In the Rhineland, winter can be grey in that hopeless way that promises neither joy nor comfort for days. The people between Cologne and Bonn are forced to create their own happy occasions. The football matches are well attended, even though the local club has been relegated to the second division. The unbearable crowds and the trams full of red and white scarves on Saturdays show that the locals are used to having street parties despite the grey cover over the grey water. If it's not carnival, then it's the stadium. Or demonstrations, whatever.
I'm always on the lookout for the weekend when I'm here. If it starts to rain that annoying little rain – snow is a real rarity – I'll have to think of something to do instead of staring at the gray sky in despair. Since the weather forecast didn't give me much reason to be hopeful, I started looking for a reason to go somewhere.
Exhibitions, concerts, films, literary events? Nothing in the area from Düsseldorf to Koblenz aroused my curiosity. Until I came across a name completely unknown to me – Kesi Marten. A new young star of classical guitar is coming from France to Bonn to give his first concert. I decided to go there – Cologne and Bonn are only about thirty kilometers away.
GUITAR AND MEMORIES
I'm sitting on a tram, waiting for an hour's trundle to Bonn. After all, line 16 is the most reliable way to travel south along the Rhine, as German railways are in a state of chaos, with understaffing, neglected infrastructure, track work and strikes. I have plenty of time to reflect on my first acoustic guitar. I was 15 years old. Music had a magical appeal to me. But I had no one around to give me the keys to that palace of harmonies and melodies.
The first guitar was cheap, with steel strings. I practiced for hours, days, months. A friend from high school wrote down the chords for me in a notebook. The first solo – Black Butterflies. I read music a little, I got the sheet music for a number of melodies. After a year I was able to play the accompaniment for some hits. After two years I managed to master my first classical piece. Romance Anónimo was a melody that any beginner on the guitar could play with a little perseverance and effort, and thus reward themselves for the blisters on their cheekbones.
Although my heroes were fast-fingered rock guitarists, above all Hendrix, in the long afternoons at home I played Spanish, Russian, Mexican melodies, old-fashioned melancholic songs and even fast cola. Anything that exercised my fingers was good for my soul. It is likely that the residue of memories of these moments, when I pressed my cheek to the body of the guitar for hours, trying to revive the miracle of music, actually made it easier for me to travel to Bonn on a gloomy Sunday.
MUSEUM AUDITORIUM
The Bonn Art Museum has an excellent concert hall in the basement. The Bonn Master Concerts for Classical Guitar take place here. Since the building by Berlin architect Axel Schultes opened in 1992, it has been one of the most prestigious addresses for contemporary art in Germany – a country where competition is fierce.
I descend the stairs to the underground level of the building and leave my winter day essentials in the cloakroom – jacket, umbrella, scarf. I enter a space that has not changed its shape since ancient times. A semicircular embrace of stands facing a circular podium. Although I arrived ten minutes early, there are quite a few people.
From the brochure I received with my ticket – 22 euros is not much by German standards – I learn details from the biography of the young artist. She is a child of this millennium, born in 2002. She started playing classical guitar at the age of five, she studied in Orleans and Paris. She has been winning international competitions since the age of eleven. The guitar has taken her on far-reaching journeys – from Argentina to China, from Thailand to Italy, from Poland to America. This is her first concert in Germany.
Before each composition, the artist reveals in English with a slight French accent some details about the creation of the piece she has chosen, and presents the composers as our contemporaries, even though some of them have been dead for several centuries.
Carlos Seixas, the son of the organist of the Coimbra Cathedral, who died in Lisbon in 1742 at the age of just 38, left behind sonatas that are still highly regarded by classical guitarists today. Although he wrote around 700 sonatas during his short life, cut short by rheumatic fever, the earthquake that devastated Lisbon in 1755 and the fires that raged for days consumed most of the scores. One of the 105 sonatas that have survived has been taken up by a young artist from France. She has brought the Baroque playfulness of the strings to life in a way that is very promising.
Cassie Marten then continued her tour of Baroque Europe, playing a composition by the 17th-century English master Henry Purcell. The journey then takes us to Spain. Dionisio Aguado has bequeathed us the sheet music for Three Brilliant Rondos from 1822, one of which Marten brilliantly performed.
The program that evening featured gems of guitar classics, including a night song by Giulio Regondi, the Swiss child prodigy – he had an Italian father, a German mother, grew up in Lyon, and lived in London. His biography is almost as interesting as the play of a French artist's fingers on the strings while playing one of his nocturnes.
What Regondi did in the 19th century – exploring the possibilities of the guitar – was done in the 20th century by the greatest Spanish composer of his generation, Joaquín Rodrigo. Of course, like most people, I listened, at least as background music for the commercial, to the leitmotif from his Concerto for Aranjuez, composed in Paris in 1939 and first performed in Barcelona the year before.
The gardens of the Royal Palace in Aranjuez from ancient times painted with sounds. The Frenchwoman played a lesser-known piece, but I also got lost in it with pleasure. As I listened to the guitar bravura, a state of consciousness close to a meditative trance began to be established. I closed my eyes, and the sounds were like acupuncture needles, freeing my spirit from all banality, I literally felt the benefit of harmonies that rise above everyday life and introduce us to unknown inner labyrinths of colors and thoughts. I was not the only one sensitive to this magic. The applause was louder than usual.
The most demanding piece of the evening was by the Italian composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. His biography is also nomadic. He was born in 1895 in Florence, and from 1939 he lived in the United States, where he died in Beverly Hills in 1968. The Sonata op. 77 had a furious ending that is appropriately called – Presto Furioso.
CHANSON AND GUITAR
The pralines were left for last. That evening I heard Amor fati, a melancholic composition by contemporary French musician Mathias Duplessis, played on a classical guitar, which associatively took me to Nietzsche's question – how to love one's own fate, to kiss destiny?
But the young Frenchwoman knows very well that this type of German audience certainly has CDs of French chansons at home, which, along with wine and cheese, are France's biggest export hit. Charles Aznavour left us the song La Boheme for all time. But I have always enjoyed Dragan Stojnić's gentlemanly interpretation much more.
This evening, Cassie Martin irresistibly told this romantic bohemian story from Paris with her guitar. It's no wonder that the audience, with their applause and shouts of "bravo", wouldn't let her leave the stage.
She had to return to the audience several times. Then she played another French chanson in a classic style. Thus her performance turned into a real triumph.
On the tram that takes me through the night, I think about the guitar. Its name has traveled thousands of years from the East. In Persia, the instrument çahartar was known – in translation it means four strings. Many centuries before Christ, the Greeks gathered around aedes – poets – who, at performances of kytarodias, sang their songs accompanied by kytars – instruments that combined strings and wood. The Arabs adopted the art of making instruments that they found in the range from Persia to Greece, and when they conquered Spain, they brought with them a name that already sounded like – guitar. The Moors left Spain a few centuries later, but the guitar remained there, which would later conquer the world.
In the arms of this French girl, the guitar became a real holiday wonder. I remember giving my first guitar, with its rather worn frets, to another guy from a Roma settlement almost half a century ago. He couldn't read music, but he knew how to get a better sound out of my guitar. I heard he died somewhere in Berlin as a refugee. He would have loved what Kesi Marten did on a grey January Sunday in Germany.
Bonus video:
