Private Passions

Dreaming of Private Passions
 

The composer and broadcaster Michael Berkeley has presented Private Passions on BBC Radio 3 for thirty years, inviting celebrities to choose and discuss various pieces of music.  The guests are all distinguished in their respective fields.  I will never be invited to take part, but it is fun to play the game, so here are my choices, with the proviso that, with the infinitude of music to draw on, any set could be influenced by any number of factors, ranging from the weather to the season to the vagaries of relationships.
 
Mozart was one of the first names I learned in music.  His Eine Kleine Nachtmusik was on one of the 78s we had when I was a child, with those chords ringing out from a teak wind-up gramophone that sat on the floor of our front room.  Later, when trying to learn the piano, I accompanied someone on the clarinet in a version of the second movement from his Clarinet Quintet.  I am not a pianist, but there is one opus I can just about manage, and there is a certain pleasure in making the notes that were composed so long ago come to life.
 
Mozart – Fantasia in D Minor, K 397 – Angela Hewitt
 
I wish I had progressed further with the piano, but with the excitement of the sixties I was drawn to the guitar.  And this perhaps is why my next choice is Bob Dylan.  I still have the Freewheelin’ LP which I bought on September 16^th, 1965.  And I still play Don’t think twice, it’s all right.....  Bruce Langhorne’s guitar adds to the effect, but it is Dylan’s confident and articulate farewell to a relationship that is so memorable.  It isn’t his greatest song, perhaps, but then given the breadth (and depth!) or his production over more than sixty years, which is?
 
Bob Dylan – Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right
 
So, I played and sang through my teens, and I was in Dublin when the Dubliners were at their height, and I spent a memorable evening at the Old Triangle folk club where I met Luke Kelly. He had a wonderfully clear, controlled voice and as he closed his eyes, tilted back his head and let flow streams of perfectly balanced ballad history the place fell silent.  This is a beautiful song, written by Phil Coulter, which, despite being steeped in Ireland’s contemporary history, touches my own past in my imagination.  
 
The Dubliners featuring Luke Kelly – The Town I Loved So Well
 
I grew up to the Beatles, and they were absolutely a part of everyone’s life in the sixties. I sat though A Hard Day’s Night twice when it came out and hung on their every appearance on TV.  John Lennon had the edge, for me, and on the day he died, some friends and I were involved in a car crash (in Italy) and it seemed that the lights had gone out.  This song is an early one and is perhaps typical of the sixties where many pop songs were about holding hands or dancing or falling in love.  It is perhaps significant, however, that one of his last recorded songs was entitled Woman – I guess some of us grow up?
 
The Beatles – Girl: Rubber Soul
 
On April 28, 1973, Bob Marley and the Wailers came to play in the Great Hall at Lancaster University.  I was living and working in Manchester at the time, but went back up to Lancaster (where I had a toehold) for weekends and this was a great night.  There was something quite new about this music.....
 
Bob Marley and The Wailers – No Woman, No Cry
 
Later I moved to Sheffield and would drink in the pubs down West Street on a Saturday night, and one had a juke box with Rod Stewart’s version of What’s Made Milwaukee Famous (Has Made A Loser Out Of Me), and the song touched something within me, (though I didn’t listen).  My wife Amanda loved him too, and this recording of Have I told You Lately that I Love You? played her out at her funeral.
 
Rod Stewart – Have I told You Lately That I love You?
 
In 1976 I was appointed to teach at St George’s English School Rome, where my adult life took shape.  And as time went by, I picked up the guitar again and formed a folk group with a friend and some of the students and we performed concerts for Amnesty International, involving my guests Adrian Mitchell, Roger McGough and then Adrian Henri, and with others at the Folk Studio and The Fiddler’s Elbow.  They were good days, but I also became interested in Italian music, and history and I visited many churches and monasteries throughout Italy and learned about Palestrina. 

