A bird room in Bamberg

It's not strictly for the birds: upstairs you can gain, as the Bamberg Natural History Museum's leaflet puts it, 'an overview of the different phyla of the animal kingdom, beginning with the lowest and ending with the highest organized living species'. But what hits you as you enter the blue, white and gold early neoclassical Vogelsaal are the birds: European in and above the central cases, exotic around the walls.

The reason this was always going to be a highlight of my long-anticipated trip to Bamberg, Germany's most beautiful town of the ones I've seen (and it would, I think, be impossible to surpass in the whole of Europe, up there with the Italian gems), was the way that Simon Winder sold it to me in his freewheeling encyclopedia of the Teutonic weird and wonderful, Germania.'The real reason for mentioning Bamberg,' he writes with typical hyperbole of a city with one of the world's great cathedral areas, 'is that it contains perhaps the most wonderful room in the world. There are many grander, more original or more powerful rooms, but in the admittedly implausible context of being forced for no conceivable reason to choose one, it would have to be the prince-bishop's Natural History Museum in Bamberg'.

The history is a little confusing as applied to the exhibits. The Nature-Cabinet was founded by enlightened Prince-Bishop Franz Ludwig von Erthal, pictured above with ancestors and stones beneath him, as a source of wonder for the ordinary Bambergers - almost too late, since secularization soon spread to the left of the Rhine in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. Bavarian troops marched in seven years after Franz Ludwig's death and the 'independent ecclesiastical principality of Bamberg' was no more. Franz Ludwig, incidentally, did make far-reaching reforms in education, the legal system, care for the poor and health: I had the good fortune to be staying in what in 1789 was the most modern hospital in Europe.

In 1803 another collection, from the Banz monastery, was moved in to the Natural History Museum and Father Dionysius Linder raised the collection to a whole new level. Throughout the rest of the century, mostly under his successor Andreas Haupt, the focus on avian species led the hall to take the name 'Vogelsaal'.

Let Winder add some flavour:

The cases themselves are a monument to a specific, pretty neo-classical moment in design that enjoyed pyramids, bobbles and high little galleries [one could add the putti and the gold busts of naturalists ancient and modern]. Everywhere there are stuffed animals, skeletons, piles of hedgerow birds' eggs [hence the section title, 'A glass pyramid filled with robin eggs', which again may be slightly overegging the pudding]

...The room requires no soundtrack; so many historical spaces need sprucing up with some mental Bach or Mozart, but the stuffed creatures and the delicate architecture chase off that kind of extra, as though you have come through to the exact, silent heart of Enlightenment idealism.

I also like Winder's delight at the way the 'stolid purpose' of the Prince-Duke's practical museum is underlined by 'fun extras' like 'a glass obelisk of hummingbirds' placed at one end of the room.

Upstairs it just gets wackier. I'm not sure what the order is in the combination of grinning stuffed monkeys and stones in the vestibule - maybe higher and lower orders represent both the start and the end -

or the rather mangy, lonely stuffed lion on top of a cabinet full of skeletons

but out in the upper gallery

you turn left for invertebrates first - sponges and cnidaria like coral,

before moving on to fish at the south end, below a portrait of (I'm guessing) Andreas Haupt

where old and new labels mix in delicious confusion, and on to amphibians and reptiles: frogs and toads

and snakes in jars.

Let Winder take over again for the 'Pomological Cabinet', 'wax models of all the edible fruits of Franconia (accidentally preserving just how small fruit used to be)'.

These strange masterpieces were designed to cut through the wilderness of folk names for different kinds of plum and pear and establish a definitive name and definitive appearance. Some of the fruit are somewhat damaged, with holes in the thin wax both destroying and enhancing the illusion of exact ripeness and desirability. They were made in the 'Landes-Industrie-Comptoire' of Friedrich Justin Bertuch in Weimar between 1795 and 1813, and the fact that most of the cultivars have been lost adds to their ephemeral quality.

