On a Case of Confusion

 On a Case of Confusion 

One evening, I watched a film showing Glenn Gould playing the Goldberg Variations.  These sorts of things expose my inadequacies, particular with respect to music.  Although I listen to a lot of music, I don’t really understand it and my “monkey mind” (as the Zen Buddhists would say) often distracts me from paying the attention that these works merit and, I think, may require.  It’s important to listen in good faith I think and, perhaps, I’m not really capable of this.  As Charles Ives’ used to say, “you have to use your ears like a man” and not shirk the responsibilities that music of importance imposes on us.  

When I was in northern Germany, I took the train to Buxtehude.  I was under the impression that the town had something to do with Bach.  Later in the month, I was in Leipzig and saw Bach’s church there (I’ve visited it before) and I thought I would supplement my visit to Leipzig with a trip to Buxtehude where I expected to see some relics of Bach’s life.  Of course, I had things entirely confused.

My original plan was to visit some neolithic grave-mounds at Fischbek, an archaeological park near Harburg.  (Harburg is a suburb of Hamburg, although in the metro area’s outer ring.)  I took the S-Bahn (#21) over the Elbe bridges and, then, to the Victorian-era train-station at Harburg, a big heap of rust-colored bricks (Klinkerziegel) in the hulking neo-Gothic style favored by north German architects.  In this part of Germany, there are no stone resources that can be reliably quarried for building purposes and, so, clinker-bricks are used for all significant buildings, mighty ziggurats of them, dark-colored and made by the millions in peat-fired ovens.  The train station in Harburg stood next to a grassy mall.  It was raining hard and the quadrangle of lawns with sculptures on small, wet pedestals was soggy. I found the Archaeological Museum and thought that I would tour that place while waiting for the rain to stop.  (A vain enterprise: in Hamburg in November, it rains every day and, almost, all day long.)  The Archaeological Museum was hyper-modern with facsimiles of prehistoric stuff embedded in plexi-glass crystals or, even, underfoot, below transparent walkways (yellow bones and beakers down there) – of course, after the German manner, the exhibits were besieged by platoons of explanatory text that I scarcely understood.  The “path of discovery”, as it were wound around a dimly lit space where small figurines and tools were floating in pools of yellow light.  The trail, then, went upstairs to a cantilevered balcony where there were more bones and canoes cut from ancient logs and carefully drilled and polished amber trinkets.  A movie crew was shooting some sort of documentary for TV about the museum, a place with a distinguished history.  The camera crew approached me and asked if they could interview me for the show they were making.  I told them that I don’t speak German well enough to be a useful interviewee.  “No problem,” they said.  “We will interview you in English.”  The crew set up a camera across from me and asked some questions as to why a tourist from America would have come out to the Museum of Prehistory, fifteen miles away from the Hamburg city center.  I told the interlocutor about how wonderful the museum was, noted its unique collections and “enthralling” presentation of the artifacts and, generally, acted as if the place should be a destination for every international tourist.  I suppose I sounded a bit insincere, but the camera crew and the sound recording man seemed happy with my remarks.  

At the information kiosk, I asked a volunteer about the archaeological preserve at Fischbek.  I would have to take a local bus out into the country, three or four miles to see the mounds at that place, some dolmens, and neolithic graves, exposed as pillars of rock supporting big, flat slabs of stone, transported here by barge from somewhere far to the south.  The woman was surprised that anyone would want to see such things.  In her view, the park was chiefly valuable as a nature center, on the flyway for migratory fowl, particularly storks that spend their summers along the sea shore in Germany and, then, fly back to the northern Sahara where they live in the winter.  Apparently, some foxes roamed around the nature reserve and there were other small mammals, martens, I think, and weasels.  I asked her whether the neolithic artifacts were worth seeing.  “Oh no,” she said.  “That part of the park is being renovated.  It is not completely perfect.”  This is an odd locution.  In northern Germany if something is not “completely perfect” this means that it is derelict, ruinous, even dangerous to inspect.  It wasn’t clear to me how you renovate neolithic tombs and mounds but this is what she told me.  Of course, I was secretly pleased that I didn’t have to make my way out into the bogs and marshes (where the African storks were now mostly gone back to the Sahara) in the falling rain.  The drizzle was cold and the lawns around the museum, although green were very wet.