 

 
Palestrina - Missa Papae Marcelli – Sistine Chapel Choir, Massimo Palombella
 
I also went to the Opera in Rome and ‘discovered’ the joys of Verdi and Puccini. And somehow this led back to Mozart. I had a journalist friend who insisted we went to see Joseph Losey’s film of Don Giovanni, in which Kiri te Kanawa played Donna Elvira.  Later on, when we had moved back to the UK, I ran a school boarding house and Kiri’s son Tom was one of my charges.  On Friday, 20^th June, 1997, Amanda and I were invited to see Kiri at a gala performance at Hampton Court, a wonderful evening, with champagne in the dressing room after the show.  
 
Mozart – Cosi Fan Tutte - Soave sia il vento – Kiri te Kanawa.
 
The supporting artist that night was Andrea Bocelli, and as Amanda was particularly taken with him, the music we played to introduce her funeral was La Voce del Silenzio.
 
Andrea Bocelli – La Voce del Silenzio
 

E chi ho tanto amato

Dal mare del silenzio

Ritorna come un'onda

Nei miei occhi

E quello che mi manca

Nel mare del silenzio

Mi manca sai molto di più…

 
When I lived in Italy, I learned the language, and loved the life, and music was all around.  I particularly liked Francesco de Gregori and his friend Lucio Dalla, and more recently got hooked on a version of Alice, with Ligabue.
 
Francesco de Gregori, featuring Ligabue – Alice
 
As a counterpoint to this romanticism (which I acknowledge is a weakness) J S Bach is another of the masters to whom I listen again and again.  But......  How does one choose?  ‘Cello suites (as my brother Simon played at our mother’s funeral)? Organ works (my father and grandfather sometimes played these)?  Piano works (as I still try to play)?  

That is the difficulty.  And while I don’t really understand it, I can immerse myself in St John Passion and let it wash right through me.  The Matthew Passion, the Cantatas, etc, they all fill my mind with temporary glory, but I think St John is the best.

 
J S Bach – St John Passion – BWV 245 - Ruht Wohl, Ihr Heiligen Gebeine: The Choir of New College Oxford, Collegium Novum, Edward Higginbottom 
 
And now, in a different vein, I include a song by John Prine, about whose sharply witty and humanely warm lyrics I knew nothing before his untimely death in 2020 during the Coronavirus pandemic.  But his last song, written and recorded only shortly before his death helps me whenever I think back over all the private passions of my life.  And it is also one I have learned to play, perhaps as a counterpart to the earlier Dylan track.
 
John Prine - I Remember Everything
 
And another song which is quite a different thing, though also strongly emotional.  Elton John was not an artist I ever felt close to, but he is music, and some of his songs are inevitably a part of the backing tracks of our lives.  Your Song is a sweet example of how he, and his associates, captivated us in the ‘70s.  Pop music has an enormous reach, and in certain ways it is the twentieth century’s answer to all the opera house excitement in the days of Mozart and Puccini et al....
 
Elton John – Your Song
 
In closure, I would have chosen either Borodin’s In the Steppes of Central Asia, an extraordinarily enduring work which a friend introduced to me when we were first at Lancaster University, or for The Symphony No. 9 in E minor, From the New World, Op. 95, B. 178, composed by Antonín Dvořák in 1893, partly because it was one of the first LPs my brother Simon bought to play on our ‘modern’ record player, and also because, a year or more since the death of my wife, I am now entering a new world, and that sense of entering fresh territory excites me and gives me hope.

 

However, the music which I would like to fade away with, is that of Chopin.  Having visited the rooms in Vallombrosa, in Mallorca, where Chopin and Georges Sand spent an uncomfortable winter in 1839, I continue to wonder at the extraordinary melodic creativity that these pieces offer us.  And at the profound melancholy that sometimes settles upon me.  I just wish I could play it!
 
