memoirs, 1933–77 ❧ 23
primarily concerned with furthering their own interests, with getting their
music played, or getting chances to perform or conduct. I have had time to
see in their unfailing selfl essness and goodwill two shining exceptions among
such people, Carlos Moseley and John Evarts in Berlin.
The fi rst Bavarian concert took place in the handsome white and gold
rococo of the Schaezlerpalais in Augsburg. There I found the former curator
of the now bombed-out Neupert Museum in Nürnberg, Bernhard Rochow,
who will accompany me as tuner and regulator of harpsichords for the rest of
the West German part of the tour. The fi rst concert in Munich is to take place
in Schloss Nymphenburg with the Stuttgarter Kammerorchester.
Playing with these half-starved German orchestras makes me feel like a
powerhouse of indecently well-nourished vitality. I am becoming adept at
procuring large quantities of chocolate at the PX stores to distribute among
orchestra members as tactfully as I can in order to conceal any appearance
of almsgiving. The quality of the playing is remarkable under the circum-
stances, and there is no limit to the devotion of these players to music and to
rehearsing as if to some kind of spiritual lifeline.
Today I stood in the center of bombed-out Munich, ninety percent
destroyed, it is said, and wondered how, without car and chauffeur and
access to offi cers’ clubs, I could ever have succeeded in getting one-tenth of a
square meal. But in contrast to the ashes and desolation of the city, the coun-
tryside showed its full June bloom when Carlos Moseley took me the other
day on an expedition to Oberammergau, Ettal, and to that crowning jewel of
Bavarian rococo, the Wieskirche.^9
I can scarcely believe what had happened. I arrived here [Nürnberg] late
last night and I walked over mounds of rubble in the main streets that would
be as high as the second-story windows, were there any second stories left.
This morning I fi nd the two principal churches being patched together. Even
parts of the old city have been restored, but the rest of the city as a whole is
irretrievably lost.
What a consolation to fi nd Bamberg virtually untouched by the war and to
play with the Bamberg Symphoniker, another excellent chamber orchestra,
in the over-acoustic but splendid hall of the Residenz. At fi ve the next morn-
ing I seize my only opportunity to see Balthasar Neumann’s masterpiece, the
pilgrimage church of Vierzehn Heiligen. No photographs have ever done jus-
tice to the miraculous distribution of light in its interior. Architecture ceases
to be merely stone, mortar, or stucco; it fl oats like a vision of gravity-defying
clouds. No trace remains of meticulous calculations or scrupulously observed
proportions; all has become music, in the way that a piece of music, which is
so carefully conceived that every note stands in relation to every other, can
become pure song when grace descends upon it.
- Pilgrimage Church of Wies, designed by Dominikus Zimmermann, constructed
in the late 1740s and early 1750s.
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