Why shouldn't you like classical music?

What do you think about classical music? Do you like it? Do you think it's boring? Sad? Relaxing? I went around London to find out what people think about classical music. It may not be for everybody, but why not? There is a little something there for everyone and every mood!




To download the .mp3 file please click here.

Dent de Verreu, French Alps

Sometimes you like someone so much that you're willing to hike up 4,000 ft, sweating like a pig, staying on your feet for 10 hours, carrying a gallon of water on your back* – all for the sake of spending a day with them, doing what they love. And if you're lucky, they will like you enough to tolerate you complaining that you're starving, you're thirsty, you're tired, that you wish you could have slept later than 6 am, you wish you had never been talked into this, and who's great idea was it after all to eat lunch sitting on a rock surrounded by mud, with your fingers freezing to your sandwich.

It was the perfect time to see waterfalls cascading down the mountains.

Yep. I'm lucky. Very lucky!

Hike up Dent de Verreu, near Samoëns, France, on June 01, 2009. I'm proud to say that more such hikes ensued and the whole experience became less painful each time.

*Okay, I confess, I've actually been so lucky that I haven't even had to carry that much going up!

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau & Salzburg

Before I began studying in Weimar in the fall of 2005 I spent the summer in Munich. A friend had offered me a place in her apartment for two months so I could take a German course – I really knew no German at the time. I somehow learned about the Salzburg Festival and thought it would be a great opportunity to hear some great concerts at what seemed to be a honky-tonk local music festival. Right. Except no one told me that it was a highly renowned festival, mainly for German and Austria high-society and hardly a place for 10 euro student stand-by tickets. But Salzburg was only an hour and a half train ride from Munich and a place I was eager to visit, and with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, whose memoirs I had been reading, speaking along with a concert (don't ask, I have no idea what he was actually doing), I decided it was worth it to make a day trip. In retrospect, I have no idea how I could have been so utterly naive.

My plan was simple: go directly to the ticket office, get a ticket for later, and then explore the city a bit before the concert. So, I didn't really know where the ticket office was, but I found it eventually, and discovered a long line out the door. Man! So many people waiting in line to buy tickets for the DFD concert! But the line didn't move, and eventually I had to ask someone just why all these people were standing in line. And what couldn't be better: they were waiting to go hear a live interview with him in just a half an hour; the ticket office was inside. But here again, no one ever told me that the Salzburg Festival is one of the poshest of all music festivals. Tickets? What tickets? There were only 2 still available at 90 euros each. What about a student discount? Ha, ha, they don't have student discounts (I think I'm actually lying, they probably did have 10% off...no, maybe 5%). Student stand-by tickets? No. Well, in my complete and utter despair, I did discover I could get in line for the interview, the 7 euro tickets for which were given on a first-come-first-served basis. And since I was there ages before it was to begin, I would be one of the first to get in.

There is, unfortunately, one more tragic twist to this story. As I happily sat down in my first-row seat, something occurred to me: it was going to be in German. . . (Oh yeah, and the lady interviewing him sat on the same side of him that I was sitting on, and she somehow managed to sit with her elbow on the table, facing him, and alas, blocking my view of him....).

Ah! Bliss!

The day honestly wasn't so unsuccessful. :)

Jean Ives Thibaudet - average guy or super star pianist?

Yes, that's right – I finally got to see one of my favorite pianists perform live, and I can't imagine a pianist I'd rather have a beer and chat with more. I got to hear him preform Ravel's G major piano concerto at Geneva's Victoria Hall on the 19th of April. He's a pianist I have admired since I was a teenager, and I was floored when he walked on stage and looked like some fellow who had just walked in off the street. Honestly. Tall, lanky, a pierced ear, highlighted hair. However, if you watch interviews with him on youtube, you will quickly come across his staunch belief that male concert performers should also get to wear fancy clothes when performing (you know, he says, those tuxedo tails are so boring!). I initially thought his suit looked like something from some cheap European market, but after further consideration, he did look fairly sharp. Nevermind how he looked, though – his colorful playing did confirm my long-held beliefs that he is one of the best living pianists. His nonchalant manner at the piano made the music all the more accessible and the atmosphere relaxed. It was just fun – what a concept!