Chopin - Nocturne in G Major, Op. 37 No. 2 – played by Maurizio Pollini
 
 
All these pieces could be anyone’s choices, though anyone could choose infinite varieties of others. It’s a game.  I feel bad about leaving out so many artists and songs (where are Joe Cocker - You Are So Beautiful; Dolly Parton - I Will Always Love You;  Merle Haggard - That's The Way Love Goes;  or Sandy Denny - Who Knows Where The Time Goes.... just for examples?)  

It's just a game.  

But ask for me tomorrow and you will find me a grave man......

 

Richard Gibbs

May 3rd 2025

 
 
 

Wacky Bachy

And so to Leipzig..... (Bach to the Beginnings)

On May 30^th, 1723, Johann Sebastian Bach, aged 38, took up his post as Thomaskantor at the morning service in St Nicholas’ Church.  He and his family had been in Leipzig for a week. He conducted musicians and choir in a new Cantata, Die Elenden sollen essen, (The Poor shall eat), BWV 75.

 

Over the next four years he composed around 150 new cantatas as well as The St John Passion and The St Matthew Passion. He was extraordinarily productive, whether you like it (his work) or not.

Petra Flemming - Basketmaker, 1979

 

I claim profound ignorance of almost everything, but, having visited Bach’s birthplace and other towns associated with him in 2015 (please see https://www.richardpgibbs.org/2015/06/j-s-bach-funky-genius.html for more of this) I felt the need to follow him to the grave (which is kind of inevitable in itself.....)

 

My ignorance is well-tempered, however, as I have been practising the Eighth Prelude from the 48 Ps & Fs since The Beatles came out with A Hard Day’s Night (and I still can’t play it (Bach) properly).  But it does mean I have some idea of how many sharps and flats JSB could get on a page. 

 

And Leipzig was his apogee, perhaps. Gone were the days when he drunkenly fought a Zippel Fagottist(bassoonist) who hit him with a stick (Arnstadt, 1705) or when he would trek to Lübeck to see Dietrich Buxtehude play the organ (or was it to woo the master’s tochter?) No this was a serious and mature musician with his second wife, various children and four wagonloads of household goods.....

Petra Flemming - Basketmaker's Wife, 1979

 

He got the job in Leipzig because Telemann turned it down – not everyone can say that. His responsibilities included the musical education of the boys in the Thomasschule; music in all four principal churches of Leipzig, under their clergy; and the musical aspects of the municipal celebrations, under the town council. His contract stipulated that his behaviour should preserve the good order in the churches and that the music should not last too long.

 

Cantata 75 lasts about 35 minutes, in two parts, so almost broke his contract, but it was met, according to the press, mit guten applausus.

 

Cantata 75 was the third piece performed at the Opening Concert of the tercentenary celebration of Bach’s arrival in Leipzig, and I was privileged to have a seat in the ThomasKirche to hear it. It was exciting, and uplifting, despite the simple fact that I didn’t really understand a word (I am a little rusty on the Gospel text, Luke 16: vv19-31, about poor Lazarus and the rich man, though I recall the Fairfield Four singing about him at the Ryman Auditorium).  

 

The church has changed a great deal in the years since Bach strutted his stuff here, but there is a certain sense of continuum.  I sit next to a couple from the city of Bielefeld, a city of 334,000 residents, dating back to the 9^thcentury, which owes its fame to a joke made in 1994 when a student posted a message denying its existence, a joke that Mrs Merkel picked up in 2012.  The ribaldry went so far that in 2019 the city offered €1m to anyone who could prove that it didn’t exist.....  Of course there was no proof that my new friends were really from Bielefeld.....

 

Sorry..... Where was I?

 

The following night I attended a second concert, this time in the Nikolaikirche, another of Bach’s main churches, but again much changed since the early eighteenth century.  This concert, under the direction of Hans-Christoph Rademann, was a more user-friendly evening that the Opening Show.  There was simultaneous translation of the explanatory notes and the music was all Bach.  I heard voices encouraging me not to fear death – death is not negative (Mein Tod ist nur ein Schlaf....)  I heard the pizzicato passing of time; the wavering of the orchestra at the beginning of BWV 48 which suggests waves of water, and uncertainty; and the oboe in BWV 60 mimicking a hen and chickens as Bach reminds us of the protective power of nature.....

