Tag: culture

Bringing Breakfast

7:45 on an almost-spring morning in a small town in Southern Germany. It’s still chilly enough that I need my fingerless gloves, but the sun is rising in a clear sky, setting the golden stucco of the old bakery at the street corner aglow with the promise of a beautiful day. The upper two stories of the old building look hardly different from how they’ve been for the last century or so, the window shutters beneath the half-hipped red tile roof folded back against the wall to show net-curtain-shrouded windows behind which the inhabitants are starting their day.

But the ground-floor shop windows are as modern as they come. I step through the automatic sliding glass doors into the warm scent of the fresh-baked breads and rolls and pastries that are piled on the shelves against the back wall and displayed behind the glass counter that runs the whole length of the shop.
On the far left, at a small café table a couple of men in business suits down a quick cup of coffee and a roll on their way to catch the train for work. The baker emerges from the back room with an enormous tray piled with fresh pretzels, which he unceremoniously dumps on the counter. Good! Those are just what I’m after. This is Swabia, the original birthplace of the pretzel, and nowhere else are they as good as here. A few salt kernels – not too many – speckle the deep, glossy, mahagony brown of the fat part with the deep slash exposing its creamy interior; the two little twisted arms are thin and crispy. Legend has it they are modelled on the first pretzel baker’s wife’s crossed arms as she watched him bake.

When I turn back to the counter to place my order, I find that two small girls are in line ahead of me, buying a sausage roll, a bread roll, and a couple of pastries for their breaktime snack at school – they’re probably in Grade 1 or 2, no more. “That’ll be €3.40,” the sales lady says as she hands over the paper bag with their goodies, and one of the girls stretches as high as she can to lay her coins on the little wooden tray that sits on top of the glass counter for the purpose. She can barely reach, but she pushes the coins across, grabs her bag, and with a cheerful “Tschüss!” she and her friend skip away. They should still make it in time for school to start at 8:00.

It’s my turn. I can’t be bothered to make a lot of decisions today, choosing from the dozen or more varieties of fresh, crispy bread rolls – white, brown, rye, plain, seeded, sunflower and pumpkin, long or plump or round – so I just ask for three of my favourites, Dinkelbrötchen or spelt rolls: a crispy crust covered in oat flakes, a tender interior with soft chewy spelt kernels throughout. Perfect for a spread of Quark, soft white cheese, topped with strawberry jam. And I ask for two Brezeln, of course.

Their warmth is seeping through the paper bag as I step back out into the street. I’m tempted to hug it to myself to warm my hands, but in true European fashion I tuck it into my backpack to carry it the two blocks to where I’m going. The golden hands of the clock tower show five minutes to eight as the drugstore around the corner and the supermarket down the street are getting ready to open their doors to customers. A new day is beginning in this small town.

The bakery has been operating in that building for more than four generations. For over a hundred years, children have been stretching to put their coins on the counter to buy a bread roll for recess, then run off to get to school before the bell rings at 8:00; working people bought their coffee and pastry and headed for the train; and folks like myself today with a little time to spare bought fresh, still-warm-from-oven rolls and pretzels to take home for a leisurely breakfast of coffee and bread and cheese and jam. The baker has been up since 3:00am to make it all happen, as did his father and grandfather and great-grandfather before him, and perhaps his daughter and granddaughter will do after him. For all the automatic sliding doors and gleaming plate glass display windows, there is a thread of continuity that runs through the fabric of existence here.

I find my soul being nourished by the warmth that gently seeps out of my bag of Brötchen und Brezeln, and I revel in that sense of being tied into a web of culture that has been in place for generations and will continue for generations to come. It’s unlikely that any children and grandchildren of mine will buy breads and cakes in this place where my grandparents and great-grandparents got theirs, but someone’s children will. The thought is as warm as the rolls and pretzels in my bag.

Life, the Universe, and a visit to the German bakery. I’m bringing breakfast today.

Groundhog Day and Candlemas

Today is a cross-quarter day, one of the four days of the year that fall between the quarter days. The quarter days, of course, were (or still are, really) festivals roughly equating to the solstices and equinoxes: Lady Day on March 25, St. John’s on June 24th, Michaelmas on Sept. 29, and Christmas on Dec. 25th. Smack-dab in between those days, there are the cross-quarter days, the old Celtic quarter days: Imbolc, Beltaine, Lughnasadh, and Samhain, on February, May, August, and November 1st, respectively. Notice something? Right close to several of those days are festivals we still know of today: May Day on May 1st; Halloween or “All Hallows E’en”, the evening before All Saint’s Day on Nov.1st; and then here we have Candlemas, also known as Groundhog Day or St. Brigid’s Day, on February 2nd.

