To the Mendelssohn House

On my first visit to Leipzig back in December - I can't believe it took so long before I saw the city - Bach had to be the priority. And he was a kind of starting-point this time, because the Nikolaikirche was his second home after the Thomaskirche, and I found myself on the fifth floor of a hotel with perhaps the best view I've had in any city; namely of the church, which filled the entire window.

I could see it at sunset

and at sunrise

and besides, the street has a row of wonderful second hand bookshops which I spent some time in on my last visit. The square was now devoid of its Christmas market stalls but there was the solitary palm column mirroring the ones within the Nikolaikirche, its shadow serving as a kind of sundial on the building where Wagner went to school (there's a Wagner Museum in the basement, nicely laid out, but it had no treasures and didn't teach me anything; I whizzed around it rather quickly).

Leipzig would have to be the mecca for musicians in terms of its astounding heritage - Bach, Schumann, Mendelssohn, young Wagner - and it treasures its orchestra. I was here for the inauguration of already-great Andris Nelsons as the 21st Gewandhauskapellmeister, about which I've written on The Arts Desk. Needless to say, the whole city viewed this with pride in a way that would be unimaginable here - can you imagine Simon Rattle plastered over Kings Cross to celebrate his return to the UK as principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra?

Note, too, it's 'Andris', like 'Mirga'. A PR friend of mine found this cheesy, but I disagree - it suggests all the breaking down of boundaries since the Call-Me-Maestro era, and Andris is the most genial and natural of conductors.

I had the day of the concert free to cover everything I hadn't seen on that first visit, and I managed a great deal of it. Namely morning in the superbly designed MdBK (Museum der Bildenden Kunste, in other words the main art gallery), for which another blog entry will be necessary, a pausa in the Stadtcafe Riquet

where I couldn't resist a photo of the table with the best Mohntorte (poppyseed cake) I've had next to the Cafe Frauenhuber in Vienna

and then an afternoon walk following part of the Leipzig Music Trail, helpfully studded with symbols on every pavement. It led me, about five minutes past the Gewandhaus on the other side of the ring road, to Königstraße 3, a large house built in 1843-4 as part of a new residential district.

In August 1845, the 34-year-old Mendelssohn, who over the previous decade had transformed the Leipzig Gewandhausorchter into a thing of wonder,  moved into the very substantial apartment on the first floor with his wife Cecile and four children. The building and garden were in a fairly ruinous state before the International Mendelssohn-Stiftung took it over and planned a hugely impressive restoration in the 1990s.  I love it that certain parts of the building, namely the old staircase, need careful treading

and the modernisation of the rest, starting with a reception desk and coffee shop manned by really friendly young women, is a treat. The nine main rooms on the first floor have been reconstructed with meticulous taste. It helps that Felix Moscheles left several watercolours of the rooms just after Mendelssohn's death, on Cecile's invitation, including - most important of all - the study where he composed Elijah.

What we have now isn't identical, but the bright yellow combines with the sunshine that flooded the apartment on the freezing cold and ice-windy but brilliant afternoon I visited.

 
It's important to see Mendelssohn's idols in the busts of Goethe and Bach, for whom he did so much during his time in their shared city of music.

 
Much else is in the Biedermeier style. The room opposite has most of the original furniture, including a cabinet containing bronze statuettes of Voltaire (which you can see on the right) and Rousseau

 
and though you can't see it from the way the rooms are arranged and cordoned, a small-scale colour reproduction of Titian's Assumption in Venice's Frari hangs above the recamiere here.

The Music Room which hosts regular events has been lovingly restored in careful application of paintwork, reconstructed stove and chandelier and careful work on the 1830 trumeau.

Objects on permanent loan from the Museum of the History of the City of Leipzig are sensitively presented, many of them in pull-out drawers below some prize exhibits. This is the 16 year old Mendelssohn's translation of Terence's Andria as 'The Maiden of Andros', with which he surprised his teacher Heyse. The work of 'F****' was published by Heyse with an introduction in 1826.

Multitalented Felix was also an accomplished watercolourist, and having seen many of his views of Switzerland in a book of Swiss landscapes given to me by my Zurich-based friend Lottie, I was delighted to see even more of the originals given a room to themselves here. Rather fond of this unfinished view of a tree-lined promenade in Interlaken. Mendelssohn had little confidence in his ability to draw figures, which is why the lady remains sketchy.

