Part 9: Ruht wohl...

Unbelievable. More than two weeks ago, the 16th of September, I promised "tomorrow, Leipzig." I still have 5 days of our trip to remember, and things are getting foggier than I like. But let's press on...

On Thursday, 7 August 2003, we trotted off to the Weimar Hauptbahnhof and got the next train to Leipzig. This was a day I had been looking forward to the whole trip, and for many years before this trip began.

On the way there was another place that had to be omitted, to my regret: Naumburg. Years ago I had been in Berlin, on a tour with the Gregg Smith Singers, and there, at the Dahlem Museum, I became acquainted with sculpture of the early Gothic period -- 12th-13th century. I was captivated by its exuberant spirit, its astonishing mature expressiveness, its remarkably *modern*-looking execution. I read in the guidebooks that Naumburg Cathedral has the finest examples of Gothic sculpture anywhere, but try as I might there was no practical way of squeezing a stop into our limited time.

Turns out that most trains that go directly from Weimar to Leipzig and back don't stop in Naumburg; the trains from Weimar that *do* stop in Naumburg kite off north along the Saale to Halle, and there just wasn't a practical way of doing what is possible so many other places in Germany: stop, sightsee for an hour or two, then get the next train out.

So we passed right by the city. I did notice that one could *see* the cathedral from the railway, but by the time I recognized it it was too late to get much of an impression. What I learned, on three subsequent passes through Naumburg, is that the 4 spires of the cathedral make a most impressive composition.

But Leipzig was the goal. First one sees a towering glass skyscraper, then miles of industrial landscape, and then a huge vista of rail yards. At the end of that vista is the world's largest train station, and what a sight it is. The reason for its size is that it served as a terminal for both the Prussian railways and the Saxon railways, and the two companies wanted nothing whatever to do with each other. So each built 13 tracks into the terminal, making a total of 26 tracks!

After World War II was over, and then after the DDR fell and Leipzig was rejoined to the German Federal Republic, there was concern for a while that the majestic station would have to be demolished. There simply were not enough trains to use all the tracks -- but in a 1995 renovation some of the tracks were employed for parking, the great head-house was adapted into a glittering upscale shopping mall, and the imposing cathedral-like expanse -- 867 feet long! -- has been preserved.

This introduction to a city is most auspicious, and we were in some awe as we floated out to the streets -- Willy Brandt Platz, to be precise, across the ring boulevard busy with streetcars, with skyscraper hotels like the Marriott, and then across Richard Wagner Strasse into the Old Town. Old in Leipzig is like old in many of the more heavily bombed German cities: occasional restored buildings from the past scattered among what might as well be a Midwestern American business district.
Leipzig is above all a mercantile city -- founded at the intersection of the Via Imperii (the Imperial Way) from Stettin on the Baltic to Venice, with the Via Regia (The King's Way) from the Rhine to Cracow (a route, it turns out, we have pretty much been following). The buildings that housed the famous Leipzig fairs are now the commercial center of the city and its widespread trading area; huge new fair buildings and congress centers in the northern suburbs make the city an eastern counterpart to Frankfurt-am-Main.

For a non-commercial visitor, this commercial character still has its virtues, having produced the many glass-roofed arcades that shelter street after street of individualized shops from the elements. Well, they're *not* air-conditioned; the builders were expecting more need for shelter from winter than from the kind of summer we were experiencing. But even with the heat, the dynamism of this city is like that of Berlin, which I had experienced as tangible through the very soles of one's shoes.

Our first destination, once we had gotten over and out of the Hauptbahnhof, was the Nikolaikirche, one of the only two Leipzig churches, of the five for which Johann Sebastian Bach had to provide the music, to survive both World War II and the Communist regime. Of special significance to a Bach devotee is that the St. John Passion was first performed here; in more modern terms it was one of the most important centers of peaceful resistance that led to the fall of the communist
regime in 1989. We entered it with anticipation -- and were assaulted by an unbearable stench of ammonia and caustic substances. The interior was apparently being thoroughly cleaned, but the building remained open to unsuspecting visitors. We gave up on really seeing anything past the scaffolding and through our tears and went into the souvenir shop. There we quickly bought some slides, commiserated with the unfortunate attendant -- jobs are still hard to find in the "Fuenf Neue Laende" (Five
New States), and fled to the fresher air of the hot streets.