 

It was a marvellous concert, though I recently read something that Eugen d’Albert (a member of the Bach Geselschaft) wrote in 1906:  There are those who can sit and listen to Bach’s cantatas for two hours at a stretch and say they enjoy it and do not grow tired of it.  They are either incorrigible pedants or unmitigated dissemblers.....

 

Perhaps I am nothing but a shallow fraud. Bernard Levin said (in 1975) I know that Bach was one of the greatest geniuses ever to adorn the human race, and that he wrote some of the most sublime music in all history.  But he leaves me, literally cold.... 

But Nina Simone said, Bach made me dedicate my life to music....  

Ulrich Hachulla - First Day of Retirement, 1976/77

 

I don’t know.  It’s all a bit beyond me, perhaps. I came to Leipzig to hear Bach where his music was first performed, and I have done that.  Tick.  But I really should have gone Bach to the Beginning and heard just one cantata as part of a Sunday service.  That, perhaps, would have been genug.....

 

Anyway, the serious stuff over, a Litre of Pils in the Augustiner am Markt revives the parts that were wilting a little in the heat, and then there’s Lang Lang (郎朗) playing Bach’s Greatest Hits behind a high hoarding in the Market Square....  Such open-air recitals are normally free to the good citizens of Leipzig (and beyond) but Lily LangLang charged the city so much that they had to pass on the expense.  What would Johann have thought of that?  (And he don’t even play the Klavier).

 

Anyway, since I was here, like a proper tourist, there are sights to see.  First up, the Bach Museum.  OK.  Yeah.  A bench and some kind of organ manual (manual organ?)  Some things that go ding.  A few pics of yesteryear and a window that give a view of a statue. My advice, if you can take it, is go to Eisenach if you want the real thing....

 

Next, the Bayerischer Bahnhof, first opened in 1842 and closed in 2001.  It is Germany’s oldest preserved railway station, but now only rises above the S-Bahn Mitteldeutschland system.  However, you can forget that, for today the Bayerischer Bahnhof is famous for its hospitality and culinary delights – and it is known as the home of Gose, a beer specialty from Leipzig which was brought to Saxony-Anhalt in the year 1738. {Originally Gose comes from Goslar, a small town in Lower Saxony... and so on (oooh, that makes me thirsty!)}

Joachim Kratsch - In Memory Of, 1973

 

And then, the ugliest construction that side of Slough, the Völkerschlachtdenkmal (Monument to the Battle of the Nations), a 300,000 ton, 91 metre high, granite monstrosity dreamed up by poet Ernst Moritz Arndt in 1814 to honour the fallen in the one decisive victory over Napoleon on German soil.  600,000 soldiers from 20 countries took part and 100,000 were killed or wounded.  For good measure, typhus broke out in Leipzig after the skirmish, and a further 10% of the local population succumbed.  100 years after the event, the monument was completed.  Over 100 years after that, it is still there.....

I am offered a separate diversion by the Leipzig Tourist People - a boat trip on the extensive canal system.  Why not?  And so, for almost an hour and a half I could have been in Birmingham -  factories turned into apartments, crumbling houses in overgrown gardens, thick green waters swirling past - except for the extraordinary abundance of all sorts in canoes and similar craft, paddling gently towards oblivion with the distinctive aroma of wacky baccy floating in the air..... 

 

What else?  I sense you may be tiring of Leipzig and its charms?  But one more delight is to be found in the MdbK.  Say that again?  The Museum der Bildenden Künste, which is, to put it mildly, a rocking fine museyroom, sensitively organised over several floors, with art and artists arranged by theme or school, from Lucas Cranach the Elder through Caspar Friederich to Max Beckmann and artists of the Leipzig School.