In the old European traditions, Candlemas was an important day. It was the start of the agricultural year, the time when maids and farm labourers were hired or re-hired and got their yearly wages. In the Alpine regions, it was and still is also the last day of Christmastide. The Christmas tree, which is put up and decorated on Christmas Eve (not in early December like in America) stays up until Candlemas. Of course, by then a very small sneeze in its general vicinity will cause an avalanche of dry pine needles to shower to the ground, leaving a prickly pole with some sadly denuded sticks protruding from it that are valiantly attempting to hold up the decorations. Time to pack them away until next winter.

Because this winter, I’m glad to say, is more than half over now. If the quarter day of winter solstice means the turning point in the light, where we celebrate the changeover from the days getting shorter and shorter to the long ascend towards summer solstice (when I’ll be moaning about there being too much light, especially at 4am when the birds are yelling outside my window), the cross-quarter day of Candlemas means that we can actually see the days getting longer. By now, we have a reasonable chance of having our breakfast and maybe even cooking our supper in daylight, and back in the days when the only artificial light people had were candles, from Candlemas on they might be able to do their spinning without them.

Candlemas is called Candlemas because it was the day when the yearly supply of candles for both church and home was blessed. I only just learned that among the domestic candles people took to be blessed was a black “weather candle”, which was lit by way of a prayer for safety when there was a thunderstorm or other dangerous weather threatening. The black colour originally came from the weather candles being made of the sooty wax drippings of a church’s votive candles. People back in the day knew how to recycle.

When I thought about what other names February 2nd has, I remembered that way back when I first started blogging, I’d already written a post about it. I looked it up, and it’s actually quite funny (even if I say so myself). I’m pretty sure the photo of the groundhog (or gopher, rather) was one I took myself on a camping trip, but I can’t remember exactly what year or where.

The fact that in today’s English-speaking world most people know the term “Groundhog Day” is also funny. Because what they know, or associate with it, isn’t necessarily February 2nd. I mean, when you saw the title of this post, did you immediately think I was going to talk about a day that repeats itself over and over in an endless loop? If you did, you can thank the Bill Murray movie. I like it when a piece of fiction that was created simply for entertainment brings a whole new understanding of a concept to our culture, and becomes so firmly embedded in our ideas that it changes the very definition of a word.

That’s what culture is: transmission of ideas from one person to another. Celtic Imbolc, black weather candles in the Alps, the Groundhog Day movie. It ties us to the people around us and to those who came before.

Life, the Universe, and Groundhog Day (and Groundhog Day, and Groundhog Day, and Groundhog… Never mind). Happy Candlemas!

A Tale of Two Operas

Where has March gone? Wasn’t it just February, like, last week? Apparently not. Well, at least I didn’t just randomly lose the month as I’m wont to do. I know exactly what happened to it: I spent it on a short-notice trip to Europe for family reasons. As I might have mentioned before, having your family a third of the way around the globe is a pain in the you-know-what, but visits have the added perk that you get to do some touristy stuff on the side. “Love where you find yourself,” and all that, you know?

My route home took me via France, where the Paris-dwelling Offspring and I indulged ourselves by pretending to be cultured. It was great fun. So as a small sampling of our jollifications, I present to you …

A TALE OF TWO OPERAS

[The curtain slowly rises, the orchestra strikes up.]

DAY ONE: the Opéra Bastille, with a production of Hamlet (the opera) by Ambroise Thomas.

The Paris Opera, as I’m sure you know (haha—I certainly didn’t before this), has two buildings, the Palais Garnier and the Opéra Bastille. The latter is a modern building, from 1989, all clean, straight (or swooping) lines and cement—now that I look at the photos, from across the auditorium the balconies look rather like the overhead luggage compartments in airplanes while everyone is stowing their carry-ons. The Opera Bastille houses the actual opera, as in, productions where people wander about on stage singing loudly and impressively while waving their arms.

So the Offspring purchased us some rather pricey tickets, and off we went to the show. It was weird. I mean, really weird. Hamlet, the opera, is an adaptation of an adaptation of an adaptation: Someone named Ducis adapted the Shakespeare play into French; Dumas, père, made Ducis’ version better by putting back some of the Shakespeare; Carré and Barbier wrote a libretto of Dumas’ take; then in 1868 Ambroise Thomas wrote music to go with it. Fairly early on in all this adapting they messed with the ending, kind of like Disney did with “The Little Mermaid”: this Hamlet doesn’t die, but gets to live out a natural lifespan, profoundly depressed, as king of Denmark. (Apparently the British audiences at Covent Garden got so ticked off at this sacrilege, the opera was adapted yet again for them and the death scene at the end was restored. To die or not to die, that is the question…)

And of course, a production of an opera is a whole other step again. So here we have a 16th century play, turned into a 19th century opera, put on in a 21st-century style. I think Surrealism is the term that comes closest for this particular performance. A lot of it left us scratching our heads, and not because it’s in French, as they actually had subtitles so you could follow. I kid you not—there was a screen at the top of the stage (so I guess it was really surtitles?) that had the French words with the English translation underneath. So we knew what they were saying (and we know the Shakespeare version fairly well, anyway), but it’s the setting and the actions that went with it that were puzzling. For example, there was one character, a member of the chorus, who periodically came out in a mime face and stood at the side of the stage, knitting. Huh? The best we could come up with was that he might have been meant as a representation of one of the Fates.

