Wozzeck

Last Friday, Red Baron was at Freiburg's Municipal Theater listening to ...

Alban Berg composed his opera Wozzeck based on Georg Büchner's drama fragment of 1836 "Woyzeck." Woyzeck is considered a masterpiece of the German language and an essential work of naturalistic social drama.

At the center is a maltreated human being, the mentally ill soldier Franz Woyzeck, who is morally lectured by his HAUPTMANN (Captain), treated as an experimental subject by his DOCTOR, and made a cuckold by his beloved MARIE with a fancy Drum Major.

In Büchner's fragment, we find the sentence, "Our kind is unhappy in this and the other world. Nothing but work under the sun, even sweat in our sleep. We poor people... "

Red Baron saw Büchner's drama Woyzeck several times in his life and Berg's opera as a pupil at the Hamburg State Opera in 1953. At that time, I was impressed by a scene where the DOCTOR acts out his scientific ambition on his Guinea pig WOZZECK.

DOCTOR: Has he eaten his beans yet, Wozzeck? Nothing but beans, nothing but legumes! He's got to remember that! The following week we'll start on a lamb. There is a revolution in science. Oh! My theory! Oh, my glory! I will become immortal! Immortal! Immortal!


In the first scene of the drama, WOZZECK shaves the HAUPTMANN: Slowly, Wozzeck, slowly! One thing after the other. He makes me dizzy. What should I do with the ten minutes he finishes too early today?
Wozzeck, remember, he still has his beautiful thirty years to live! Thirty years: that's three hundred and sixty months, and only how many days, hours, minutes! What does He want to do with all that time? Divide it up, Wozzeck!

WOZZECK: Jawohl Herr Hauptmann (Aye, Captain)!

HAUPTMANN: Wozzeck, it's all right, it's all right! I know: He is a good man.

WOZZECK: Jawohl, Herr Hauptmann!

HAUPTMANN: Oh, he's stupid; he's foolish. Wozzeck, he is a good man, but ... He has no morals! Morals: that's when you're moral! Does he understand? It's a good word and alludes to MARIE's child: He has a child without the church's blessing...

Now it screams out from permanently agitated WOZZECK: We poor people! You see, Captain, money, money! Who has no money! Just once, someone gives birth to his own kind in a moral way! One also has his flesh and blood! Yes, if I were a gentleman with a hat, a watch, and eyeglasses and could speak nobly, I would want to be virtuous! There must be something beautiful about virtue, Captain. But I am a poor fellow! Our kind is unfortunate in this world and in the other! If we were to go to heaven, we would have to help thunder!

HAUPTMANN: It's all right, it's all right. I know: He is a good man, a good man. But he thinks too much. It wears him out. He always looks so riled up.
The discourse has attacked me. Now go, and does he not run like that! Walk slowly down the street, right in the middle, and again, walk slowly, nice and slow!

In the Freiburg performance, the orchestra and chorus stand in the center on a scaffold on the revolving stage. To the left and right, a few scrawny trees.

 Büchner's stage direction is: Woyzeck cuts sticks in the bushes, but in the Freiburg staging, Wozzeck does not cut, but as soon as he enters the stage, he breaks off a branch and begins to whittle. And he whittled during the whole performance. 

After observing the "whittling" Wozzeck for a while, a scene in Annette von Droste-Hülshoff's novella Die Judenbuche came to my mind.

Friedrich Mergel, accused of having slain a Jew under a beech tree*, flees into foreign lands. As an old man, he returns unrecognized to his home village, where he earns a living as a carver of wooden spoons. One day he goes to the Breder Wood near the village and does not return.
* The villagers called the tree The Jew's Beech (Die Judenbuche).

A child had seen him sitting on the edge of the Breder Wood, whittling away at a spoon. "But he cut it all asunder," said the little girl.

Finally, Friedrich is found. He had hanged himself at the "Judenbuche," the place of his crime.

Of course, we read Droste von Hülshoff's masterpiece in school, and of course, we had to write an essay about it. One of my classmates, a master of the German language, wrote the best essay, as usual. The girl's statement, "But he cut it all asunder," culminated in my classmate's final sentence, "Friedrich whittled away at his life, but he cut it all asunder." The teacher and we all were impressed.

Had the Freiburg Wozzeck performance director read Die Judenbuche for Wozzeck also cut his life asunder.


Back to the opera performance. In the actors' costumes, the director had gone wild in alienation. Thus the captain appeared in women's clothes and sang and acted accordingly,  overdressed. Next to the leading actor, he later received the most applause.

The stage with the orchestra rotated in the background of the actors acting toward the audience. A notable element was a balloon that hovered above the stage and changed color and shape depending on the scene being played.

DOCTOR,WOZZECK, and HAUPTMANN:
- Hey, Wozzeck? But he has a good wife, doesn't he?
- What are you trying to say, Doctor, and you, Captain? (©Stadttheater)

The DOCTOR and the HAUPTMANN meet WOZZECK in the street, alluding to his relationship with MARIE.

 
HAUPTMANN: Hey, Wozzeck? But he has a good wife, doesn't he?

WOZZECK: What are you trying to say, Doctor, and you, Captain?!

HAUPTMANN: What a face that guy makes! Well! A hair, if not precisely in the soup, but if he hurries and runs around the corner, maybe he can still find one on a pair of lips! A hair, namely on a pair of lips! Oh, I felt the love once, too! - But, guy, he's white as a sheet!

WOZZECK: Captain, I'm a poor devil! I have nothing else in this world! Herr Hauptmann, if you're joking...

HAUPTMANN: I mean well with him because he is a good man ...

Wozzeck is tossed back and forth by extreme sensory input; his delusions lead him inexorably toward his personal apocalypse.

WOZZECK meets MARIE and now is sure: You with him!

MARIE: And even if!

WOZZECK wants to hit her: Bitch!

MARIE: Don't touch me! I'd rather have a knife in my body than a hand on me. My father didn't dare when I was ten years old ...

WOZZECK: "Better a knife"... Man is an abyss; it makes you dizzy when you look down. I'm dizzy ...

And it comes as it must when MARIE and WOZZECK are standing at the lake in the woods.
WOZZECK: You have gone far, Marie. You shall no longer run your feet sore. It's quiet here. And so dark.

MARIE: How the moon rises red!

WOZZECK drawing his knife: Like a bloody iron!

MARIE: Why are you trembling? What do you want?

WOZZECK grabs her and plunges the knife into her throat: Not me, Marie! And no one else, either!

MARIE dies: Help!

WOZZECK: Dead!

Later Wozzeck returns to the place of his crime, looking for his left-behind knife.

WOZZECK: But the moon betrays me; the moon is bloody.

From afar, the Hauptmann and the Doctor hear the sounds of Wozzeck's fall: As if a man were dying. 

The maltreated human being sinks into the lake.

Franz Wozzeck drowned himself, and Friedrich Mergel hung himself.

Standing ovations: Drum Major, Marie, and Wozzeck

Applause well deserved

*

15 years with Kieser

Red Baron goes to Kieser twice a week for muscle training.

One of the coaches saved my day this morning when I left the gym.

He handed me a bottle of sparkling wine for my loyalty: 15 years of Kieser: Staatsgut (Estate of the State of Baden-Württemberg) in Freiburg. The bottle is filled with "Cuvé brut," i.e., with excellent quality wine. Note the Minster steeple on the label.

Fortunately, I had my new backpack with me for the first time. I unfolded it to full size so the bottle in its packaging just fit.

The sparkling wine came with a card, the text of which I do not translate here, and a second card on which the coaches I know had signed.

I still remember my first contact with Kieser well. Elisabeth and I had just moved into our new apartment in Mittelwiehre when a neighbor suddenly stood before me. We talked, and then he looked at my sad figure from top to bottom, and it came out of him spontaneously, "You must go to Kieser."

He dragged me to the Kieser gym and got a small cash bonus for his new acquisition. He spent the money inviting me and our wives for lunch in a nearby restaurant. And we continued that practice without a Kieser bonus. That's how we became friends. Sadly, he died a few years ago, and Elisabeth succeeded him.

Of course, I thank Kieser for the sparkling wine, but my thanks for the faithful training accompaniment are much more important. From time to time, it is refreshing to go through individual exercises with one of the trainers for correct execution and listen to their various opinions.

Once again, my heartfelt thanks go to the competent Kieser Team in Freiburg's Grünwälderstraße.

*

Power Structures And File Analysis

Last Tuesday: Carriage from the Cologne carnival procession of 2023 in
front of the Freiburg Minster church: #Judgements instead of expert reports
©evangelisch.de

Not only the Catholics of the Archdiocese of Freiburg are shocked.

©BZ

Last Tuesday, retired judge Eugen Endress and former prosecutor Edgar Villwock presented the long-awaited 582-page final report* of their independent working group "Machtstrukturen und Aktenanalyse."

*Initially to be published in October 2020

According to the report, 190 clergymen abused 442 boys and girls from 1946 to 2014 in the Archdiocese of Freiburg. After the report was completed, new abuse cases came forward, so 552 victims and 253 clerical defendants are currently known. However, experts estimate that the number of unreported cases is significantly higher.

There are reports from other archdioceses in Germany that contain similar information. What makes the situation in Freiburg particularly tragic, however, is that for decades the archdiocese systematically covered up sexual assaults on dependent youths.

Archbishops Oskar Saier and Robert Zollitsch (©BZ)

Former Archbishop and President of the German Bishops' Conference from February 2008 to March 2014, Robert Zollitsch, is mainly blamed in the report. He completely ignored canon law concerning abuse cases during his tenure in Freiburg from 2003 to 2013. Neither did he initiate mandatory preliminary investigations, as required by ecclesiastical law and guidelines, nor did he report even a single case of child abuse to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in Rome when suspicions were substantiated. While violations of celibacy by clergy were punished, the abuse of children and adolescents was not punished under canon law.

Zollitsch transferred suspected perpetrators at short notice to another parish, preferably further away or, if possible due to age, to retirement, thus covering up suspected abusers.

Superiors at the new place of work were not informed of the actual reasons for the transfer. Accordingly, no written instructions were passed on, such as prohibitions on contact with children and adolescents. Thus, there was also no internal church control system for offenders at risk of recidivism.

Zollitsch's predecessor, Archbishop Oskar Saier, was also without empathy for those affected by abuse. He was fixated solely on "his" priests and their reputation or the undisturbed image of the Church. Saier refused without exception to inform the state prosecuting authority, a cover-up attitude probably with "consensual action" of his then secretary Zollitsch.

It was particularly cynical that Archbishop Zollitsch sent abusers in his diocese a letter of thanks and congratulations on solemn occasions, such as round birthdays or priestly anniversaries.

Zollitsch wrote to a convicted cleric in one case: "You have allowed yourself to be called by the Lord and were allowed to experience how beneficial your work as a priest became. With you, I thank the Lord for what he has accomplished through you."

In another case, Zollitsch reportedly paid tribute to a priest sentenced to several years in prison for multiple sexual cases of abuse of altar boys. On the occasion of his retirement, the archbishop wrote, "Your good skill in dealing with children and young people benefited youth work, especially altar boy work."

The 84-year-old Zollitsch, who recently moved from Freiburg to a senior citizens' residence in Mannheim, had his legal spokesman say, "Out of consideration for those affected by sexual violence and out of respect for a necessary and complete reappraisal, the former Archbishop of Freiburg has imposed silence on himself."

The latest developments: Zollitsch renounced all decorations, such as the Bundesverdienstkreuz (Federal Cross of Merit), and also does not want to be buried in the bishop's crypt of the Freiburg Minster. This does not undo the suffering of the victims.

*

Remembrance-Concern-Commemoration

... was the title of a panel discussion at the Aula of the University about 175 years Revolution of 1848/49. Due to illness, Dr. Thalhofer could not participate.

During the discussions, Red Baron took some notes, but I rather like to concentrate in my blog on some personal reflections regarding some remarks made by the panel members.

The panel members agreed that the revolution of 1848/49 is a foundation of our democracy today, but a discussion arose about whether it should be considered a milestone. Doesn't an unsuccessful revolution not have an endpoint, and isn't a milestone a point on a continuous path to a goal? Can't or shouldn't a milestone also be a signpost?

