Something is rotten in the state of Denmark

Actually it isn’t, so far as I can tell, Denmark is an astonishingly cool place. But I hope you didn’t honestly expect an old Shakespeare buff like me to put together a blog without saying that at some point!

So far as the state of my WagnerQuest is concerned, we’ve got a nice little pattern going. Most of the days this week have begun with a little breakfast, see left (at first, squinting from across the street, I thought this place had a slightly different name and so took this photo for Juraj’s benefit):



After a light breakfast, we’ve typically been trying to get in some sight-seeing, as for example this church from 1170 (Danish architecture from this period is more preoccupied with light and space than some of their southern contemporaries):



Somewhere along the way there ends up being a little food excursion (Seneca, you might want to open a franchise of this fine establishment up in your hometown):



And then before you know it, it’s time to take the water bus, which leaves from the canal at Nyhavn (named for my college town of New Haven, formerly a lot of seedy fishermen’s dives, now more upscale restaurants and housing):



The water bus takes us and thousands of other Wagnerites over to the beautiful new opera house for the evening’s show:



We had a day off without any opera, yesterday, and so took a little adventure out of town and went up the north Øresund coast to Helsingør, known to Shakespeare fans as Elsinore. It’s not far from Copenhagen—about 45 minutes on the train—although it would have taken Hamlet a long time to get here from college down in Wittenberg. Across a narrow strait from Helsingør is the little Swedish town of Helsingborg. Ferries constantly shuttle back and forth between the two cities, and if the water weren’t so darn cold I bet you could swim it:



The castle itself dates from the Renaissance (although it was burned and rebuilt several times), when the Danes noticed that all traffic passing out of the Baltic Sea into the Black Sea had to pass through this tiny little channel, and thus they could get really wealthy by taxing every ship that passed by or blowing them out of the water if they failed to pay the tax. Reminds me a little of all the Ottoman and Italian castles protecting the narrow passage of the Bosphorus, north of Istanbul, which we visited five summers ago. Elsinore (its real name in Danish is Kronberg Slot) is, in fact, a really beautiful castle, much more so than you typically see when you watch a film or go to a production of Hamlet:



It doesn’t have much to do with Shakespeare’s play, however, despite the fact that they seem to be constantly producing the play on the castle grounds and in the nearby town. Shakespeare, everyone thinks, had never been to Denmark (although his patron, King James, had stayed at this very castle, which is where his wife Queen Anne of Denmark had grown up). Will merely revised an older play, which was itself a new version of an old story. But our knowledge that it never really happened didn’t stop us from shouting out our favorite lines from the play at every chance we got, photographing ourselves in the attitudes of the various characters in places where they might have been, and trying to find Ophelia floating in the moat:



After our Elsinore adventure we returned toward Copenhagen, stopping briefly in the town of Humlebæk to check out the fabulous Lousiana Museum of Modern Art (it began as the private collection of a wealthy art-collector, all three of whose wives were named “Louise”). Unfortunately we ran out of time at the Lousiana Museum, and so I can’t say I really got to enjoy all the museum was offering. But I did get to explore their fabulous sculpture garden, a particular interest since a) I’ve always been kind of interested in this art form and b) the Seattle Art Museum back home is about to open a huge new sculpture garden. The following photo shows my favorite sculpture I saw yesterday (I’m sorry, I didn’t get the name of the piece or the artist):



It’s tough, in a two-dimensional picture, or in blathery prose, to represent the extreme coolness of this piece. At the center of the marble sphere there are four windows, two looking out at the camera, both angled from top left to bottom right, but one on top of the plane and one below; the two windows that look to the woods are oriented in the opposite direction, since the plane back there is at perpendicular to the one on this side. Anyway, it’s really fun and makes you want to go and stick your head inside it, or pretend you’re an article of clothing and put yourself in the dryer.

On today’s trip, as you might guess, there was much discussion of the two Ring operas we’ve seen this week, and the singing, design, and concept so far. No one is absolutely convinced, but I’d say most of us are curious to see where director Kaspar Bech Holten and his team are going to take us. Between their feminist/matriarchal approach to the Ring, the popularity of Denmark’s Queen Margarethe, the new novel everyone’s talking about that’s supposed to hit Danish bookstores this morning (Peter Høeg’s The Silent Girl, apparently it too has something to do with rebalancing gender inequities), I’m not at all surprised to find a piece like this one in the Louisiana Sculpture Garden:



We had a very late lunch in the outdoor café at the Lousiana Museum, the best part of which was the view. The museum is situated on a bluff overlooking the Øresund; the sculpture garden extends out into well-landscaped grounds that sweep down to the water. In the distance is Sweden, now a little farther away than at Helsingør. Here are John and Laurel Nesholm, posing with John’s ancestral home of Sweden in the background:



John had been to the Lousiana Museum in 1965, and was enthusiastic about making another visit, even a brief one. Laurel enjoyed the museum, but was skeptical of the video art installations, especially the one featuring the drunken, portly Danish video artist whose ‘piece’ consisted of an endlessly protracted strip-tease which I can’t imagine anyone wanting to watch. I think the creator probably hoped to call attention to the narcissistic process of the solipsist artist’s self-revelation. It reminded me more of the Star Wars Kid. For narcissistic self-revelation, I always say, nothing beats a blog!