I’ve been catching up with the blogs on my website, sadly neglected for over a year, but now back in action. In fact, I’ve neglected it for longer than that, considering I hadn’t posted anything about my foreign travels since 2015, when I went on two trips, to Italy https://wolfiewolfgang.com/it-was-all-mistake-my-three-inspiring/ and to Portugal https://wolfiewolfgang.com/my-time-in-lisbon-portugal-was-pure/

During my travels, I usually take my camera and, when armed with that, I am unstoppable. Looking through my photographs recently, I was worried that soon it would be too late to remember the details and, reluctantly, I would have to abandon ideas of writing about my experiences abroad.

So, to make it up with all those photographs lying dormant and ignored in my crazily crowded computer files, I decided a few weeks ago to do a blog-marathon and write these 17 blogs about my European travels over the the last 7 years – 7 years of real change in all our lives, here in the UK, and around the world.

Four failed UK prime ministers – plus another one soon.

There was Covid and Trump

Putin

Netanyahu

The world definitely changed and some of those changes were made only too apparent on my various journeys around Europe. I’m hoping that although things have got so bad, they can’t get much worse before, who knows, the bad guys are forced out, and the rest of the world will be pressured by the rest of humanity to make a real change for the better.

With apologies to all you disenfranchised UK citizens, and on a totally selfish note, there was at least some good news for me since 2017. I got my Irish citizenship and retained my EU passport.

If you want to look up my latest set of travel blogs, the links are below:

Amalfi Coast, Italy (2017): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/on-the-amalfi-coast/

Naples and Sorrento, Italy (2017) : https://wolfiewolfgang.com/category/travel/page/2/

Puglia: Polignano a mare, Italy (2018): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/two-weeks-in-puglia-polignano-a-mare/

Puglia: Lecce, Bari and Trani, Italy (2018): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/some-other-towns-my-journey-through-puglia-in-southern-italy/

Puglia: Alberobello to Matera, Italy (2018): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/on-the-road-from-polignano-to-matera-via-alberobello/

Milan, Italy (2019): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/milan-city-of-fashion-music-and-art-even-in-the-rain/

Naples, Italy (2020): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/back-in-naples-weeks-before-covid-soon-we-were-all-told-to-stay-home/

Pompeii, Italy (2020): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/in-2020-i-went-to-pompeii-and-then-to-troy/

Tropea, Calabria, Italy (2022): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/tropea-taking-it-easy-in-calabria/

Lahti, Finland (2022):https://wolfiewolfgang.com/flying-to-lahti-in-finland-for-sibelius/

Helsinki, Finland (2022): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/a-week-in-helsinki/

Ainola, Finland (2022): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/a-week-in-helsinki/

Tallinn, Estonia (2022): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/day-trip-to-tallinn-in-estonia/

Leipzig, Germany (2023): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/an-easter-meeting-in-leipzig-with-js-bach-300-years-on/

Berlin, Germany (2023): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/im-a-berliner-now/

Sysmä, Finland: (2023) https://wolfiewolfgang.com/away-from-it-all-at-the-centre-of-all-things-in-rural-finland/

Lahti, Finland, (2023): https://wolfiewolfgang.com/back-to-lahti-in-september-2023/

The post I’ve caught up with blogging about the last seven years of my European adventures. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

I was in Germany in April 2023, I’d been to Leipzig for the Bach 300 festival before catching a train for ten great days in Berlin. A city I last visited in the late 1990s, just a few years after Germany’s reunification and the city was still like a building construction site. Then it was possible to travel from the former Western Berlin through the Brandenburg Gate to the former East and see the immediate change from glitz to drab. This was all in the process of change. Twenty-five years ago, I was working on the English language dub of a film with my German colleague and friend from EuroArts, Bernd Hellthaler and the Hungarian film director, István Szabó. I was staying in a small hotel on the well-known and poetically-named street Unter den Linden (under the linden trees) that runs straight, East to West, through the centre of Berlin. I had the opportunity at that time to discuss, with these two intelligent, liberal-minded, and much more informed people than me, what was going to happen in Germany after the great change. Their mood was of cautious optimism. In 2023, I was interested to see how Berlin must have changed in those twenty-five years.

