Amsterdam
may be considered the epitome of a Dutch city with its canals, but I think
Delft beats Amsterdam. I admit it is not half as big, but that may be part of its
charm. There are many canals, and in summer big white lilies float on the water.
Water traffic is limited, so the water lilies can thrive and blossom. On
Saturdays there is an extensive market along the canals, as well as a special
antiques market in the summer months. There is the regular bric-a-brac, but there are also some interesting finds, as well as antiquarian books, old maps
and - it being Delft - , hand painted Dutch tiles, not just the Delft blue ones.
bric-brac-along the canals
There are cafes and restaurants galore, a flower market, and a market with
fresh produce. The stalls line the canals, in front of book stores and
kitchenware shops. The latter have luxury articles for sale from Scandinavia.
Scandinavian design as an antidote or contrast to the Delft blue perhaps? Among
the real hand painted Delftware are many works of art, but those are far too
expensive to take back as a souvenir.
Behind the New Church
Saturday
afternoon I enjoyed just roaming around, exploring shops, canals and alleys
which I hadn't seen before. Along some of the canals one finds imposing former
merchant houses and warehouses. Nowadays the big houses are used for student
housing or as offices, and hardly privately owned. The centre is dotted with
cafes and restaurants, not just in the wide market square with its ancient Town
Hall (where one of my brothers got married long ago) and its imposing New Church which houses the graves of the Royal family,
the House of Orange. There are cafes in the old "Waag" the weighing
house, along the canals, and in squares, sometimes on barges used as floating
terraces, and in the square next to the Old Church with its tower slanting like the tower of
Pisa. Both churches have beautiful, big and famous pipe organs and there are
regular organ recitals. I just missed a
lunchtime recital in the New Church.
Bikes, stalls, and a canal
Delft was home to the famous painter Johannes
Vermeer, whose grave can be found in the Old Church. Don't mix Delft up with the
town pictured in the film "Girl with
a Pearl Earring". The film was shot in Belgium, and not in Delft, as it
was much easier to find a medieval town centre in what used to be the Southern
Netherlands. In Belgium they have not meddled so much with their heritage as we
have in the Netherlands where we seem to replace historic buildings by new ones
– or by parking lots and ring roads.
On Friday
night I went to an organ recital in Katwijk. When I entered the church – and I
was rather late – the organist was still tuning the pipes. This is most
unusual. However, organ pipes, and especially the reeds, are very sensitive to
weather changes and sudden changes in temperature. Friday was a peculiar day.
It was very hot in the morning, around 30 degrees centigrade, no wind, sun, in
fact summer! Around 3 o'clock in the afternoon the weather changed
dramatically. It started raining and the temperature dropped 10-14 degrees in
two hours time. So very quickly the organ was totally out of tune. As the music
required the use of reeds, the recital could not start till the reeds had been
tuned! This is Holland for you!
The church boasts a big pipe organ,
suitable for French organ music of composers such as Pierne, Vierne (who incidentally
died at the console of the organ of the Notre Dame and fell off the bench at
the end of an organ recital), Saint-Saëns, Widor. Most of
those composers cum organists lived in Paris and wrote their compositions for
the big churches there, the Notre Dame, the St. Sulpice, the
Saint Clotilde, the Madeleine. They have the acoustics needed for those
compositions, which often require the plenum, the full organ stops. The organ
in Katwijk, which has all the required stops for those French organ compositions,
is far too big for the Nieuwe
Kerk which it was built for. The church, built as a protestant church, is almost a square, like a
hall. It hasn't got a nave, choir and aisles,
nor a place for an altar. The performing organist, Ben van Oosten, chose an
exclusively French programme:
Louis Marchand (1669-1732), Grand dialogue in C
major from Troisième Livre d'Orgue (1696)
Ben Oosten is very well-known, and although he tried to adapt his choice
of stops to the available space, the sound seemed to burst through the walls
and blow up the roof. I have heard such music in the dark and cavernous St. Sulpice
in Paris, and there it sounded wonderful as the pillars, the vaults and the
space in general soaked up the sound and gave it a mysterious quality. Not so
in Katwijk! I thought it would burst my ear drums. But there is a snag. The
loss of hearing in one of my ears due to a virus infection, has left me
virtually with mono sound. I still hear the very high and the very low bass
sounds, but the mid-register has gone. This means that I have a loss of depth.
You could compare it to the inability to see depth if one is blind in one eye.
Just after I partially lost my hearing, I could only listen to soft and very
melodious music. Loud music was just noise, and all the pleasure had gone out
of it. It couldn't move me. Gradually this has improved a bit. Interestingly
the other day I rereadMusicophilia, Tales of Music and the Brain,
by Oliver Sachs. He describes several
case of musicians and music lovers, who lost hearing in one ear. They were
absolutely shattered and appalled by the effect this had on their enjoyment of
music. Composers doubted if they would ever be able again to compose anything.
Conductors doubted if they could hear the subtleties they are supposed to hear
and so might no longer be able to do their job properly. It generally is a loss
which fills people who are affected with sadness and sometimes despair. This
was quite a consolation to me. I thought I had just imagined it. Another
phenomenon is that it is no longer possible to hear from which direction the
sound comes. So having just one functioning ear has many implications. The
latter was also noted by Oliver Sachs as a big handicap. However, the brain is amazing, for in most cases
the brain compensates gradually for the disfunctional ear and somehow or other brings
back this enjoyment of music and fills in the scale of sounds one has lost. As
far as the ability to judge the direction the sound comes from, that can't be
repaired. However, turning one's head quickly around seems to help and people
seem to do this almost automatically.
Sachs also has very interesting
things to say about perfect pitch. Apparently a very high percentage of people born with poor vision
or born blind, seems to have perfect pitch. Unfortunately
I am not one of them, although I have always compensated my poor eyesight with
my sharp ears! It was quite a shock to lose part of my hearing as well, especially
as music and singing forms an important part of my life.
Appeltern is a
village I had never been to. I did not even know where to locate it. But it is
well-known for its show gardens and as I won a free ticket, I went there for
the day on Thursday, together with one of my neighbours who loves special plants
and gardening. We were lucky as it was a
beautiful and very warm summer day, one of the few we have had so far this summer.
The area is rural and very quiet. It was surprising not to hear any traffic or
see a motorway in the distance. There are some 200 gardens in beautiful
parkland with old trees, a restaurant, a shop or where one can buy the most
beautiful and special plants, and all this in a large area along the river
Maas. We had a wonderful day.
As a
finishing touch we found a nice restaurant, Moeke Mooren a bit
further along the river with a view of a recreational lake connected with the
river, which used to be a sand pit.
An organ
recital was a good excuse to drive to Friesland on a pleasant and sunny Saturday
in July. The drive along the Afsluitdijk
is rather boring, but at least the speed limit is now 130 km an hour, which
helps!
Once in rural
Friesland, the world is different. Big horizons, green pastureland dotted with
cows, copses around old farmhouses,
windmills and many ditches and canals, it is all there. Just as tiny hamlets,
always with a church surrounded by a churchyard, however small the village.
Immediately after crossing the Afsluitdijk, I took an unclassified road along
the dike of the IJsselmeer, the former Zuiderzee which is now a lake.
Unfortunately the sheep and cows on the dike had a better view of the
IJsselmeer than any car drivers or cyclists, as the road is below the dike and
not on top. So I got out occasionally to have a look at the beautiful skies
with the amazing towering cumulus clouds, reflecting in the water.
The first
stop was Makkum, a very Dutch town in miniature, popular with sailors but also
known for its hand
painted ceramics, too expensive to be tempted to buy anything at all.
To my
surprise there was an international egg
throwing festival, which sounded too odd to be true. But it was true. One
part of the contest was a sort of Russian roulette with raw and hardboiled eggs
which had to be cracked on one's forehead. I did not get the rules, but two
people sat opposite each other with caps on their heads and the loser got its
face more or less covered in dripping raw egg. Then there was an egg throwing
contest and a relay race. The spectators had to be careful not to be hit by the
flying contents of the cracked and broken eggs! I never even knew this was part
of the local folklore. It seemed rather medieval and wasteful as well.The centre
of this small but delightful yachting town was closed off for traffic for the
occasion.
Tichelaar Ceramics Works
Instead of a front garden, Makkum
I stopped
at Gaast, a tiny hamlet, to have a look at the graves in the churchyard, the
texts on the stones often in the Frisian language, more related to English than
to Dutch.
Gaast
On to
Workum, a slightly bigger town also with harbours, formerly of course for freight
sailing ships, now just for pleasure boats. It had open access to the IJsselmeer.
There are a few sluices, but access is relatively easy. The town is rather narrow,
and long, originally built along the banks of a river which is now the main
street. With its raised sidewalks it is clear that once here was water. The
houses have beautiful gables and fronts and it looks as if once the town was prosperous, because of the fishermen and the traders,
goods being transported via the open sea.
There is a Roman Catholic church, and
a protestant one, before the reformation also Catholic of course, the St. Gertrudis,
dating back to the end of the fifteenth century, the late Gothic period. Because
of lack of funds the church was never fully completed on the west side, and so
the tower which dates from 1420, is not attached to the church. There is pulpit
which is beautifully carved and dates from 1718.
But most spectacular is the collection
of painted biers which belonged to the different guilds. There is one for the
builders, another for the bakers, one for the pharmacists , the carpenters, the
sailors and silversmiths. Most moving are two smaller biers for children.
I enjoyed
exploring the town, the old shipbuilding yard, the different harbours and
drawbridges, the imposing gabled houses and the tiny ones, but most of all the
church, the biers and the organ.
My friend was due to give an organ recital that evening, the main reason for my
trip. Just too bad that the attendance was so low. The organ dates back to the
17th century and although not too big, the sound is clear and
beautiful. The programme was varied, and included two of my favourite pieces.
The first one Larghetto and Allegro from Concerto nr. 13 in F by Georg Fr.
Handel, Cuckoo and Nightingale.