So it was on to taste some of the arcades, aiming in the direction of the
Naschmarkt and the Maedlerpassage -- to see Auerbachs Keller, made famous by Goethe in a scene from his "Faust." I had rather expected this to be Leipzig's tourist-trap version of Boston's "Cheers" bar -- and so it is, in a way, albeit more imposing and tasteful. The sculptures of Faust and Mephistopheles in the passageway are, well, sculptures of a devil and a scholar. Big. Imposing. So now we've done Auerbachs Keller (I suppose we really should have at least gotten a drink there, but somehow it was not a place that seemed to invite the casual stopover).

Then we saw a wide area of excavation and construction between us and the Thomaskirche. The city was busy in its quotidian activities, and tourists mingled among the office workers and shopkeepers, and it was a little hard to remember why we had come here. Could that not too impressive-looking church over there *really* be the one we were aiming toward? But before we knew it we were among Bach Cafes and Bach Bookstores and Bach Museums, and there was indeed the Thomaskirche.

We entered to the strains of organ music -- I still don't know whether someone was practicing or whether it is normal custom to have music greeting the throngs of musical pilgrims. It was gentle music from the romantic period, not intrusive, and looking up to the organ loft one saw that the player had an assistant to help with page-turning and stop-pulling. The church was quite full of people just wandering about. Visitors were asked not to use flash cameras, but photography was otherwise permitted.

I began hearing strains of music in my mind other than the ones that were being sounded in actuality -- a snatch of a cantata, part of a motet, then choruses and arias from the passions and the B minor mass -- and suddenly I was in tears. Quite different from the ammonia-induced tears at the Nikolaikirche, they came as a complete surprise to me. I had to sit down, and I was convinced I was in the presence of the great man himself.

I looked up at the organ in the north gallery, the one that is a reproduction of the kind of instrument that Bach would have played, and although I was sorry I wasn't hearing that one instead of the 19th-century instrument that was being played in the west gallery -- still I *was* hearing it, and it didn't matter that my physical ears
weren't registering the sounds.

There was the Mendelssohn window -- a recent installation to honor Mendelssohn's restoration of Bach's works into our consciousness -- and I looked at Felix and bowed in thanksgiving. Now I was under a spell -- had the camera out, not knowing what to do with it, observing that Jay was doing good duty as photographer, and I wanted to find Bach's grave.

According to the guidebook, he had been buried in the choir -- that is, the part of the church that leads to the sanctuary and the altar. Then I found a display of photographs and texts that told the story of this particular entombment. He had originally been buried (in that famous year of 1750, 65 years after the astonishing year of 1685 that saw the birth not only of J. S. Bach, but of G. F. Handel and Domenico Scarlatti) in the cemetery, "Friedhof," of the Johanniskirche, just outside the course of the erstwhile city walls to the east. In 1894 his bones were
identified and exhumed, to be reburied in a vault inside the Johnniskirche. When that church was destroyed by bombing in 1943, his bones were rescued and watched over until they could be reburied in the Thomaskirche in 1949.

I was having a little difficulty understanding just *where* the grave was -- in the "Chorraum," the text said, and at first I thought I would have to search for the choir room, or the place where the choir might gather and robe (a venue I became very familiar with in my years in New York at Trinity Church and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine). But of course the word "Raum" simply means "space" or "area" -- not necessarily an enclosed room, and I finally realized it was the Choir they were talking about.

So I moved toward the steps up to the sanctuary, and indeed, right there in front of me -- gently barricaded to keep people from walking on it -- was a great brass plate engraved with the name Johann Sebastian Bach -- which I had to read upside down, because of course it was placed to give homage to the altar, not to be convenient for tourists. Somehow, though, people had managed to place flowers around it.

There it was. The goal of a pilgrimage I had been only dimly aware that I was on. I gazed long at the grave and breathed, over and over, the words to the closing chorus of the St. John Passion: "Ruht wohl, Ihr heiligen Gebeine." Rest well, sacred bones.