This time, I was happy to get an unexpected message from Bernd soon after my arrival in Berlin, and, as well as being pleased to see that he is still the same charming guy, and a key figure in music broadcasting, even though he has now retired, he is also still very much the pragmatist who answers political questions with his characteristic shrug. We had a convivial and still largely optimistic meeting with coffee and kuchen, but these days conversations about East and West are dominated by talk of Russia and Ukraine, but not without an opportunity grabbed to rib me about the UK’s unpopular decision over Brexit. I was happy this time to be able to wave my new Irish passport showing that I’m still very much in the EU.

I was staying here in ‘quirky,’ ‘arty,’ ‘gritty,’ ‘edgy,’ or just plain ‘trendy, Kreuzberg, a student quarter, south of the city centre, Mitte, in a ‘trendy’ and ‘arty’ apartment, next to a very cool bar on one side and a hipster restaurant on the other, with more down the street on both sides and Babylon Kino, an arthouse cinema at one end, in a district that has almost wall-to-wall graffiti.

Very soon, this bar became a kind of home – a place to go if you wanted to go out somewhere interesting but couldn’t be bothered to go far. Next-door was often far enough for me, especially when it was as pretty as this place.

It became the rendez-vous of choice when meeting up with family and friends, who also happened to be in Berlin, before moving on a few yards up the street for dinner. Max & Moritz was a really classy but informal ‘German’ restaurant, serving authentic, no really, German food.

And then, when it was time for bed, I only needed to stagger a few steps and I was there,

With the blinds open, I used to wake up in the morning to a leafy inner-courtyard view and, if I was lucky, a sighting or two of the local red squirrels, who might have been watching me.

Every morning, rain or no rain, I headed to the end of the street to a small square called Oranienplatz, an open space in this area of dense housing.

Oranienplatz supplied me with a gritty, in the literal sense, square for my martial arts practice…and so, yet again, I had found an ideal Kung-fu and tai-chi dojo. My audience, most mornings, was a trio of elderly Turkish women. One of them, on my last day, did a funny and unexpected imitation of my upper crane block.

If Kreuzberg is ‘edgy,’ it only seemed like that a couple of times at the entrance to the Kottbusser Tor metro station, when it was probably wise not to pay too much attention to the furtive huddles of young men rolling small polythene bags into silver foil. If we are talking about crime in Kreuzberg, the statistics tell us that serious crime is minimal here, with at worst, some drug peddling and drunken behaviour. I was careful, but not fearful in this vibrant part of the city.

Kottbusser Tor station was the quickest way to get into the city centre, so I went there a lot, excited, the first time, to be on my way to Berlin Alexanderplatz, the location of one of my favourite books. Alfred Döblin’s montage-style 1929 novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz. It is the story of Franz, an ex-con who is drawn back to crime in the working class districts around the famous Berlin square, in the closing days of the Weimar Republic and the beginnings of the rise of Nazism.

The novel was made into a masterly and, yes, unforgettable tv series in 1980 (now remastered) by film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Here is a short trailer for the remastered videos, sorry, but I could only find the version with French subtitles. It is still one of my very favourite TV series – all these years later.

When my train got into Alexanderplatz station, I knew that it would be a totally different experience to the novel, the series, and even the historical Alexanderplatz, which was destroyed by bombing in World War 2.

The station is beautiful – colourful, bright and clean…

…and up on street level, it has gained in shopping mall convenience what it has lost of its, yes, ‘edgy’ reputation. And, I forgot to tell you, it rained a lot during most of my stay. Apparently, it really can rain in Berlin.

Nothing, though, can rob me of my inner image of Alexanderplatz, even if, I have to admit, I am more that a little bit disappointed by its rebuild.

