Patrick Bade
Munich: A Cultural History, Part 1

Patrick Bade - Munich: A Cultural History, Part 1

- Well, I’m talking today and next time about a city, which has played a very big role in my life. I lived in Munich from 1973 to 4, and I was more or less adopted by a local family. And I went back every year until 2019. It’s felt very strange, actually, that I haven’t visited Munich since the onset of COVID, but I’m very happy that I’m going to be leading three trips to Munich this summer, one for a private Canadian group, one for Martin Randall Travel, that’s an opera trip, and a museums and palaces trip for Kirker. And I’ll put the details of those last two trips if anybody’s interested into my handout for the next lecture. Now, this is a very famous view of Munich painted in the 1740s by the Venetian artist, Bellotto. And the view is taken from the other side of the River Isar in what is now the very posh suburb of Bogenhausen. Then, it was just a little village near to Munich. But, the skyline of a city, very characteristic, really hasn’t changed much over the centuries. Immediately to the left, on the other side of the river is the Isartor, one of the mediaeval gates into the city. And then, we see the spires of the Peterskirche and the Heilig-Geist-Kirche and the twin towers of the Frauenkirche. Over on the right hand side, the Baroque dome of the Theatinerkirche. It’s a city, which is very, very much dominated by its churches. Here is a similar view, but further down the river. But, you can see all the same buildings from the early 19th century, from the local artist, Wilhelm von Kobell. And this is what it looks like today. They’ve been very careful, actually, to preserve the skyline of Munich despite everything that’s happened in the 20th century.

This is a photograph that I took from a monument in the famous English Garden. The English Garden, which is like a finger of the countryside that penetrates into the very centre of the town. It was very much a product of Enlightenment thinking. And it was the creation, actually, of an Englishman, we might call him American because he was born in America, called Count Rumford. And that dates back to the late 18th century. Here is the Monopteros, which is the little artificial hill in the English Garden where you can get this beautiful view. And at the foot of Monopteros is a neoclassical, marble bench. And it’s on this bench, on the 3rd of September, 1939, that Unity Mitford shot herself. She attempted suicide at the out, on the Declaration of War against Germany by Britain and France. Somebody asked me last time about the English aristocracy and its attraction to Hitler or its support for Hitler. Of course, Unity Mitford was the most notorious of the English aristos who went to Munich and became a follower of Hitler. He admired her very much. He said that for him, she was the perfect specimen of Arian womanhood. And she actually shot herself with a mother of pearl encrusted pistol that Hitler had given her. So, Munich is, for me, it’s the heart of Europe. It’s where North meets South. It’s got many Italianate, very southern qualities in the architecture and the culture and the way of life. It’s just north of the Alps. The Alps are not quite as near as they seem here.

This is one of those kitchy fake postcards where they’ve done a trick photography to bring the Alps closer to the town. On certain days, in certain weather conditions, you actually can see the snow capped Alps in the distance, but they’re much further away than it looks in this postcard. And it’s also very much where East meets West. I remember a French woman once saying to me, she arrived in Munich, and she saw the onion domes on the Frauenkirche, and she thought, “Oh, my God, I’ve arrived in Eastern Europe.” Here’s another one of these rather faked postcards with the artificially enlarged Alps brought up nearer than they really are. Now, if you really want to understand Munich culture, there are two words, mysterious words, that you need to know. One is Föhn, and the other one is Kreislauf. And the two things are interconnected. Föhn is a mythical wind that comes from the south and traditionally is supposed to cause all sorts of problems and mental health problems. At one time, if you murdered your spouse on a Föhn day, that was taken into account as mitigating evidence. Because it’s when you have Föhn, actually, that you can see the Alps, and they actually really do look a lot closer than they really are. Föhn also causes problems with Kreislauf. Kreislauf is a medical condition that only seems to affect Germans, but it’s big, it’s big business in Germany.

Kreislauf, I mean, literally translated, it’s circulation, but it’s actually much, much more than that. I can’t really explain it to you. I’ve never really, and I’ve talked to many doctors about it over the years, both German doctors and non-German, what is Kreislauf? And nobody can really explain what it is. But, certainly, an awful lot of money is spent on Kreislaufmittel, that with the sort of remedies for problems with Kreislauf. You hear old ladies at bus stops exchanging deep, meaningful conversation about their Kreislauf problems. This is Munich as it looked in the 16th century. And you can see that the city is, actually, it’s where it is because it’s a point on the River Isar that was bridgeable or crossable, fordable, shall we say. It’s actually not a very ancient city. It’s one of Europe’s newer cities. It was founded in the year 1158 by the Duke Henry the Lion. And he was in disputes with the Archbishop of Freising, which is further along the river. So, he just upstakes and moved his capital further down the river to be out of the jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Freising. This map of Munich is very informative, actually, because you can see that it was a circular city with circular walls. That was very normal in the Middle Ages. And also that the city was actually some distance from the river. It’s similar to the Danube in Vienna because at different times of the year in different weather conditions, the river could move. So, there’s a kind of flood plane between the city and the river. It wasn’t till the 19th century, as with the Danube in Vienna, that the flow of the Isar was regulated, and that enabled the city to spread right down to the banks of the river.

This is what Munich looked like on the eve of the Second World War. And this is what it looked like, again, this is a model in the wonderful Bavarian National Museum, one of my absolute favourite museums. It’s really the Bavarian equivalent of the Victoria and Albert Museum. And it shows the city completely dominated by two structures. So, this model must date from the end of the 16th century because in the bottom left hand corner, you can see the vast Jesuit College that I’ll talk a bit about in a minute. But, further up, you can see the Frauenkirche, which is basically an absolutely huge parish church. It was not built as a cathedral. As I said, the bishop was down river at Freising. Freising has a magnificent, huge, amazing mediaeval cathedral. So, the form of the Frauenkirche is very simple. It’s just, as I said, a big hall church, a big parish church made out of brick. And just like Vienna, the walls survived until the 19th century when they no longer had any military purpose, so they were demolished. Although, three of the mediaeval gates were preserved in some form or others. Top left is the Königstor. Bottom left is the Isartor that faced the river. And on the right is the Sendlinger Tor. This is the Jesuit College, an enormous, enormous structure that dominated the city, built in the 1580s.

Jesuits were, of course, the shock troops of the Counter-Reformation. And Munich was, or was and is, a very, very Catholic city. And it was one of the great bastions of the Counter-Reformation. This, attached to the Jesuit college, is one of the great churches of Munich. This is the Michaelskirche. It’s very beautiful in itself. And it’s also a place of pilgrimage because in the crypt, there is the tomb of King Ludwig II, of whom I’ll be talking in my next lecture. It’s a very beautiful church. You walk into it, you would have no idea that anything had ever happened to it. But, this is what it looked like at the end of the Second World War. As you can see, it was reduced pretty well to a shell. They’d done a fantastic job, really an amazing job on reconstructing it. That’s, you have to bear that in mind in Munich that it was very, very heavily destroyed in the last stages of the Second World War. And it has been painstakingly put back together, mostly, I think, very successfully, far more successfully than, say, Nuremberg was. And what is, I think, very fascinating, when you go around the city, is to see the different solutions for restoring damaged or destroyed buildings or replacing one. It was always an intense matter of debate. Still, when I lived in Munich in the 1870s, these questions of how to restore a building, whether you could restore it, whether you could replace it. These were intensely, intensely debated in Munich and often very politicised. These two churches, this is the Heilig-Geist-Kirche, the Holy Ghost Church, on the left and the Peterskirche, it’s the oldest church in Munich, on the right. And again, you walk in them today, and they’ve done a fantastic job in putting them together. But, this restoration and recreation of Munich went on over many decades. And when I first went to Munich in 1973, both these churches had nothing in them.

They were completely whitewashed, they were completely empty, completely naked. I assume that many of the sculptures had been, were removed and were preserved and could be replaced. But, all the frescos you see in the ceiling, these are all recreated from scratch because they were totally destroyed. Again, an image of Munich at the end of the 16th century. It was a small city. Actually, it was a small city, really, until the 19th century. It’s only after 1870 that Munich, like Berlin, expands enormously. And a very big chunk of the city was taken up by the Residenz, which is the Winter Palace, the main palace of the Wittelsbach family. It was, you see it’s already absolutely enormous in the late 16th century, and you can see the Hofgarten on the right hand side, but it was greatly expanded again in the 18th and 19th centuries. It’s actually the second biggest palace complex in Europe after the Vatican City. And it’s, well, if you do a tour of it, you have to really set aside at least half a day, and going round at quite a gallop. It’s an effort to get round the whole place. It’s absolutely vast. This is the so-called Antiquarium, end of 16th century. So, it’s Renaissance, and it was built to house a collection of antiquities. For me, it’s a magical room. When you walk into it, it reminds me, actually, of one of my favourite scenes in my favourite movie, which is Beauty and the Beast by Cocteau. There’s a scene where she floats down a gallery, and I have a sensation when I walk in here that one could do that, you could sort of float down it.

Again, some of the ceiling paintings, I think, had been, they were actually on analogue canvas. They’re not frescos. And they were taken away for safekeeping, and they survived. But, quite a lot of the fresco painting in the ceiling, of course, had to be recreated after its partial destruction in the Second World War. So, it was a great Renaissance centre. It’s the first German Renaissance centre. the Michaelskirche, which I showed you, is the first great Renaissance style north of the Alps. This is a grotto, clearly inspired by the grottoes in Florence in the late Renaissance manner of style. This is the Reichekapelle, again, painstakingly recreated from precious and semi-precious stones after its almost total destruction in the Second World War. So, Munich was very prosperous and very important in the Renaissance period, the late Renaissance period. One of the highlights, even if you don’t want to walk around the whole of the Residenz, I always say to people, one thing you must go and see though is the Schatzkammer. This is one of the great Schatzkammers, rivalling Vienna and Dresden. Those are the three great chambers of treasures. And on the right hand side is an absolutely breathtaking statuette of St. George, precious metals, gold enamels, rubies, and emeralds. Really spectacular piece of craftsmanship from the end of the 16th century. And all going back even further, are these two mediaeval crowns. And I feel, when I look at these, I feel a bit of crown envy because the English Crown Jewels, of course, were all melted down and destroyed by Cromwell in the 17th century.

So, the English Crown Jewels are, well, they have big chunks of diamond and precious stones, very controversial because they were often got in ill, they were ill-gotten, those, you know, the huge Indian diamonds and so on in the English Crown Jewels. But, historically and aesthetically, the English Crown Jewels are really not very interesting. The greatest collection of crown jewels, of course are the Vienna ones, the Habsburg Crown Jewels. They are really spectacular and amazing. But, the only mediaeval English crown that survives is in Munich. It’s the one here on the right hand side. It’s just known as the crown of an English queen. They’re not absolutely sure who it was made for, but in the 14th century that it was part of a dowry, and it came to a German prince, and it’s preserved now in Munich and a very, very lovely thing with these lovely cabochon jewels rather than cut jewels. So, like many cities, Munich is a city that has had a series of golden ages at different periods. And certainly, the late 16th century under three rulers was golden, in the late Renaissance period, was a golden age culturally, architecturally, and also musically. And that is largely thanks to the Flemish composer, Orlando di Lasso, most of whose career was spent in Munich. And he’s probably, after Palestrina, the greatest and most influential composer of the 16th century. And I’m going to play you, this is an image of him as a court musician performing on the left hand side and a portrait on the right hand side. I’m going to play you a piece, which I like very much because it’s very nostalgic piece for me.

The title is “Am Abend Beim Kühlen Wein”, that’s Drinking Cool Wine in the Evening. Well, I did an awful lot of that in Munich over the years. Bizarrely, the statue to Orlando di Lasso has also become a shrine to Michael Jackson. I think that’s because when Michael Jackson visited Munich, he stayed in the luxurious hotel, Bayerischer Hof, which is right next to the statue. Munich suffered very badly in the Thirty Years’ War. Of course, all of Germany did. It was a huge, huge setback. And the Swedes, who terrorised Central Europe and Germany under Gustavus Adolphus, they got right down to Munich. They captured Munich in 1632. They were very rapacious. It was probably a good thing for the Bavarians that Gustavus Adolphus was killed later the same year in the Battle of Lützen. But, he’d said that he was so impressed by the beauty of the Residenz, the Renaissance parts of it, he said he wanted to put it on wheels and wheel it all the way back to Sweden. So, it took, really, much of the 17th century for Bavaria to recover economically and culturally from the incredibly destructive Thirty Years’ War. And then, at the end of the century, Bavaria becomes involved in another very destructive war, the War of the Spanish Succession, which lasts from 1700 to 1714, 14 years.

And Bavaria backed the wrong side. Bavaria was allied to France against Austria and Britain, of course. And the most decisive battle of the War of the Spanish Succession was on Bavarian soil in the little village of Blindheim, Blindheim in 1704, we call it Blenheim. And it was a joint victory for the Duke of Malborough and Prince Eugene of Savoy and a total disaster for Bavaria. The Elector, Max Emanuel, was forced to flee. He went to Paris as a refugee for the rest of the war. And the Austrians occupied Bavaria quite brutally until the Treaty of Utrecht at the end of the war. This is the first Baroque building in Vienna. This is the Theatinerkirche. Now, Max Emanuel, his involvement with the war was partly because he, everybody knew that the last Habsburg King of Spain, Charles II, was incapable of having children. And he had terrible, terrible health problems caused by inbreeding and so on, wasn’t really expected to live. It was something of a miracle that he lived into his thirties. And secret deals were done that the Elector of Bavaria would become King of Spain. And that accounts, partly, for the absolutely imperial scale of the buildings in and around Munich of this period that reflects these aspirations. So, the Theatinerkirche was, in fact, by an Italian architect called a Agostino Barelli, although the facade was added later by Cuvilliés. A very beautiful church, that incredible Baroque heavy richness, which I think is mitigated by the fact that the church is entirely white inside.

The golden age of Baroque, I mean, it comes to Bavaria very belatedly. And Baroque is a style, in Italy, it goes back to the beginning of the 17th century. So, with this is the tail end of the Baroque style. And I’ve already talked about this in some detail in my lecture on South German Baroque, so I’m just going to go through some images. I won’t talk about this in any detail. This is the absolutely jaw dropping Asamkirche on the Sendlinger Strasse in Munich. It is the ultimate Baroque building. It’s theatrical, operatic, absolutely extraordinary building. And church, I’ll talk more today about the palaces that were built for Max Emanuel. This is the Palace of Schleissheim, which is outside central Munich, but you can reach it on the S-bahn. It’s actually three palaces. The oldest part is in the foreground, and it’s late 16th century. And as far as Germany is concerned, it’s Renaissance in style. And the main part, which was, it was started just before the onset of The War of Spanish Succession. But that would, of course, the building was interrupted, and it was only completed in the 1720s after the end of the war. And you can, and actually, it’s still only a fragment of what was intended. You can see it’s absolutely enormous. And the model for it is clearly Versailles. It’s intended to be the Versailles for Bavaria. And then, at the end of the canal, you have Lustheim, which is like the little pleasure, the tris anons. It’s your palace away from your palace at home, so to speak, where you can go and relax. But, the most beautiful of, well, I love Shcleissheim, actually.

Schleissheim is a magical place. But, I think the most beautiful summer palace that I know anywhere in Europe, and beyond, way beyond Versailles, beyond Potsdam, way beyond Shönbrunn in Vienna, this is Nymphenburg. And this is really on the outskirts of the city. Like Versailles, it started off in 17th century as a small hunting lodge, and it was gradually transformed and expanded. Various architects worked on it, but the most important one who really gave it its final form, it was an architect called Joseph Effner. So, it’s vast, but it’s not heavy like Shönbrunn. It’s got a, there’s an incredible sense of lightness. And there are certain points where you see it, and it almost seems to float on air or to float on water. And in fact, you can’t see very well in this image, but the corridors linking the central pavilion with the side pavilions are raised on a colonnade. You can actually see through the colonnade to the park on the other side. That’s partly what gives this amazing illusion of floating on air. Inside the main pavilion is the, you’ve got, this is a summer palace. It’s for, it’s a fun palace. It’s for entertaining and having a good time. And this is the main festive area of the palace, which is decorated by the Zimmermann family. If you heard my lecture about South German Baroque, their great masterpiece in ecclesiastical architecture is the Pilgrimage Church or the Wieskirche.