In November 2008 I also got to hear Evgeny Kissin in the same hall perform a recital of mostly works of Chopin. It was less memorable, and I certainly would not want to have a beer with him.

Winter delicacies from Thüringer Wald

As far as I understand it, you won't find this really anywhere else in Germany, except isolated in the Thuringia forest. In teaching English for a community college of sorts for the area of villages surrounding Weimar, I was invited by a family to come over on Sunday for a long afternoon to enjoy this specialty from the forest just south of Weimar.

Here we go:
First you take potatoes (preferably from your garden), cook them and peel them (Germans always peel their potatoes after they cook them – don't ask why, I never understood it...). Then you smash them through this thing:




Then you mix it with flour to make a sort of dough, and roll it into large rolls:



Then you cut off a slice of the roll, and then roll that out, into a flat pancake, and cut it into pieces:



I tried this part. I failed.



And put them on a pan and cook for a couple of minutes on both sides:



You butter them up and stack them up; it's a family affair:



And several hours later, behold, the potato tortilla!

You dip them in sugar and eat them with hot chocolate, and alas, you don't need to eat again for the whole day.

Many thanks to Familie Rausch!

PS – This is why you might want to stay inside and enjoy cooking:

A missed opportunity...

It might seem odd that I should write about Franz Schubert, who really had no great connection with Weimar. Schubert's connection, however, lies with Goethe. I must explain that I've never read anything by Goethe – though that isn't to say I haven't tried. After living three years in a town and area that idolizes him, it becomes tiring to hear the name. So I am less inclined, really, to talk about Goethe, as I know little about him and I honestly haven't become very interested. (Hopefully I'm just saving a great artist to appreciate later in life.) Goethe only, perhaps unfortunately, has meaning for me in that his poems have been set to music, and this music has been set by some of my favorite composers, namely Schubert. And even here, the Goethe poems that Schubert set to songs are not as interesting to me as other songs (such as Der Tod und das Mädchen or Der Hirt auf dem Felsen). So why write about Schubert and Goethe in a blog about Weimar?

Imagine this: Schubert is a teenager, and quite in love with a girl named Therese Grob. He is, however, unable to marry his love – at his young age he is not reputable enough as a composer or musician to have financial stability or the status needed to be granted a marriage license in Vienna. So Schubert's dear friend Josef von Spaun takes it upon himself – with a great admiration for his friend's music – to present the composer to a famous poet, that is Goethe, with whose recognition, Schubert could gain the regard needed to succeed professionally and thus personally. Spaun puts together a compilation of Schubert's setting of Goethe's poems (including such songs as "Gretchen am Spinnrade" and "Erlkönig"), and sends it with a letter to Goethe on April 17, 1816. This letter was ignored.

There are other "what if" instances – Goethe had an affair that reached its height in 1815 with a singer named Marianne von Willemer. 10 years later in 1825 she wrote a letter to him saying how she requested Beethoven songs from a music store and was also sent a song set to Geheimes from Goethe's West-oestlicher Divan. Schubert had set Geheimes (op. 14) to music in 1821 and was the only major composer to every do so. Unfortunately, though, Marianne didn't mention the name of the composer – was this a lost chance for Goethe to be confronted again with Schubert's name? Interestingly too, is that Marianne was a friend of Anna Milder-Hauptmann, who was a famous singer and sang a song from the same set (Suleika II, op. 31) in Berlin in 1825 – she was also a friend of Schubert's.

Schubert tried, though, to have another attempt at gaining Goethe's recognition. It seemed to be important to him. He wrote himself then to Goethe in June 1825. This letter was also ignored.

