo jet. And I wanted to experience what it was like to fly this jet myself as the pilot, to immerse myself in the logistics of an opera—all the different crafts, all working towards take-off: a forty-person choir, fifty-person orchestra, the stage, thirty minutes ‘til performance, fifteen minutes, everyone’s in their seats, the lights—and boom! Take off! And now, you can’t get off.
If you were standing in front of God and He asked you, Anna-Sophie, to tell Him, what is the love of music to you as a human being? What would you say? The spiritual world is, after all, interested in human experiences on Earth.
That is difficult to put into words. I can feel it, but whether I can find the words for it? Maybe later. I’ll think about it.
Does the music carry you? Does it carry you with a living, unending hope? Is music a comfort?
Yes, Musica, the Comforter.
Perhaps, when we experience music, it’s as if we experience a world more true than our everyday lives? And, in this experience, are we in this truth?
I once worked in a prison with juvenile offenders. There was one cell with a piano in it. I played preludes and fugues by Bach to some of the young prisoners because they’d asked me to. They fidgeted and giggled the whole time. Still, they wanted to listen to Bach. Then another guy came along and spotted some weights lying around. Twenty-kilo weightlifting discs. Oh, cool, look, he said. I thought it wasn’t going to be quiet anymore. But then they put these weights on their stomachs, closed their eyes, it was quiet for four preludes and fugues, and tears started to flow.
The violin was your instrument since early childhood, and you became a concertmaster. At 27, you lose your lifelong dream. You try everything to play violin again; you want nothing else. Then, a voice from outside says, “Stop crying, learn to conduct.” Looking back, do you think it was the right thing to have happened, that it had to be? Did it take you on a path that you wouldn’t have found yourself?
Maybe, yes. Probably. Immediately after completing my training as a conductor, I received a request from Daniel Barenboim to create an orchestra in the West Bank.
You’ve only just finished your studies, and one of the world’s greatest conductors gives you an offer?
It came from one of his assistants who’d known me for years. He knew I could teach. To create an orchestra in Palestine, Barenboim needed someone who could say not only how it should sound, but who also knew how exactly to make it sound at all. He needed someone who could work pedagogically. After his invitation, I spent five days in Ramallah, and I thought it was terrible. But then I met five girls who were trying to play the violin. Because of the political situation, they never had consistent lessons. In the few hours we had together, I grew so fond of them that I came back from Ramallah and said, “I’ll do it.”
These five human beings touched you so deeply that you said, “I’ll do it?” Again, something from outside. Did you feel this was your calling?
This was the beginning of the orchestra. I was there for two weeks, then three months, and in the end, it was seven years. It was a very big project: musical programs in schools, a musical kindergarten, a music school, and several orchestras. Barenboim had sent many fantastic musicians there over the years.
You’re in the desert, so to speak, and now fantastic musicians are coming to you?
Yes, they taught there for a while. After two years, the children and young musicians were already able to play a Beethoven symphony. The West Bank is neither geographically nor culturally a desert; it has a rich culture and excellent schools. But traveling in this area was extremely complicated. The orchestra rehearsed in Ramallah, about twenty kilometers north of Jerusalem. A clarinetist from Jenin and a double bass player from Bethlehem asked: Can I come too? How do I get there? Well, they managed somehow. Barenboim kept coming to visit, and we gave concerts together.
Do you feel like Palestine was your place?
Yes! I was very taken by Palestine. Ever since I was young, I had a vague interest to get to know the Arab world. I also tried to learn Arabic.
So, another area of your life and work that you would not have thought up yourself, but then it became your life and required you to be a conductor.
Of course, the people around me thought it was crazy to go to the West Bank. They expected me to have a career at an opera house. While I was in Ramallah, I was trying to do both—to go to Europe for projects and try to maintain a normal conducting life. But I was also in the desert!
And that’s where the world-famous Barenboim comes to you, with whom you had the privilege to work for seven years?
I am deeply grateful to him and have learned a lot. He has an enormous ability to concentrate and to transfer this ability to the orchestra. He would often talk about the orchestra as a school for democracy: sometimes the clarinet has a solo and everyone listens and follows along, even the conductor; then it moves back again to be an accompanying voice and the cello comes forward—a school of listening. The orchestra is an organism where everyone has a chance to take the lead at times, and the others lay out the red carpet for them. “Listen to the stories of the others,” is what he means. Our project in Ramallah was affiliated with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. There were Israeli and Palestinian musicians, and some from Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, and so on. Tensions were enormous. The doors were blown open quite a bit, especially at the beginning. At first, it was like saying today: we’re making an orchestra with Germans and Russians. Or with Ukrainians and Russians. Maximum taboo.
