I find this hard to believe, but today marks the 7th installment of this blog! We had a full day to enjoy Leipzig, and Leipzig did not disappoint. After breakfast, the choir went to another religious service at Bachfest to hear the Sociedad Bach del Paraguay (Bach Society of Paraguay) perform two cantatas and a world premiere titled Kirito ra’arõvo composed by their conductor, Diego Sánchez Haase. Haase’s piece set liturgical text in a language indigenous to Paraguay called Guaraní, and it intentionally mirrored Bach’s chorales in form despite being more abstract. Haase utilized tritones, clusters, and unexpected modulatory points to create a very compelling and intricate harmonic language, and as someone who thinks too many composers rely on “pop chords” because they care more about selling well than challenging themselves intellectually (a blog post for another time), I enjoyed Haase’s piece and celebrate his straying from the beaten path. Furthermore, watching a composer-conductor like Haase bring his choir to Bachfest and premiere one of his pieces in Bach’s hometown filled me with dreams of doing the same with my own group someday, so this morning was a morning well spent!
The service was held in a gorgeous space at the University of Leipzig called Paulinum – Aula und Universitätskirche St. Pauli. Paulinum has a tragic history, as the church was originally constructed in 1231 as a Dominican monastery. Following the Protestant Reformation, the church became part of the university in 1409. Unlike some other German churches, the church escaped damage during WWII, but in 1968, despite vehement local protests, the original church building was demolished with dynamite by the East Germany communist regime. Following the reunification of Germany and liberation from the Soviet Union, Leipzig decided to build a new church in the original location under the same name, hence the very modern-looking space in the photos below despite the church’s origins dating back to the 13th century.
After leaving the service, Cardinal Singers did a few pop-up concerts on the streets of Leipzig and attracted far bigger crowds than I expected! The city is buzzing with choral music enthusiasts due to Bachfest, and we received enthusiastic responses, even having some audience members follow us to multiple locations to hear us sing more! Once we were done singing for the day, I went to a Bach museum directly across from Thomaskirche with a few other Cardinal Singers. The entry fee was only 8 euros for students, but I would have paid 80 euros for the experience! The museum housed a complete overview of Bach’s life and family tree, and as one of the foremost Bach research centers on the planet, they housed tons of original manuscripts and artifacts from Bach’s life, including multiple keyboard works and choral works I’ve performed before! The museum also had a special exhibition on the women of the Bach family, and I came to admire Anna Magdalena Bach’s strength and perseverance following J.S. Bach’s death (Anna was his second wife). A talented musician and vocalist in Leipzig churches, following Bach’s death, Anna made ends meet by completing Johann Sebastian’s unfinished The Art of the Fugue and distributing it to publishers as a 50% stakeholder. While J.S. Bach was still living, Anna often helped notate compositions to speed up the process, and she remarked to friends that she dreaded being woken up in the middle of the night to transcribe compositions for him!
After a wonderful morning and early afternoon of hearing Bach’s music and learning more about his life, I was sufficiently inspired, so I spent a few hours of my afternoon working on a choral commission (more about that in a few months!). To cap off the evening and celebrate an afternoon of hard work, I went to a grocery store with some friends and we had sandwiches, chips, and German chocolates at outdoor tables as a makeshift picnic!
I’ve remarked before that I keep finding unexpected connections to Kentucky in Germany, and I found perhaps the most unexpected one yet today. On a side street near Thomaskirche and the museum, there was a Corvette parked with German plates! Corvettes are manufactured in my hometown of Bowling Green, and it was amazing to think that I drive past the building where the Corvette was manufactured daily when I visit Bowling Green! Sadly, this is our final full day in Leipzig, and we depart for Koblenz tomorrow (a five-and-a-half-hour train ride). This is a very different city from Berlin yet an amazing one, and these two days have done nothing but give me a desire to come back. If I don’t return sooner, I will hope to return someday by bringing my own group to Bachfest to perform. Tomorrow’s blog post might be uneventful due to travel taking up most of the day, but I’ll look forward to tomorrow’s installment nonetheless!