These days Alexanderplatz mostly exists indoors, like here in the giant Galeria Kaufhof – but if nothing else, it makes a welcome refuge from the rain.

I was a brave and often rather a damp sight-seer around Berlin city centre, but that didn’t stop me appreciating the mammoth changes that have happened since I was last here twenty-five years ago. I had often wondered how the city would handle its reconstruction, or maybe I should say series of reconstructions, since the long tale of the war and its consequences took its toll on what was once a handsome city with a long history of welcoming people from other countries and cultures.

I was intrigued to see what the new architects had been doing to replace the shattered centre of Berlin – there are some wonderful new buildings by innovative architects, but not maybe, in the very middle of town, the so-called Island of Museums, where they have gone for rebuilding replicas of the originals. It was a marathon job, of course, and one to admire, but, I couldn’t help feeling that the soul of those buildings has been lost in the replications. It is not really for me to say, but I would have liked to have seen a new cathedral built here instead of the monumental duplicate that they built in its place.

I love a lot of the new buildings and admire the way Berlin, and Germany in general, has become a modern culture not afraid to recognise its past, even the most distressing aspects of it. The well-known British comedy series, Fawlty Towers, had a running gag where the Brits are repeatedly told ‘don’t mention the war’. I never felt that I had to pretend when I was in Berlin. I was especially impressed by the number of open spaces, bomb sites, that instead of being simply built over to make a white-washed new city centre, a few prime sites, where the Wehrmacht had its centre, have been left either untouched or dedicated to a grieving and dignified form of remembrance as in the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Denkmal für die ermodeten Juden Europas), designed by Peter Eisenman and Buro Happold (2005) where 4.7 acres of valuable real estate in the centre of Berlin has been covered in a maze of 2,711 concrete slabs with an underground Ort der Information (Place of Information) that holds the names of approximately 3 million Jewish Holocaust victims.

Not far from there is a small inner city carpark which is the unmarked site of Hitler’s bunker, and not much further away, one of the last Nazi era constructions, once the largest office building in Europe, built in 1936, as the headquarters of the Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe, then the House of Ministries during the Democratic Republic and now, bizarrely, it is the headquarters of the German Finance Ministry.

Running along the side of the indestructible building, are some of the remains of the Berlin Wall, now a memorial too, for all those who died trying to cross it into West Germany during the DDR, or GDR (German Democratic Republic). The derelict land in front of the wall, still a kind of No-Man’s Land, it is, I was told, the site of the Gestapo and SS Headquarters. It seems that the land, like the Biblical Potter’s Field is just too contaminated to have any use other than one for mourning the dead.

Thinking about the Berlin Wall and the days of East Germany, the DDR, I visited the DDR Museum, a brilliantly designed and curated record of what ordinary life would have been like during that era. Sure, the repression and autocracy is there, some dreams too, but it is also a museum to a world which was temptingly so much less materialistic than ours is today.

Life for that mystical tribe known as ‘ordinary people’ had its ambitions restricted, certainly, but looking round the museum, I couldn’t help feeling that those who didn’t become victims of the Stasi, were freed from the negative effects of too many choices – what kind of deodorant, washing powder, or kitchen units? Does it really matter? I thought. Maybe they had something there.

Then, of course, there was the dead hand and chilly smile of autocratic bureaucracy, and my mild envy for those people disappeared like a short-lived daydream.

A strong desire for the new in 1968 is unsurprising. In those years, the new often meant building on bomb sites. Berlin had been given, not as a gift, a rubble-covered tabula rasa for building on. The Neue Nationalgalerie building was one of those masterpieces, designed by the famous Modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe as a vast ground floor exhibition space with a lower floor for the permanent collection (Picasso, Munch, Mondriaan and Calder among others). It was closed for six years in 2015 because the design led to many technical problems, especially cracking glass and condensation. The British architect, David Chipperfield, undertook the major renovation and the gallery was opened again in 2021.