I did snap a picture of it and was dismayed to discover that I had failed to set the camera to automatic, so that it flashed. Now that I'm home I'm grateful the fates permitted me that little transgression, because the picture is quite clear, and I know that without flash it would have been just another one of those mysterious deep-brown rectangles.

There was still a lot of this great city to taste, and even then I was aware of the truth that now grips me: one must live in this city for a time to grasp the full scope of its riches and understand the mystery of its dynamism. One must experience performances, live in its spaces, interact with its people. But there was at least surface yet to be skimmed, so we moved on -- next stop, Mendelssohn's house.

To get there one passes by the Augustusplatz, site of the great central public buildings of Leipzig including the opera house and that shrine to musicality, the Neues Gewandhaus, home to one of the world's most superb symphony orchestras, successor to the orchestra founded by Mendelssohn. It also has that great glass skyscraper one saw from the train, miles away. According to my Green Guide, this was part of the University, and I thought it so very fitting that the tallest building in Leipzig, city not only of music but of books, should be the university. It has long
been a theme I've been intrigued by: the priorities of a civilization can often be judged by the functions of its tallest buildings (if I ever get a web page I'll go into more on that subject). Among major cities, about the only other one I can think of where the university occupied, at least when built, its tallest skyscraper is Pittsburgh, where the Cathedral of Learning houses the University of Pittsburgh. [In hindsight, I realize that Moscow also holds such a distinction.]

But it was hard to tell, passing by, that this building had anything to do with learning, although it was said to have been designed in the form of a book. And indeed, I have learned that now that capitalism again reigns in eastern Germany and especially flourishes in Leipzig -- it has become just another office building, now called the City-Hochhaus-Leipzig. See [this link has broken -- I must find a new one]
for more information about this, at 466 feet the tallest building (aside from TV and radio towers in Berlin and Dresden) in the former East Germany. There you will find the delightful information that it is locally known as the Weisheitszahn -- the Wisdom Tooth.

But where were we? Oh, yes; on our way to Mendelssohn's house, and from there I wanted to go by the site of the Johanniskirche to the place where Robert and Clara Schumann had lived. We crossed the ancient moat and the ring boulevard -- I almost didn't pay close enough attention to the streetcar traffic -- and found a sign on a street that promised that Mendelssohn's house could be visited. It took us some time to find our way into the courtyard, and to the proper doorway, and to learn from a
not-very-effusive cashier that after we paid our entrance fee we did indeed need to go upstairs. The exhibits in this sanitized museum contain very little trace of the human sweat and tears that accompany the life of any creative artist, and I'm afraid my memory of the visit offers little more satisfaction than a checkmark on a checklist. Right; I did Schubert and Mozart and Beethoven and Haydn (and many others) in Vienna, and Bach in Eisenach and Weimar and especially here in Leipzig, and Wagner in Luzern, and Faure's (and others') church of the Madeleine in Paris, and now I've done Mendelssohn. Check.

One more urgent checkmark on this life-list of composers' stomping grounds remained for this day -- the often overlooked and, to my mind, underrated Robert Schumann (and his wife Clara Wieck and their dear young friend Brahms were also involved in this one). From the Mendelssohn house we made our way past the empty, grassy, tree-bordered triangle where the Johanniskirche once stood, and finally found the street and the house wherein Schumann had occupied an apartment. There was a sign on
the door: it was closed until 8 August. Today, if you've been paying attention, was the 7th. I photographed the sign, hoping that my camera might impose a date stamp on this sad document. I quietly hummed "Er, der herrlichste von allen" to myself, and sighed, and we turned back toward the city center.

Too many travel experiences, especially to great cultural centers, turn out to be postcards, carefully cropped and retouched to remove anything unsightly or discomfiting. Leipzig was turning out to defy any such enterprise, even if that had been something I wanted to produce (yet my rarely exercised photographic efforts have always seemed to turn away from the dirty and the messy; I have to consciously make myself aim at such sights, when I remember to do so).

