Munich and Luzern

I’m writing this blog this evening down here in fabulous Venice-—“Ah, Venice...” you’re supposed to moan—-where a couple important chapters of Wagner’s life take place, unlike the Ludwig castles. I’m gonna have to skip the pictures (plus the leftover pictures I didn’t post from the other day) because this internet connection is, as we say in London, "a bit dodgy". But I can give you the scoop on my discoveries in two fine Wagner cities.

MUNICH
Wagner himself only lived in Munich for a little bit, maybe a year and a half. When Ludwig II became king of Bavaria, in 1864, he immediately summoned Wagner to be his Court Composer (even though Wagner was technically still in exile because of his participation in the Dresden uprising back in 1849). Wagner immediately moved to Munich and began living in outrageously sumptuous style, pissing all all the Müncheners because a) he was obviously spending all the king’s money on his personal luxuries, b) he went around telling everyone he was the king’s tutor and principal advisor, and that the king would do anything Wagner said and c) he was also obviously having an affair with Cosima Liszt von Bülow, a married woman (whose husband was Wagner’s right-hand man). And don’t forget d) he was often a complete and total asshole. So by 1866, they ganged up on him and asked the king to get him to leave town.

Now, it’s a really lovely town! I’d heard lots of nice things about Munich and was happy to find out they were all true. Like Berlin, it’s a great world city; but it doesn’t give me that slightly odd, askew feeling I noticed in Berlin (even though Munich, too, was bombed to pieces during the war). Many people refer to Munich as 'a great big village’, and I understand why; it’s easy to feel really safe there, apparently there’s no crime at all, just lots of fun-loving beer-drinking Bavarians and, this week, soccer fans (they call it ‘Fußball’ here). There are zillions of orchestras and two big opera houses: I was staying half a block from the smaller of the two opera houses, Theater am Gärtnerplatz, where my old friend Frances Lucey (known to Seattle opera fans as Rosalba, in Florencia, Despina, and in a few weeks Sophie van Faninal) is in the ensemble. (Meaning she’s one of about 20 resident singers, performing a handful of roles in the 10 or so operas they do in rep each year.) I heard her sing a charming Papagena (in an otherwise stupid production of Magic Flute) and Berta in a Rossini Barbiere set in the land of insects. (Don't ask...just come back when I get the pictures up!)

My three favorite things about Munich were the opera houses (including Frances’s theater, where they sing everything in German and do a lot of lighter stuff, including American musicals), the eastern-looking onion domes on the tops of church steeples (a Bavarian obsession, I understand) and the incredible Victualienmarkt—a vast open-air market, à la Pike’s Market, with lots and lots of yummy and weird things all prepared and ready to go. I had some charming Bavarian beer and even tried the local favorite Weisswurst, a sausage made from (ugh) veal. But when in Rome...live like a Roman, and it'll turn out they know what they're doing!

LUZERN
When Wagner was forced out of Munich, he moved to Tribschen, a nice house in Switzerland on the shores of Lake Lucerne, right outside the town of Luzern. It was here he wrote much of Meistersinger and Siegfried (his two comedies), became great friends with Nietzsche, and spent probably the happiest period in his life. I followed in his footsteps and went down to Luzern from Munich (it’s about a 5 hour train ride, mostly through the Alps). The real reason I went was to see the Richard Wagner Museum now housed in Tribschen; but frankly, after Bayreuth and Villa Wahnfried there’s not much point in going to any other Wagner museums. Luckily for me, there turned out to be plenty more in Luzern itself.

The thing about Wagner museums is, they’re not necessarily very well-funded, or for that matter professional. I’m fond of Ballard’s Nordic Heritage Museum; but if you’re coming from EMP, or even the Seattle Art Museum, there’s something that’s charmingly naive about these places, and the Wagner museums are no different. They remind me of the Catholic churches famed for having relics of saints—-St. Bartholomew’s fingernail, part of Lazarus’s chest, etc. “Here’s a letter Richard Wagner wrote his landlord!” “Here’s a reproduction of a photo of Richard Wagner you’ve already seen 10,000 times!” “Here’s one of Wagner’s silly berets!” But then again, what would you expect to find in a museum devoted to one person?

When I got to Luzern, I took the bus down to Tribschen-—it was a hot day, and we passed by a school where a bunch of 12 year-olds were tossing javelins—-and checked out the museum, where the coolest things were a late-19th century painting of the Red and White Lion Inn in the Leipzig Brühl, where Wagner was born (which is now a department store, see last week’s blog), a bust of Mathilde Wesendonck, a bust of Wagner’s hand, which is only a little smaller than mine-—he was a very short man, but had comparatively big hands—-and a Tristan und Isolde altarpiece. Not kidding, it’s one of those fold-out triptych things in the shape of a heart; when the covers are closed, on the outside you see T+I glaring at each other, as at the start of Act One Scene Three; open it up, and inside they’re naked, doing it, and reaching up toward a large figure of some kind (I suppose it’s supposed to be the goddess of Night)—-with, on the left panel, Tristan in Kareol yearning for the right panel, which is Isolde coming to him on waves full of flowers. Oh my God. Never seen anything so ridiculous in all my years.

I walked back up to the main part of town, which hugs the shores of the river feeding into Lake Lucerne. (What was the ‘outskirts of town’ in Wagner’s day is really about 20 minutes walk from the center of things.) Since it was a totally gorgeous day, I signed up for a boat ride that evening: the ferry out into the Vierstättenwaldsee (known to us as Lake Lucerne?) with dinner served, a two-hour sunset cruise. Just amazing. I mean, I knew Switzerland was supposed to be pretty; but this was outrageous! (You really should be looking at some of the pictures right now.) Cross a boat ride through the San Juan Islands with a drive through the Cascades and Olympics, with the mountains coming straight down to water’s edge, and cute little villages everywhere you look, and you’ll get some sense of this alarmingly beautiful corner of the world. I met some very nice Swiss people on the boat, a young couple who came from an hour away just to enjoy this sunset cruise and who didn’t mind playing tour guide to an idiot American. One thing that alarmed and embarrassed me: Swiss German is not German German. After all that time in Germany, I was getting the flow of things again with the language. I even caught myself giving an impromptu lecture to some college kids in German the other day. But I couldn’t understand a word anyone in Switzerland was saying, and I got the sense that they’d rather speak English than Hochdeutsch. Also, they don’t use euros (why didn’t anybody tell me about that?) and their electric sockets are not the same as those in Germany or Denmark. Sigh. What you need to know, to be prepared for, when traveling...