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.