You Go Nate!

How I spent my Somer Vacation - Part V (July 12-13th):

BACH TO THE FUTURE

When I was staying with Sybille & Wolfgang I spent some time planning my trip for the next week. I really wanted to visit the town of Leipzig and so I called several hostels. Everywhere in Leipzig was booked for that Saturday night! So I decided to call the Leipzig LDS Outreach Center (for Young Single Adults) and see if anyone there knew of a place I could stay for cheap. The missionary "Outreach" couple who answered the phone said that they would be happy to let me stay with them for that night. They even offered to pick me up from the train station.

So I left Berlin on Saturday evening and headed south to Leipzig. I arrived at the train station...

...and Elder & Sister Dixon were there to meet me. They are from near St. George, Utah; he was a high school math teacher and she was a hairdresser. They were both very nice and kind.

It was still light when I arrived so they offered to take me for a walk around the inner city. It was a beautiful evening and Leipzig has a very interesting inner city.

It really got pretty as the sun started to set.

It was an especially pretty backdrop for the St. Thomas Church (more on that later).

There was a big open-air concert fest going on in front of the Gewandhaus Concert Hall.

Across the street is the famous Leipzig Opera House, built in the Communist days after WWII:

A glockenspiel:

I was able to sleep on a mattress on the living room floor of the Dixon's apartment. Sister Dixon made breakfast the next morning and then we were off to church.

The other Young Single Adults were singing in church that day with Elder Dixon playing the piano. I was invited to join in...

...so I did.

After church it was pouring rain. Sister Dixon made a nice lunch and then the weather cleared up a bit and they took me out again to the city to see some of the sites.

Our first stop was the St. Thomas Church. This is where the Johann Sebastian Bach worked from 1723 until his death in 1750.

Here he was the Cantor of the Thomas School as well as Music Director of the church. He wrote many of his greatest works while living here in Leipzig. The Leipzig Boys' Choir, which I saw perform in Sternberg the week before, comes from this church and would have been more or less the same organization that Bach instructed and led.

Inside the church is the grave of Bach himself.

Here is the inside of the church:

There was also a very small exhibit of some period artifacts from Bach's time:

Here is a Liturgical Book from 1781 which would have been used during Bach's time here.

Here are the death accounts of several of Bach's children who died in infancy:

A Bible from 1702 that would have also been in use at the church during Bach's time:

And here is the Paten and Goblet used for Bach's last Communion:

Here I am with the Big Guy:

After visiting the St. Thomas Church we walked around the city a bit more and I was able to snap a few shots.

The famous German writer Johann Wolfgang Goethe spent some time in Leipzig...

Here I am at the Gewandhaus Concert Hall again trying to put my umbrella in my back pocket. A lot of the great classical music performances and recordings were made in this building. It was fun to see it in person being the avid classical music collector that I am.

The 19th Century composer Felix Mendelssohn also worked in Leipzig for several years. It was he who rediscovered and popularized Bach's music as music director of the Gewandhaus. This was his apartment: