36 hours in NYC

Day 1, Feb. 28

Turns out that when you tell people that you're heading to/are in NYC to see the Caspar David Friedrich retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 9 out of 10 people say "how nice--who's that?"

Those of us who grew up playing from the very affordable two-volume Dover reprint of Beethoven's piano sonatas know who Caspar David Friedrich is...

Mondaufgang am Meer (1822)

Mann und Frau in Betrachtung des Mondes (ca 1824).
And Beethoven sonatas edited by Heinrich Schenker, which I'd never noticed before...

...so "how nice--who's that?" confirms not only that liberal arts education relating to European history and art history has dwindled in the past 40 years, but so has the number of USAmerican kids taking piano lessons. Ah well.

Gentle Reader(s), Der Wanderer ueber dem Nebelmeer was there, inviting us across two or so centuries to share in the sublime, to feel the intimate human connection (and disconnection) of Wanderlust and the appeal and immensity of nature both conquerable (as viewed from atop the hill) and distantly out of reach.

We're going to that hill in June.

Immensity...

...intimacy...

Wanderlust

We were in NYC to see Der Wanderer, but one of our favorite paintings at the Met turned out to be Berglandschaft in Böhmen (Mountain Landscape in Bohemia, ca. 1830). 

As a landscape amongst other 1830s landscapes, it was apparently a revelation. The Met's accompanying text borrowed from an 1833 review: "The most striking, and the most interesting thing about the painting, is its very sparsity....Three colors and two lines, is that a landscape?... And why so extraordinary?... What emerges in this picture is the abstraction of the artist himself, his choice."  

And yet what we saw wasn't sparsity or abstraction, but so much attention to detail that our 21st-century eyes saw it almost as a photograph, with the familiar, vivid, green and yellow fields that we see all over Germany.

From the Querweg hike in 2022... 

On the wall opposite the Bohemian landscape was an unfinished work, with layers and layers of surface detail still waiting to be filled in, looking flat and decidedly non-photographic in comparison.

Das brennende Neubrandenburg, ca. 1834

Ruine Oybin (1835) glowed. How does one make paint glow?

In addition to oil paintings, the exhibit featured numerous sketches and watercolors. Two faves:

This looks like a good spot for casting
magic bullets, a la the image below...

...which is not by Friedrich--the 1822 Weimar set
design for the Wolf's Glen scene in Der Freischuetz

This watercolor of a cave looked more detailed from a distance than up close

By the time we finished wandering through the Friedrich exhibit, we were a little overwhelmed by the quantity of art that still laid before us at the Met. We took a quick zip through a few more rooms, then headed up the street to the Neue Gallerie and its basement cafe that had been recommended by friends. Therein we partook of the most ridiculously expensive Kaffee und Kuchen we are likely to ever encounter in our lives. Nonetheless, it gave us the energy to return to the Met on our way back to our hotel, to check out some of the other exhibits and take a quick look at the Friedrich exhibit one more time (carpe diem).

Some additional Met highlights:

Before we ingested cake, we felt about as tired as this scribe looks.

Tiffany

Part of a ca. -10 BCE temple relocated from an area that flooded thanks to the Aswan Dam

Closeup to show the graffiti. People have been jerks for centuries...

Zoom in to see the surface-decoration pubic hair.

We saw a similar hippo last year in Vienna's Kunsthistoriches Museum

In the evening, we met up with a dear friend from grad school, J.H., and I can't believe we didn't think to take a single photo together.

Day 2, March 1

J.H. works in a building called The Spiral, and she invited us up to the 52 floor to admire the views.

The Spiral has terraces that spiral down the outside of the building

The Spiral is near the Vessel. J.H. said it had only recently re-opened after a series of deaths by suicide. We didn't climb it, but it offered some fun photo ops. You can't see the new safety nets in the photo below.

The Vessel, looking up from below

After forgetting to take selfies again and then parting ways with J.H., S and I headed to the TKTS booth to look for discounted tickets to a Broadway show. So did a mile or so of other tourists, motivating us to walk to the August Wilson Theater, where we did not have to wait in line and found affordable last-minute tickets to Cabaret, starring Adam Lambert and Auli'i Cravalho.

Wow. Just wow. "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" was particularly bone-chilling, with the line "but soon says a whisper, arise, arise" extending into a Nazi salute, as though we were watching Elon Musk saluting behind the presidential seal of the United States. Later, Lambert--as he apparently had done in previous performances--paused near the end of "If You Could See Her Through My Eyes" to call out audience members who laughed at an anti-Semitic line. "No," he said slowly and clearly. "This is not a joke. Pay attention." When uncomfortable giggles followed, he repeated the message.

After the show, we swung back toward our hotel to find an early dinner before heading to the airport. We ended up at Sicily Osteria, to which we enthusiastically give all thumbs up, from the Finocchio salad (repeat at home!: arugula, shaved fennel, toasted hazelnuts, fileted orange segments, and pomegranate seeds) to the beautiful signature dessert, Limone di Sicilia (a bed of lemon jam and lemon creme with streusel crumbs, on which sat a yellow white-chocolate shell filled with lemon vanilla mousse and lemon confit). Hard to imagine we'll ever eat a more beautiful or gustatorily satisfying dessert.