1871

Well, it was not a straightforward path to democracy in Germany: from 1848 via the "imposed" empire of 1871, the democratic Weimar Republic, the dictatorship of the Third Reich to a divided Germany with a democratic Federal Republic in the West and a German "Democratic" Republic in the East.

 
One reason the revolution of 1848 failed was that too much was to be achieved too soon and at once: popular sovereignty and German unity. Thus, classifying the revolution in a European context is impossible. Only in Italy was an appreciation of the revolution with the idea of unity.

Foreign interference in Germany, especially from the French side, was expressly undesirable. One did not want to see the arch-enemy on this side of the Rhine. This sealed the fate of the German Democratic Legion* in Paris led by Georg Herwegh, which tried to come to the aid of the revolutionaries in Baden.
*Although composed of politically exiled German workers and craftsmen. Read more in German.

Were the people of Baden particularly eager revolutionaries? If one regards the length of the uprising from September 12, 1847, the meeting of the friends of the constitution at the Salmen Inn in Offenburg to July 23, 1849, with the surrender of the Federal Fortress of Rastatt, which was occupied by freedom fighters and besieged by Prussian troops, this is a good argument.

But Johann Philipp Becker, a participant in the Hambach Festival and later chief of the Baden People's Army, gives further exciting aspects in his book Geschichte der Süddeutschen Mai-Revolution von 1849:

The Allemannic territory between the Black Forest, the Vosges, and the Alps, torn apart by German civil wars and French intrigues*, has already been dominated by different states and forms of government for two centuries. Nevertheless, in the German Baden, the French Alsace, and the Swiss border cantons, there is a similarity of dialect, customs, habits, and occupations, which will last longer than the political separation of these countries...
*again, the hereditary enemy

... This is why Baden is as flooded by French ideas and swayed by the Paris revolutions as it is educated by the neighboring Swiss republic cantons, whose freedom guarantees their prosperity. These influences help to understand democratic forms of government and spur one to imitate them ...

... The revolution, however, finds more Girondists in Baden than Jacobins; citizens, as well as peasants, have hitherto had more affection than a passion for the republic and for freedom, and one cannot deny that most of them would like to reach the republic by peaceful means without revolution. However, since the circumstances proved to them the impossibility of this, they also agreed to the revolution, admittedly without knowing its consequences and sacrifices to the full extent. On the whole, the people offered sufficient material to capable revolutionaries ...

The failure of the 1848/49 revolution had a decisive influence on the development of the democracy movement in Germany, and so today, the events are still seen through the lens of the victors of the time, i.e., as an honest attempt to change something that was doomed to failure due to the circumstances prevailing.

            The farmer's wife welcomes her drunken husband:
- Are you back from the people's assembly?
 - Yes, wife!
 - Well, on what did you agree? Is there now freedom, or is there still order?

Another reason for the failure, at least in Germany, was the lack of "orderly" structures. They did only exist in Baden, also in Freiburg, in the form of local people's associations at the beginning of 1849, i.e., too late.

Since the peaceful revolution in the GDR, which led to Germany's reunification, the word revolution is less negatively loaded today. Still, it was a "dirty" word in German at the time, given the events in France. In Prussia, when in the spring of 1848, the people went onto the barricades in Berlin, the officials spoke of the "events" of March 18.

Already in his opening statement, Heinz Siebold mentioned the social question as a crucial element of the revolution of 1848/49. The plight of the many peasants and the still few industrial workers was a potent trigger of the uprisings. 

This aspect was somewhat neglected in the discussion, although the social question remained a driving force until the end. On July 18, 1849, five days before the surrender of the Rastatt fortress, Ernst Elsenhans wrote in Der Festungsbote - the newspaper he edited - the essay Was ist und was will die soziale Demokratie? (What is and what is the aim of social democracy?). For more, read this blog.

So what is democracy? Some basics, such as freedom of the press, independence of the courts, and free secret elections, are non-negotiable, but we must not rest on the success of a working democracy in Germany. Democracy is to be constantly re-evaluated; each new generation has to rethink it and define it for itself.

The panel members agreed: Democracy was worth striving for in 1848/49, and today, it must be protected. Professor Jung used the example of the so-called September Revolution, a popular uprising in Frankfurt in 1848.