Norbert Wagenbrett - Girl on the Street, 1987

 

Which takes us, almost inevitably, to the Gedenkstätte Museum in der Runden Ecke (the Round Corner), primarily an exhibition about the Stasi, the former secret police in East Germany, (one time employer of Vladimir Putin) as Leipzig’s history is inextricably confused by the GDR period during which everyone spied on everyone else.  For forty years, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany infiltrated society with suspicion and physical and mental violence.  Until 1989 this building housed the Leipzig District Administration for State Security.  This secret service apparatus penetrated into the most private aspects of people’s lives, sowed mistrust among neighbours, and violated the most elementary human rights.  Almost every aspect of freedom was suppressed, from friendship to art, music to thought.

 

Definitely worth a visit (though, of course, for purely historical reasons - these things couldn't happen today....).

 

To reflect on this, I drink more Gose beer in Gosenschenke Ohne Bedenken, (which could translate as Unscrupulous Beer Hall, but which might more generously be Beerhall Without Hesitation....) a fair walk north of the centre.  Here the skinhead barman anticipates retirement (in two years) when he will decamp to Chang Mai (Thailand) where (with no sense of irony) he intends to shed the problems of immigration which he sees as having ruined Germany (he quotes knife crime as one of the biggest problems).  His beer is good.  Not sure about his vision.

Otto Thielicke - Refugees, 1948

 

And to finish, some Allasch (a caraway liqueur, peculiar to Leipzig) in the First Whiskey Bar, where celebration goes on late into the night with other Bach enthusiasts due to the resignation of one Alexander de Pfeffel Johnson....

 

As I wander off into the night, I think of Bach again.  All this modern stuff.  If, I muse, Johann Sebastian Bach were alive today..... 

.....He would be turning in his grave.

 

Boom, Boom!

Leipziger Straßenmagazin KiPPE 
(The Leipzig Big Issue)

The poor shall eat.....

Gerhart Kurt Muller - Foreman, 1971/72

Weimar - Travels in former East Germany - 2

Gouty (and Sheila).....

Flood of Life, Storm of Deeds

As readers of Finnegans Wake will know, James Joyce decreed that the triumvirate at the apex of European Literature were Dante, Goethe and Shakespeare....  on my honour of a Nearwicked, I always think in a wordworth's of that primed favourite continental poet, Daunty, Gouty and Shopkeeper..... 

Shadow play - Gouty in Weimar

So, Dante is well known as the stand-up comic of the late middle ages, though his comedy has perhaps lost something of its mass appeal in terms of stadium-filling.

Shakespeare.... well, they am still negotiating the film wrights of some of his works, and translations continuous are made.... Who don't know, To be or not?  nor, Et tu, Bro? nor, Tomorrow, and that.... nor, Romeo, Romeo, what's in a name, Rosie.... ect ect (sic)?

Shopkeeper - jauntily statued in Weimar

And therefore, who were this Gouty? What claim did Johann Wolfgang von Goethe make on the great Iris, JJ, to be linked in a trinity with our two way fambly favourites, the Scribbler of Southwark and Stratford,  and the Circumnavigator of the Circles Line?

Busty substances - the many faces  of Goethe

It maybe because I'm a Londoner... or so to speak, but Gouty's big disability is that he was foreign.  I know that reeks of UKIPologies, but ecktually the nuances of Goethe's German have never (apparently) been easily translated into the mother tongue of Air Traffic Controllers, as spoken in Thanet (for example).  Daunty, on the other cheek, is ultimately fairly simple to sing along with (Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita....)  But try putting Faust (part II) into google translate (Alles Vergängliche/Ist nur ein Gleichnis;/Das Unzulängliche/Hier wird's Ereignis;) and it fairly rapidly sounds like a greek menu in Soho.... (For the record, the German means something like: All that must disappear/Is but a parable;/What lay beyond us, here/All is made visible.... and it does not contain the words Taramosalata, Houmous nor Tzatziki)....