It took me back to my childhood when my father
took on the back seat of his bicycle to the Lutheran church in The Hague for my
first organ recital. Feike Asma was the organist and when he played this piece in
the semi dark church I was struck as if by lightning. It was absolutely
wonderful and I decided then and there that I wanted to learn to play the organ
as well. It was also the piece played during the private organ recital which
our organist friend played as part of the celebrations for my parents' 60th
wedding anniversary, in their local church. So all those memories came flooding
back during the recital in Workum.
The other piece
was the Suite Gothique by Leon Boellmann (1862-1897)
Here played
on the formidable organ of the St. Sulpice in Paris
The organ
in Workum is of course not comparable to the grand Cavaillé-Coll organ in Paris
and it needed some juggling to play the piece well. The organ has a will all of
its own and doesn't take kindly to weather changes, changes in humidity and
temperature. So halfway the organist had to stop to adjust the system combining
the two manuals, resulting in a loud and disconcerting bang! I thought he had become
unwell and fallen from his bench. Fortunately that wasn't the case. Once done,
he continued playing.
After the
recital we – the organist, the assistant and I – were invited for coffee at the
verger's house, which was nice. On my drive back the weather broke and I drove
through heavy downpours for the last 30 minutes or so. Home after midnight.
A busy
weekend, with a choir party and a bring and share meal on Saturday, the last
church service for our choir on Sunday before the summer break, followed by a
birthday lunch in a Pancake restaurant in The Hague and Choral Evensong in the
Hooglandse Kerk in Leyden on Sunday evening.
Worth
mentioning is the Choral Evensong. There was a guest choir, well versed in the
Anglican tradition. Here is the musical order of service:
Introit: Ave Verum by William Byrd (1543-1623)
Preces and Responses: William Smith (1603-1645)
Psalm 66, Jubilate Deo, on a triple chant by R.
J. Ashfield, a modern composer.
Canticles: Charles Wood (1866-1926)
Anthem: Psalm 100 by John Rutter
Byrd, beautifully sung by the Tallis Scholars
All was
well sung, but also spiritually uplifting. Very often Choral Evensongs in
Holland, in non-Anglican churches, are too stylized and spiritually just empty
shells. For me Choral Evensong is a beautiful and very meaningful form of
worship, not a concert. It need not be flawless, although of course the aim is
to give our best in worship to God, but it should be meaningful, a way to open
our hearts to God.
The hymns
were traditional and joyful, and I loved joining in.
NEH 178, 't Is Good Lord to be here
NEH 374, How Sweet the name of Jesus sounds,
with its beautiful melody
NEH 427, O Praise ye the Lord, and
NEH 368, Guide me , O thou great Redeemer
Although I
had to hurry to get there in time and so had no time to cycle but had to take
the car and pay for a parking ticket, it was well worth going and it filled me
with happiness. It was the perfect end to a Sunday. And an antidote to the
morning service, which lasted for almost two hours, twice as long as Evensong.
But - for me at least - not twice as uplifting. On the contrary...!
Rutter; A sharp contrast with Byrd and the Tallis singers!
A warm day and so I decided to go for a walk along the beach. To my surprise
there were very few people around. I could even park in the small free car
park, only a short walk through the dunes to the beach. The abundance of
flowering shrubs and plants amazed me. Dunes are just sand hills, no fertile or
rich soil. But the path on both sides was laced with fragrant roses, a special
species which so far I have only found in the dunes. In contrast to garden
roses which need to be pampered, watered and fertilised, these roses seem to
need next to nothing and flower all summer. They have a single row of petals,
saffron yellow hearts, and are either white or pink in colour. Together with
the porcelain blue flowers of the Echium Vulgare (in Dutch: Slangenkruid, Blueweed in English ), and the yellow flowering Jacobeae Vulgaris or Ragwort they provided a feast
of subtle colour to the usual silvergrey shades of this coastal landscape.
Probably our wet spring had something to do with it.
It was warm,
but overcast and very humid. The beach had this mysterious air, the villages to
the north and the south hardly visible through the haze. The weather forecast
was for thunderstorms in the afternoon, high winds, hailstones and rain. So I set off in the morning. Fortunately, as the tide was just going out,
I could walk on very firm sand, as yet totally untouched: no footprints at all,
except for the webbed prints of seagulls which forage on the edge of the water looking
for mussels and clams or other small sea food. Once walking away from the Wassenaar,
I hardly met anybody. The water was clean and crystal clear, but still very
cold, only 13 degrees I was told, for me just about right to dip my toes in and
cool my feet.
It was exhilarating, the feeling of having this vast empty space
with a wide horizon all to myself. The sound of the breaking waves and the
cries of the sea birds made thinking impossible and chased away any anxieties
or nagging thoughts. It was an added joy to find a perfectly formed and
undamaged shell, a very rare find on the beaches along this coast. I have
always lived on the North sea coast, but this was the first time I found a
shell like that. There might be more, for when after a brisk walk of an hour I
retraced my steps, a tractor with a net attached to it was scooping up banks of
shells out of the water and placing them on the hard sand in ever growing
heaps. They were loaded into a truck later, so I don't know what hidden
treasures, if any, were carted off among that load of common shells.