After the National Assembly in the Paulskirche had agreed to an armistice between Denmark and Prussia - albeit only grudgingly - many people were disappointed that the war would not continue. Discontent with the parliament's decision led to a spontaneous uprising. The National Assembly was harassed, two deputies were murdered, and the Paulskirche had to be protected by federal troops*. Jung immediately drew a historical line to the attack on the Capitol in Washington on January 6, 2022.
*Read more in German

And democracy must be able to resist because even in countries of the European Union, paths to dismantling democracy begin with the censorship of the press, the restriction of the independence of the courts, and, so far not yet, the targeted influence on elections.

So Jan Merk concluded, "Today, we don't realize how quickly we can lose things we take for granted." Indifference to democracy, he said, is a great danger.

*

Bach's Great Passion

My latest Hamburg trip centered on Johann Sebastian Bach's St. Matthew's Passion. Red Baron often listened to The Great Passion and wrote about it in 2012 and 2016. The present performance was exceptional as

- at the Elbphilharmonie, the audience surrounds the orchestra, choir, and soloists and

©FBO

- we Freiburgers listened to the Freiburger Barock Orchester, i.e., Baden meets Hamburg.

©VL

The Baroque instrumentalists were completed by the Belgian vocal ensemble Vox Luminis.

From the program booklet of the Hamburg performance, we learned that the first performance of the St. Matthew Passion on April 11, 1727, remained uncommented. There were only four other performances in Bach's time.

The main reason for this may have been what an audience member put in 1729 in the following words, "God forbid! It sounds as if one were in an opéra-comédie!" Had the Thomaskantor not made a contractual commitment not to write music that was too operatic for church purposes? And now this.

Bach's St. Matthew's Passion was "lost" for over 100 years. It was the 20-year-old Felix Mendelsohn-Bartholdi who "resurrected" Bach's masterpiece, although in a slimmed-down adaptation in 1829 with the Berlin Singakademie. In the romantic Biedermeier era, the audience's tastes had changed considerably.

And so Felix's older sister Fanny wrote to a friend about the spectacular performance, "What we all dreamed of as a possibility in the background of time is now true and real, the Passion has entered public life and become the property of the mind. The crowded hall looked like a church; the deepest silence, the most solemn devotion prevailed in the assembly; one heard only individual, involuntary expressions of deeply excited feeling, what one so often says with the injustice of undertakings of this kind, one can claim here with the true right that a special spirit, a generally higher interest directed this performance, and that everyone did his duty to the best of his ability, but some did more." What a long sentence!

Mendelsohn's groundbreaking performance of the St. Matthew Passion launched a Bach renaissance that continues to this day. The master rightly leads the three Bs: Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, as the conductor Hans von Bülow exaggerated in the 1880s, "I believe in Bach, the Father, Beethoven, the Son, and Brahms, the Holy Ghost of music."

The Hamburg performance made it evident that Bach wrote his Great Passion for two orchestras (Chorus I and II), two choirs, and soloists (Coro Primo and Second). 

 In previous stagings, the performers were primarily crowded together and faced the audience. This time, the two orchestras and choirs were separated, requiring precise cooperation between conductors. Lionel Meunier stood as bass in the right ensemble, and concertmaster Petra Müllejans sat elevated and played the first violin in the left orchestra.

This double constellation created excellent transparency and dynamics, especially when all the singers joined in on some choruses.

With this star cast, the performance was bound to be a success, and the sustained final applause put a smile on the musicians' faces.

Criticism? More intensive acoustic preparation would have been needed in the Elbphilharmonie. For example, the Evangelist sounded strangely softly in the unusual positioning of the musicians, and in my favorite aria, Erbarme dich o Herr, sung by an excellent countertenor, the accompanying violins covered up the sobbing solo violin.

The two and a half hours flew by, especially since this time, Red Baron was listening to the music not in a wooden pew but in a comfortable armchair in the 3rd row of the parterre.

*

Nuclear Phase-Out

Germany's last three nuclear power plants were taken off the grid today. This marks the completion of the German Atomausstieg (nuclear phase-out). Der Spiegel published an article Deutschland schaltet ab (Germany switches off), and Red Baron used the copyrighted slides for the present blog.

