Everyone is talking about the climate.

Richard Wagner too.

When you walk through Bayreuth, you can download podcasts onto your pocket phone: on the subject of “Art and Climate”.

Marie Luise Maintz and Patrick Hahn came up with this for the clever, impertinent series “Diskurs Bayreuth”.

Because Wagner really wrote about “Art and Climate”.

One of his writings from 1850 is called that.

Ulrich Konrad reads from it, and it quickly becomes clear that Wagner classifies the climate as largely irrelevant for art.

Rather, civilization is the evil of all roots because it destroys nature and makes us unfree.

That's why Wagner wanted to "press the reset button" at the end of "Götterdämmerung", according to Herfried Münkler.

Sounds easy.

So also this: “We are experiencing how our earth is warming up faster and faster.

This threatens us all.

(...) We feel pain.

The Beethovenfest 2022 expresses this mood.

It is a main theme of the festival.

Many works are about pain.

But we also do something to counteract the pain: these are encounters, closeness and a variety of experiences for everyone.

They should help us to feel better.” This is what Steven Walter, the new artistic director of the Beethovenfest Bonn, wrote about the introduction to his first season, which will begin on August 25th.

"All people" is her title.

Based on Friedrich Schiller's line "All Men Become Brothers" sung in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

"Today we would say: All people become brothers and sisters," adds Walter.

But Schiller in fair language - we haven't got that far yet.

First Beethoven in simple language.

In fact, Beethoven wrote in the sketches for the Ninth that “becoming ever simpler”.

It still got complex.

"All people become brothers" does not mean "all people".

First of all, people have to become people.

In Beethoven's view, they would do this by engaging with art and science.

"All people" means Steven Walter: also the road workers and asphalt cookers, also the migrants with a faint knowledge of German.

That is beautiful.

Because Beethoven must not be a privilege for higher earners with a university degree.

Walter may not mean “all people”: people who grill a lot, SUV drivers and corona deniers.

No participation without exclusivity.

At all times, political groups claimed ownership of Beethoven.

In 1927, Hanns Eisler wrote in the communist newspaper “Die rote Fahne”: “Because he was ours”.

Shortly thereafter, Joseph Goebbels saw things the same way.

Now it's the turn of the climate activists.

The radio station “Stimme der DDR”, which tries to make people “people” in Beethoven’s sense through education, used to have a series in which – inserted into a program for listeners who in today’s market research studies are called “Tchibo housewives” firm – could hear Beethoven's "Eroica" in full length.

Title of the series: "Music to all, for all".