I have written before about the inevitable downtime that alternates with extremely busy times in the life of a Fest singer. Take the end of last season, for instance. During one grueling month I had two premieres (both large, new roles) and had performances of three other pieces (all smaller roles), all of which required some remedial rehearsal time. I’d known from the beginning of the season that it would be a grueling month, and was so glad when it was over.
The month after that, however, I had just six more performances (four different shows) until the season ended, which meant I had no small amount of free time on my hands. Unlike downtime in the fall, downtime at the end of the season is like a little gift from heaven. I didn’t have anything to prepare for the immediate future and the next season seemed so far away. That meant one thing: travel!
Germany—and most of Europe—is crisscrossed by a fantastic network of trains and planes, and you can get almost anywhere you want rather quickly—and for relatively little money. During those last weeks of the season, I spent time in Hamburg, Berlin, and Dresden and then headed to Warsaw for a couple of days to visit friends and in-laws.
But that’s not all—from January to April of last year, I went to Madrid, Barcelona, and twice to Prague. And the year before that to Basel, Carcassonne, Montpellier, and a couple of other cities in France. Then there are the short day trips—which I get to take much more often—to towns you have probably never heard of around Leipzig. Although Prague, Warsaw, and all of those other cities are incredible, amazing, stunning, and every other word you can think of, it’s the journeys to small, unknown villages—like Grimma, Colditz, Guldengossa, and Engelsdorf—that are sometimes the most remarkable.
Germany as a nation is, politically speaking, a relatively new idea that didn’t exist until about 150 years ago. Long before a centralized government united them, there were hundreds of independently ruled duchies and mini-kingdoms scattered throughout the countryside, each with its own distinct history, some going back more than a thousand years. Compared with 1,200 years, 150 years isn’t all that much, especially considering how tumultuous the last 70 of them have been. Most of those small towns have an identity that reaches much further back than the founding of the German Federal Republic and still exists to this day. When you ask a German where he’s from, for instance, he gives the name of the town, no matter how big or small, and doesn’t mention the Bundesland (or state).
Before the interstate network streamlined road travel in America, folks got around on the old highway system. They were forced to pass through tiny little towns, which was mutually beneficial to all involved. Families would stop off at the local restaurant, check out the slightly odd but still charming town specialty (“Welcome to Le Mars, Iowa, the Ice Cream Capital of the world!”), and invest money in the local economy.
Germany is still that way. I’ve been to Altenburg, home of the card game Skat, to see the playing card museum there; through Gößnitz to see Germany’s longest train platform; to Torgau to see two real, live brown bears in the (empty of water) castle moat; and to Pötzschau, the third-prettiest town in Saxony.
Each little town has something that makes it special, that helps define the people who live there, and helps anchor them to the past. It’s such a privilege to visit these little towns, take in the culture, and tap into the history. It is in these very places that I think Germany really exists.
In my first year in Germany, on Reformation Day (the anniversary of when Luther purportedly nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Schlosskirche, All Saints’ Church, in Wittenberg), a group of us students got a chance to visit Wittenberg. We turned a corner and found ourselves in the middle of a huge parade, made up of people dressed like they would have 500 years ago, all drinking beer that was made according to the Reinheitsgebot (German beer purity law), which was established in 1516, a year before Luther changed the world. This is a country that holds on to and celebrates tradition.
Every once in a while, usually when I’m riding around the city, I can’t help but smile in wonder: I get to live here! I’ll be riding my bike to work, to the store, or to the park to perform some mundane task that is then made notable because it takes place in Leipzig—where Bach lived, where Mozart played, where Mahler conducted, where Wagner was born!
A friend from the States visited me last spring for a week of vacation tacked on to her business trip to London. She’s a music librarian for an opera company and spends her days poring over the music written by the great masters. During the conference she attended in London, she spent a day at the British Library to check out their holdings. In the middle of the tour, the guide hauled out Handel’s score—his actual score, the one he wrote out with his hand—of Hercules, and let her page through it (the library had just finished preparing a new critical edition of the work).
On her next-to-last day in Leipzig, I dropped her off one afternoon to check out the former local headquarters of the East German Secret Police, followed by a look around St. Thomas Church (Bach’s church) and nearby Bach Archive and Museum. I went off to a coaching and returned a few hours later to find her sitting just outside the church, looking distraught—or so I thought. Concerned, I asked her if she was OK. She told me that she had walked into the church and immediately burst into tears. Here she was, some American from Philadelphia . . . she had just had the trip of a lifetime and could hardly believe it was true. How in the world could this be how her life has turned out?
And I knew just how she felt.