It was at this point, with the purpose of my trip to Harburg now thwarted, that I decided to see the traces of J. S. Bach at Buxtehude.  The S-bahn continued from the train station out into the country another ten miles or so to the small city and, so, I decided that it would be reasonable to make that excursion.  The train tracks ran straight across the open country.  At a couple of elevated sidings, the S-Bahn briefly stopped at shelters to accommodate commuters – at this time of day, the exposed stations were deserted, just a few forlorn bikes padlocked to the fence.  The land was flat, pocked with small marshes and lakes, lines of trees marking the edges of shallow, murky canals.  At Buxtehude, another station shaped like a clinker-brick barn stood alongside a metal train-shed.  The station was ten blocks from the old town where more brick buildings encircled a medieval church.  The street from the train station to the city center crossed a bridge spanning one of the little canals cut into the moor.  The canal was a narrow box of dark, peat-colored water lined by rowboats and small colorfully painted skiffs.  Next to the dour church, a narrow building with a glass facade, a modern edifice, held the city’s Rathaus and museum.  An old man greeted me at the door and seemed very happy to have a visitor.  He began to explain the lay-out of the exhibition in German but, observing my perplexity, switched effortlessly into English.  The museum displayed a good collection of prehistoric artifacts, mostly stone tools, some celts, and small pieces of carved bone.  There were grave goods from pre-Christian burials, mostly necklaces and small circular bosses of the sort that are ubiquitous in northern Europe, knob-shaped adornments of chased metal, either tin or brass that people apparently wore for adornment.  In one case displaying some baroque surgical tools, there was a flea-catcher – apparently, the curious funnel-shaped device was used to pluck and confine fleas crawling in the wigs of 17th century gentlemen.   In a side-room, there were some big black and white photographs showing the destruction of the city in World War Two.  Apparently, the town had been destroyed before, in fact, several times, burnt to the ground, first in the 30 Years War and, then, burnt again in the early part of the 19th century.  One small room contained pastels and water-colors showing Buxtehude as it looked around the middle of the 19th century.  Many of the pictures featured a romantic-looking castle that seemed to have fallen down and not been rebuilt.  I found no reference to J. S. Bach.  I vaguely recalled that he had been in this place, perhaps, even composed music in Buxtehude.  But there was nothing on that subject.  This venture had also been a failure, although the museum was interesting in its own right.

Later, I discovered that Johann Bach had, in fact, walked to Buxtehude.  But the Buxtehude that he visited wasn’t this town, but, rather, a Danish composer named Dietrich Buxtehude (1637 - 1707).  I had taken the word “Buxtehude” to refer to a place, but, in fact, it was a man’s name.  In 1705, J. S. Bach hiked 250 kilometers north from Erfurt to visit Dietrich Buxtehude, then, regarded as the leading composer and organist of the day.  In fact, Buxtehude was serving as music director at the famous Marienkirche in Luebeck, the harbor town on the Baltic Sea.  (Thomas Mann was born in this old Hanseatic city).  Bach’s pilgrimage was to pay homage to Buxtehude and hear him play the organ at the evening concerts (Abendmusik) that the music director presented once a week.  Buxtehude replaced the previous music director, Franz Tunder, who had died unexpectedly.  According to custom, the new music director was required to marry the deceased director’s wife.  First, Handel was offered the position.  Luebeck was a prosperous town and the job paid well and the church could afford first-rate talent.  But Tunder’s widow was not to Handel’s liking and he turned down the job offer.  Buxtehude was more accommodating and agreed to marry the widow. 

Bach stayed at Luebeck for three months, studying with Buxtehude.  In the nave, there was once a frieze of lifesize figures – priest, a city official, a merchant and a beautiful young woman – each of them accosted by Death, a scrawny figure wearing a decaying loin cloth and a flat hat over his mummified face.  This was the so-called Luebeck Todtentanz.  Near the startling mural (painted around 1425), there was a majestic organ, called the Todtentanzorgel (The danse macabre organ).  This organ with the frieze was bombed into ashes and a tangle of melted bronze in 1942 by the RAF.  Bach supposedly had played on the Todtentanzorgel under Buxtehude’s direction.  But this was in another town on the opposite side of Hamburg, forty miles from the big city, where the Elbe flows into the Baltic Sea.  

This was my misadventure with Bach and Buxtehude.