The main new exhibition here on my visit was the series Birkenau (2014) by the German artist Gerhard Richter. The works are based on four photographs taken in the concentration camp that Richter has gradually transposed with charcoal and oil paint until they became abstracts with the original drawings invisible. They are positioned in front of four matching mirrors that add to their own level of transposition. Other parts of the exhibition show over-painted photographs in Richter’s long exploration of how to represent the Holocaust in art.

Another brave new 1960’s building in Berlin is the Philharmonie, opened in 1963, with Herbert von Karajan conducting the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in Beethovens 9th Symphony, the Choral – a hot ticket, I should imagine. The old Philharmonie building was destroyed by British bombs in World War 2, but there can be few complains about its wonderful replacement. The Berlin Philharmonic were away on tour when I was in Berlin, but I managed to get tickets for a concert at the Philharmonie with Berlin’s other world-class orchestra, the Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester Berlin (the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra), with their principal conductor Vladimir Jurowski. They were playing Shostakovich’s excitingly modern Symphony No. 4 in a performance that is still playing in my head over a year later.

Before the symphony, there was the German premiere of a new work by the Russian composer Elena Firsova. Her Piano Concerto for the pianist Yefim Bronfman, is, she says ‘very personal and reflected my meditations about the mystery and meaning of Death.’ She quotes a phrase from Beethoven’s late String Quartet op. 135, over which Beethoven had written: ‘Muss es sein?’ (Does it have to be?). Born in St Petersburg and a student in Moscow, Elena Firsova now lives in London, but before she left Russia, she, like Shostakovich, was condemned by the authorities for her modernist tendencies. The Congress of the Composers’ Union in 1979 attacked her and two other composers of her generation: ‘Elena Firsova, Dmitri Smirnov (her late husband) and Sofia Gubaidulina compose pointless and noisy mud…..they should be denied the right to represent Soviet music abroad.’

We were not denied the chance to hear this thought-provoking new work with its very human struggle for meaning in life and, also, maybe death. I don’t think Stalin would have liked it, but Beethoven, and I think, Shostakovich would have approved.

Unsurprisingly she is dismayed by the war against Ukraine; it ‘fills me with deep shame, I count myself lucky I left Russia thirty years ago and was last there seventeen years ago.’

Here is a video taken at that performance of the Firsova Piano Concerto in Berlin on 18 April 2023

Shostakovich’s fourth symphony was composed in 1935/6 and has had a dramatic history as it is the last work that Shostakovich wrote unfettered by the rules imposed on creative artists during Stalin’s reign in the Soviet Union. Pravda, the official newspaper was instructed by Stalin to write a critique which was a barely veiled personal attack on Shostakovich, who was at that time the brilliant enfant terrible among Soviet composers. His opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsenisk, which shared a lot of musical material with the fourth symphony, was called ‘muddle instead of music.’ Rehearsals had started for the premiere when it was announced that Shostakovich had withdrawn the work – probably to save the orchestra from Stalin’s wrath – and the symphony wasn’t premiered until 1961, long after Stalin’s death. Something died in Shostakovich after this….the fiery and dangerously challenging part of his creative genius was at least partially paralysed if not killed outright. He certainly never wrote anything like this symphony again.

At the Philharmonie last April it was definitely music instead of muddle – we heard the voice of a radical young man shouting out loud for his freedom from oppression. Berlin felt like the right place to hear him, having walked round the remains of Hitler’s Reich and the last remains of Berlin’s Soviet wall.

I looked to see if there was a recording of that performance but couldn’t find anything, so here is a short except of it played by the Berlin Philharmonic, in the same hall, conducted by Simon Rattle.