This is very, very Rococo, no longer Baroque. So, we’ve got a lot of white, you have pale, sweet colours. It’s full of light, it’s very airy. And of course, the wonderful curly Rocaille forms in the stucco in the ceiling. But, the ultimate masterpiece to my mind of the Rococo style anywhere in the world is the Amalienburg. It’s one of a number of small pleasure pavilions in the park of Nymphenburg. It should be on everybody, anybody who’s interested in architecture and art, this should be very high up your bucket list of places to visit. It is so exquisite. It’s a hunting lodge. And you can see at the top, you can see a circular platform with a balustrade. And you could, so you could observe the hunting, or presumably, you could even stand up there with a gun and shoot things. Inside, but I don’t think any hard work was done in this pavilion, at least not by the courtiers and the princely family. This is such a breathtaking room, enchanting room, isn’t it? With the silver rather than gilt, silvered, stucco, decoration. Playful, joyous, full of humour, full of nature. The little birds and bees and animals and natural forms and full of light again. And you can imagine at night with all these mirrors, that reflecting the candlelight would also have looked terrific at night. Here’s some of the detail of this very playful, very inventive, very delightful stucco decoration in the ceiling. And if you are exhausted after shooting lots of animals that have been put in front of you, and you need a nap, or perhaps, you just want a little nookie, you want to have, you know, some naughty afternoon sex, there are little hidden beds for you to do this.

And a kitchen, again, you feel this would certainly be a kitchen for fun cooking. I don’t think any very serious, hard work cooking was done in this particular kitchen. And so, a lovely thing to do is going to Nymphenburg on a lovely day to walk around the park and visit these various pavilions, alcove was the word I was seeking, of course. This is an alcove. This is the Pegodenburg, where everything is either painted blue and white, or it’s actually tin glazed earthenware. It’s delftware, but it’s all pretending to be Chinese porcelain. And it’s where there’s this love of everything Chinese in the 18th century, chinoiserie. And this is a great masterpieces of chinoiserie. And you could go and spend an afternoon having a fantasy that you are in China. And this is at the Badenburg, where you can bathe communally. And most fun of all, really, is that Magdalenenklause. As I said, it’s very Catholic. And if you are Catholic, you have to go to mass once a week or even more than that, spend an awful lot of time listening to masses in Latin, which you may or may not understand. So, let’s make the chore of going to mass fun. And so, you could, this is a chapel, and you can see it is apparently in a ruinous state. This always used to make me laugh in Munich where everything is perfect. It was too much. I remember when I lived there in 1973, every building, well, of course, many things have been reconstructed since the Second World War, but that’s how the Germans are.

Everything has to be absolutely immaculate and perfect except this building, of course, where the joke is that it isn’t. And inside the building, you’ve got tinkling fountains and grottoes and so on. Certainly makes going to mass a lot more amusing than it might have been. Now, at Nymphenburg in 1747, a porcelain factory was set up. Until the 18th century, only the Chinese and the Japanese had the secret of hard-paste porcelain. It had to be imported halfway across the world. It was white gold. It was incredibly valuable, incredibly costly. And the secret of making hard-paste porcelain was discovered at Meissen in 1710 by a man called Böttger. And every crowned head, every prince in Europe wanted to have a porcelain factory. It was a prestige thing, but the technology was a closely guarded secret. And the story of how porcelain spread from Meissen to other porcelain factories is very fascinating. It involved espionage and people being kidnapped and drugged and murdered and God knows what. So, it’s some decades later that the Elector of Bavaria gets his porcelain factory, which is actually housed within the premises of the palace. But, to my mind, Nymphenburg porcelain is the most exquisite and the most beautiful of any 18th century porcelain. Far, far more beautiful, I think, especially the figures than either Meissen or Savoy in France. And it’s particularly these figures by a modeller called, modeller who makes these miniature sculptures. He’s called Franz Anton Bustelli. That they have very Rococo, full of movement, these dance like poses, but a real understanding of the body underneath the clothing. To my mind, Bustelli is actually one of the great sculptors of the 18th century and far superior to the figures at Meissen.

