Robert Stadler

When I bought my ticket for the Dresden gallery for sculpture and fine arts, I was offered a ticket to the show in the building  next door as well, a show by called 'You may also like: Robert Stadler.'  I had poked my head in the door on my way to the gallery and had seen that it was a one room show which didn't look terribly promising. But I bought the dual ticket just in case. I am glad I did because looks can be deceving. Like the title of the show, Stadlers 'art’ (or craft?) is thoughtful and memorable. He takes everyday objects and changes them, making comments on society and how we organise our lives.

I particularly liked his dissolving plastic chair. He said he made it because he hated the ubiquitous plastic chairs that are just everywhere. I think he'd like them to decompose organically, but like everything plastic they don't. They just break and become a problem.

Disappearing plastic chair by Robert Stadler

Another of his works struck me particularly, mainly because it reminded me of a childhood incident. Stadler had made a  monkey with very large pink balls,  a comment on what we find embarrassing and don't like talking about.

The three silent staff members who stood like statues for the half hour (or was it longer) that I slowly meandered around the room might have smiled as I chuckled. I don't know as I was too engrossed with the monkey.

When I was a kid there was a very prudish Minister​ of the church who called in to say hello  occasionally. I remember him drinking tea  with us one day. We were  being very proper (we were four children) when the talk turned to zoos. I think we must have recently visited a zoo as my  youngest sister looked up at this Minister  and very earnestly informed him that “ the baboon had a red bottom!”. The embarrassment factor must be why I remember the incident to this day. I'm not sure whether he or we were more embarrassed, but most likely my sister once she discovered that you don't talk about bottoms as you drink tea with a Minister.

Robert Stadler's Monkey with large balls.

As I left the gallery that day I congratulated the nearest staff member on their ability to stand motionless for so long. She laughed and looked appreciative. 

Leipzig and Dresden

If you know the language of countries you visit, your visit is so much richer. I wish I knew more languages than two. A good example of added richness this visit were the pre-concert lectures, but chatting with chance acquaintances was equally informative. 

After seeing Salome, my head was in the clouds and I got on the wrong tram. It was a lucky mistake as it brought me in contact with a friendly student from Erfurt. We talked about opera, about music and about the difference between Dresden and Leipzig.

‘ Oh yes,’ he said. 'You' are right. There is a big difference between the two cities. Leipzig is very ‘Weltoffen’ (open to the world). Dresden, not so much.’

I had read in Dresden that the city had been at the end of the train line during the days of divided Germany and too far from the border to get western TV, so they had to rely on state television. (How times have changed.) My student friend said that the impact is still being felt. He said that there have been big demonstrations in Dresden against asylum seekers that shocked the rest of the country.

I told him about the woman in Dresden who said she couldn't imagine people wanting to live in a place they weren't born in. She had been astonished to hear I was traveling alone and I doubt I could ever have changed her mind set. My student friend said that in his opinion the changes since 1989 had simply been too much for people to cope with. The wall came down, the old order was replaced by a new order that was not always better, and then there was the refugee crisis. 

My Leipzig landlady on the other hand was an example of Leipzig openness. She said that there were a lot of mixed marriages nowadays, 'whites and blacks; Christians and Muslims, Germans and foreigners' and in her opinion the only thing that mattered was that the couples were nice to each other. 

A lecturer staying at my pension who runs exchange programs with the Leipzig University told me that students love Leipzig. She said it is not only cheaper but 'much cheaper' than studying in the big cities where the price of a room is very high. The waitress at the little Italian restaurant across the road confirmed this. She was from Albania and has spent a year in Hamburg before moving to Leipzig. 
"I've been here seven years now," she said proudly. "I love it here."

Südplatz, Leipzig:
the Italian restaurant
 is on the ground floor

Dresden - youth culture

Äussere Neustadt

If you take the tram from Dresden's central station over the River Elbe to Neustadt then walk north, you reach Äussere (Outer) Neustadt. This is where alternative youth prefer to live and the buildings here are older than the old-looking buildings in the center which are mostly reconstructions. 

I went in the morning when it was very quiet with most shops still shut (one had a sign saying "open at 17:00") but wandering through the courtyards was still a pleasure as many of the buildings have been decorated with interesting artwork, some of which, like the piping below, was functional as well as decorative. 

Dresden : the hill from 1813

Dresden's "old city" has some beautiful old buildings, buildings which have been re-created from post war rubble, some like the Semper Oper during DDR times and other like the Frauenkirche, relatively recently. 

