World Cup Churches 19. Germany

Continuing a series of blogs heading round the 32 qualifying countries in the 2022 World Cup - I will pick out one church in each one.  I am not going to choose only churches that are to my liking.  This is an exploration not a recommendation! To see all in the series select the label 'World Cup Churches' below.

Germany has a remarkable World Cup record - and also a vast array of remarkable churches. I've visited a few and even spoken in one, but I've decided to go for a church that I have never visited.  Nevertheless, given the opportunity this is a church I would definitely go to see - Thomaskirche in Leipzig.

It may look like any other Germanic city church, but the story of this church is without equal.  It was a church where Martin Luther visited often and preached - this (with many counterparts in the German states) linked to the Reformation, the foundation of Protestantism which revolutionised Europe both ecclesiastically and politically.  It became, therefore, Lutheran - the Reformation in Saxony proclaimed in this church by Luther himself in 1539.

Forward about 175 years and a new cantor arrived.  His name?  Johann Sebastian Bach. Bach's influence on music was and is as profound as Luther's on religion and politics.  It is calculated that it would take decades to physically write down the works of Bach, yet he not only wrote the scores, he composed them.  Weekly a cantata for St Thomas's, larger works for feasts and festivals, other works for the three sister churches, and utterly amazing general music besides. Oh, and he had 20 children . . .

As if this church did not have enough in being at the heart of two great revolutions, Richard Wagner was baptised here, and both Mozart and Mendelssohn played the organ as visiting musicians. Sme churches have history, but this is on another level!

Missing Notes

I was listening to an organist bemoaning this amazing Fugue by J S Bach (s. 948).  It is not the famous one of the same notation (in D Minor) but it has many spectacular elements in it as you will hear.

It is usually played on the harpsichord.  The organist pointed out that he'd heard harpsichordists didn't care for it much either.

For a harpsichord (which has a much smaller keyboard than a piano) there are a few impossibly low notes.  For an organ (with its pedal board of low notes) those notes are easy, but there are very few of them.  That's what the organist was complaining about.  "It's not really for organ".

What does all this musical stuff add up to?

Perhaps this.  That just because life isn't a perfect fit for us, some talents under-used, some requirements out of reach, we should see in our imperfections the beauty created by the Composer and forget our limitations by comparison.

Pipes

On Monday I went to the funeral of a lady who had been involved with our church many years ago.  The service was in a little village chapel.  The chapel was in a little village lane (we were directed to park in something between a car park and a farmyard).  The chapel looked like a house (as all good old-fashioned non-conformist chapels do).  There was ice on the roads and as it didn't, from the outside, look like a building that had benefited from heavy investment I feared there might be ice on the pews. (It was pleasantly warm in fact). 

We walked in.  The entrance was sufficiently narrow to make me grateful I'd lost weight recently, not a funeral director's favourite kind of entrance.  But on this occasion I was congregation not platform participant and as I finished squeezing into the pew, designed for that earlier generation that was rather less than my 6 foot plus, my eyes were transfixed by the pile of metal material in the corner of the room.

My initial thought was that a local farmer may be using that corner to store old pipework.  Pipes stood behind the single keyboard organ as if they had been thrown there.  Some were straight others at various angles, there were gaps where pipes seemed to be missing, some looked kind of rusty.  Perhaps an old space satellite had landed in the village punching a hole in the chapel roof which was now repaired.  However, in the end, I was forced to conclude this pile of pipes had really been the organ, uncased, disused and left in miserable decay in the corner of the chapel.

An older lady stood up.  Well she stood more than stood up on account of not being young enough or tall enough to do the 'up'.  She had a music bag!  And then the horror dawned.  She was making her way to the pile of pipes!!  I braced myself.  Here I was, with a grieving family and some thoughtful and kind members of my church sitting beside me and I was about to hear the most pitiable example of what passes for church music played on an instrument that the local museum would laughingly refuse to consider as a free gift.

Christine climbed and sat on the organ stool.  She spread out her music. She began to play.  A J. S. Bach prelude floated from the corner.  There were no missing notes.  There were no missed timings.  There seemed, after all, no missing pipes.  Simply masterful music beautifully played by a more-than-able musician on an instrument that my ears told my eyes was not as ugly as my eyes had imagined.

Some chorales and hymns later I was remembering not only a lady I had often visited but (thanks to Christine) also the words of the Lord Jesus,

Stop judging by the way things look, but judge by what is really right.