Südwestrundfunk (SWR), the regional public television and radio broadcaster serving south-west Germany needs to make savings of €166m (£129m) by 2020. The main victims of the cuts will be its two leading orchestras. The Radio Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart and the Sinfonieorchester, based in Freiburg and Baden-Baden, will be forced to merge after the majority of the SWR's broadcasting council voted in favour of the move last month.
Peter Boudgoust, the director of the SWR, has been called a "cultural gravedigger" by the general secretary of the German music council, Christian Höppner, for what he called the "cultural political catastrophe". Höppner says the merger will save little money, but lead to the death of two leading German orchestras.
More than 27,000 people across Germany, including international figures such as pianist Martha Argerich, singer Thomas Quasthoff, viola player Tabea Zimmermann and violinist Rainer Kussmaul, have signed a petition against the merger, while the audience at the Sinfonieorchester's final concert before the summer break broke into their own version of Beethoven's Ode to Joy to voice their concern. The lyrics were adapted to "it must stay, so we sing, because where's the future without culture?"
The existence of two leading orchestras in one broadcasting organisation is a legacy of the allied occupation of Germany after the second world war. The French military government established broadcasting company Südwestfunk (SWF) in their zone of occupation while the American military government established Süddeutscher Rundfunk (SDR) in their zone. In 1952 the two zones were merged to produce the state of Baden-Württemberg. SDR and SWF continued to operate separately until 1998, when they joined to become SWR, though the orchestras remained separate. Although some have called the merger overdue, it will bring to an end the existence of two highly respected orchestras that have shaped Germany's cultural landscape since their establishment in 1946.
"The merger is not only a cultural and strategic catastrophe, because it will mean the destruction of two prestigious bodies of sound, but in the long term it would seem that the economic arguments behind it are unfounded as over time it will not lead to any savings," said Dieter Schickling, a former head of music programming at SDR. He added that even many young musicians will have to be pensioned off at great expense.
Victor von Oertzen, a director of SWR in Stuttgart, said: "The SWR is quite simply proud of both its orchestras and everyone would like to keep them. But we're now living in 2012, not 1945, and contrary to back then, when we had to produce music ourselves if we wanted to listen to it, there is now an inexhaustible amount of classical and contemporary music."
He added that Germany's ageing population meant that there were fewer licence fee payers, leading to less money. "Germany is shrinking," he said. "And so too is the amount of money collected through the licence fee. It's a simple bit of mathematics."