Well....  Der truth is that Goethe was a wise guy.  And he struck it lucky in writing a piece called Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of the Young Werther) and scoring a hit with it in 1774 when its author was barely 25 years old. 

Following the sensational success (associated with the Sturm und Drang movement, you know) of this youthfully romantic epistolary novel (keep up) the then Duke of Saxe-Weimar, Karl August, made Goethe a member of his Privy Council. People of discernment, he said, congratulate me on possessing this man. His intellect, his genius is known. It makes no difference if the world is offended because I have made Dr Goethe a member of my most important collegium without his having passed through the stages of minor official professor and councillor of state.....  A diplomatic edict, for sure - worthy of FIFA.....

And so, dear reader, clever clogs Gouty became a sort of Alastair Campbell of the day, before having a sort of Blairite hissy fit (of course I exaggerate) in 1786 and disappearing to Italy for two years.

Which adventure near came to a sudden stop in Malcesine, when arrest threatened the supposed Austrian spy for sketching the castle....

It was indeed here, on the very day that the King (Elvis) died, that I first became aware of Goethe.....  As it is the population of this Lake Garda town all converse in fluent German, and it would seem as if it were but only the other day that Herr Gouty was actually imprisoned in said fortress....

But, hey, it didn't really happen, or at least it was only a Sturm in a Stein, and he made his way to la bella Roma, where, throwing off the pressures of the Weimar Privy Council, and the strains of his erstwhile unrequited love life, he allowed the jolly German aristos who made up a kind of artistic/literati conclave within the infernal city, to wine and dine young Werther until his head span....  As for the artistic tastes of the German colony here, I can only say: the bells ring loudly, but not in unison.....

A couple of days later (after mentioning Angelica Kaufmann, a Swiss painter, married to the Italian painter, Antonio Zucchi) he wrote, I find it becoming more and more difficult to give a proper account of my stay in Rome.  The more I see of this city, the more I feel myself getting into deep waters.....

Ah, poverino!  I had the same problem (though that's where the similarity ends!)  Goethe's Italian Journey is a most approachable book, which, if not the greatest literary achievement of a long life, gives us not only an insight into a different Italy, but also into the life of one that some at least rate as a near equal to Shakespeare and Dante.... I spent some happy, peaceful hours alone in the Public Gardens close to the harbour [Palermo].  It is the most wonderful spot on earth.  Though laid out formally and not very old, it seems enchanted and transports one back into the antique world..... 

[I wonder if it is the paucity of W H Auden's translation, or the superficiality of Gouty's own thoughts, but I am minded that I could have written that....?]

Nagging Gout....  Four horses afore the doors of the Gouty House in Weimar

Anyway, after a great deal of geological specimen collecting (he had 17,800 rock samples when he died), and observations on Raphael's skull (a brain-pan of beautiful proportions and perfectly smooth, without any of those protuberances and bumps which have been observed on other skulls and to which Gall's phrenological theories attach such importance.  I could hardly tear myself away.....)

Anyway, after all that, he made his way back to Weimar, where the good Grand-Duke had kept his place for him, and settled down to a literary life, occupying a vast house with garden on the Frauenplan.  

The house is much as he left it, with his collections of minerals, paintings, sculptures and ceramics on display. He and his wife, Christiane (who died in 1816), developed it into a meeting place and he was constantly holding soirées and receiving distinguished guests.  

Although famous as a writer (his drama Faust was highly influential throughout the literature of Europe; Schopenhauer cited his novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship as one of the four greatest novels ever written, along with Tristram Shandy, La Nouvelle Heloïse, and Don Quixote - though who was he to judge? - and just about everybody from Mozart to Mahler set his poems to music....) Gouty also produced a number of scientific works, and he was read by Charles Darwin, among others.  He himself considered his Theory of Colours (1810) to be his most important work.

A Brown Study - where Gouty worked (and died)

With his friend Sheila (aka Friedrich Schiller, 1759 - 1805) who lived a street away, Gouty founded the Weimar theatre, and together they stand to this day on the Theatreplatz, with fresh flowers at their feet every day.

