ARTS 
Classical music Last Wednesday marked the 60th anniversary of the founding of the GDR; next month will see the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. On the Baltic island of Usedom, another anniversary was marked last week. Forty years ago, the local communist party stepped in to ban a contemporary children’s opera, Burkhard Meier’s The Nightingale, which was enjoying an otherwise unremarkable run in Greifswald.
Hella Brock’s libretto, based on a Hans Christian Andersen fairy-tale, told of an emperor and avoided revolutionary themes, the Party complained. Brock, the composer’s widow, and others involved in the ill-fated 1969 run joined a full house at Usedom’s Mölschow for the first staging of the piece in four decades. It was an emotional moment.