Nuclear power reactors operating in Germany in 1994.
Note the "unsafe" reactors in East Germany were switched off soon after the reunification.

From today. The decommissioning work will be gigantic.

Is the world to be healed the German way? Note that the red-colored countries
plan to or are building new nuclear power reactors.

While some European countries envisage abandoning atomic energy, others plan or build new nuclear plants. 

 
The reactors presently under construction are well behind schedule and will cost much more than initially budgeted.

In Germany, electricity produced by renewable energies
surpassed that by coal-fired power stations already in 2017

There is no longer such thing as cheap nuclear energy, more so as clean, renewable wind and solar energies are more than competitive. Experts calculated that since 2010 electricity generated by wind is cheaper than that produced nuclear. The corresponding year for solar electricity is 2012.

The enormous mass of nuclear waste expected
during the dismantling of Germany's decommissioned nuclear reactors

Strangely enough, both types of power generation have problems with storage. While inexpensive electricity storage is not available in sufficient capacity for replacing renewables at night and during lulls (Dunkelflaute) there are significant problems with storing radioactive waste after nuclear power plants are shut down. Where to store highly active spent nuclear fuel safely for generations? Red Baron has blogged frequently about this issue.

In 2011 the Fukushima accident led the German Bundestag to decide by an overwhelming majority the phasing out of nuclear power in Germany.

Was this an overreaction? I have always considered the risk of a reactor accident negligible. In contrast, for me, the unresolved final storage of highly radioactive waste is the reason why, after initial euphoria for nuclear energy, I later rejected it.

Nuclear reactors are increasingly experiencing problems with cooling. While the warming of rivers by reactor waste heat has been abandoned for a long time, evaporators with their water consumption pose a problem, especially in summer months with little rain. Excessive water withdrawal from streams for cooling purposes causes water levels to drop to alarming lows. This is a problem not only for river navigation but also for fish fauna. It is a fact that in the past, Germany supplied electricity to reactor-ridden France.

I regard my country as being on the right path to the future by abandoning nuclear power and turning to renewable energies.

*

Der Freiheit eine Gasse

Georg Herwegh, the poet of freedom, named one of his poems from 1841 An Alley for Freedom. This alley is said to have been opened by Arnold von Winkelried to his fellow Confederates at the Battle of Sempach in 1386. He grabbed a bundle of lances from the Habsburg knights and threw himself into the breach, impaling himself. Read more in German.

The motto served my friend Andreas Meckel as the title of a scenic representation of the revolutionary events in Freiburg at Easter 1848.

Organizer Heinz Siebold and author Andreas Meckel are in good spirits

Members of the Initiative for the Commemoration of the Baden Revolution organized the spectacle in the Freiburg Regional Administrative Council courtyard on Easter Monday.

  

Mayor Ulrich von Kirchbach greeted the audience

Heinz Siebold introduced the participants as there were:

The Biedermeier Group Offenburg

The Hecker Group from Offenburg

The Hecker Singers from Schopfheim

And the Dramatis Personae:

Carl von Rotteck junior (Peter Haug Lamersdorf), lawyer and son of the famous professor of constitutional law Karl von Rotteck.

Georg von Langsdorff (Olaf Creutzburg), Cand. Dent. and later known as the Minster General.

Carl Mez (Wigand Alpers), sewing thread manufacturer and early social benefector.

Emma Herwegh (Cornelia Schmidt), wife of poet Georg Herwegh and ardent freedom fighter.

Battle near Kandern.
Note the democratic colors: Black-Gold-Red!

On their way from Constance to Karlsruhe, Friedrich Hecker's irregulars were crushed by government troops near Kandern on Maundy Thursday. The news also reaches Freiburg, where 1500 armed revolutionaries, threatened with the enclosure of the city by soldiers of the German Confederation, are waiting for their relief by Hecker's men. Read more in German.

Note the correct colors: Black-Red-Gold.

In Freiburg, Carl von Rotteck, Georg von Langsdorff, and Carl Mez discuss the situation in Freiburg. Is the news of Hecker's military defeat fake news? Isn't an advance guard under Hecker's adjutant Franz Sigel and Gustav Struve standing in Horben to march on Freiburg? Or will the city be stormed beforehand by the Grand Duke's troops under the leadership of War Minister Hoffmann?

