One of the most valuable new acquisitions in the collection from recent times, which can now be seen in the new German Romantic Museum in Frankfurt, is found in a tent made of wire, stretched out as if from piano strings: it is the sketches of Robert Schumann's setting of Goethe that create the outdoors Deutsche Hochstift was able to bid by a stroke of luck in 2018.
The composer and bookseller's son, who for a long time toyed with the idea of becoming a poet, came into contact with the Romantics early on, had read Schlegel, Tieck and Jean Paul, and his Eichendorff and Heine settings are among the most beautiful of all Song composition has produced.
The preoccupation with Goethe, however, was lifelong and culminated in the “Scenes from Goethe's Faust”, completed in 1853, which, in their boldly open form, were far ahead of their time.
A museum jewel
Sandra Kegel
Responsible editor for the features section.
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It is all the nicer that parts of the “Faust” sketches have now been removed from the basement of the Hochstift, which has been cooled down to eighteen degrees, and taken to the new museum. In fact, only a few people have ever seen the bundle of sketches, piano reductions and scores, as it has always been in private hands. Schumann's notes can be found in the multimedia exhibition station on the top floor of the museum and are surrounded by additional acoustic, optical and written explanations that literally appeal to all the senses. After almost ten years of preparation, construction and many imponderables, the new museum will finally open its doors on September 14th. A first tour shows that architecture,Scenography and filigree exhibits correspond here in the most beautiful way. Frankfurt has a new museum jewel.
The basis for the permanent exhibition is the collection, in particular on the literature of German Romanticism, which the Free German Hochstift and sponsor of the Frankfurt Goethe House has been compiling for over a hundred years. For a long time the treasure of paintings, manuscripts and relics rested in archival boxes in the vault of Frankfurt's Großer Hirschgraben 23, where Goethe was born on August 28, 1749 and spent the first years of his life. The plan of the Hochstift director Anne Bohnenkamp to build a place of remembrance of the Romantic era in the immediate vicinity of the historicizing replica from the 1950s was as courageous as it was visionary. Such a museum has not existed in Germany before, even though the era is associated with this country as much abroad as only Richard Wagner or the cuckoo clock.
When the neighboring building became vacant when the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels moved away, Anne Bohnenkamp recognized the moment and set her plan in motion. Very close to the estate of the Gontard family, where the young Hölderlin fell so unhappily in love as a private tutor and later found an ugly functional building until it was demolished, Christoph Mäckler designed a three-part building whose yellow and sandstone tones match the color spectrum of the neighboring Goethehaus records. The building has an exhibition area of 1200 square meters on three floors. The foyer, which at the same time represents the new entrance area for the Goethe-Haus, thrives on transparency, and indeed on the optical urge to go out into the open. A large panoramic window provides a view of the newly designed romantic garden,while the firewall, which, unlike the building itself, survived the war, was brought into view towards the Goethe house. The destroyed Frankfurt old town is set into the ground in the form of those rubble stones that were fabricated from the rubble of the destroyed city after 1945 and that the Mäckler had placed between the bricks.