On the way out of a room I was very reluctant to leave, I descended the staircase past antlers attached to early 19th century model deers' heads

and out in the courtyard there's a splendid old black walnut tree.

Life is all around the Natural History Museum in the Inselstadt, enlivened by the presence of the university and its students. The lively Grüner Markt is still the place of choice for fruit, vegetables and flowers, here attracting a couple of nuns in front of St Martin's Church

while a place where I spent several happy hours, surrounded by folk of all ages, none of them on mobiles or laptops (was there a house rule?), was the Cafe Müller.

Its clean white lines reminded me of our dear friend Marta's favourite in Vienna, the Cafe Prückerl. I could get just as attached to this place if I lived here - and while Berlin might make more sense for a life, I can imagine the bürgerlich perfection of this place would be fun for half a year.

Anyway, there it is, a post I've been wanting to put up for months. Too many bright ideas come and go under pressure of work, but I feel I still haven't done extraordinary Bamberg full justice despite the Arts Desk piece, the little Hoffmann homage and this. Cathedral and riverside still on the list, but they may have to wait some time.

St Petersburg 1914

So now I can stick on my CV that I've written a monologue for a famous actor. I've had scripts for two Glyndebourne 'Opera Bites' - a sadly defunct CD series of introductions - read by Fiona Shaw (Bizet's The Pearl Fishers) and Timothy West (Prokofiev's Betrothal in a Monastery), but this one 'for' Jonathan Pryce is slightly different. It seemed like a crazy thing to have to do when Radio 3 approached me to provide a 'musical postcard' from St Petersburg for its series Music on the Brink, about Europe in early 1914. 'Present it like an "I was at a great concert last night" type of thing', I was told, and groaned far too audibly.

Then it came to me. First, why not just snippet from Prokofiev's extensive diary for that year? Not quite the format they wanted. So how about this: write the postcard as from one of SSP's fellow St Petersburg Conservatory student friends, waiting for his climactic participation in the student competition to claim a Schroeder grand piano as prize (he won it playing - in an unprecedented move - his own First Piano Concerto as well as Liszt's transcription of Wagner's Tannhäuser Overture)? That did it: thus I could cover not only SSP's new steps in music but also the ongoing Wagner craze and his first live hearing of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring in a Koussevitzky concert. Picture of SSP below is a bit later, from the American period.

You can hear the results this afternoon at some point during In Tune starting at 4.30pm, and thereafter for the next week on the BBC iPlayer, perhaps maybe for all time on this clip added tonight which I've just (23.00) heard (as a matter of personal pique, although I'm assuming Suzy Klein gave a credit in the back announcement, there's none as it stands in the presentation or the broadcast here, which is a bit poor; but what's a script hack compared to a 'star of stage and screen'? UPDATE: my gripe has been answered, the credit added. So I'd wipe the rest of the parenthesis were it not for the sake of the comments making sense).

My mention of a chess game Prokofiev held during the competition with a female rival got cut, but in any case I stopped short of chronicling a simultaneous,  momentous event in his life, his participation in the 1914 St Petersburg International Chess Championships held that April.

I have a fair bit about it in the biography, and there's more in the ever compelling diaries, but until today I didn't know this extraordinary photo existed. That I now do is courtesy of Edward Winter's Chess History website

Spot the composer? I thought I saw him at the back. This partial key from some diligent chess fan made me look again. You'll need to click on the pic to enlarge for the numbers.