Emancipated Emma shows one of her attributes.

Emma Herwegh bursts into the scene, which alternates between hope and despair, and announces that the Democratic Union of Germans living in political exile in Paris, led by her husband, has reached Strasbourg. The armed men want to come to aid the revolutionaries on the other side of the Rhine. An offer to which the German irregulars only half-heartedly agree since the crossing of the Rhine is misunderstood as a French intervention.

Heavy fighting at Freiburg's Schwabentor.
Note the colors: Red-Gold-Black!

It comes as feared. Struve's vanguard is defeated before Freiburg near Günterstal, and the city is taken by the federal troops. Further attempts in 1849 to establish a democratic republic in Baden also ended in bloodshed. Read more in German.

And yet the sacrifices were not in vain. Many popular demands of the time, such as freedom of the press, universal suffrage, independent courts, education for all, and a democratic army, were reflected in the texts of the Weimar Constitution and are part of today's Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Olaf Creutzberg's talent as a revolutionary singer is legendary. Ultimately, we sang along to the famous lied: Die Gedanken sind frei (Thoughts are Free).

*

Art And Culture On the Elbe River

The blog might also be called Hamburg 3, although the numbering is not conclusive concerning my frequent stays in the Hanseatic city. Hamburg 2 refers to my trip on Sylvester 2019, but after that, I was in Hamburg for my class reunion in 2021, for the first alumni meeting at the GOA in June, and for the Christmas Market in December of 2022. I abandoned the numbering and named this blog according to the trip's motto Kunst und Kultur an der Elbe.

To say it right away, this trip to Hamburg with the Badische Zeitung was the best of all so far.

The Westin's reception and coffee bar are at the height of the visitors' gallery
on top of the old storage building and running around the building.

Although we only traveled second class on the ICE from Freiburg to Hamburg this time, the Westin Hotel in the Elbphilharmonie building already topped everything I had experienced so far.

The room and bed were huge, and there was a direct view into the wet room, which could be covered by a blind.

On the other hand, with the nice weather, the view of the Hamburg church towers was simply breathtaking.

Of course, this arrival had to be celebrated, so I headed to the coffee bar in the early afternoon and ordered as a late lunch snack "Champagne meets brioche," the latter filled with North Sea crab. Outside, people passed on the visitors' gallery running around the Elphi, occasionally casting a furtive glance at the guests in the coffee bar.

View on the Elbe River from the visitors' gallery (©RW)

As you may remember, the Elphi is at the fringe of Hamburg's old Speicherstadt (warehouse complex), which is - adding new buildings - transformed into a new quarter called Hafencity (Harbor City).

  

Look from the Speicherstadt to the "old" city with Der Michel.
 The St. Michaelis Church is actually located in the part of town called Neustadt (new city)

Refurbished old Speicher (warehouses)

The harbor areas were abandoned when container shipping replaced general cargo shipping. The old buildings are an integral part of Hamburg's Hafencity.

During our visit to the new part of the Harbor City, the tide was out

Construction is going on near the Marco Polo Terrace

The tide is creeping in

When ships want to enter the Harbor City, the road bridge is raised

During the traditional harbor tour, the motorboat captain explained the changeover from cargo to container shipping.

      

Giant cranes are ready to handle those shipping containers

The Chinese company Cosco Shipping owns 25% of Hamburg's container terminals

Inland shipping on the Elbe. The former Hamburg landmark,
the steeple of St. Michaelis greets all professional and landlubber sailors

On our way back, we passed Hamburg's new landmark in all its beauty

Red Baron will deal with two highlights in separate blogs. The Hamburg Trilogy will comprise the Concert at the Elbphilharmonie and the visit to the Hamburger Kunsthalle.

  

Follows our visit to the Komponisten Quartier. This is supposed to become a new Hamburg tourist attraction on Peter Street, with houses reconstructed in the old brick and timber framing style.

Here the musicians correlated to Hamburg are lined up. Judge yourself on the relationship these composers have with the Hanseatic city:

Georg Philipp Telemann, born in 1681, came to Hamburg in 1721 as Kantor of the Johanneum Lateinschule and music director of the five large churches.