There is a lot of Dresden though that is not so beautiful. As trams criss cross the inner city much of what you see are square soulless DDR-and-moderrn blocks planted in still-empty land. I can't help but think of all those refugees bombed to oblivion in 1945. 

View from my window. The building on the left is an office block, residential on the right

This is the view from my window. The building is one tram stop from the station and is part Hotel, part hostel. It looks out over offices and squat apartment buildings on my side and the railway line on the other side - I am glad I requested a quiet room when I booked as it has been too hot to keep the windows shut. 

View over the train track.

Yellow part is hostel, white part is Hotel.

At every corner you are reminded of this city's turbulent past. In a city park a small monument with a jar of flowers in front of it was a commemoration of "The Red Army".  I wondered who put the flowers there.

Commemorating the Red Army.

On Sunday I discovered another historical memorial.  Sunday was a very hot day in Dresden and about 6 o'clock I looked for somewhere cool to eat. There were plenty of places open at the station nearby but not much else in the area. I checked out Google maps and discovered a cafe in a small park a few blocks away. Google said it was open and the menu looked solid old-fashioned Germany fare.

The park was shady and pleasant, perched on a small hill, a lovely spot on a hot afternoon but there were not very many people there. They served beer and Wiener Wurstchen with toast, so that was what I ordered.

An elderly couple sat down at my table as it was the only table of the three with seats to spare. (It turned out all the people at the café knew each other.) They told me the hill was created in 1813 to stop Napoleon's invading army. They came close, but not to this spot. You get the feeling in Dresden that the past is very much present, the distant past as well as the recent past.

The elderly woman said she could not understand people who leave the place they are born in. They were from near by and the cafe was their ‘local’.  She looked around at the others and said, " They are all from here. They live even closer than we do."

The 'hill' with the cafe between the trees.

Maximilian Schnaus (*1986)

In the center of Dresden, near the Frauenkirche is a booth selling festival tickets. I asked there about a good place to get a salad. 

They not only recommended Vapiano restaurant on the other side of the square (good choice), but told me about a free pre-concert concert taking place at 7pm in the Frauenkirche. It was an organ concert by Maximilian Schnaus, who has a stipend with Stiftung Kunst und Musik für Dresden. He was playing his work Come Sweetest Death. 

I went, primarily to have a chance of seeing the inside of the church  before dark, but oh how glad I was that I went.

I usually find organ music rather boring as it never seems to change - but not this time. It was exactly the sort of music one would expect of a 21st century composer and the sort of music you wished you heard more often.

It began with sounds of things water somewhere far away (reminded me of Wagner's Rheingold) and high pitched distant birds then moved slowly into the loudest thunder. I wondered if it might  shake the church foundations. There was no room for boredom in the half hour piece which ended with the sweetest of melodies.

Thank you Maximilian Schnaus!

Frauenkirche: ceiling

Rienzi at the Frauenkirche

In Dresden's Frauenkirche, listening to the Overture from Wagner's Reinzi, then mezzo-soprano Waltroud Meier singing Straus' Four Last Songs, I wonder, ' have I have died and gone to heaven?'

But no, I am alive and fulfilling a long held dream: to visit the Frauenkirche in Dresden and hear a concert. That is should include something written by Wagner then songs sung by Waltraud Meier is the unbelievable dream. 

The music (which I heard last night after a train trip from Hamburg) put me on such a 'high' that I was still spinning and sleepless at 2am.

Waltraud Meier and festival orchestra take a bow.

I was on level two, high above the performers (there is also a level 3) but the acoustics were wonderful and I heard every word. The Rienzi overture was fabulous and made me want to return for a Wagner binge.

 The Frauenkirche was destroyed during the second world war and rebuilt between 1994 and 2005.  During the intermission a local audience member told me he had studied in Dresden and had always hoped the pile of rubble in the city center where the Frauenkirche once was might one day be rebuilt. He said that when they did restart building they laid all the stones out in the city square, hoping to reuse them with use of a computer.  The German building rules, however, require that stones which have been subject to fire be tested for stability and when these stones were tested many of them, being sandstone, were found to be unstable. Those that are original are dark, the new stones are light coloured. The building is overwhelmingly light coloured. 

After the concert: Frauenkirche at night

Dresden under water

Dresden, June 2013

Dresden is a city I have long wanted to visit but never quite reached. In 2006 I was planning a visit but the city flooded, undoing much of the work of the just-completed and much vaunted city renovations.

Now the water is rising again and the Dresdner Semperoper is cancelling opera performances.  I shall have to plan my visit out of the rainy season as floods are predicted to get more frequent.