Viewers find themselves staring straight down the barrel of a gun, its gaping muzzle so large it appears very close to the eye. The dark background makes it impossible to see who might be holding the weapon. The starkness, immediacy, radicalism even of the cover for Carl Maria von Weber’s Romantic opera Der Freischütz are truly striking. The image was created in 1973 by Holger Matthies, a Hamburg-based artist known for his poster designs. The multi-award-winning designer, who was professor of visual communication at Berlin’s University of the Arts between 1994 and 2004, also worked for Deutsche Grammophon for many years, with an estimated 150 albums bearing his signature. His ingenious designs are predominantly based on the staging of real objects, often to alienating effect:
The powerful immediacy of the cover image is musically reflected in the recording itself. This was made at Dresden’s Lukaskirche, with a team of outstanding soloists working with the Dresden Staatskapelle under the baton of Carlos Kleiber. During an unusually extended recording period of two weeks in February 1973, every detail of the score was dissected. The spoken scenes were approached as if they were a radio play (voiced by actors rather than the singers), adding enormously to the sense of realism of the recording.
As for the cover, it was given its own hyper-realistic twist by the fact that the designer simulated bullet holes in the lettering of the title – not with Photoshop back then, but by actually perforating the almost final draft version with a sharp pencil!
Very aware of all the latest trends in the art world, Matthies may have been inspired by artists such as Lucio Fontana or Niki de Saint Phalle, both of whom drew attention to the surfaces of their paintings by breaking through them. In the late 1940s, Fontana began creating an increasing number of canvases and objects whose surfaces were pierced and slashed, giving them a heightened plasticity. His Concetto spaziale (Spatial concept) series in particular, whose paintings at first sight appeared to have been damaged by cuts or punctures, were intended to be understood as an expansion of the spatial dimension and opening up of the surface, and ultimately established a new – sculptural – pictorial concept.
As for Niki de Saint Phalle, she pushed her desire to destroy conventional art forms so far that she took rifle shots at her own works. Having first added food, everyday objects or even bags of paint to her canvases, she covered them in plaster. Then, by shooting at them, she transformed them into her own form of battle paintings, which can also be interpreted metaphorically as reflecting her personal psychological wounds.
Holger Matthies’s shotgun cover, so closely associated with radical artistic ideas, was however just one (albeit the best-known) of the designs for Kleiber’s recording of Der Freischütz. Here, both visually and musically, recent German history had a role to play. Despite the political distance between the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), the power of music helped time and again to bridge the gap between the two. There were, for example, regular joint recording projects between musicians from the two countries, some of them for DG:
Of course, such collaborative efforts had to be authorised at the highest political and diplomatic level. They were organised by the GDR through the music publisher VEB Deutsche Schallplatten, whose offices in the Imperial Presidential Palace were directly adjacent to the Berlin Wall. These projects had another purpose beyond their cultural value – they were also intended to bring in foreign currency to the notoriously impecunious GDR, whose own currency, the East German mark, was non-convertible. The recordings were released on different labels in each state, in this case Deutsche Grammophon (West Germany) and Eterna (East Germany). As a result, cover designs were also subject to each label’s conventions and were overseen by the respective graphics departments.
While DG developed its more avant-garde cover for Der Freischütz, Eterna opted for a very traditional design. The East German label used the same motif for both the 3-LP complete recording and the 1-LP highlights disc. Designer Christoph Ehbets (1935-1992) used an image of one the stage sets designed by Lorenzo Quaglio in 1822, a year after the opera’s premiere, for a production of Der Freischütz at Munich’s Nationaltheater. The dramatic rocky and wooded landscape perfectly reflects the Gothic Romanticism of the plot of this almost fairytale-like opera. Gnarled roots cling to craggy rocks, the billowing clouds in the night sky are dramatically illuminated by the full moon. The names of the composer, label and work appear in white at the top and bottom of the picture in a traditional Antiqua typeface.
Ehbets had studied at West Berlin’s College of Graphic Design and Printing before working in East Berlin as a freelance commercial graphic designer. He created a wide variety of album covers, notably designing hundreds for the two state-owned labels Amiga and Eterna. After the collapse of the GDR, the formerly state-owned Eterna was transferred to Deutsche Schallplatten Berlin GmbH, but the trademark was soon sold off. This period of upheaval was a time of great uncertainty for many former GDR citizens, especially if they had previously worked in professions and companies with close links to the authorities. It was against this backdrop that, tragically, Christoph Ehbets took his own life. So we shall never know what artistic exchanges he and his West German colleague Holger Matthies might have shared, had the two ever had the chance to meet.
With many thanks to Berlin Classics, a label of Edel Music & Entertainment GmbH, which now holds the rights to the Eterna catalogue.