However, as I said, we greatly enjoyed ourselves. The music is beautiful, and the singing—wow. And watching that strange surrealist setting and trying to figure out what they were trying to do or say with it made us feel rather clever.

We had so much fun at the Opera that we decided to try it again the next day.

INTERMISSION

DAY TWO: a ballet called Pit at the Palais Garnier.

The Palais Garnier, or Opera Garnier, is the original Paris Opera building, and today is mostly used for ballet performances by the Paris Opera Ballet company.

If you go to the ticket office on the day of a performance, subject to availability you can get cheap “partially obstructed view” seats. So for €12 each, we got to see a ballet! Truth be told, it was weird and surrealistic, too. But again, we had fun. And the best part of that whole experience was not the performance per se, but the building.

The Palais Garnier is the quintessential opera house—in fact, it’s the setting for Phantom of the Opera. Built in the 1860s under Napoleon III, it hits every stereotype you can think of. Gilding, marble, statues, red plush (the red plush! Everywhere!), swooping curtains (of red plush, or painted to resemble red plush), tiers and tiers of boxes (lined with red plush), rows and rows of seats (upholstered in red plush), sparkling chandeliers dripping with crystals (those aren’t red plush), grand sweeping staircases, saloons… It’s mind-boggling.

I had to keep myself from squealing out loud when we got to our box—actually, I might have squealed just the teensiest bit. You step from the sweeping curved hallway through one of the many little doors that are side by side in a round wall, and you’re in a tiny, dimly lit red plush foyer—maybe five feet wide, and eight feet deep. There is a bench on one side to rest your weary slipper-shod feet, coat hooks on the opposite wall for your opera cloak, a little shelf to put down your opera bag while you use the red-plush-framed mirror above it to straighten your elegant opera coiffure. Straight ahead is a looped back red plush curtain, through which you can see six red-plush-and-gilt chairs, arranged in three rows. And beyond them, past the red plush railing, the great red-plush-and-gilt cavern of the auditorium, with its enormous chandelier suspended above from the centre of a rainbow riot of Marc Chagall paintings. The Chagall ceiling is the only piece that is not in keeping with the 19th-century opulence, being of an entirely different style of overwhelming colour, but it’s Chagall—it’s glorious.

The tickets we had were for the two back-row chairs of our box; about a quarter of the stage would have been obscured by the sides of the box, but we could have seen it standing up and leaning over a bit. We got there early enough that nobody else was there yet, which is why I was able to sit in one of the front seats for a few minutes, staring at the Chagall, and just revel in all the red-plushness around me. Eventually I moved back, though, because the box is so narrow that there is just barely enough room between the chairs to get past, and I didn’t want the awkwardness of having to do a seat-swapping tango with our fellow box occupants. (Come to think of it, I wonder how, in the days when the theatre was new, Victorian ladies in their crinolines ever got in and out of those boxes…) But we were lucky: the couple that arrived shortly before the beginning of the performance took the front two seats, and then nobody else came. So we moved up to the middle seats, and with just a bit of neck-craning were able to see most of the stage.

I don’t have too much to say about the performance—as I mentioned, it too was rather strange and very, umm, modern. However, the skill of the dancers was astounding and a delight to watch, and I for one found that surrealistic weirdness is easier to enjoy when it comes through a medium that is already mostly abstract, such as dance and instrumental music. I didn’t quite follow the plot of the story they were telling, but that didn’t bother me much, as the experience of just being in the Palais Garnier is what made it all worthwhile.

And then the performance ended, and we streamed along with the rest of the audience out through the gilt-and-marble foyer into the rainy Paris street and down into the Metro system. And not just the audience, either: just before our train doors closed a well-dressed woman jumped into the car, a violin case strapped to her back—obviously one of the members of the orchestra. Just your ordinary Parisian working woman on her way home from her work shift.

Somehow that seemed to put the final touch to the experience. It was all so “Europe”: gilt and red plush, surrealism and a classical orchestra, high culture and utterly democratic public transit. A tale of two operas, a tale of two worlds that are, really, just one.

Life, the Universe, and a Tale of Two Operas. It was the best of times, it was the… No, not that. It really was wonderful.

FINIS