Schumann Wahlfahrt

You'd think that because 2010 is the 200th anniversary of Robert Schumann's birth, every organ concert this year from here to Berlin would feature at least one of the composer's intriguingly unidiomatic organ works, in the same way organists celebrated Felix Mendelssohn's 200th Jubelaeumsjahr last year. Of course, Mendelssohn wrote a lot more music for the organ than Schumann did, and his holds together better, and it isn't so stormily melodramatic or--how should I say it--puppy-doggishly confident. But with such a small opus, it would seem easy enough to play all of Schumann's organ works, from the brilliant cream-of-the-crop to the so-so ones--and be done with them, just for the record.

Alas, this is not to be. The baroque church in St. Peter is offering a series of six summer organ concerts, and would you believe this past Sunday's was the only one to program anything by Schumann? Knowing this in advance, of course we had to go.

We didn't have access to a car, so first we walked 1.5 miles to the Hauptbahnhof, took a train to Kirchzarten, caught a bus to Stegen, misunderstood the driver and got off one stop too late, near Eschbach, guessed we might find a trail behind a recently-mowed hay field, and ended up at a creek. Since Stefan was the only one of us wearing waterproofed shoes, he gallantly carried me and Elias to the far bank. There we followed a path covered with a lifetime supply of sheep poop until it disappeared in a field. We waved to the sheep across the fence, then switchbacked through the waist-high grasses and flowers until we found a logging road that went directly up the Berg.

The logging road eventually ended at a huge pile of sawed up pine trees--uncharacteristically untidy for Germany--so we descended a bit and took an alternate route: a muddy wildflower- and weed-covered road that ended at a fence in a field of stinging nettles and raspberry brambles. After squeezing through a gap in the fence, we comforted an understandably distraught, scratched-up, stinging-nettle-zapped Elias, decided we'd have better luck bushwhacking through pine branches, and retraced our steps. Trail-less, we continued upward around branches, over sticks and moss-covered rocks, through thinning brambles and nettles, until at last we reached a graded gravel road. There, Elias and I traded right socks, as his was threatening to give him a blister, and we briefly admired that my size 10 foot fits into the sock of a nine-year-old boy.

When the gravel road met up with a mostly paved one, Elias offered a sacrificial gelatin-free gummi bear to a patch of stinging nettles, and it was relatively easy going after that. We followed the ridge for a few more miles, eventually encountering fourteen stations-of-the-cross markers that led us down to St. Peter.

Looking at the photographs above, taken from the ridge, you're probably thinking the hike was pretty easy. I didn't take any pictures of the miserable bits with the evil expanse of stinging nettles. The photo to the left, taken at a small open spot with a wee tilting chapel surrounded by the sourest blackberries in the world, hardly does justice to the incline.

We arrived in St. Peter about 20 minutes before the concert, and stopped off at a little cafe across from the church for the quickest and tastiest Kuchen inhalation ever. Then into the church we went for some Buxtehude, Couperin, and--bestill my beating heart--Schumann.

Johannes Götz played Schumann's B-A-C-H fugues numbers 5 and 2 and the canon in A-flat, and I learned that I am not the only organist baffled by certain aspects of these pieces. It's no wonder Clara Schumann was able to build an entire career out of being the only person who could properly interpret her husband's musical genius. I'm certain that despite their bizarreness, these pieces can be played convincingly, and I'm giving myself the rest of 2010 to figure out how to play the B-A-C-H fugues in a way that, short of leaving me satisfied, at least doesn't make me irritated.

As an encore, Götz played a transcription of Schumann's Lied, "Im wunderschönen Monat Mai," which ends inconclusively on the dominant of the submediant. In nontechnical terms, that means that most of the audience sat in stunned silence waiting for the piece to end, not realizing it already had.

After the concert, we headed to our favorite Italian restaurant and ate gnocchi on the balcony, watching storm clouds roll in over distant Freiburg. Then: a bus to Denzlingen, a train to Herdern, and a rainy walk to Urbanstrasse, and we were home. All in all, quite a fine day.