If Goethe had only taken the time to hear Schubert's songs, and ultimately recognized him, perhaps Schubert would have had a more prosperous, happy, healthful life. If he could have married his first love, perhaps he wouldn't have succumbed to seeking satisfaction in brothels, and wouldn't have contracted syphilis, which led him to his untimely death. He could have perhaps lived far longer than the 31 years he was granted, if only Goethe had paid some attention.

Kenneth Whitton's book Goethe and Schubert: The Unseen Bond sums this up well.

Why Weimar?

I have really struggled to begin to summarize Weimar's rich cultural history. I did find a nice 550-page encyclopedia of Weimar's history, and in flipping through it at random, I quickly came across a well-known name again and again. The number of significant people who lived and worked in Weimar is listless, and actually, in learning a bit about Weimar's importance in German cultural history, it's often easier to ask who didn't play a role.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) is of course the most obvious name associated with Weimar, who lived here under the Herzogtum (Duchy) Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach, and was, as some argue, the most important German writer ever, known for leading the Weimar Classicism era. Goethe, then did quite a job of drawing others to Weimar, including Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805). Schiller is, of course, perhaps best known for his Ode to Joy (An die Freunde), which Beethoven set to music in the final movement of his 9th symphony. No, the poem wasn't written here. There are other important figures, who while may not be very well-known in America, are household names in Germany: Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), a head pastor of the Weimar city churches, who also published philosophical articles and is known for his important collection of regional songs, or Christoph Martin Wieland (1733-1813), a poet and publisher, who helped the Duchess Anna Amalia establish Weimar as a cultural center and whose translations of Shakespeare and Latin classics were vital to the Weimar Classicism. Martin Luther, too, going about his rounds in Germany, made a few stopovers in Weimar.

Let's not forget art either: Lukas Cranach (1472-1553) and his son by the same name (1515-1586), also made their home here, known for their portraits and alter pieces, with the elder being one of the most important German painters of the 16th century (I still remember my aunt moseying into the city church, now known as the Herderkirche, nearly falling over when she discovered the alter piece was nothing other than a Cranach); and then we have Walter Gropius, who made important impacts on New York City's architecture, and the Bauhaus art school and tradition, with Weimar being one of the main cities of the movement. The Bauhaus brought in teachers none other than Paul Klee or Wassily Kandinsky.

And of course the most important thing to me: music. Franz Liszt (1811-1886) was appointed Kapellmeister here in 1842 and from 1848 to 1858 he was the head musical director of the Hofkapelle and the music theater, and even in the 1860s as he divided his life between Budapest and Rome, he still maintained a home in Weimar. Or Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778-1837), a composer, conductor, and virtuoso pianist (student of none other than Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Antonio Salieri, and Joseph Haydn), who was the Hofkapellmeister in Weimar from 1819 until his death. While he might not be as well known today as other composers, he was considered one of the most famous pianists in Europe in his day, and brought Beethoven symphonies to Weimar. Or Richard Strauss (1864-1949), who was the Hofkapellmeister in Weimar from 1889-1894, whose symphonic works Don Juan, Macbeth, Tod und Verklärung, as well as his opera Guntram were premiered here. The young Felix Mendelssohn also had a little encounter in Weimar, as he was well-liked by Goethe.

I have to save the best for last, of course: Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750). In addition to a brief time spent in 1703, Bach spent 9 years, from 1708-1717, here as the court concertmaster and organist. While we don't know whether or not Bach enjoyed his time here in Weimar, he did struggle to get approval to leave, and the battle of which left him in jail for nearly a month. Nevertheless, two of his sons who were to become musicians and composers of their own right were born here: Wilhelm Friedemann Bach and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach.

I'm afraid to say I am leaving out other important names, but this is a common hazard when trying to summarize Weimar's history.

It's really no surprise that I would find myself in Weimar of all places. I often have a ridiculously youthful passion for music history. I remember the utter excitement I felt when planning my first trip to Lüneburg, Germany in 2004 and discovering Bach studied there when he was 17. Weimar is no different – every other building has some cultural history and housed those who played a crucial role in the arts we have today. It's not a bad place to be!