The Old National Gallery (Alte Nationalgalerie) sits in a prime spot on Berlin’s Museum Island and I could have spent my whole holiday here. It was founded to exhibit the works of major German artists, but later it was expanded to include many major 19th century French and Dutch artists….worth a visit in itself. You can see Cezanne, Corot, Courbet, Daubigny, Daumier, Fantin-Latour, Jongkind, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Rodin, Signat and Van Gogh. I shall ignore them, love them as I do, for the purposes of this blog, because a lot the German artists were new to me and I want to share them. I have long admired Friedrich, Böcklin, Klinger and Beckmann, but the others mentioned here, and many more, changed my perspective about German art in the 19th century, so dominated, for me at least, by the great French schools of Romanticism, Neo-Classicism, Realism, Impressionism and Expressionism.

And then I came to the pictures of King Frederick the Great of Prussia (1712 – 1786), painted with a propagandist brush by Adolph Menzel in his days as a history painter. Frederick was the sensitive and artistic son of an autocratic father, Frederick William I, the ‘Soldier King.’ Frederick, the unlikely heir, was first admired, or sneered at, for his interest in music and philosophy who, later in life, became interested in armies and soldiers and consequently, war. He modernised Prussian bureaucracy, reformed the justice system, and favoured the freedom of the press. Here in Menzel’s picture, he is seen as Old Fritz (der Alter Fritz), friend of the poor, who is going to be way-laid by a poor couple about to present him with a petition.

He was all of those things, but we would be getting him wrong if we really beleive he was a man of the people, an honest Joe. He was, for all his liberal ideas, a firm believer in Enlightened Absolutism and, whatever else he thought he was, he was certain that he was the number one guy in the country – the first servant of the state.

Is was tough being the lord of all you survey, so, I suppose it was understandable that sensitive and artistic Frederick, needed a beautiful summer palace to escape to when he needed some rest and refreshment. I had a long-held wish to see the place, romantically named Sanssouci (without worry) his version of Dun Roamin’, a kind of mini-Versailles, where, like Northern France, some of the gilt feels a bit washed out by the rain.

He was, as far as I know, happy here. He made the place just as he liked it….a bit camp, gilded and glittering, but also small in terms of other palaces, private too and, in his inner sanctum, simple and unpretentious.

The glitz was mostly reserved for the main reception rooms like this, his music room, where JS Bach’s son C P E Bach, played for him on the harpsichord and also accompanied the musical king’s flute. It was at Frederick’s other palace, the one at Potsdam, (bombed and destroyed during World War 2), that he persuaded CPE Bach to bring his father, Johann Sebastian along to play for him. The result, now famous, was that JS improvised multiple fugues on a tune composed by Frederick and later elaborated them further into what became A Musical Offering ( Das Musikalische Opfer, BWV 1079), one of the composers late and greatest masterpieces.

I suspect Frederick the Great was happiest though, later in his reign, to be alone in his study, reading, writing and practising his flute, and, from time-to-time, gazing out of the window at his favourite statue, placed there perfectly framed by his window.

It was here, in his armchair, in his seventies, crippled by asthma and gout, that he died in 1786, leaving instructions to be buried at Sanssouci next to his beloved greyhounds.

Unlikely but apt, somehow, I thought when I came across this framed screen-print of the old king, by Andy Warhol (1968). Weary, paranoid, camped up, and slightly ridiculous, the old man seems weighed down by monarchy and the impossibilities of finding happiness as an enlightened absolutist, or even here, sans souci – without worry. I’m sorry about all those wars, about the Partition of Poland, and for Frederick’s cruel treatment by his father, who had Frederick’s closest, and much loved, male friend beheaded in front of him after they’d tried to run away together. But, if for nothing else, I’m happy that Frederick invited Johann Sebastian Bach – the main reason for my trip to Germany – to come to Potsdam and to write one last masterpiece.

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Even people who don’t think they like classical music know and even like at least some of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 – 1750). Those who love classical music are mostly in consensus that he was probably the greatest of all the classical composers. I certainly feel that he stands tall not just in the world of music, but in the world of human creativity too. I believe that we are all a bit dwarfed by Bach and his like. – dwarfed but inspired, moved, uplifted and even healed. He is definitely a giant. Last year, in April 2023, I spent two weeks over Easter in Germany – the first half of the trip was spent in Leipzig – an impressive, beautiful and highly cultured city, formerly in East Germany, and now a thriving part united Germany.

