Living in the past

Memory Lane may work in the States, but a trip to Europe is a trip down Memory Superhighway. Every time I travel to Europe, I am overwhelmed by the architecture, the history, the ancient amid the new. That doesn’t lose its potency, time after time. And it shouldn’t.

Since my last post, I have visited Frankfurt, Halle, Leipzig, Dresden, Naumburg, Merseburg, and Berlin. Still to come: Hamburg, Lübeck, Cologne, Paris, Sherborne, and London. Whenever I visit a new city, I recognize that the current residents live in the present while honoring the past. But I have only the past as a point of reference. I walk into the Dreikönigskirche in Frankfurt and think about Helmut Walcha, who stopped performing in 1981 and died in 1991. I walk into the Thomaskirche in Leipzig and think about JS Bach. (A lot of water has passed under that bridge since Bach's time!) And imagine how reverently I sat in my seat on the train when it made a quick stop in Eisenach, and I read the sign “Eisenach, Geburtsstadt Johann Sebastian Bachs.” I walk past the Dresden Opera and think of Wagner being there, even though he died in 1883!

More recent history comes alive in more minds in such places as, say, the Frauenkirche in Dresden. Or all over the entire city of Berlin, which is simply electric with its WWII history. Finally, in 1999 the choir I was playing for in Houston visited the memorial to PanAm Flight 103 in Lockerbie, Scotland. That crash occurred in 1988. By 1999 Lockerbie had moved on, but we first-time visitors were overwhelmed as if it had just happened.

The passage of time changes perspectives, depending on where you are or where you were. I will always wish I had been born a few years earlier, so that I could have heard, say, Dupré or Fox or Crozier or Horowitz perform in their primes. I would love to have met Rachmaninoff. I will always wish we could bring composers back to see how rightly famous they are now and to answer questions for us. I’d especially like to bring back those composers who died too young and let them compose some more and live more life: Schubert, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Distler.

Sitting in Sunday service at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, I kept wondering, Would Bach have approved of that sermon? What would he have done on a typical Monday, after Sunday’s hectic schedule? What would he think of all the attention bestowed upon him now? In which of those upper galleries might he have placed musicians? Did that crucifix exist in his day? Was that paint that color? Was this pew original? And so on.

A trip to our (Western) musical past is nearly indescribably informative and meaningful, as witnessed by this rambling post. So stop taking my word for it, and get yourself to a part of Europe where music history would speak most to you. If in doubt, visit Germany, especially Leipzig.