A nice creative touch is the use of the kitchen to display Mendelssohn's travels in a series of commemorative plates

with an introduction which made me especially happy:

Upstairs are the Archive devoted to that great man and Gewandhaus presiding genius for many years Kurt Masur

and, more important still, a series of rooms devoted to Felix's fabulously gifted sister Fanny, named throughout as Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel. Her artist husband gracefully adorned many of her manuscripts,

and I sat in one of the rooms listening to a recording by Lauma Skride (sister of Baibe, who was playing in the Berg Violin Concerto later) of three movements from her piano series Die Jahr, a predecessor of Tchaikovsky's The Seasons (which of course should be The Months). No small talent, this. It is saddening to read in the exhibition of how her brother prohibited her from publishing her music. The same old story of male dominance which pertained to Alma Mahler, whose husband made it clear there weren't room for two composers in one household. That document is highlighted, but there is also plenty of memorabilia here too, not least from time spent in Rome.

The garden has a recent bust of Mendelssohn

and a chastening exhibition in the outbuilding of Mendelssohn and the Nazis. I was saddened to see a picture of Strauss conducting under a giant swastika as late as 1938 - I have been too much the apologist for the extent of his compliance with a regime he hated - and there's also the shocking story of Beecham and the LPO visiting Leipzig in 1936, laying a wreath at the foot of the statue on 9 November, only to return the next day to find it gone. To his credit, the Mayor resigned in protest at this disgrace. A reproduction of the statue was placed in 2008 at the back of the Thomaskirche (this from my first visit last December)

and Mendelssohn has left us a watercolour of the church for which Bach composed so many of his cantata masterpieces.

The Music Trail, meanwhile, leads one on to the Grieg Memorial Centre in the next block. Grieg was the guest of publishers Abraham and Hinrichsen during his Leipzig stays. 

With opening hours limited to Friday afternoons and Saturdays, there was no chance of visiting, so I contented myself with the sight of the plaque and a bust in the neighbouring garden. 

The building which housed the former Peters Music Library is nearby, too, and then you come to the splendid Museum complex including the Museum of Musical Instruments and the graveyard at the back where Bach was originally buried (members of the Mendelssohn family, too), but that was locked and I had no time on this visit to see the oldest fortepiano, so on I pressed to the apartment in which Robert Schumann and Clara Wieck spent the first year of their marriage, on the first floor of Inselstraße 18.

This is a far less lavishly maintained museum than the Mendelssohn-Haus; perhaps more has gone into the Schumannhaus in Bonn. But it had an old-fashioned charm, one of domineering father Wieck's pianos

and a rather less period-conscious assemblage of copies of reproductions favoured by Schumann

as well as an equally well-maintained staircase.

Time for the evening's concert was drawing closer, so I headed back via the Wagner memorial behind the Opera House, surrounded by snowdrops

and the frozen pond below it.

There will be plenty more of that ice in my next photojournal - I've recently returned from Bodø, well above the Arctic Circle in Norway, and that really was a winter wonderland.

Ending and beginning with Bach

This year's attempt to play a Bach cantata on every appropriate Sunday and holy day of the year stands a better chance of lasting than my 2013 attempt, which fizzled out at Easter because I hadn't ordered up the right CDs in time (I could have done it via YouTube, but I was too sound- and performance-fussy). With the Hänssler box of Rilling's Bachakademie Edition to hand, and a good online guide to what cantatas should be heard/performed when, I'm all set. I describe how I came round to Rilling, with his superb team of soloists led by Arleen Auger, a choir projecting the meaning of the German texts and various magnificent oboes, in a feature on The Arts Desk.

Properly the listening should have begun at advent, but I started with the perfect aria, "Bereitet die Wege, bereitet die Bahn", launching BWV 132, from Auger with oboe obbligato, the day before Christmas Day, and then followed the seasonal route with individual cantatas rather than those making up the Christmas Oratorio. I've made due notes, but should start here by observing the latest two beauties, BWV 28 "Gottlob! Nun geht des Jahren Ende" on New Year's Eve and BWV 171, "Gott, wie dein Name, so ist auch dein Ruhm", which we listened to on Jill's Bose up in Southrepps on New Year's Day, aka the Feast of the Circumcision or Snip Day. Apologies if in the ensuing I don't dwell much on the text - I shall when Bach illuminates the words in a special way.

Again, Auger led the way, heralded by striking figures from two oboes and oboe da caccia in harmony, in BWV 28, composed in Bach's third year at Leipzig for the end of 1725. There's a double whammy of glory here - the ensuing motet treatment of a chorale is one of Bach's most giddying contrapuntal inspirations, and Gardiner had it performed at the very end of his 2000 Bach Pilgrimage. A tenor recit is haloed by strings and leads to a dancing duet; the final chorale is enhanced by brass (cornet and three trombones).