Listening to the stories of others is more necessary today than ever. Listening to what Putin says, what vaccination critics say? Excluding and silencing people divides us. The unheard, the surprising, the deceptions, the dangers, the traumas that once took place on stage in the theater are now taking place in life all around us and in society. And it affects everyone. What’s to take place on the stage now? You once spoke of the “void in the theater.”
Today, the world is the stage where everything takes place, the performance of the world. The philosopher Matthias Burchardt calls this the “inversion of the arena.” He uses soccer as an example. In the past, “the war in shorts” took place in the stadium, and nations fought against each other in a playful manner. Today, there’s real war. I experience opera and the theater like this. What used to be a dramatic film is now a documentary. What happened on stage is now on the daily news. Life, itself, has more impressive punchlines than the world of drama. In the 1960s, scandals, taboo-breaking, sex on the bonnet, and conspiracies took to the stage. People madly watched a three-hour Lucia di Lammermoor opera—shaken up, shocked, crying. Musical theater, opera, woke up the good citizens. Now we still have theater, but what we do there isn’t in productive tension with life outside the theater in the way it used to be. The 1960s were, perhaps, a bit stuffy and uptight in parts of society, but then the scandals were on the stage, and there was this productive tension with real life.
Today, I feel there’s a void. Is there still a need for the theater to shake us up with scandals, taboo-breaking, and traumatic stories? Don’t we see all this with our own eyes all the time, all around us, in real life? The top ten operas: La Traviata, Othello, Don Giovanni, Carmen, Butterfly—all highly traumatic stories, where the women almost always end up dying, jumping from the Castel Sant’Angelo, dying of thirst in the desert, or being stabbed to death, like Carmen. Their only way to freedom was death. But is this still in keeping with the times, to keep telling ourselves these traumas? What would it be like, for example, if Carmen just said: I’m done. Thank you for inventing me, Prosper Mérimée. Thank you, Georges Bizet, for writing the score. I’ve now died somewhere in the world every night for 150 years. I’m done now and am going to start healing. I find the adventure of healing much more exciting than a knife in the chest. But that’s an option opera doesn’t have right now because it’s so closely tied to the music. What’s more, most directors love trauma and have a strong relationship with negativism. For example, in Madame Butterfly, already such a traumatic story, they added the story of child abuse, which is not even in the play. The story can’t be bad enough to get a good review in the FAZ [Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Frankfurt General Newspaper]. “’Nice’ doesn’t fill up an evening,” they say: I do understand that. But there is little imagination and curiosity that asks whether there might be another way to escape these stories.
The hopelessness that knows resolution only in death and the tragic, perhaps this no longer exists today as it did 150 years ago, now that we can go through tragedy in our own development as ‘I’-beings today—self-guided. We no longer have to die from what has to die within us.
With the intensity that Tosca jumps to her death from the castle, she could also dive into life. Jump out of the trauma. Post ego.
What does that mean for musical theater?
First, we do need this void. It has to be endured first. The first step is to experience the pain of there being a void. The void, the zero point—it can last a long time. We now have this tendency towards negativity in the theater. The negative is celebrated. Yesterday, I read in the government’s cultural program that they want to make visits to concentration camps partly compulsory for schools. Culture—a memory of trauma? I do think it’s a good idea to visit these places with schoolchildren. But is there a reason why political and societal traumas are relegated to the département of culture and the arts? It is a strange tendency that we have such a hard time dealing positively with our enormous cultural heritage. As if we should hide our light under a bushel and always focus on the low points.
Which builds up something ghostly in the way it’s done. It becomes utilised.
If we’ve now become aware that there’s a painful inner emptiness in the theater and, if we really feel the suffering there, we could also say: now, our culture of remembrance will be that for the next hundred years, we’ll just have preludes and fugues by Johann Sebastian Bach, every evening, until we come to our senses again.
To be able to hold on in the emptiness, in a “non-presence,” where all that’s become, all support from what’s come, is gone—this is possible only by means of an etheric force. It’s not about the soul. Consciousness of the work of the etheric forces and a conscious working with them is the next step in the development of humanity. An “ethics of the living,” as Birgit Ebel called it for the World Child Forum. Can this become an event for the stage?
That is a very interesting question! What forces are at work? And what is real? As a conductor in an opera house, I once experienced in Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio—where the message is about the victory of humanity over tyranny—that actually, in the conditions backstage, tyranny triumphed over humanity—across the board, in every level of the organization of the house and among all the actors involved. At some point, will the audience develop a sense that we’re selling a message we’re not living backstage?
A sense of truth. What’s fake, what’s authentic?
Is this real, what we’re seeing here? In every respect, across the board?
The result of an activity can be nothing more than what is already contained in the process that leads to it.
Recently, I heard the phrase, “The show must go off.” Is this the motto for our time?
“The show must go off” would mean that you perceive something of the human being?