1-Alekhine, 2- Janowski, 3-Capablanca, 4-Bernstein, 5-Marshall, 6-Blackburne, 7-Lasker, 8-Tarrasch, 9-Rubinstein, 10-Nimzowitsch, 11-Gunsberg, 12-D.D. Korelev, 13-A.I. Alekhine, 14-J. Taubenhaus, 17-N.A. Znosko-Borovsky, 21-E.I. Talvik, 22-Boris Bashkirov-Verin 23-P.A. Saburov, 24-S.S. Prokofiev, 25-J.O. Sossnitzky, 26-­A.A. Chepurnev, 27-R. Gebhardt, 29-B.E. Maliutin, 31-P.P. Saburev, 33-A. Burn, 35-Vainshtein, 36-P.A. Eftifeev, 37-Lochwitsky, 39-Ed. M. Nabel, 40-P.P. Potemkin, 56-B.Z. Kolenko, 58-Frau Lasker

So that includes not only SSP (24) but also the great contestants whose game was taking place around the time of the picture, Prokofiev's soon-to-be firm friend José Capablanca (3) and Emmanuel Lasker (7), whom the composer compared respectively to Mozart and Bach (see pages 99-100 of my Vol. 1), as well as his feckless chum Boris Bashkirov who wrote poetry under the name of Boris Verin (22). Also in the biog's appendix is the simultaneous chess game victory Prokofiev gained over Capablanca on 16 May.

As for the wider events leading up to the terrible, unanticipated* explosion of August 1914, I've been reading more about them with horror and a heavy heart in between the wit and wisdom of Simon Winder's sequel to his captivating Germania, Danubia.

Oh, the pointlessness not just of the Great War but all those lives lost in the carnage of the Habsburgs' earlier conflicts. What especially makes the heart sink is the shifting Realpolitik which dogs every conflict even today, the principle of 'my enemy's enemy is my friend' which afflicted the patchwork of nations and languages making up the ever-shifting Austrian (and Austro-Hungarian) Empire.

Even so, despite all those mid-19th century feckless battles, Winder constantly reiterates, as he did in Germania, how 1900s Vienna didn't especially see itself as the dancer on the abyss it becomes with hindsight. He's fascinated by the social life which leaves none of the traces we use as signifiers - film, music, art, literature.

Winder's most extravagant flights of fancy come in accounts of visits to often melancholy sites around the former empire. Marienbad/Mariánské Lázně gets the 'attractively brittle...pointless fraud' treatment, harmless on the surface and horrible underneath, Winder concluding that section brilliantly: 'This framework for polite, empty circulation, a regulated, closed environment for the right kind of people, now seems to stand for a lost and enviable pre-1914 world, but in practice it has always been toxic and peculiar'.

His paean to the architecture of Budapest Zoo culminates in a delirious ('demented' would be Winder's word, sometimes a bit overused in his second volume) description of the Guinea-Pig Village. Below, the 'faux-Tamerlane' Elephant House, 'possibly the maddest of all Hungarian "Turanian" fantasies about national origins in some vague but grand part of Central Asia, with the unique displacement activity of also granting the nation's elephants a shared Hungarian ancestry'. Winder goes on to tell us how during the brief, unlikely re-alignment with the Ottomans in the First World War the suggestion of a mosque for pachyderms caused offence, so the minaret had to be removed for a bit.

Buy, read, marvel at the lightness with which Winder wears his polymathy. His curiosity is boundless and he's left me with an enormous list of places to see - aforementioned zoo, the perfect Bohemian town of Český Krumlov on the Vltava and Sibiu in Romania right at the top; of literature to read - time to pick up my three-volume Banffy, but also to seek out other Czech and Hungarian novels; of films to see and music to hear (Winder is one up on me in knowing, and making attractive the prospect of listening to, the four Zemlinsky string quartets - shame I couldn't get to any of the concerts in the Hampstead Festival cycle). But to make the full 'follow up' inventory I need to go back to the book and comb through. It's certainly one for the ages.

*A tart commenter takes me to task for the irresponsible use of that word - I reply (see below) that I should have qualified it with the acnowledgment that it was the extent of the explosion, its ramifications, which could not have been anticipated.

Collectors strong and fat

If ever you want a deflating and painfully funny outline of history, turn to Simon Winder, whose Germania I not only treasured at the time but also turned back to more recently as an alternative guidebook while we were in Dresden and Berlin.  Winder begins his Saxon rhapsody thus:

It is conventional in histories of Germany at this point to start talking about Prussia so that everyone can start gibbering and rolling their eyes with fear. Instead I thought I would write about Saxony.