At first, we thought this was a real lemon. Amazingly delicious.

We walked an extra long route to the Metro to get a few more miles in, then headed to JFK and home to Durham.

Pursuing Nebelmeer

In 2023, I wrote about my desire--inspired by the painting Der Wanderer ueber dem Nebelmeer by Caspar David Friedrich--to hike the Malerweg, an almost-loop hike in the Saechsische Schweiz of east-central Germany. The trail has a reputation as one of Germany's most beautiful hikes. It includes acrophobe-challenging cliffs, bridges, and stairs that have drawn tourists for generations.

Alas, the stars (i.e. distances and train schedules) didn't align for hiking it in 2023, but the trail remained on my list of aspirations.

2024 marked the semiquincentennial (250th) anniversary of Caspar David Friedrich's birth (Sept. 5, 1774), but we had too much other hiking planned last summer to include the distant Malerweg.

This summer is looking to be the time to hike it--and goodness, how the stars are aligning.

The most essential star: S will be serving as a mentor for three weeks in Dresden, where grad students from Nearly Ivy, Backyard State, and UBY will be participating in a research exchange program with the Technische Universität Dresden. While he's busy mentoring, I'll be busy hiking, with hopes that he can meet up with me for weekend sections of the trail. The Malerweg has the advantage of easy S-bahn access from Dresden. Indeed, instead of staying in huts/hotels every night along the way, several segments offer opportunities to cross to the south side of the Elbe and catch a train back to Dresden. 

The second star is quite the treat: Der Wanderer ueber dem Nebelmeer, along with ~75 other works by Friedrich, will be on exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC this spring, from Feb. 8 - May 11, 2025. Normally these paintings are scattered in various museums in Germany and beyond. Der Wanderer usually resides in Hamburg, a long enough schlepp from Steinebach--and even from Dresden--that we've never seen it in person.* What a treat to be able to see all of these works gathered in one place, a short, cheap flight from Durham. Hooray for international collaborations and semiquincentennials!

The third star also promises to be magical. We seem to be in the recent habit of seeing at least one opera per summer. In the spirit of German Romanticism and art inspired by the Saechsische Schweiz and Bayrischer-/Böhmerwald, we've purchased tickets to see Der Freischuetz at the Bregenzer opera festival in July. The previews look both fantastic and phantasmagoric, and it's hardly a surprise that librettist Friedrich Kind and composer Carl Maria von Weber both lived in Dresden when Der Freischuetz was composed. The Wolfsschlucht on the Hockstein along the Malerweg is one of several presumed candidates for the landscape that inspired the opera's famous Wolf's Glen scene, wherein the eponymous magic bullets are melodramatically cast.

*It's possible that we saw Der Wanderer ueber dem Nebelmeer in 1992, the first time I visited Germany with S; we took a long road trip that included Hamburg, where he had been a college student before transferring to the U.S. S has no recollection of visiting the Hamburger Kunsthalle on that trip, nor when he was a student, because "why would I want to do that?" But here we are now, 33 years later, and all grown up...

Expanding the Bavarian curse repertoire

Cross post!

Der Bürostuhl über dem Nebelmeer

An ad for The Atlantic showed up in a teeny tiny corner of my computer screen today, and I clicked on it for obvious reasons. Didn't read the article, but here's the image (Getty; Paul Spella / The Atlantic). Der Bürostuhl über dem Nebelmeer, I presume? 

Lenggries to Brannenburg, Day 5: Bayrischzell to Brannenburg via Wendelstein

Our final day of gap closing took us up the Wendelstein and down to Brannenburg. The Wendelstein is a popular peak for tourists, made easily accessible by gondola from Bayrischzell and cog train from Brannenburg, so we encountered lots of people at the top, but only a few on the trails.

Heading up:

Well would ya look at that: signage for the Koenig Maximilian Weg. Hello, old friend. We had two directions to choose from as we approached the top of the mountain, so of course we took Maximilian's route.

A chapel greeted us near the top...

...with the sort of views we had come to expect:

We paused to enjoy some Kuchen, and then joined many other tourists hiking the Panorama Weg around the top. The route included a tunnel...

...and, as the trail's name suggested, abundant would-be panoramic views:

As we reached the astronomical observatory at the tippy top, the clouds began to clear...

...at least looking up. In every other direction, the views were remarkably similar:

In theory, Hohenpeissenberg is visible yonder...

Posing with a pair of lovers by Erika Maria Lankes

As we headed back down,...

Can you spot the chapel below?

...the clouds finally cleared...

The trail zigged and zagged

...and we could see all the way into the valley below.

We then began the long descent...

...down...

...to...

We didn't take the train, but we waved as it passed by

...Brannenburg. We celebrated with gelato and pizza before hopping on the Regiobahn and S8 back to Steinebach.  

Grand total for our five days' effort: 65 miles, ~16,500 ft elevation gain.