Scandinavia; Return

Two days ago I returned from the temperate summer of Europe to this uninhabitable (ten months of the year, anyway) climate. I am not yet sure whether I would advise two-and-a-half weeks in Europe to anyone. It was, for the most part, a wonderful experience, but I have hardly begun to process it. Real travel, the kind that necessitates closer inspection of a society and people than one can get from the train window, requires a good deal of careful observation. I am not altogether certain that I was worthy of the task. But let us dispense with such quibbles. Allow me to describe Scandinavia, in my deficient manner.

Copenhagen did not make an ideal first impression, as the train station is directly across from Tivoli Gardens. (I have, once or twice, seen people quite literally "falling-down drunk" before, but that was always on a college campus, where one, unfortunately, has come to expect such a thing.) Having read about Tivoli as a child, I pictured it as more of a city park with some attractions; in fact it is simply an amusement park, and I find such places to be tacky and loud, even in the best of circumstances. I suspect the atmosphere in the city owed much to the time of year, for it was right around St. John's Eve that we were there. (I did, in fact, observe that odd Danish custom of burning an effigy of a witch on a bonfire. The men in charge of lighting our particular bonfire were incompetent, and resorted to spraying the feeble flames with lighter fluid. I don't know whether the Danes have a custom of keeping burn-unit nurses on hand at such events.) Roskilde and Hillerød were both far more pleasant, and both have remarkable historic instruments. The 1610 Compenius at Frederiksborg Castle, in Hillerød, is especially stunning.

It appears that the Danish language is, in fact, a conspiracy perpetuated by the entire nation, for nearly every Dane speaks flawless English. Danish has but two phonemes, the glottal stop and the schwa, and these bear no relation to orthography. How anyone manages to speak, much less understand, the language is a most vexing matter.

After less than three days in Denmark, it was on to Sweden. Stockholm appears to be a very pleasant city, if one can judge a place by its smell. Every city has a smell, you know. Many American cities stink chiefly of polluted air, be it from factories or from our all-too-beloved automobiles. Vienna's smell, as I remember it, has an earthiness — perhaps that is the Wienerwald — atop which is a mixture of other, more acidic, smells: cigarettes, the Danube... I cannot identify all the components. Czech and German and Danish cities have their own smells. Stockholm is perhaps the nicest-smelling city, for more than anything else one smells Lake Mälaren. Perhaps it is different at other times of the year, or when the wind is from other directions. Unlike the Germans (who, as far as I saw, are utterly incapable of dressing up), the citizens of Stockholm dress well. The city is particularly expensive, though I suppose it was the height of tourist season this past week.

Uppsala, though it perhaps does not smell as nice, was far more agreeable to my tastes, being far less busy and with far fewer tourists. The city is dominated by the Domkyrka. (A note on Swedish orthography, which is at least a bit more sane than Danish: it appears that, after nasal consonants, "k" becomes an unvoiced post-alveolar fricative, that is, "sh". Thus, domkyrka comes out something like "domshirkah", as I am not in the mood to look up the IPA exactly.) In most respects it is a college town, which is perhaps what appealed to me, besides the cathedral. The Church of Sweden, though now it is just as empty on Sundays as any other European church, at least had the good sense not to dispense with all high-church frippery. (Apparently this is due largely to Laurentius and Olaus Petri.) The dom-museum in Uppsala has an impressive collection of vestments, altar-ware, and other historical churchy artifacts.

Perhaps appropriately, the very last place to visit was Leufsta Bruk, a tiny village at what feels like the end of the world. Leufsta Bruk is a surreal place: here, in the taiga of northern Uppland, is a perfectly preserved eighteenth-century settlement, with manor house, workers' quarters, and a church. It is the church that is of primary interest, for it houses a virtually unaltered 1720s Cahman organ.

Is it worth even attempting to describe what makes certain instruments so much better than others? I fear it is not. I could not have understood it myself before hearing, and playing, a historic instrument. Suffice it to say that, on historic instruments, the music makes sense in a way that it does not make sense on modern instruments. Sweelinck, and Buxtehude, and Bach, and all the great geniuses of organ composition, knew their instruments and wrote accordingly for them: everything, from touch to phrasing to registration, just seems to work on a historic instrument. There are difficulties, of course. Historic pedalboards are all flat, of course; that is not really a problem. (My teacher at Notre Dame notes that a curved AGO pedalboard conduces to "cookie-cutter interpretations", and I think he's right.) But historic pedalboards are also not standardized. Most have considerably shorter compasses, and many are wider — that is, the space between pedal notes is wider — which can be quite disorienting. The winding of certain instruments is downright difficult. These problems (and several others) notwithstanding, it is very much worth it to play historic music on historic instruments.

