After four days of driving and a few stops along the way we are back where we started in Sweden. Our car is delivered back to its creators and now embarks on a 3-month cruise through the Panama Canal. We embark tomorrow morning on a 21-hour sequence of three flights, with stops in Copenhagen and San Francisco before finally landing in Portland about 9pm local time.
The people at Volvo have been wonderful. Taking care of all of the necessary arrangements for shipping the car and driving us both back to the hotel today and from the hotel to the airport tomorrow.
Apart from a few long road delays due to accidents, our northward trip was uneventful. We spent the weekend in Leipzig absorbing a bit of the rich musical culture. We had arranged tickets for a Sunday matinee concert by the Gewandhaus Orchestra.
The Gewandhaus began as a concert hall in the late 1700s and the orchestra grew to prominence under the leadership of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (who somehow loses his last name in America, though it is nearly always used here). The orchestra bearing its name claims to be the first to survive without political or religious patronage.
The old Gewandhaus was fire-bombed in World War II and rather than rebuild according to the old plans, a completely new and modern building was erected and opened in 1981. I have complained a lot in this blog about Soviet attempts at architecture (and there is a lot to complain about!), but they got this one 100% right.
The new building is on Augustusplatz, along across from the opera house and adjacent to the spectacular new glass building of the University of Leipzig.
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| New Gewandhaus from edge of Augustusplatz |
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| Glass building of University of Leipzig |
The Gewandhaus hall is constructed "in the round," with the orchestra surrounded by the audience. Here is a map from their ticket Web site, with the orchestra located in the gray area in the middle.
Our seats were in the back row of the little wing on the left, as shown by the black circle. Really, there isn't a bad seat anywhere in this hall and the acoustics are amazing. Every note from every instrument can be heard distinctly and the hall accommodates the biggest fortes without losing the smallest pianissimos.
These pictures will give you a little more of a feel for the interior, but of course I can't post anything that would give you an idea of the wonderful sound.
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| Intermission lounges, with multi-story mural on wall to the left |
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| Augustusplatz from the intermission lounge, with opera house opposite |
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| Organ and the behind-the-stage seating area |
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| View from our seats |
But there were no disasters on Sunday. The performance was brilliant---everything you would expect from one of Europe's great orchestras. They filled the room with euphonious sound when the augmented brass sections let loose, yet left us all on the edges of our chairs as the volume died slowly to silence at the end.
Six curtain calls, after the last of which the orchestra members stood up and all shook hands with their stand partners, congratulating each other no doubt on surviving three performances of this gigantic work in four days. The Friday performance will be released later this year on DVD as part of their cycle of Mahler's symphonies. (Only the first and third remain to be recorded.)
After the concert, we headed out to do as much as we could of the Leipzig Music Trail. Behind Vienna, Leipzig is probably Europe's leading home to great composers. Bach, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Grieg, and Wagner all spent large parts of their musical lives here, and all have houses, museums, or monuments on the Music Trail. As it turned out, we only had time and energy for two museum visits: the Mendelssohn House and the amazing Musical Instrument Museum of the University of Leipzig.
The Mendelssohn Museum is located in the house in which he lived for 20+ years. There are a number of period musical instruments in the upstairs apartments along with furniture that he owned. Downstairs are exhibits devoted to his life and work. In addition to his wonderful career as a musician and composer, Mendelssohn also painted very appealing landscape watercolors, many of which are displayed in the house. I had not realized the Mendelssohn was Jewish and that as a result the Nazis had destroyed all of Leipzig's statues and other memorials to him.
Down the block from Mendelssohn's house was the house in which Norwegian Edvard Grieg lived and worked for 30 years. This house is not open as a museum, but has a marker outside and a curious "Grieg-to-go" box where you can push a button and here parts of six composition.
Further down the street is the Musical Instrument Museum. We had tried to visit similar museums in Vienna and Budapest in recent weeks, but both times found them closed. The Leipzig museum was open ... and wonderful! In addition to tracing the history of wind, string, keyboard, and percussion instruments, the museum was filled with musical oddities, such as this "serpent bassoon," with what looks like a brass mouthpiece and a "tongue" coming out of the bell.
We have 100+ photos of instruments and we did not even come close to taking pictures of everything interesting. Here's a selection to whet your appetite, but you'll just have to visit for yourselves!
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| A particularly attractive clavichord |
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| Compact organ |
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| This harpsichord would travel better than the traditional ones |
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| Glass trumpet/bugle |
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| Mendelssohn and a few others wrote for the "serpent" |
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| Trumpet with (five) keys instead of valves |
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| The display says this is a combination piano/organ with a single keyboard |
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| Piano-harp |
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| Strangely shaped alto horn |
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| Flute with square keys |
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| Strangest trumpet I've ever seen! |
And finally, why does the piano keyboard have to be one-dimensional? This "orthotonophonium" arranges the keys in a two-dimensional matrix, just for convenience. Once you figure out the legend at the bottom, you're ready to start practicing!
Sadly, our energy ran out long before the interesting musical sights of Leipzig, so we did not make it to the Schumann House or the Bach Museum. Perhaps we'll be fortunate enough to visit Leipzig again some day to finish our musical sightseeing.
After Leipzig, we hit the road again heading north and west to Magdeburg, Hannover, Hamburg, and up into Denmark. We stopped at a suburban post office in Hamburg to ship a box of books and music home. (After finding out that the Slovak mail service is run by the same people as the Foreign Police, we felt more confident shipping from Germany.) The lovely lady at the window spoke excellent English and made sure that we got the right forms filled out.
We spent Monday night at a little inn that was built in 1610. The original burned down in 1973, but was faithfully reconstructed according to the old plans, but with larger rooms and modern conveniences. A comfortable and cozy stop on a chilly, wet, and windy day.
International economists often talk about the theory of "purchasing power parity," that exchange rates and prices should adjust so that things cost about the same in different countries. Anyone who still believes in purchasing power parity has never visited Scandinavia. On this trip, we spent three nights in Prague very close to the center of the city, two nights in Leipzig in the suburbs, and one night in Denmark in the middle of nowhere ... and our total hotel bill was about the same at all three places! How does anyone afford to live in Denmark or Sweden? Why don't their respective kroner depreciate?
We were curious to see whether there would be any noticeable effects of the migrant crisis on the parts of Sweden we could see. There are. We had a relatively long delay at the border as the immigration agents tried to reconcile our Copenhagen passport stamp (from the flight in), our claims to have been living in Slovakia, and our need to enter Sweden to deliver our car for shipment. After 2 or 3 minutes, I think they gave up trying and decided that we weren't much of a threat even if they couldn't figure us out.
Out hotel is in the very center of Göteborg, located at the corner of a very large shopping mall. We have been through the mall several times, both for shopping and to get to the parking garage on the other side. There are non-Swedish-looking faces everywhere, many of them begging, busking, or just sitting indoors where it is warm. From this limited and casual observation, it is not hard to understand how difficult it is for a small country---even one with a very welcoming attitude---to absorb vast numbers of refugees. How will this all end?
Tonight we celebrate our final night in Europe with Marriage of Figaro at the Göteborg Opera. Maybe I'll offer a few comments about that in my final post after getting back to Portland, but I'm going to close this post now rather than try to update it long after my normal bedtime tonight. Tomorrow will be all about navigating airports, airplanes, immigration, and customs with massive amounts of luggage. We are just hoping to get everything, including ourselves and our sanity, back to Portland safely.
Bye for now, or, as Google Translate claims the Swedes would say, hej då för nu.
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