BWV 171 comes after the three Leipzig cycles and was first performed on New Year's Day 1729. The opening choral fugue starts in old-fashioned style, but the entry of the first trumpet with the theme is a real wake-up call. In Gardiner's words, 'the music suddenly acquires a new lustre and seems propelled forwards to a different era for this assertion of God's all-encompassing dominion and power'. Violin obbligati enrich the tenor and soprano arias (the latter adapted from a number in a secular cantata where the instrument illustrates a 'gentle wind'), while there's typical originality from Bach in the bass's arioso-recitative, with striking illumination from the two oboes. As in BWV 28, but even more strikingly, the brass adds glory to the final chorale.

The above photos of Leipzig's Thomaskirche were taken on what turned out to be a wonderful trip just before Christmas, ostensibly to see and write about the Blüthner Piano Factory - it was enlightening, and write I shall anon - but which opened up to embrace two performances at the Opera (already described lower down the blog) and an afternoon/evening at large in the centre of town.

I won't deny that I got pleasantly teary sitting as near as I could to Bach's grave in the Thomaskirche chancel. His bones had been dug up from the cemetery of the Johanniskirche, placed inside the church in 1900 and moved here following that church's destruction in World War Two in 1949 (it is perhaps even more shocking that the Soviets dynamited the University Church, where Bach was director of holiday services, as late as 1968).

At last I completed the journey which had begun with the unforgettable performance of the B minor Mass by Collegium 1704 around the font where Bach was baptised in Eisenach.

So much has happened to honour Bach in the last few decades. The Nikolaikirche was stripped of the Baroque refurbishing which the composer would have known during his tenure in the 1880s; further re-Gothicization, returning the 'hall' church to how it looked in 1496, took place in the early 1960s. But the biggest restoration took place in time for the 250th anniversary of Bach's death on 28 July 2000. Much of the funding for this and other projects has come from the Thomaskirche-Bach 2000 Assocation, and it's heartening to see the list of names involved in the state-of-the-art Bach Museum opposite the church.

The Bachs lived in the old St Thomas School, which no longer survives, but this house at Thomaskirchof 16 was the residence of their good friends the Boses, a merchant family which had the 16th century building refurbished in Baroque style. The beautifully designed museum rooms are mostly geared towards education about the essence of Bach's music and his life, with plenty of listening posts, but they do include a chest which was identified as late as 2009 as coming from Bach's household (thanks to a seal)

and the restored organ console from the destroyed Johanneskirche at which Bach played in 1743.

There's a nicely displayed room of musical instruments to complement the ones to be seen in the Thomaskirche, including this handsome viola d'amore.

Holiest of holies, though, in the 'Treasure Room' is a magnificent bequest, by far the more brilliant of the only two portraits of Bach painted in his lifetime by Leipzig artist Elias Gottlob Haussmann in 174 and showing Bach holding a score entitled ‘Canon triplex à 6 Voc: per J. S. Bach’. It was bequeathed to the Leipzig Bach Archive by American musicologist and philanthropist William H Scheide, who died last November aged 101 (the other work, far duller, is in the main city museum, which I didn't have time to visit).

This is manuscript heaven, too. The full autograph score and the individual parts of the Cantata BWV 20, 'O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort', can be seen in the museum together for the first time ever. The former is in a superb little exhibition on Bach and Luther, finishing on 28 January, which also includes a grand Luther Bible with Bach's name inscribed in his own hand. 

I left the Museum after dark, though there was abundant life in town as the Leipzigers flocked to the stalls of the Christmas Market, which spreads outwards along most streets from the central Markt. And I did just manage to see the outlandish interior of the Nikolaikirche, redone long after Bach was master there, between 1784 and 1797, in neo-classical style by J F C Dauthe. The palm columns are something else.

Handsome as it unquestionably is from the exterior, the Nikolaikirche is celebrated now as the peaceful source of protests which led to the fall of the East German regime in Autumn 1989. The Rev. C Führer's description of those events in the green pamphlet is movingly phrased, especially as it heads towards the quiet denouement of 7 October:

...the prayers for peace took place in unbelievable calm and concentration. Shortly before the end, before the Bishop gave his blessing, appeals by Professor Masur, chief conductor of the Gewandhaus Orchestra, and others who supported our call for non-violence, were read out. The solidarity between church, art, music and the gospel was of importance in the threatening situation of those days.

The prayers for peace ended with the Bishop's blessing and the urgent call for non-violence. More than 2,000 people leaving the church were welcomed by tens of thousands waiting outside with candles in their hands - an unforgettable moment. Two hands are necessary to carry a candle and to protect it from extinguishing so that you cannot carry stones or clubs at the same time. The miracle occurred.