Munich has several buildings, or two or three shall we say, that I would put on my list of top 10 things to see in Europe as far as architecture is concerned. And one of them, another one, I’ve already mentioned Amalienburg, another would be the Cuvilliés-Theater, which was the court theatre in the Residenz. And it’s by an architect, designer of Flemish origin. He actually started off as a court dwarf, but developed into an architect, designer of genius. That’s François Cuvilliés, and this is the theatre that he built between 1751 and ‘53. For me, this is the most beautiful theatre interior in the world. It’s absolutely exquisite, and we’re so lucky, so lucky to have it. Very, very few theatres from the 18th century survived because they were candlelit, and they all burnt down, nearly all. The other great one, of course, in Germany that survives, I mentioned recently was the one at Bayreuth, which is a generation earlier and in a Baroque style. This is very Rococo again. And so, it was a miracle that it survived the 20th century, and it was a near miracle that it survived the Second World War because Hitler did not want it to survive. Hitler gave orders that everything, by this, by the end of the war, it was clear they were losing, and he wanted everything to be destroyed.

And so, it was strictly against orders that many, much of the panelling, the contents of the Residenz, and this entire theatre interior was dismantled and put away safely three days before the building itself was completely destroyed by the bomb. So, it was able, it was possible to reconstruct it after the war. It’s not something I’ve never achieved, but I do hope I will, before I pop my clogs, I really want to see a Mozart opera performed in this theatre. You know, it’s an intimate theatre, perfect space for the performance of a Mozart opera. This is what it looked like in the 18th century. Here is Mozart. And in 1781, Mozart was called to Munich to write an opera. And he was very thrilled to do this because Munich, at the time, had the very best orchestra in Europe. The Elector, the new Elector, Karl Theodor, he had been the elector of the Palatinate. And then, he inherited the rather more important Bavaria. And he’s actually a very key figure, Karl Theodor, because he brought with him his extensive art collections, which became the basis of the Alte Pinakothek, one of the world’s greatest collection of old master pictures that I’ll be talking about next time. But, he also, in Mannheim, he had created for him what was considered to be the absolute best orchestra in Europe. So, Mozart coming to Munich in 1781, as I said, he’s just 25, he writes his first great mature opera, which is “Idomeneo”. And he, Mozart, is in clover, working with this wonderful orchestra. And it was certainly a success. And you can, you’ll hear in a minute how the orchestra inspired him to create orchestration of great delicacy and beauty. But so, he desperately wanted to be taken on as court composer because he hated the Archbishop of Salzburg. And he felt unappreciated in Salzburg.

He really wants to become, he begged Karl Theodor, “Please, please, will you employ me as court composer?” And Karl Theodor loftily said to Mozart, “Oh, no, no, I’ve got enough composers already.” What an idiot. I mean, Munich is a very important musical city. Of course, it’s one of the great musical cities. But, imagine it’ll be, it’s important later on for Wagner, for Strauss and other composers. But, it could have been the Mozart city, but they lost that opportunity. So, we have quite a lot of correspondence from Mozart about the creation of this opera. And the tenor who took the part of Idomeneo was at the end of a glorious career. And Mozart says, “Well, hmm, he’s a bit past it, but the one thing he can do really well still is chopped noodles.” And what Mozart meant by that was very florid, florid, decorated vocal line. So, the arias, this has been a big problem for people wanting to perform “Idomeneo”, of course, great musical masterpiece in the 20th centuries, to find tenors who could get their way around what Mozart wrote for Anton Raaff. I know of two recordings that really do justice to it. One is actually by a recent American tenor recommended to you, I recommend to you called Michael Spyres. He has recently made an absolutely spectacular recording of this aria with amazing frills and trills and runs and everything. But, I’m going to play you a historic recording. This is Hermann Jadlowker. Now, I’ve talked about him before, in fact, in several lectures.

