Pilgrimage to Leipzig

Anticipating that the day after Dachau might be something of a downer, we had decided to go to Leipzig, city of light and music, for a pick-me-up. Actually, the ‘light’ part was in doubt at first – our entire weather forecast for the week was somewhat inaccurate. We went to Dachau on what was supposed to be a gray, gloomy day, but it actually turned out to be very pretty (not that we felt much better as a result). The next day in Leipzig was supposed to be sunshiny, to hopefully raise our spirits and make us feel better about the human race (yes, I do tend to script my life like scenes in a movie). This prediction was looking equally dubious, as we rode a train through four hours of rain and clouds. But as we left the train station, the clouds were beginning to break, and it ended up being the beautiful day we’d hoped for, although we never would have appreciated it as much if it had happened the way I’d scripted it in my head (or maybe that’s just the post-production editor in me, trying to insert morals into events that don’t need them).

Leipzig is mainly known for its connections to Western music through the composers who spent many years of their lives here. There were too many such composers for us to do justice to them all in one daytrip, so we had to prioritize. After a quick, failed attempt to find RichardWagnerplatz (which I swear was on the map but sadly did not seem to have a correlate in reality), we went to the house of the composer who is more associated with Leipzig and whose legacy left the city pilgrimage-worthy in the first place: J.S. Bach.

Laura in the Thomaskirche

Despite being a huge name in classical music today, Bach led a pretty low-key lifestyle throughout his compositional career. It was only the Baroque period, and composers had not achieved the international rockstar status that would later be associated with Mozart or Liszt. After several years in Weimar and Cöthen, Bach accepted a position as Cantor at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, where he would spend the remaining 27 years of his life. While there, he enjoyed a prolific career, writing, rehearsing, and accompanying one cantata per week, as well as churning out a couple of little Bachs who would become pretty well known composers during the Classical period.

Jumping by the Bach statue

Much like every other tourist attraction you’d like to see in Western Europe, the Bach museum was undergoing renovations and only had a small portion of its exhibits up, with no English translation available. But we did get to spend a lot of time in the Thomaskirche, which was one of the main things I wanted to see while in Europe. Bach’s immense faith and compositional impact, all while serving on a relatively small scale to a local congregation, have always been an encouragement to me. But the fact remains that later composers and audiences would not have been inspired by Bach or even known who he was had it not been for the diligent musicological efforts of the next guy whose house we would visit, Felix Mendelssohn.

You see, the classical music world in Mendelssohn’s day was sort of the opposite of ours – while we are trapped in the past, making the same tired overtures to a relatively small cabal of dead Europeans, the musical programs of Mendelssohn’s day were solely focused on the present, a relatively small cabal of live Europeans. Tastes had changed with the times, and Baroque music was ignored and forgotten. Despite Bach’s paradigm-changing mastery of counterpoint, chromaticism, and fugue, audiences 80 years later preferred to listen to the cookie-cutter classical garbage emanating from any number of no-name halfwits who are today completely forgotten. But Mendelssohn, who had risen from a child prodigy (better than Mozart, according to Goethe) to one of the premier composers of his day, also took a strong interest in staging the works of master composers long deceased. It was through Mendelssohn’s efforts staging Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in Berlin that ignited later generations' interest in Bach's music.

Mendelssohn looking oddly diagonal

Mendelssohn is my idol in many respects – he was a polymath, also creating numerous drawings, watercolors, and paintings, some of which are displayed in his house. He also spearheaded music education by founding the Leipzig Conservatory. He was friends with Liszt and the Schumanns, and they hung out at each other’s houses. He had a recital hall in his house, where friends and family would periodically perform new pieces they were working on. If I were to be displaced to any place and period in history, it would probably be late 18th Century Leipzig.

That being said, Leipzig is still very nice even if you’re not crazy about history. The University is quite modern in some parts, including a space-age tower that looks a bit like an open book or a wisdom tooth, depending on your perspective. The city has many beautiful open squares with fountains (a must for any old European city), very good street musicians, (though not as transcendent as Prague’s), and, according to Laura, really incredible hot dogs.

Final rating: 7.0/10.0