He was successful not only as a composer but also as an entrepreneur in music. He died in 1767 and was followed by his godson Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, born in 1714, the second son of Johann Sebastian Bach.

After protracted negotiations, the Prussian court relinquished Bach's position as court composer in Berlin so he could become Kapellmeister (director of music) in Hamburg in 1768.

Carl Philipp Emmanuel,
in negotiations with the Head Pastor of St. Michaelis

In Hamburg, Bach began to turn his energies to ecclesiastical and choral music. The job required steady music production for Protestant church services at the Michaeliskirche (Church of St. Michael) and elsewhere in Hamburg.

CFEB's tomb slab in St Michaelis. The photo was taken in 2016

Carl Philip Emanuel Bach died in Hamburg in 1788.

Johann Adolph Hasse was baptized in Bergedorf near Hamburg on 25 March 1699. In the Hamburg suburb, his family members had been church organists for three generations. Hasse's career began in singing when he joined the Hamburg Oper am Gänsemarkt in 1718 as a tenor.

He left Germany in 1722, worked as a singer and composer, married soprano Faustina Bordoni, and died in Venice in 1783.

The composer Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy was born in Hamburg in 1809. His father moved the family to Berlin in 1811, when Hamburg became a French city under Napoleon.

Carl Friedrich Zelter Mendelsohn's musical teacher introduced the 12-year-old Felix to his friend Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (then in his seventies). In the following conversation, Goethe said,

"Musical prodigies ... are probably no longer so rare, but what this little man can do in extemporizing and playing at sight borders the miraculous, and I could not have believed it possible at so early an age.
"And yet you heard Mozart in his seventh year at Frankfurt," said Zelter.
"Yes," answered Goethe, "... but what your pupil already accomplishes bears the same relation to the Mozart of that time that the cultivated talk of a grown-up person bears to the prattle of a child."

Felix Mendelsohn died in Berlin in 1847.

Mendelsohn's older sister Fanny was born in 1805. She was a composer and pianist of the early Romantic era. Her extensive compositions, sometimes attributed to her brother, went unpublished in her lifetime.

In a letter to her, her father determined, "Music may become a profession for him Felix, while for you it can and should always only be an adornment, always a means of education, the basic bass of your being and doing. For him, therefore, ambition, eagerness to assert himself in a matter that seems important to him because he feels called upon to do so, is more likely to be looked up to, while you are perhaps no less honored that you have always shown yourself to be good-natured and reasonable in these cases and have proven by your joy in the applause that he has earned that you would also be able to earn it in his place. Persevere in this disposition and conduct. You are feminine, and only femininity adorns and rewards women."

Fanny, married Hensel, died in 1847, the same year as her brother.

Johannes Brahms was a composer, pianist, and conductor of the mid-Romantic period. Born in Hamburg in 1833 into a Lutheran family, he spent much of his professional life in Vienna.

 

In fact, he failed to get a good position in Hamburg and eventually was appointed conductor of the Wiener Singakademie in 1863.

Brahm in Vienne

In 1889, Hamburg made his "lost son" an honorary citizen. Brahms died in Vienna in 1897.

Hamburg around 1880 (Click to enlarge).
Note the new and present town hall was only started in 1886.

Gustav Mahler, born in 1860, was an Austro-Bohemian Romantic composer and one of the leading conductors of his generation.

Gustav Mahler in Hamburg

In 1891 Mahler took the post of chief conductor in Hamburg. But his aim was an appointment in the Austrian capital. Through his pragmatic conversion to Catholicism in 1897, Mahler eventually became director of the Wiener Hofoper. He died in Vienna in 1911.

The Olympus of Composers at the Brahms Museum

The day ended with a visit and tour of the Swedish church, once meant to be a spiritual sanctuary for Swedish sailors. King Gustaf Adolf defending the Lutheran faith in the Thirty Years' War on German territory, fell in the Battle of Lützen. 

We listened to a longish introduction into the church's history interrupted by Swedish music interpretations on the orgue and the piano.

We were tired and happy to find our car in the twilight near the Landungsbrücken (jetties). The dial is not a clock, but the tower shows the tide in Hamburg harbor. To follow ...

*