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Luxuriating in German cultural history

Luxuriating in German cultural history

Last updated on: June 1, 2015 at 2:46 pm by Dan Peterson

Luxuriating in German cultural history 2015-06-01T14:46:09-06:00 Dan Peterson

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A portrait of Philip Melanchthon by Hans Holbein
(Click to enlarge.)

The official name of the city of Wittenberg is actually Lutherstadt Wittenberg, “Luther City Wittenberg.” The great Reformation university is essentially gone, having moved quite some time ago to Halle, and its name is now Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, so the city’s claim to fame is its association with the great Reformer, not its eminence as the seat of an illustrious school.

And that’s a great claim to fame. A phenomenal one. The Protestant Reformation is one of the greatest single elements in the intellectual, cultural, and political history of the West.

But Luther wasn’t alone in it. Not even in Wittenberg.

Before leaving this morning, my wife and I toured the home of Philip Melanchthon, the erudite classicist and biblical scholar who was one of Luther’s closest and ablest associates, and who may actually have been more important (for example, in the translation of the New Testament for the Lutherbibel) than he is generally recognized to be.

J.S. Bach’s grave can be seen in the floor before the altar of the Thomaskirche, the Church of St. Thomas, in Leipzig.

(Click on the image to enlarge it; click on it again to enlarge it further.)

We then drove to Leipzig. where we spent quite a bit of time listening to the organ in the Thomaskirche. (We’ve been very fortunate during this trip, hearing wonderful organ music in virtually every historic church we’ve entered.) It was in this church, the Church of St. Thomas, that Johann Sebastian Bach served for twenty-seven years as Kapellmeister, music director, organist, cantor, and teacher.

Clara Schumann (59), in 1878
Portrait by Franz von Lenbach

What a musical heritage! Bach is buried inside the church, and a larger-than-lifesize statue of him stands by one of the entrances. But a statue of the sadly short-lived Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy stands in a small park directly adjacent; an avid fan of Bach, Mendelssohn was also a music director at the Thomaskirche and lived a short distance away in a house that’s still preserved in his honor. And the musician and composer Clara Wieck grew up nearby — and eventually, as Clara Schumann, lived with her husband, the great but tragic Robert Schumann, in a house that still stands within an easy walk of the church. And Richard Wagner was baptized in Thomaskirche (though it doesn’t seem to have stuck with him very well) and studied piano in its music school.

Then, after considerable time in the Thomaskirche, we strolled for lunch over to Auerbachs Keller, Goethe’s favorite eating and drinking place from his student days in Leipzig. Here’s what he had to say about it:

Wer nach Leipzig zur Messe gereist,

Ohne auf Auerbachs Hof zu gehn,

Der schweige still, denn das beweist:

Er hat Leipzig nicht gesehn.

Here’s my loose and quite unpoetic translation:

Whoever travels to Leipzig for the fair

without going to Auerbach’s inn

should keep his mouth shut, because that shows

that he really hasn’t seen Leipzig at all.

Auerbachs Keller dates back to the late 1400s, though it received its name only in the early 1500s. And the food is very good. But its foremost claim to fame, I suppose, is that, in Goethe’s Faust, Part One, Auerbachs Keller is the first place to which Mephisto or Mephistopheles takes the alchemist/astrologer Faust.

We left Leipzig, driving through rolling wooded countryside in occasional rain to the sounds of Bach’s Weihnachtsoratorium or “Christmas Oratorio,” performed by the Thomaskirche choirs and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchester, a recording of which we had just bought there in the church’s shop.

Now, though, we’re in Bayreuth, which could justly be called Wagnerstadt Bayreuth. Quite a change.

Richard Wagner (1813-1883)
This image is everywhere here in Bayreuth.

We’re staying within a hundred yards or so of Bayreuth’s Stadtfriedhof or city cemetery, so, naturally, we walked over to it and through it. We saw the family grave area of the Wagner family, and the grave of the well-known German poet Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (d. 1825), who wrote as “Jean Paul.” (“God is an unutterable sigh,” he once said, “planted in the depths of the soul.”) And — the high point of the cemetery for us — we visited the dignified tomb of the composer Franz Liszt (great in his own right, of course, and father of Richard Wagner’s second wife, Cosima).

Wonderful places.

Posted from Bayreuth, Germany

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