Leipzig, for all music-lovers, is known as the city of music and of composers, like Mahler, Schumann and Mendelssohn, but most of all, it’s a city known as the spiritual home of Johann Sebastian Bach and 2023/4 is a significant anniversary year because over 300 years ago, in June 1723, 38-year-old Bach was appointed musical director of the St Thomas Choir, meaning that he would head up music in the two Lutheran churches of the thriving trading hub of Leipzig – Thomaskirche, St Thomas Church, and Nikolaikirche, St Nicholas Church. The St Thomas choir, which was founded in 1212, which sang in both churches, was internationally renowned as one of the finest ensembles of the day – as it still is in 2024.

My Easter holiday in 2023 was dedicated to celebrating the great man here in his home town where the majority of his masterworks were written. Leipzig is mounting a two-year festival, Bach 300, to mark the anniversary with a series of Bach concerts and events.

Bach’s monumental statue stands outside St Thomas Church, it is the familiar figure of the be-wigged grandee in his elegant 18th century finery – as in his most well-known portrait….

… Bach, maybe of all composers, is a man for all eras, not just 18th century, so I like to think of him as in the bust I saw in Leipzig’s Bach Museum – the man without a wig, with no fancy clothes, an everyman and a superman.

He is not just superman, but he is also immortal, or his music is, so it was a minor shock, a moment of disbelief, to find his grave stone set into the floor of St Thomas Church. I don’t accept that he is dead, or that he will ever die.

The big ticket at this Easter festival was a performance of Bach’s St John Passion (1724) played in one of the two churches that he mostly wrote for, with their particular acoustics and architecture already familiar to him. It was originally intended to be premiered here at St Thomas Church, but Leipzig council asked for a last minute change to St Nicholas Church. The St John Passion was first performed down the road at St Nicholas Church, after some adjustments made by Bach, on Good Friday on the 7 April 1724, three hundred years ago. He revised the work the following year for performance at St Thomas Church, his first intention must have been to do the work here where I heard it last April. You can watch a video of that performance if you scroll down to the bottom of this page. If you can’t listen to the whole two hours worth of music, dip in and out of it. It was an inspired event, with the choir, vocal soloists, along with the organ and the Gewandhaus Orchestra performing from the organ loft at the West end of the church, as it would have done in Bach’s day. The soloists were internationally-aclaimed Bach singers, Julian Prégardien (tenor, the evangelist) Tomáš Král (bass, Christus) Anna Prohaska (soprano soloist) Andreas Scholl (alto soloist) Raphael Wittmer (tenor soloist) Tobias Berndt (bass soloist) with the Thomanerchor Leipzig, and the Gewandhausorchester conducted by Andreas Reize.

I was sitting in the gallery with a good view of the performers, an excellent position for sound which, I am told is much nearer to Bach’s acoustics since the removal of some of the 19th century resoration work. Behind me, up there was a stained-glass window dedicated to the composer, with his portrait at the centre.

The audience downstairs that night, were, as you’d expect, facing the altar at the East end of the church, so they had their backs to the performers….less distracting I guess, but I don’t think it would catch on in modern concert halls.

Bach lived across the square from St Thomas’ Church with his wife and large family of children along with servants and live-in students. It was a busy household right in the middle of this vortex of musical activity. A concentration of musical creativity that would, quite literally, change the course of musical history.

Down the street, a five minute walk, turn left and go straight on, another couple of minutes, and you can’t miss it – St Nicholas Church – Bach’s other church. The great man would have done this walk almost on a daily basis and I had a constant feeling when I walked round Leipzig, that I really was walking in Bach’s footsteps.

St Nicholas Church now looks different inside from Bach’s day because the fancy neo-classical decor in added in the late 18th century. It is still a fine building with a superb acoustic and it cannot be denied that this is still an essential part of Bach-world.