He continues: 

The fundamental pleasure of Saxony lies in its hopelessness. It is as characteristically German as Prussia and yet as a political entity it failed in all it did. Saxony's history appears somewhat marginal, and yet this is the place that gave us Schumann, Wagner and Nietzsche. Despite woeful frivolity, insanity and misamanagement it clung on to its independence, never quite going under , until the last wholly unmourned king abdicated at the end of the First World War. At least while within the confines of Saxony it is possible to think of an alternative Germany - wayward, self-indulgent and inept in a way that gives hope to us all.

'Woeful frivolity' is incarnated in the personage of Friedrich August, Augustus II the Strong, who may have made the skyline of Dresden what it is today but who also, in Winder's inimitable words, 'embroiled Poland in disastrous wars [as its king, bizarrely converted to Catholicism], frittered money away on bits of amber and ivory, fathered over 300 children [si non e vero...], did a party-piece involving tearing a horseshoe apart with his bare hands, and left Saxony helpless and indebted to an eye watering degree'. It comes as no surprise to find him gilded on his horse, an appropriate image of hubris which we encountered with crescent moon behind it on a balmy summer evening stroll over to the Neustadt.

Yet we now have to thank Augustus the Strong for his obsession with the curious, and his 'pitiful' successor August III the Fat for his incredible assemblage of great paintings which forms the backbone of one of the world's finest collections, the Dresden Gemäldegalerie. He it was who in 1765 commissioned Bernardo Bellotto, nephew of Canaletto and happy to take his uncle's name, to paint the most futuristic-looking amon g that artist's often conventional views. Pictured up top, it represents the unintentionally prophetic demolition of  the Church of the Crucifixion's demolition on a site where now stands the Church of the Holy Cross in the Altes Marktplatz, around which sandbags still lay deposited a week after the floods.

Anyway, I digress. You can't get much more 1945 than such a painting.

I'd been to the Gemäldegalerie in 1990, of course. But since then Dresden's state museums organisation, the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, has created several more of the world's best museums. It was a sentence about the 'headspinning Green Vault'  in Winder which made me keen, even on a day when we might have basked in the sun on the banks of the Elbe, that we should all visit the Neues Grünes Gewölbe in the Residenzschloss.

We first had to surmount some confusion over which ticket to buy; there seemed to be a separate one for the reconstructed vault itself, a main one for its major treasures and other collections. Clearly we had to see the extravagant and pointless masterpiece of August the Strong's chief goldsmith, the Swabian Johannes Melchior Dinglinger, The Birthday of the Grand Mogul Augungzeb.

I don't know what you can glean from this, one of the images the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen supplied me on request and all (I'm assuming, for some are creditless) taken by Jürgen Karpinski. The devil of 'woeful frivolity' is in the detail: 137 enamelled figures covered in 5,000 diamonds, rubies, emeralds and pearls. There's also a hideous coffee set and plenty of what Winder calls 'repulsive little statues of dwarves'. Other regal donors had little more taste: Peter the Great  gifted a large sapphire in the form of a nose. Overshadowing the Lilliputian court in terms of expense is the green diamond for which Augustus III paid 400,000 thalers in 1742, now set in an agraffe (that's a clasp, for those of you who like me had never head the word before)..

This was the crowning glory in the route round the rooms as we took it. I think I preferred most of what was in the first, though, all around the late 16th-early 17th century mark and already tumbling into mannerism. Here's Daphne as a drinking vessel by Abraham Jannitzer of Nuremberg, coral serving as the laurel branches which mark her metamorphosis.

Much in this room would really come to life if the museum had a little more imagination to provide demonstrations once or twice a day. One such is the rolling-ball clock with supposedly revolving Roman emperors made by Hans Schlottheim in 1600. Again, the beauty is in the detail, so I apologise for the long shot.