Broken German

Perhaps the first thing any tourist must overcome is the fear of being seen as an utter fool. (I use the word "tourist" in the sense of a person who wishes to visit a foreign culture — not just hang around with other insufferable Americans at a resort; if there were a lower genus than "tourist" I should assign such cultural troglodytes to it.) Irredisregardless of how well one knows the language and mores, one will make mistakes. Foolish mistakes. In a larger city, like Vienna, they are at least accustomed to having ignorant tourists frolicking about, but in the hinterland the things we do can come across as genuinely peculiar.

The chief barrier to communication is, of course, the language. While I have taken a German course in college and spent ten weeks previously in Vienna, my German is still, one might say understatedly, inelegant. My vocabulary is limited, yes, but far more limited is my knowledge of German grammar and syntax. The greatest problem posed by the German language to the amateur speaker is not (only) the word order but mostly the articles. German, as you may know, has three genders, with corresponding articles. It also has declensions, and while some nouns are declined, it is mostly the articles that bear the brunt of this process. It is thus difficult to even represent the sort of mistakes the English speaker is likely to make in his forays into German. There are two options for the ignoramus who would nonetheless have himself understood: (1) omit articles entirely. I suspect this comes across a bit like cave-man language. Or (2) attempt articles with the knowledge that most of them are incorrect. This was my strategy, and, though my sins against the German language were many, it seemed I got my point across. A good many conversations have been conducted in both broken German (on my part) and broken English, for while English is spoken by some Germans, they learn it a bit like Americans learn Spanish: for a few years in school, perhaps, then to be mostly forgotten. It is work, maintaining a language.

Grinzing

Sie sind uns nur voraus gegangen,
und werden nicht wieder nach Hause verlangen.
Wir holen sie ein auf jenen Höh'n
im Sonnenschein, der Tag ist schön,
auf jenen Höh'n.

It being an overcast and rainy day, I opted to go out to Grinzing. (A note about rain here: like everything else in Vienna, it is far more polite than back home. Perhaps less extreme weather conduces to a more civilized people.) It's a pleasant enough ride by the excellent mass transit system (take the U-4 to its end at Heiligenstadt and get on bus 38A; for variety's sake I took the Straßenbahn back into town), and thanks to the weather neither Heiligenstadt nor Grinzing were overrun by groups of Americans or Japanese visiting Beethoven's house (as if there were only one; he moved constantly) and stumbling out of the more touristy Heurigers.

I had not come for Beethoven, anyway, but for Mahler. Up the hill, pretty clearly marked, is the Grinzinger Friedhof, one of Vienna's smaller cemeteries (certainly much smaller than the Zentralfriedhof). Mahler is buried there. After some searching (for there was a small map by the gate, but it would be poor taste to label only famous graves, I suppose), I found the grave. Nearby were two other tourists come to pay their respects, as I had. (They had a Vienna travel guide in English, but neither their faces nor their accents suggested they were native speakers.) We shared a few kind words. I believe they were genuinely kind. For a short moment, at least, we shared a kinship, united in the love of the works of Mahler, this man who died more than a century ago. Music speaks to the souls of those who hear it; some souls respond. It is gratifying to meet a like-minded soul: "Ah, so I was not the only one!"

Vienna

Greetings, dear reader, from Vienna! We arrived here late last night, after a full day of travel. "Life is a journey", it is said, tritely. People say this to remind us that it is not so much the destination that matters as what happens along the way. I do not entirely agree with this. The destination matters quite a bit. In our case the travel was far less pleasant than the arrival. After a transatlantic flight, we had a layover of six hours in Copenhagen's Kasterup Airport. The Danish are an exceptionally attractive people who speak a barbaric tongue not fit to be understood by man or beast. While Kasterup is pleasant, as airports go (it has a sort of streamlined Scandinavian aesthetic), six hours in an aiport is about five-and-a-half hours more than I wish to spend in an airport. We finally reached Vienna around ten, after a much shorter (albeit delayed) flight. (We flew over Germany's Baltic coast, but couldn't see most of the country due to heavy clouds beneath us. Fortunately, it's fairer weather down here.) At the airport I managed very efficiently to get us lost, having to rely on the worst sort of German: discomfited American tourist German. ("Bitte, wo ist der Zug?") We did finally find the CAT (City Air Train), making it to Landstraße-Wien Mitte, and thence to the Kolpinghaus, finally getting to bed after midnight.