St Nicholas Church’s choir was renamed BachChor Leipzig in 2006, and it now has responsibility for all of the church’s services and concerts in St Nicholas Church, under the direction of its director, Markus Kaufmann. Over the Easter weekend in 2023, apart from hearing the St John Passion up the street at St Thomas’, I heard the BachChor Leipzig perform Bach’s Easter Oratorio here in St Nicholas and, on Good Friday, one of the best singing of the week, in a setting of Via Crucis, the Stations of the Cross – I couldn’t find information on the composer (maybe a reader of this can tell me) but it was unaccompanied choral singing at its very best. Bach would, I hope, be proud of the choirs continuing the great choral music tradition in these two churches.

There was more Bach at Leipzig’s splendid modern concert hall the Gewandhaus, home for the Gewandhaus Orchestra (directed for some time by Mendelssohn, no less), one of the most celebrated orchestras in the world and one I was happy to hear live in the St John Passion. On this night there was a very different style of performance here. Bach and the Dutch composer Dieterich Buxtehude, were performed on a smaller scale by the chamber choir, Collegium Vocale Leipzig and Die Merseburger Hofmusik, an early music ensemble who perform on original instruments, directed by the conductor and organist, Michael Schönheit.

The concert consisted of Buxtehude’s great cycle of seven vocal cantatas for solo voices and instrumental ensemble, known as Membra Jesu nostri (1680), a series of aria and chorus settings of meditations on parts of Christ’s crucified body (the feet, the knees, the hands, the sides, the breast, the heart, and the face). The idea might seem strange to us now, but the music is sublime. Buxtehude was perhaps Bach’s greatest predecessor as the master of music in Germany. The young Bach made a 400 km walk to hear Buxtehude play the organ in 1705 – and, apparently, he never regretted the journey. We can tell by listening to Buxtehude, just how much Bach learnt from him.

The second half of the concert was devoted to Bach – his chorale cantata for chorus and orchestra, Christ lag in Todes Banden, (1707) (Christ lay in death’s bonds) based on a hymn by Martin Luther. It was one of his earliest church cantatas, but also one that he performed years later, in 1725, St Thomas Church. In between these two works, Michael Schönheit played a number of Bach’s organ pieces on both the small portative organ and the giant Gewandhaus organ, with thrilling effect.

So, my visit to Leipzig was Bach-dominated, but he wasn’t the only composer with a very visible presence in this most cultured of cities.

The Schumanns, Robert and Clara, husband and wife, had an apartment in a house here in Clara’s home town. They were both composers, Robert Schumann (1810 – 1856) is known for his Piano Concerto, his solo piano music and his song cycles, but Clara Schumann (Wieck) (1819 – 1896) was better known in her lifetime as one of the leading classical pianists of the 19th century. Their’s is one of the best-known love stories in classical music, and it is difficult not to hear their love in their compositions. I didn’t visit the Schumann museum but I did get a strange thrill walking part their house every day and imagining the domestic lives of that great couple.

Another Leipzig composer who had an important influence on its musical life, was Felix Mendelssohn (1809 – 1847), a musical prodigy, one of the most talented composers of his generation, he was, from a young age, recognised as a composer, a pianist, organist and conductor. He had one of the most comfortable upbringings of all famous composers, but he often struggled with the conflict of the bourgeois life, his musical facility, and his creative genius. His best works, the Italian Symphony, the Octet, his last String Quartet and his music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, are up there in the echelon of 19th century masterpieces, but a lot of his lesser works are characterised by his inherent conservatism which had an all too dampening effect on a number of composers who followed his example.

Felix Mendelssohn and his more recently appreciated composer sister Fanny Mendelssohn, came from the rich Leipzig banking family who ran the Mendelssohn & Co. bank, one of the major German banks in the 19th and early 20th centuries. the brilliant siblings were the grandchildren of the renowned philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729 – 1786). Felix Mendelssohn lived in an apartment in Leipzig after taking the job as director of the Gewandhaus Orchestra in 1835 until his death in 1847.