There are also intriguing fripperies like the automatic spider of Tobias Reichel - what wouldn't you give to see this in operation? -

and the celebrated cherry stone of 1589 which, flanked by gold, enamel and pearl, is viewed under a magnifying glass so you can make out the 185 heads carved on it.

In spite of all this folly, much of the goldsmiths' work is extremely beautiful and artistic. I loved the wall mirror with Nebuchadnezzar's dream, the globe-shaped goblet held up by Hercules, some stunningly wrought ewers and basins. And there are quite a few handsome frigates like this one dated 1620 by Jakob Keller of Dresden.

The eye eventually tires of such opulence, but there's enough contrast to keep the interest alive for longer than usual in a museum trawl (I admired the Venetian reticulated glass in the third room, for instance). Even so, we had to give it a break and walked a fair way for lunch on the extraordinary roof terrace of the Yenidze Tobacco Factory - but that's for another time. Suffice it to say that we returned for more than an hour to the glories of the Turkish campaigns on the floor above the Neues Grünes Gewölbe, and were especially dazzled by the designs on the enormous tents, again sumptuously displayed and glowing in the near-darkness.

On, then, to Day Two in Dresden and back to the Gemäldegalerie in the Zwinger Palace. It's awaiting a big revamp, but so far the big grand room you reach first seems to have been sensitively relit and ordered. Raphael's celebrated Sistine Madonna, with the most reproduced winged putti in the world, naturally dominates, though I was pleased to see the two Dosso Dossis either side of it. These, like a very large percentage of the Italian renaissance collection including a Saint Sebastian of Antonello da Messina very different from the exquisite miniature portraits we saw in Sicily,

seem to have been acquired by Fat Augustus from Modena, also the source of some large-scale Correggios (the artist's least attractive work to me). He bought pictures from dealers all over Europe, and his taste - at least in the pictures on show - seems to have been catholic and yet discriminating. Mostly because of that, the Gemäldegalerie seems to have almost as much a representation of all the great artists, at least up to the 1750s, as the National Gallery. There's a Van Eyck to rival the one in Berlin (the saint's wings on the left are especially beautiful)

and two relatively early Vermeers, one characteristic

and the other not (how drawn one is in a room to the yellow of the Procuress's blouse).

The Guercino Evangelists are all outstanding, and once you hit the Titian room with the gallery's other most famous painting, the reclining Venus, a wealth of portraits unfolds over the next three rooms. Statesmen by Tintoretto and Titian

are followed by three great Holbein heads for the price of two, quite overshadowing for me the famous Dürer portrait of Bernhard von Reesen. In this room there's also a haunting face by an artist I'd never heard of, Barthel Beham)

and even among the host of Cranachs young and old there's an outstanding pair of portraits of two hard-looking nobles, Lord and Lady Macbeth to the life.

As it's Rembrandt's 407th birthday today (15/7) - Google, of all things, doodlingly reminds us - I ought to balance hard with soft and J's favourite picture in the collection, of Saskia with a flower.

Once past the Bellottos - and I think I'm right in saying there are some pictures by the real Canaletto too -  on the next floor, Fat Augustus's sway gives out, along with my interest in the eras concerned, but unflinching self-portraits by Mengs and Rosalba Carriera keep it lively. And then you come out in to the Zwinger courtyard, and realise how many thousand tourists have given one of the greatest galleries in the world a miss. Their loss. Augustus the Fat bequeathed an artistic treasure-house to the world. He also, according to Winder, carried on the tradition of 'political infantilism' by destroying Poland and reducing Saxony 'to a nullity'. I'll leave you Winder's judgment as postlude.

Germany's 20th century fate was not as Wilhelm II and Hitler believed it to be: to follow in the footsteps of Frederick the Great. Instead Germany followed in the footsteps of August III the Fat and his successors and was  beaten, devastated, occupied and partitioned, having twice entirely misunderstood the forces and resources arrayed against it. Perhaps Saxony is a more striking model for the anxious appraisal of German behaviour in the modern era and a much less harmless one than first seemed the case.