Dresneyland
To be perfectly honest, I didn’t really want to go on the required excursion to Dresden arranged by our study abroad program at first —my parents were in town, I had research to do for my final papers, and on the night of the World Cup semi final we were scheduled to attend a staging of Verdi’s Macbeth at the Semper Opera House. Plus my friend who was there for a day en route to Prague had mentioned that due to postwar reconstruction, the city had a strange Disneylandish vibe about it. Short of “It’s a Small World” humming out of speakers disguised as lampposts, the center of the Old City did feel somewhat inauthentic. But much to my pleasurable surprise, it didn’t take long before the lovingly restored churches and spectacular Baroque palaces worked their magic—and I became smitten with Dresden.
As the capital of Saxony, Dresden has a long history of economic and cultural influence in Eastern Germany. Dresden’s architecture and art constituted the showpieces of the Saxon kings' might—the Semper Opera House, built in 1841 by Gottfried Semper, is a cultural icon in Germany and world-renowned for the quality of its performances. The cavernous house was decorated in breathtaking grandeur that put Berlin’s State Opera House to shame. Plus, their particular staging of Macbeth, in comparison to the one I’d already seen in Berlin, was correspondingly more impressive. The performance had me riveted to the seat, so much so that I forgot about France versus Portugal!
I was most impressed, however, by the array of quality art Dresden has in its various museums. The Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister contains the most famous pair of cherubs in art history, the two puzzled putti at the bottom of Raphael’s Sistine Madonna. Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus of 1508 was to be seen next to the work of his friend Titian. The galleries also had an impressive array of Rembrandt paintings as well as two Vermeers. The Art Academy was having an exhibition of “Rodin in Germany,” which focused on the French sculptor’s influence and relationships with notable contemporary German artists and intellectuals, such as cultural critic Georg Simmel, one of his earliest dealers Georg Treu, and poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who actually worked as Rodin’s secretary for a while.
Dresden’s New City district, populated mostly by students from its Technical University, felt like the trendy Prenzlauer Berg district in Berlin with its array of ethnic restaurants and hip novelty boutiques. There was the Kunsthofpassage (“art courtyard passage”) that united a felt craft workshop with art, music, dance studios and a calligraphy store, along with a Vietnamese restaurant behind a decorated wall that displayed a “water show” on the hour. This is not to say, however, that my friend was entirely wrong about the kitschiness of Dresden’s Old Town. Dresden’s Frauenkirche, reduced to a pile of rubble by British airpilots in WWII, was recently reopened to much fanfare after a decade of painstaking restoration. Indeed, they organized old blackened portions of the church with new stone masonry, giving the distinctive dome and exterior an interesting hybrid façade.
After an introductory video tried to impress us with its thorough documentation of the rebuilding efforts (accompanied by appropriately sentimental horn music), we stepped inside the church…and I immediately wanted to shield my eyes from the blindingly gaudy gold leaf, blue/pink/yellow paint juxtaposed with pseudo nouveau-Baroque paintings. Kitschy doesn’t even begin to describe the tastelessness with which the interior was outfitted—though I suppose it provides an interesting case study for post-period aesthetics, by which I mean it is easier to call certain artwork beautiful merely because the ameliorating effects of age have rendered them so. What I feel they should have done with the Frauenkirche—it being an important memorial to the centrality of faith despite human folly—is to leave the interior as austerely simple as possible, or even built around it, like the Kaiser-Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin. As a testament to post-war generations’ efforts to literally lift the city out of the rubble, a minimalist design would have been more appropriate, and truer, to the project of memorializing.
posted by joyce @ 7:24 PM
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