I couldn’t get tickets for the Leipzig Opera, which was sad. Mendelssohn conducted here and Gustav Mahler (1860 – 1911) was once the opera director, but I was in Leipzig for Bach, so I didn’t try as hard as I might’ve to see their zany new production of Bach contemporary Handel’s musically thrilling opera, Giulio Cesare in Egitto (1724). Another time, I hope. Here’s their trailer to show you the kind of work they are doing here at Leipzig opera.

I did get to visit the magnificent glass box that is Leipzig’s Museum of Fine Arts (Museum der bildenden Künste), with its collection of works from the late Middle Ages, especially Old German and early Netherlandish medieval paintings and German art of the 19th and 20th centuries, with a particularly good collection of works by Max Klinger (1857 – 1920), including his controversial ‘topless’ Beethoven. There is also a collection of paintings, not well-known outside of Germany, perhaps, of artists from the GDR (German Democratic Republic) period. These were certainly new to me, giving new insight into every day life, even dull life, in Leipzig in the days of the Soviet Union.

It is too easy to forget that Leipzig hasn’t always been such a relaxed and comfortable place to visit. It is also maybe too easy to dwell on the bad things too and to only see bomb craters where exciting modern architecture stands today. It is also still possible to see some of the old pre-mid 20th century buildings in an enjoyable mix with the new. I found it tempting to imagine living here. I know that’s a common holiday sin, but I liked Leipzig a lot, with that mix or the old and the new, high culture and popular culture, treated with a sophisticated respect for the aesthetics of beauty and design..

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832), another intellectual colossus, was a university student in Leipzig from 1765 to 1768. HIs masterwork, Faust (1772 – 1831), has a lively drunken scene in Auerbach’s Cellar, when Mephistopheles, the Devil, goes on his wild ride on a barrel, which possibly reflects the young Goethe’s at least occasionally riotous student life. Auerbach’s Cellar, somewhat restored, is still there and still selling food and drinks.

Mendelssohn is here too in statue form – in his own right as a great composer, but also, placed near to St Thomas Church, he is honoured as the man who revived the reputation of J.S.Bach in the 19th century, with his own conducting of Bach’s St Matthew here in 1829. Goethe was there at that Leipzig performance and said that hearing Bach revived was ‘like the distant roar of the sea.’

I was staying in a hotel across the road from the railway station, a walk away from the Bach churches and the museums, but also from the many restaurants and cafés that are an essential part of the Leipzig experience.

I not only found places for some of my favourites – coffee and croissants, German sausages, wonderful (the best) German rolls (brötchen) and Weißbier (white beer) – but I also found a space for my morning martial arts practice by these magnolia trees, across the road from the station, near to the hotel, and also to a busy procession of morning commuters. If I can do all 66 tai-chi moves undisturbed, then I feel I am at home. An elderly German woman, who had been watching me intently, even came up to me after I had finished and told me how much she’d enjoyed the show, having tried her own tai-chi style for over twenty years. She looked very fit from it too.

I also found time, inspired by this artistic city, to try my hand at photo-editing – it made me feel, almost, like I was an artist too.

Another Bach statue stands round the corner from the more well-known one by St Thomas Church, Mendelssohn helped raise the funds for its erection and it is a modest affair, easily missed, but it is believed that this is the truest likeness of the composer, and therefore a fitting way to say aufwiedersehen. Below is the recording of the St John Passion that I attended in St Thomas Church. It is well worth a watch.

Johann Sebastian Bach – Johannes Passion, BWV 245 (Gewandhausorchester with Andreas Reize, 6 Apr. 2023 Leipzig, Thomaskirche) Julian Prégardien (T) Tomáš Král (B) Anna Prohaska (S) Andreas Scholl (A) Raphael Wittmer (T) Tobias Berndt (B) Thomanerchor Leipzig

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