Sheila's claim to fame, apart from being partially responsible for the term Weimar Classicism, lies in his dramas (several of which became famous operas, such as Verdi's Don Carlos, Donizetti's Maria Stuarda and Rossini's Guillaume Tell) and in his poem, An die Freude, which became the Ode to Joy in the final movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.  

Not a bad claim to fame?

Sheila at home - shame about the wallpaper

Schillers Wohnhaus is an altogether more modest affair than Goethes Wohnhaus und Ausstellung, 

But both give some idea of the lives lived within them, and both have extensive additional space devoted to exhibitions. In Gouty's case, it is an exhausting labyrinth of cases demonstrating just how (indisputably) great the man was, which was in fact the intended destiny of his house (it was open to the public within hours of his death and has remained so ever since).  In Sheila's case, the current exhibition is of works by another worthy Weimar resident (his house still stands on the Marketplace), Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472 -1553).

Sybille of Cleves (not unlike Prunella Scales)

Cranach portrayed himself, next to Martin Luther, in his masterwork, the Triptych Altar Piece in the City Church of St Peter and St Paul,

Lucas Cranach the Elder, with white beard, being anointed with the blood of the crucified Christ

Though apparently several of his greatest works mysteriously went missing in the middle of the twentieth century.  One very fetching Venus can still be seen in a photograph of Hitler's study, though the original is no longer to be found....  The exhibition notes put it clearly:  The Nazis attempted to reassess Europe's cultural heritage from their standpoint of racial chauvinism.... [They] held Cranach the Elder aloft as a representative of 'Germanic artistic creation'....  This ideological instrumentalization (sic) of art went hand-in-hand with their justification of power....  

This had nothing, of course, to do with the fact that Hitler's favourite Cranach was a decidedly sexy young lady wearing nothing but a bee sting..... 

Gouty too was a collector of Cranachs, though his taste was clearly more religious.....

The UNESCO World Heritage committee added Classical Weimar to a list of world heritage sites in 1998, thereby acknowledging the art-historical significance of the public and private buildings and park grounds dating back to the height of Weimar's classical period and the outstanding role Weimar played as an intellectual centre of European life in the late 18th and early 19th century.

It wasn't only Gouty and Sheila, nor the paintings of Lucas Cranach, père et fils, that created this extraordinary heritage.  J S Bach lived and worked here,

The Church of St Peter and St Paul, also known as the Herder Church.
Several of Bach's children were baptised here.

Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche lived here for a while, and as Master of the Weimar School of Arts and Crafts Architect Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus here.  In 1540, five years before his death, 57-year-old Martin Luther wrote to his wife from Weimar, that I’m doing well here. I eat like a Bohemian and drink like a German, thanks be to God for this. Amen.

Martin Luther on the balcony of the Elephant Hotel - the same balcony from which Hitler addressed the local people....

Another famous resident, whose house is also open to the public, was Frans Liszt. He lived here, with his friend Princess Carolyne zu Sayne-Wittgenstein, for the summers between 1869 and 1886, and the music conservatoire of Weimar is named after him. [Fancy having a conservatory named after you!]

Fliszt in the Park

With all this Kultural History it is not surprising that Weimar was European Capital of Culture in 1999, though I suppose it only fair to say that perhaps Joyce's Gouty played the biggest part.....   

But what Gouty would have made of Finnegans Wake..... We have to had them whether we'll like it or not.  They'll have to have us now then we're here on theirspot.  Scant hope theirs or ours to escape life's high carnage of semperidentity by subsisting peasemeal upon variables......

[Aktually, I think the true of them would have gott off like a horse of fire.....]

The Goethe Gartenhaus in the Park on the Ilm

You don't play the flute by just blowing - you've got to move your fingers!

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
28th August 1749 - 22nd March 1832

Flood of Life; Storm of Deeds