He was from Eastern European Jewish origin and initially trained as a cantor. And I think it’s his cantorial skills that really show in this absolutely spectacular record I’m going to play you. Now, when I when I went to Munich, I think I told you, that I was adopted by this elderly couple. At least he was, she was middle age I suppose, and he was 30 years older than her. He was really quite elderly. He was a Count Ottin, and he was a member of the Stauffenberg family. He was a cousin of the Stauffenberg who put the bomb under Hitler or tried to bump him off in 1944, for which, of course, the family paid very dearly. But, he had long memories. He went to the opera in Munich before the First World War. And he could vividly remember going to see Hermann Jadlowker. And he said what he mainly remembered about him was how incredibly handsome he was, which doesn’t necessarily come across in the photograph I’ve got here, but certainly, in the recording, you’ll hear his spectacular technique. Wow, this trill there at the end. And I’m going to finish with another recording from “Idomeneo”, an aria sung by the character of Ilia, sung here by the Croatian soprano, Sena Jurinac. Lovely, creamy voice, but I’m playing you this as much for the orchestral compliment. And you’ll hear in the lead in to the aria how Mozart has such confidence in this wonderful orchestra that he can expose individual instruments as soloists and produce a great variety of instrumental colour in the introductory section. Right, let’s see what you’ve got to say.

Q&A and Comments:

Q: “Do you know "Coffee with Hitler”, an excellent historical book by Charles Spicer all about the English aristocracy?“

A: I don’t know that book, but sounds very interesting.

"What was the second word associate…” Kreislauf. Föhn, which also is the word for a hair dryer, is the wind, this mysterious wind that causes aberrant behaviour. And the second thing, Kreislauf, which the literal translation, if you look up in the dictionary, it says circulation. But, it is much, much more than that in German parlance.

This is Nanette saying, “Föhn gives many people headaches, but I’m not sure if it is true or a good excuse for getting attention.” Yes, I know I’ve never had, I’ve spent so much of my life in Munich, really years when you add it all up, and I’ve never even noticed when it was Föhn. But, you know, people will say to you, “Oh, it’s Föhn today, and I’m not feeling very well.”

Q: “Were there Jewish residents of Munich?”

A: Relatively few. I’m going to talk more about that next time. It’s more relevant to you when you get to the 19th and the 20th century. Probably the most distinguished Jewish residents of Munich, I’ll talk about him next time, was the novelist Leon Feuchtwanger. But, when I went with Trudy, we took a group from the London Jewish Cultural Centre to Munich, we debated long and hard about it, whether it was appropriate or not because as we shall see next time, of course, Munich’s association with Jews are negative. You know, if you go to Berlin or Vienna, despite the horrors of the Third Reich, there’s so much richness, there’s so much wonderful to celebrate. It’s not really the case with Munich, which, of course, prided itself in being Hauptstadt der Bewegung. It prided itself in being the capital of the Nazi movement.

Q: “Why were so many churches white inside?”

A: Well, when I, because when I first went to Munich in 1870s, a number of churches were white inside because they’d been destroyed or burned out. But, I’m not sure.

It’s interesting question about the Theatinerkirche, whether it was always intended to be white from the start. Once you get to the Rococo, the Rococo style actually likes large, it likes pale, sweet colours, and it likes large areas of white to show off those pale, sweet colours.

Glad you like the architecture. And I think the silver effect in the Amalienburg is pure magic.

Q: “Where did Munich’s money come from?”

A: Munich was not a rich city. It was, you know, compared to other cities in Germany, you know, Nuremberg was a much richer city than Munich. Munich was, and Bavaria was relatively poor until, and so you might well ask, “How did they build on this scale?” You know, because the Wittelsbachs are all a bit mad. There’s madness in the family, but they’re all crazy about architecture. It’s a family tradition. As far as the churches were concerned, as I said in my previous lecture, a lot of the materials were very cheap materials. They’re not like Italian churches that were built out of precious marbles and stones and so on. South German churches are, you know, it’s all theatre really. It’s all built wood, plaster, fake marble and so on. Munich becomes much more prosperous like all of Germany after the unification, the so-called Gründerzeit. But, it’s really after the Second World War that Munich becomes, what can I say, stinking rich. And you can thank the Cold War for that. You can thank the Americans, the Americans who pumped so much money into Germany after the Second World War because they wanted it to be rich because they wanted it to be a bastion against communism. And for me, you know, coming from a lower middle class English background and having been a student in straitened circumstances, I was just shocked when I went to Munich in the 1870s. The wealth on display, the traffic jams of Mercedes cars, the flashy clothes at the opera, it just seemed to me indecently wealthy in the 1970s.