The day was brutally hot (nothing new here, of course). The Nikolaikirche stank so badly we couldn't stay. Much of the city center is under construction, especially for the new subway for the street railways. Mendelssohn's house was disappointing and Schumann's wasn't even open. What next? What other proof would we encounter that this was a vibrant, living, operating, changing city and not just some Disney production for the titillation of tourists?

Well, we have a little time left, so let's check out the Art Museum. We entered the building by a door that hardly seemed worthy of such a lofty enterprise and found ourselves facing, of course, a woman who needed to sell us little pieces of paper before we would be allowed in. It seemed that a special exhibition on chocolate was the current occupant of the temporary exhibition area -- one could even sample the product, although the hot-drink version did not appeal on this hot day, while the
confections were hardly more inviting (there was no ice cream in sight).

So we made our way up the stairs, following the signs to the picture galleries. What we first found there was the souvenir shop, of course -- and yet another woman who insisted that we purchase yet more pieces of paper. I showed her the quite costly pieces of paper we had already purchased downstairs, and after some increasingly agitated exchanges (in which I used that ultimate German condemnation, "Dies ist nicht Ordnung!") we forked over still more Euros and went into the picture gallery. The chocolate exhibiton was an entirely separate enterprise that had no connection to the museum, we were told. I was reminded of the time I had an ultrasound and CT scan at a hospital, only to have Blue Cross refuse to pay for it because my contract only covered hospital visits, and the imaging company was merely using space in the hospital. Capitalism. Bah.

There were some good things to see, but this particular art museum -- which may not even have been the city's main one, I now realize -- was not offering visual inspiration on the level of the musical and literary inspiration Leipzig is so famous for. Further, we both needed to find a W.C. -- and my German was escaping me (as it tends to do after more than a week of forced usage), and when I asked for a vah tsay instead of a W.C. (vay tsay), the women who were guarding the halls were very confused, until I finally said, "Toilette" -- and they laughed, and I ran through the alphabet "ess tay oo fah vay..." and laughed too, and finally we had relief.

So much for the art museum. We retrieved our checked items, looked at books and postcards but didn't buy, and went back on to the street. As we vectored toward the train station I was uncomfortably aware that we were passing extremely important buildings to whose identity I had not a clue, and it was a relief to get back to that magnificent building that now felt like a kind of home. There we even found a comfortable waiting room, with its first-class annex (we had bought first-class passes, which were only marginally more expensive than the second-class ones), and even though the first-class waiting room was not airconditioned while the second-class one was ("climatisiert"), it was quiet and empty and offered overstuffed chairs one could almost lie prone in. I needed that. And the chilled white wine served to us by the attendant.

On the way out I asked whether there was an internet cafe in the station -- and she pointed 20 feet away, on the other side of the bar -- there were a half-dozen terminals, not even being used! But by this time we needed to go to the track where our train would soon be waiting, so there was an opportunity missed.

Once again we passed by Naumburg, and I noticed many other interesting places besides just the cathedral, including some castles and monasteries. We arrived in Weimar, went to our hotel for dinner (it had been a relief to find that most German restaurants now *do* offer vegetarian alternatives, although the selection seems to be limited to about the same four possibilities everywhere), and then to the
Stadtkirche to pay further homage to Bach, and especially to Cranach the Elder. That's where I learned that J. G. Walther had also been organist in Weimar, much longer than Bach in fact, and that he was buried at the Jacobikirche -- just the other side of the Rollplatz from our hotel. As was Cranach.

So we also visited the churchyard at the Jacobikirche and photographed the memorials to Cranach and Walther. Night fell, we slept, and next morning took a taxi to the train station. The plaza in front of the Weimar station has only recently been refreshed, and it is a marvelously attractive space. But Dresden beckoned. My plan had been to use Pirna, a small city south of Dresden, and gateway to the Sächsische Schweiz -- the Switzerland of Saxony -- as our base for four days of exploration.
Tomorrow -- Pirna, and the *other* Canaletto. And by now you know that you should not hold your breath until my interpretation of "tomorrow"
comes.


[composed Date: Sun, 5 Oct 2003 01:20:21 -0400]