Schubert is only twenty when he sets Gretchen's nervous breakdown to music on the spinning wheel.
43 bars long, until the verse “My poor mind is cut to pieces”, then the song breaks off.
Now the sheet of music is at the far right on the third floor of the Romantic Museum in a drawer that you open almost casually, lost in thought.
As a further shoot of a listening station with books, sound samples, picture postcards and a video installation of falling snow around Schubert's “Winterreise” and Wilhelm Müller's “Poems from the papers left behind by a traveling French horn player”.
Florian Balke
Culture editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.
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But the museum draws on one of the best romantic collections in the world, as Ina Hartwig (SPD), Head of the Department of Culture puts it: "The city is proud of this jewel." which will be open to all visitors for the first time on Tuesday morning.
And they are already waiting.
The sunny morning goes perfectly with the facade colors of Christoph Mäckler's museum building, which makes you think of Mendelssohn's “Italian Symphony” rather than his “Scottish” one.
The blue ribbon, which is stretched across the new main entrance of the museum and Goethe-Haus at the Großer Hirschgraben, is cut by the visitor Alexander Reuter who happens to be at the very front at the request of Anne Bohnenkamp.
After all, it should be a museum by everyone for everyone.
This is how the director of the Free German Hochstift who stepped in front of the house and the representatives of the city, state and federal government formulated it the evening before at the ceremony in the Cantate Hall.
Manuscripts, drawings, paintings
Reuter didn't stop by by accident. He is a passionate museum visitor, says the man from Frankfurt during a conversation on the “Himmelsleiter”, the blue staircase on whose steps visitors go up to the floors of the permanent exhibition. Reuter is enthusiastic: “I am completely slain.” In fact, there is a lot to see, learn and understand about manuscripts, drawings, paintings, sculptures and musical instruments. And with obvious joy. Pensioners and schoolchildren take their time at the numerous stations covering the decades between 1749 and 1859, trying out, discovering, looking at and drawing connections between the exhibits, the exemplary labeling in German and English and other delicacies.
One of them is the ironic permanent commentary by Heinrich Heine, which is represented everywhere with quotes that can be opened. At the station for the Cologne cathedral building project promoted by Sulpiz Boisserée and Goethe, a schoolgirl with a headscarf explains to a white-haired man how he uses the QR code and smartphone for further explanations, next door Madame de Staël talks about the spread of romanticism across Europe. “C'est bien fait”, a French visitor says appreciatively to her friend.
The blue-glazed bay window facing the street, in which you can sit down to look not outwards but inwards, follows the maxim that the architect Christoph Mäckler used in the venue of Michael Quast's Fliegender Volksbühne the previous evening the museum he designed declared: “It makes visible and invisible.” In keeping with Novalis, whose definition of romanticism is one of many with which visitors are greeted in the mirror cabinet on the second floor as soon as they walk through the picture gallery on the first to have.
Füsslis "Nachtmahr"
It tells Goethe's life in pictures up to the trip to Italy, with Meißener Werther porcelain from 1789, Füssli's “Nachtmahr” from 1790 and Faust ornamental plates from 1821, on which a wonderfully fiery red Mephisto flames, but also points ahead Upheavals coming. “The art of alienating in a pleasant way, making an object strange and yet known and attractive, that is the romantic poetics,” writes Novalis in 1800. The house follows her. It shows a completely new Goethe, says Bohnenkamp. Together with a romance that is as fresh and innovative as Novalis had hoped for. No wonder that the students seem anything but forced to visit Goethe: “This house has something to say to everyone,” says Hartwig.
Mäckler's bay window, where you can stare into the blue, is surrounded by Beethoven's music, which ETA Hoffmann praised as the “purple shimmer of romanticism”, and the experiments of the physicist Johann Wilhelm Ritter, who improved Alessandro Volta's battery and invented the accumulator. The room sponsor is the Cologne gallery owner Karsten Greve, who with a donation of one million euros was one of those who gave Bohnenkamp and her colleagues the courage to continue at critical points on the ten-year journey from the idea to the opening. The Hochstift was originally supposed to raise four million euros, says Carl-Ludwig von Boehm-Bezing, chairman of the administrative committee of the research facility: "Significantly more than double that amount was entrusted to us by private individuals." The museum has received more than 1,500 individual donations, says Bohnenkamp .The whole hall rises to greet them on Monday evening. No wonder. After all, she turned something invisible into something visible.