Yes, you’re quite right. I mean, of course, it’s not just in Bavaria that poor people paid the price for the luxuries of the rich.

“These magnificent churches built to glorify their God and to emphasise the fact that…” Mm, I don’t, let’s not go there too far. I mean, do you really think that? I think you are becoming a bit obsessive. You really think that the churches were built with the sole purpose of emphasising the fact that Jews killed God? I don’t think I can answer your question because I don’t think I really follow you on this.

Q: “How did they finance the rebuilding of the church?”

A: Well, you know, it’s the Wirtschaftswunder, the economic miracle that, of course, very resented by France and England who thought they were the victors in the war, and they saw Germany forging ahead in this incredible prosperity of Germany becoming the richest country in Europe. And I imagine that there must be a certain bitterness, well, I know there is a certain bitterness. Countries that, all the countries that had been impoverished because of the Second World War in Eastern and Central Europe, and then, of course, with Russian occupation, they must have looked with some unease at the incredible wealth of Germany after the Second World War.

Dennis, sort of, I’ve seen the Flying Dutchman there. I must say, it was rather terrible the last time I saw Flying Dutchman at the opera.

“Föhn is a type of dry, relatively warm, down slope wind that occurs in the lee of a mountain range.” Thank you for that definition. Right, you have a similar wind in Canada, but as I said, I’ve never noticed it. I’m just not sensitive to it.

Q: “What is the societal basis for the imitation of larger de lancey?”

A: I didn’t mention it because it’s 19th century, and it come up, will be part of my next lecture. I will talk about it in the next lecture.

“Say the name of the Eastern…” Oh, Hermann Jadlowker. Hermann Jadlowker.

Q: “How big is that incredible bejewelled horse?”

A: It’s not huge. I would say it’s probably, I don’t know, 14 inches high. So, it’s a miniature sculpture, really.

Q: “Has there been a talk on the fashion of this century?”

A: I don’t know which century you mean? Do you mean 20th century? I do talks sometimes on fashion in 19th and 20th century. I could do one, but it wouldn’t really fit into this series.

Yes, Dresden also, of course, the most famously, the Frauenkirche, which, in Dresden, which was recreated from a heap of rubble. I mean, Dresden is, to me, Dresden is less convincingly restored than Munich. Dresden, there’s something a bit fake about it all.

Oh, I will talk about the Olympic games next time. Such a tragedy, really, because I remember that at the time, you know, because the 1936 Berlin games were a thing of shame, really, for Germany and the international community. And so, it was a wonderful thing for Germany that Munich had the opportunity, in a way, to erase the bad memories of 1936. But, well, you all know how dreadfully wrong it went and what a terrible, terrible disaster it turned into.

“The Archbishop of Canterbury agrees with you, Ivan.” About what? Do you mean that the churches were…

“Architecture is magnificent.” I’m sure the Archbishop of Canterbury would not say, if it’s you that said it, that churches were built to, primarily to celebrate the fact that Jews, inverted commas, killed Jesus. I really don’t believe he would say that. “

Q: Any comments about the beer in Munich?”

A: I don’t really like beer to tell you the truth. And although, a meal that I do like beer with, I like to go and have Leberkäse or weiswurst in the Viktualienmarkt and have a nice cold beer in summer. But, I’m definitely not a connoisseur of beer. And although, I like beer gardens. The garden, the wonderful beer garden in the English park, I think, is delightful in summer. But, I have a kind of horror of, I mean, Trudy will tell you this, nothing will drag me into the Hofbräuhaus in Munich. I just can’t stand it. It’s just too creepy. It has too negative connotations for me. I really don’t like those kind of Munich beer holes.

So, that seems to be it for questions, and I’ll continue with Munich on Wednesday. Thank you all very much.