flourish! drum roll! Fanfare! With his first official act, the new Senator for Culture, Joe Chialo, landed a coup: he brought an expert in high culture to his side: Sarah Wedl-Wilson, the rector of the “Hanns Eisler” Music Academy.
Chialo comes from pop music, he is familiar with the functional mechanisms of the creative economy, with clubs and other places of entertainment. The so-called bourgeois arts, on the other hand, such as opera, theatre, dance, orchestras and museums, have not been a genuine part of his free time to date. But his new state secretary knows her way around.
Classical music is her specialty
Sarah Wedl-Wilson, born near London in 1969, grew up in a family of musicians, learned the violin at an early age, then studied linguistics at Cambridge and entered arts management in 1991. After positions in the operations office of the Cologne Philharmonic, as artistic director of Schloss Elmau and managing director of the Innsbruck Festival, she moved to the Mozarteum in Salzburg in 2014. From there she was finally appointed to the Eisler University four years ago.
So she brings exactly the expertise that the CDU senator lacks. Also in the field of state cultural funding. Because Joe Chialo is a career changer with no administrative experience at all, he will have quite a bit of cramming to do when he gets to grips with the complicated funding mechanisms and structures of Berlin’s cultural bureaucracy.
Sarah Wedl-Wilson can then give him tips, explain tricks – and, if in doubt, answer detailed questions from parliamentarians about budget titles, selection committees, accountability reports or institutional or project-related subsidies in the culture committee of the House of Representatives.
Above all, however, Sarah Wedl-Wilson will be able to help Joe Chialo to master the greatest challenge of his tenure: the reorganization of the Berlin opera scene through a clever, forward-looking filling of the vacant post of General Music Director on Unter den Linden.
Frederik Hanssen is a classical critic and has been observing Berlin’s cultural politics for three decades.