Yes, but not just sweet and harmless. If Carmen really got involved in her healing, it wouldn’t be sweet and harmless, it would be hard work! Post-ego stories have so much potential to be new heroic stories! In music, at the end of the nineteenth century, there was the Verismo movement. This was when people began to portray circumstances in art without any embellishment. In La Bohème, the woman dying of tuberculosis in the attic is mercilessly portrayed. At the time, the most important and contemporary thing to do was to show: this is how it really is!
But now we’re in the twenty-first century. What’s the most topical thing now? There’s a split in society. Some are convinced of something with the same vehemence as others are convinced of its complete opposite. There’s no point in trying to seek understanding if the other person is nothing more to you than the convictions they have and less important than one’s own convictions. You have to have the strength to put the other person above his or her convictions and above your convictions. In this way, now, we’re the actors in the play. And if we’re not, we’re being acted upon. The opposing convictions are what has come into being, what has become. Holding to them has the same logic as jumping to one’s death. What has become cannot be decisive for the leap into life. That’s also the case in your biography. Probably with everyone. Is it about healing?
I would go to an evening at the theater for that!
Healing as an authentic artistic event. Not as a therapy session.
Another important point is that the church, as a place of vertical resonance, has, for all intents and purposes, disappeared. Could the theater be a place where vertical resonance takes place? If I were really surprised in the theater, totally surprised with something completely new, if I were enchanted, if there was real inspiration and laughter, if I could experience something like consolation, then, in 2025, we’d once again have a tension with life outside the theater. The music promises this sphere, which the libretti often do not have. But in music, the cosmic view is present. And now I know what I’d say if the good Lord or spiritual beings asked me: What is the love of music? I’d say: Just come once, for a visit.
And there they are already. And that is the love of music.
That’s actually the answer.
Your answer: Spiritual beings, just come once, and visit the music, then you’ll experience for yourselves what the love of music is. And their answer, I say, is: We’re already there. And that’s what the love of music does for people. The spiritual world lives within it already. Love arises where there is contact with the spiritual world. And that’s also what keeps you going in the creative process. When you conduct, you’re directing such a process. What does leadership mean to you?
If you want to watch leadership at work, buy a ticket for a symphony concert. There’s a person standing on a platform with a stick. I conduct without a baton, but many conductors use a baton as a symbol. And seventy people sit in front of him or her. Then, you can see leadership, unlike any business or political group. For me, leadership and hierarchy are positive words. Power and that kind of politics are not. These words sadly just got lumped together. I think leadership is great when it’s limited. In Berlin, there’s an orchestra of young people who work without a conductor, the Stegreif-Orchester. Their leader once called me and said: Anna-Sophie, we need three days of hierarchy. I came and did three days of hierarchy. And then they said: Bye. We’ll do the concert without you. That was a liberating experience, a new way of looking at my job. There is a need for an outside ear. You can hear here, there, the balance is off, the trumpet’s too loud, etc. That’s one reason why there needs to be guidance—something that lies in the art itself. But a lot of the inner workings of a theater, for example, can be organized collaboratively. You could say, “Now we’re doing an opera. This conductor or this director is coming, and we’re going along with them for six weeks. We won’t interfere since we know there are good reasons to have a guide here. But after the show, we’ll do something else.” I’ve occasionally seen in opera productions, when directors come and say at first, “Now, we’re all going to find our ways into the roles”—then immediately, the whole mood dies. If someone comes with a good concept, then actually everybody’s happy. People like to go with a good concept for those six weeks and are happy to be a part of it. Not everyone needs to have a say in everything. But you can decide together how certain things will work or what certain members of the orchestra do. There are incredible competencies in an orchestra.
When it’s about a community working spiritually, how do you see leadership?
The more spiritual the content, the more difficult it can be to accept something like hierarchy, to say that someone is really further along in their development. We all have infinite possibilities. But possibilities are not yet realities. It’s as Johann Sebastian Bach said, “I was obliged to be industrious. Whoever is equally industrious will succeed equally well.” We just have to feel the full force of Bach’s words.
Anna-Sophie Brüning studied violin, piano and conducting in Hanover, Berlin, Freiburg and Chicago. She began her career as a concertmaster with the Lübeck Philharmonic Orchestra and later moved first to the accompaniment department and then to the conductor’s podium. She worked for many years as a conductor at opera houses and is now a freelance conductor of renowned orchestras in Germany and abroad. She writes stage plays and teaches in various contexts at universities, schools and prisons, as a speaker for the Bronnbach Scholarship with young business leaders and as a temporary artistic director in projects such as M.O.V.E.- Culture without Borders with young refugees in Istanbul or the Ghetto Classics from the slums of Nairobi. She lives with her family in Hanover.
More Anna Sophie Brüning
Translation Joshua Kelberman
Images Impressions from the musical work of the Barenboim-Said Foundation in Ramallah, West Bank, 2005–2007. Photos: Peter Dammann / Fotostiftung Schweiz. More Music education in Palestine
