Double Hallelujah

Location: Bus (of course) from Rottenburg to Leipzig

Listening to: Haydn - “Seven Last Words of Christ”

Actually, I’m listening to Laura Hewitt talk about her brother Mason and his wine reviewing site - nickelanddimewine.com.  It sounds pretty interesting.  Anyway...

Yesterday we arrived in Rottenburg at around 13:00.  It’s a beautiful town - I’m definitely a little bit jealous of Emily.  We had lunch and took a walking tour - like every town, the churches just take your breath away, especially the Weggental church where we had our concert.  It’s a huge, baroque-style building with beautiful paintings, architecture, and other visual art.  It’s up on a hill via a little service road (which we walked), which only makes it more majestic on the outside.

Last night’s concert was absolutely unforgettable.  For the first time in my career with the chorale, we came back to the front of the church after leaving for an encore performance.  This is a little ironic considering they were so hesitant to applaud at first (because the concert was in a church, I later found out) that I think Dr. C started the applause after Andrew conducted the third or fourth song.  After Mata, our encore song, they applauded so loudly (and in unison) that Dr. C turned to me and asked whether I had another hallelujah in me.  At first I thought he just wanted me to shout “Hallelujah”, but then I realized he was actually asking whether I could hit the two F#‘s in my solo again.  I wasn’t sure, but we did it a second time and I had a blast with it.  It’s a huge, bombastic spiritual where I get to pretend to be Kirk Franklin or an old-time baptist preacher with lines like “Moses stood on the Red Sea shore (been down into the sea), Smotin’ the water with a two-by-four...”  I walked about halfway down the center aisle during the call-and-response section, and there was one older man waving his arm in the air and singing right along with us.  I’ve never smiled so wide in my entire life.  

These very prim-and-proper Germans just can’t get enough of the raw, explosive energy that we’re lucky to call the American spiritual.  As I said before, even the concertmaster of the Leipzig Baroque Orchestra was moved by our “Hallelujah”.  This trip and these audiences have given me a much deeper appreciation for this music; I always knew spirituals were more fun to sing (for me anyway), but I’m not sure I ever really considered their theological significance and power in the same way that we think about the St. Matthew Passion or Praise to the Lord until this week.

After the concert we had a chance to see where Emily’s been going to school all semester.  I don’t suppose all of you know Emily German - she’s a Church Music major from Valpo and an absolutely incredible person.  We’ve really missed her and it was fantastic to see her again.  She attends the Hochschule of Church Music there in Rottenburg, and the facility was pretty interesting.  Music students always joke about living in the VUCA (music building) at Valpo, but she literally does.  The first two floors are classrooms and practice rooms, the third and fourth are residence halls, and the fifth floor is administrative office space.  They have a beautiful view of the surrounding area from the balcony - it must be very intense but I think it would be really cool.  They had a nice reception for us where I actually got to practice my Spanish with Marcel, a Barcelona native (I probably butchered the spelling, lo siento).  Today, Dr. C gave a 90-minute lecture on American choral music, which was probably as educational for the majority of the chorale as it was for the Germans.  I may end up traveling with Emily and Marcel toward the end of July - stay tuned.

After our workshop at the Hochschule, we went to Burg Hohenzollern (again, probably butchered the spelling on that one).  It’s an enormous castle on top of a mountain, owned by the Prussian royal family and its descendants for around a millennium.  I thought it was especially cool to see Frederick the Great’s flutes and scores, after reading Evening in the Palace of Reason in our J.S. Bach seminar.  That didn’t happen at the castle, but the museum area downstairs had some really interesting stuff like those flutes and a bunch of old letters, medals, swords, and ridiculous clothing.  I think the most impressive thing (at the risk of sounding very “European”) was the dress - this thing took 11 people a full year to make, using only real silver thread.  The train could have covered a small room like a rug.  It was really incredible.

We’re on about hour 6 of this bus trip - I wasn’t hungry and the beer was cheaper than my Diet Coke or the water but I resisted.  We’ll be staying in Leipzig for the rest of the trip (except our final night in Berlin), and we’re all pretty excited about it.  We loved our motel and that area of town - should be a fun week.  Adios.