Dresden to Pittsburgh

Thabo

This young bull elephant, like me, is moving from Dresden to Pittsburgh's Highland Park neighborhood this month. Thabo attacked his keepers last year, injuring one of them severely, and needs a new home. The Pittsburgh Zoo down the street from Wellesley Rd. offered to take him, as they have a good herd of bull elephants, plenty of room, and, I guess, more courageous keepers. So he's being shipped in a giant crate later this month. Thabo, five, was born and raised in the Dresden Zoo, a result of artificial insemination (glad I wasn't there).

Such a cutie!

little Thabo-Umasai (his full name)

The Sächsische Zeitung in Dresden did an interview with me shortly before my departure, with the hook that both of us were soon leaving for Pittsburgh. They also asked me a lot of questions about what I have been doing in Dresden musically, and took pictures of me in the Professor's office, and in front of it with bassoon. We'll see what kind of article they come up with. Soon, I imagine.

Neighborhood connections: Hellerau-Plauen

Hellerau

Plauen

Hellerau and Plauen are neighborhoods in two opposite corners of Dresden which I visited in my last week here. I am writing this in the airport awaiting my flight back to the US. I chose to go there because the brochures about them put out by the local transit authority made them sound interesting. They were.

The brochures describe walking routes around the neighborhoods, pointing out interesting sights. The point is that by taking public transportation around Dresden, one can see really interesting stuff. I, of course, rode my bike, and found connections between the two places that were most interesting (to me), and probably not often noticed.

Hellerau row houses...

...and gardens.

Weisseritz gorge at Felsenkellerei brewery.

I visited them in alphabetical order. Plauen is a planned garden community, designed at the beginning of the beginning of the twentieth century after the model of English garden towns. It was intended to offer workers and others a place to live away from the noise and pollution of the city, and is in a peaceful, wooded area. The many distinctive row houses are tiny, but all are connected with small garden plots. Apple trees abound.  Near the edge of the community, the planners placed a public well and a linden tree, something that the brochure says is typical of small towns.

The designers also included provisions for artistic life. There is a large hall which was to serve as a performance space for dance and music, and Émile Jaques-Dalcroze was brought from Switzerland to lead a music and dance school. The hall now houses the European Center for the Arts, a festival of modern dance, music, and art. It was initially a hotbed of the avant-garde, but World War I soon stopped all further cultural life and development before it could really establish itself. In the Communist times, the hall and surrounding buildings housed Soviet soldiers and their gym.

The next day, I travelled to the Dresden area of Plauen. It was an industrial area with large millworks and a brewery, situated on the Weisseritz, a tributary to the Elbe. The Weisseritz goes through a spectacular gorge there, and the Felsenkellerei aged their beers in cool cellars dug into the rock. The brochure walk goes through woods and along the river and up the ridge and back into the town. In the town area of Plauen, the businessman Bienert, who ran the industry here, had a fountain built in honor of the German poet Wolfgang Müller (above). Probably because Bienert made his fortune primarily in milling, and the poet's name means "miller," and he wrote romantic poetry about millers.

Wolfgang Müller lived in the early nineteenth-century and is known now primarily because he wrote two cycles of poetry that Franz Schubert immortalized with his musical settings, Die schöne Müllerin and Die Winterreise. The fountain in Plauen shows the young miller hiking, with a quote from the first poem of Die schöne Müllerin at his feet: "Wandering is the miller's delight." And under that, you can see a millwheel.

The connection to Hellerau is seen in the first photo above: Die Winterreise's fifth song is called "The Linden Tree," and starts "At the fountain near the gate stands a linden tree." So Schubert and Müller unwittingly tie together these two Dresden neighborhoods, which didn't or barely existed when they wrote the songs. Nice performances on youtube for "The Linden Tree" with Schreier and Eschenbach:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05E3cVI88hA
and "Wandering" with Pears and Britten:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqgvp751if4

It has rained four days straight in Dresden, including the day of my departure. It was very sad to leave, but the bad weather made it easier. Maybe it was crying. But I'm going home.