Today we first walked around the Ring a bit, making it into Stadtpark, over past Café Prückel (which I am resolved to visit tomorrow), and from the Stubentor stop on the U3 over to the Zentralfriedhof. I'd been there already, the last time I was here, but it's a much more pleasant place to visit in the summer. I noted with some satisfaction that more flowers were placed on Brahms's grave than on Schubert's, though Beethoven had them both beat. Schoenberg, rather unfairly, had none. (No accounting for taste, I suppose.)

Back in the city, we went to Doblinger's, where I purchased several books of chorale preludes by obscure Viennese composers. (My rationale is that I should purchase things published by the Doblinger press, as they're a local product and I may not find them elsewhere.) I had Schnitzel-King for lunch, and it was glorious beyond words. And yet, just as no man steps in the same river twice, no man eats the same Döner sandwich twice. I don't remember there being cucumbers in it before, but I think they make a fine addition.

Into Relative Silence

I'll refer you to this article, about the lives of Trappist monks. The questions the author asks of the monks are not particularly good (and he erroneously describes Trappists as "the only Western-based monastic order that still actively practices the 'vow' of silence"; what about the Carthusians, next to whom Trappists are a bunch of chatty Cathies?), but he is wise enough to let them speak for themselves. When asked if silence is a sacrifice, one monk answers:

I would not speak of the “sacrifice of words” except in relatively rare instances when a passion moves me to speak and I struggle to hold my tongue. The silence which is my natural habitat is not created by forcibly sacrificing anything. When a man and woman meet and fall in love they begin to talk. They talk and talk and talk all day long and can't wait to meet again to talk some more. They talk for hours together, and never tire of talking and so talk late into the night, until they become intimate—and then they don't talk anymore. Neither would describe intimacy as “the sacrifice of words” and a monk is not inclined to speak about his intimacy with God in this way. Is silence beneficial for all people? I would say the cultivation of silence is indispensable to being human.

Travel, Memory

When, in a few days, I leave for Europe, I am sure I'll be very excited. But for the meantime I am still rather apprehensive about it. This stems mostly from the number of things I still must do before I can depart (in peace, anyway). Experience suggests that most things are better anticipated than experienced, but I suspect that this is not the case with travel. I look forward to travel with a sort of dread. Perhaps this is because I have developed such an ingrained distaste for being late: the idea of missing a connecting flight or a train distresses me as few (ultimately) trivial things can. And on this particular journey, there are an awful lot of trains one can miss.

Nevertheless, I am optimistic that travel may yet improve me (despite the many ways in which it probably will not). Playing historic instruments will be instructive. We've spent several months trying to line up time on various organs, and it appears we'll be playing instruments in Tröchtelborn, Magdeburg, Niederndodeleben, Hildesheim, Gifhorn, Clauen, Schellerten, Norden, Roskilde, Frederiksborg Castle, Leufsta Bruk, and Östhammar. Besides organs, we have set aside several days to explore Vienna, Prague, Magdeburg, Hannover, Roskilde, and Copenhagen. I hope to write about things on this web-log as much as is practical; while I hate the idea of spending an entire vacation trying to remember said vacation (taking pictures — which still strikes me as asinine, especially in churches — and writing web-log posts), I suppose I should produce some evidence of travels.

This makes me wonder about the nature of memory. Why would anyone devote so much time and effort encasing experiences in amber? Well, pictures and words, in one way, have a sort of sacramental aspect. No, then again, they don't at all: a sacrament is by its nature a tangible object, whereas images and words are the opposite of tangible objects, unless I engrave them like Job. (19:23-24: "Oh that my words were now written! oh that they were printed in a book! That they were graven with an iron pen and lead in the rock for ever!") Pictures and words on the internet, are, I guess, a sort of memorialist understanding of the past: we recall times gone by, but we lack the Real Presence, as it were.