Halls of Music

Almost lost to sight in the worldwide building boom of new factories, apartment houses and skyscrapers are the new concert halls and opera houses going up to keep pace with the ever-growing music audience. In the U.S., Architects Wallace Harrison and Max Abramovitz are at work on plans for a new home for the Metropolitan Opera Co. in Manhattan's Lincoln Square development. A $2,000,000 opera house has been projected for Colorado Springs by Architect Jan Ruhtenberg which features sculptural shell concrete forms with adjustable walls that can be thrown wide open to empty a full house (3,000) in 1 1/2 minutes. Abroad the boom resounds even louder, with new structures rising and war-damaged buildings getting a thorough refurbishing.

Faced with this new demand, architects find themselves confronted with an age-old problem. The oldest solution to building an ideal structure for listening still seems the best; the ancient Greek and Roman amphitheaters were often acoustically so good that a sigh on stage carried to the farthest row. How to get the same characteristics under a roof and still make room for 100-piece orchestras, huge choral groups and whole opera companies with their oversize sets, ballet corps and costume designers is testing anew the ingenuity of the present generation of architects. Among their solutions:

P:Berlin's $1,750,000 Concert Hall, authorized this month after seven years of debate, will give Berlin's famed Philharmonic Orchestra a new home in an irregularly shaped, eight-sided structure that will place the musicians in the center, group listeners around them in a full circle. To spread the music equally in all directions, a concave sound reflector will be hung over the orchestra. Architect Hans Scharoun, 63, took his cue from watching music lovers clustering around improvising musicians, concluded: "The natural location of music, spatially and optically, is in the center of a music hall."

P: Stuttgart has completed its attempt to provide an acoustically perfect shape with its $2,600,000 Liederhalle. The result is a windowless, concrete, ear-shaped main auditorium (capacity: 2,000) with as many curves as a Stradivarius. On the right wall hangs a cluster of boxes, below a buttonhook-shaped balcony that begins at orchestra level, becomes a raised balcony on the back wall. Says Co-Architect Adolf Abel: "The layout not only makes more sense acoustically but it helps to relax the audience."

P: Cologne's Architect Wilhelm Riphahn, 67, solved the problem of cramped space in a bombed-out lot close to Cologne's twin-spired cathedral by erecting a structure shaped approximately like an Aztec pyramid. The massive, $3,800,000 Cologne Opera House, due to open this May, devotes two-thirds of its interior space to the stage and storage areas (five stage settings can be erected at one time), seats 1,386 in the horseshoe orchestra floor and ring of bobsled-shaped boxes.

P: Sydney, Australia, which staged one of the world's biggest international competitions (721 architects submitted 222 designs for the $17,975 prize money), has emerged with the most pleasing and original design of all for its harbor-front site --a billowing shell concrete structure covering two separated Greek amphitheaters. For his winning plan Danish Architect Joern Utzon, 37, onetime pupil of France's Le Corbusier, Finland's Aalto and Frank Lloyd Wright, won the wholehearted praise of Architect Eero Saarinen, one of the four competition judges. Said Saarinen : "So many opera houses look like boots. There is the high proscenium arch, then the low part which is the audience. Utzon has solved the problem."

From the Balkans across northern Europe to Britain and the Orkneys and southward to Spain, ancient swords, spears, drinking horns and jewelry are still being uncovered to testify to the far-flung power of the once-great warrior Goths and seafaring Vikings. Their marks were runes, a strange linear script (see above) that was in use for well over a thousand years to record magic spells, set down great exploits, and preserve the Norse legends. Most elaborate and impressive of all are the rugged stone monoliths still standing as mute testimony to a past age in the fields and forests throughout Scandinavia (see color pages).

To account for the runes (literally, secrets), Norse sagas credited their invention to the gods themselves, showed the difficulty of learning them by telling how even Odin had to suffer before he could decipher them. For nine whole nights Odin hung in a windy tree, self-wounded with his spear, while "I peered downward/ I caught the runes/ Learned them weeping;/ Thence I fell down." But Odin's long struggle was worth it. The magic script revealed the power to blunt his enemy's sword, stop an arrow in flight, calm waves and even "change the mind/ Of the white-armed woman/ And turn all her heart."

Even today a sense of mystery clings to the looming runic stones, carved in solid rock, and often decorated with scroll-like forms of entwining dragons. For three centuries scholars have debated the origin of runic script, with its baffling similarities to Greek, Roman and even Etruscan letters. Consensus now is that the runic alphabet was improvised by the Goths in the region of the Black Sea and lower Danube by borrowings from Greek traders (the earliest runic alphabet of 24 characters is remarkably close to early Greek) and Roman legionnaires.

The script, first carved in linear slashes on staves of wood, went with the Goths as they swept westward to Spain. Their kinfolk, the Northmen, carried it with them on their swords and battle axes, carved runic charms on the stems and rudders of the ships they sailed from Britain to Novgorod.

The use of runic inscriptions began to die out with the arrival of Christian missionaries, who brought with them the Latin alphabet, finally won out after a long battle. Spain forbade Visigothic runes in 1115. In Britain runes survived barely a century after the Norman conquest. They lingered longest in Sweden, where church sepulchers with runic inscriptions were made as late as 1449. But as memorials, the runic stones have lived on, still make good their boast: "This shall call to mind these men as long as human kind liveth."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.