Reunification day, Ravenna Schlucht, and music

Saturday, Oct. 3, was the 19th anniversary of German reunification; November 9 will mark 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Southern Germany celebrated by closing up shop and going hiking.

We took my parents for a hike up the Ravenna Schlucht, a pretty, narrow gorge near Freiburg. The trail followed a series of small waterfalls up to a functioning mill house, where a water wheel was powering two rapidly rotating stones to grind whole grain into coarse meal.

Afterward, we headed to St. Peter for an organ concert: a recreation of Mendelssohn's 1840 "Bach Denkmal" (Bach memorial) organ concert at the Thomaskirche (Bach's church) in Leipzig. In 1840, Mendelssohn performed several compositions by Bach, then closed with an improvisation on "O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden" and the motive B-A-C-H (German for B flat-A-C-B natural). Yesterday's concert, featuring organist Johannes Goetz, repeated all of the same works by Bach and closed with a fleshing out (by Rudolf Lutz) of Mendelssohn's unpublished fragments on the aforementioned themes. After the concert, Elias and my dad played a game of chess in front of the church.

It has been a musical weekend. Friday night, we attended a concert in the Muenster featuring various choral psalm settings, including works by Mendelssohn, Dvorak, and Kiel, and Bernstein's Chichester Psalms.

We have not been to a single concert this year in Germany that has not included a composition by Mendelssohn, born 200 years ago in 1809.