It started with a casual comment to my colleague Randy last Christmas, that it would be fun to visit someplace for not too much money, where I could speak German. I was pondering possibilities of how to use up some free time before our Mexican family excursion, already planned. He suggested Sibiu, just a few hours away. German? In Romania? He said it used to be called Hermannstadt. And then the history of Transylvania began to open up to me—settled by Saxons as early as 800 years ago; fortified churches built for protection from invading Turks and Tatars; wholescale conversion to the Lutheran faith after the Protestant Reformation; prosperity and peace in a storybook beautiful bucolic setting interspersed with violence and periodic destruction. And this included the incredible horrors inflicted upon enemy and compatriot alike at the hand of the infamous ‘Vlad the Impaler’ of the 15th century, the real Dracula. The most recent atrocity to this part of the country was the handiwork of Ceausescu in the 1970s, when he ‘sold’ large numbers of German-speaking homeowners, mostly of the more successful middle class, to the German government, insisting that they ‘repatriate’ them after these last 800 years, or he would have ‘other ideas’ in store for them. Ethnic Romanians and gypsies took their place in the now empty houses. Then, when the Iron Curtain fell after 1989, Germany accepted most of the rest of them with open arms. Now, only a small remnant of the once dominant Saxon German population of Transylvania remains. And those are the ones we went in search of in those few days before last Christmas!
As luck would have it, in a lively jazz club, The Imperium, recommended by the friendly owner of Gasthof Clara, our lodgings, (she also owned the club), we met a gregarious multilingual Irishman, Bob, whose organization, the European House of Arts, happened to be putting together an arts celebration to coincide with the summer festival that would mark the fact that Sibiu had been chosen as the Eastern European Cultural Capital for the year 2007. [Divertimento: The owner of the Gasthof Clara did speak German, but her English was better. And the punchline of an old joke comes to mind—“So why are we speaking Spanish?!?”—in this case, German.] Bob wanted to know, did we know of any aspiring musicians who would like to come to Romania to perform simply for the pleasure of performing in the Eastern European Cultural Capital? His shoe-string budget could offer lodging and meals only, period. Welllll . . ., we knew about the travel plans of our daughter Madeline and her beau Matt for next summer, so arrangements for email auditions were made on the spot, and voilà, by March, all formalities had been covered.
And so it was in early August, that the four of us, Millie and I and our two young traveling musicians, Maddy and Matt, packed ourselves and our gear into our bright yellow VW Polo and wended our winding way through the mountains to Sibiu.
One of the functions of friendship is to trade favours. So Bob called in a favour and organized that his Frankfurter friend Kiki, who’d married a Saxon Romanian girl whose mother had returned from Germany to her home village west of Sibiu, Rusciori, would get his mother-in-law to open her house to visiting artists, and allow her school to be used as further lodgings and a centre for meals and a general headquarters for the ‘European House of Arts’, Bob’s organization. And that’s how we came to live for a few days in a most interesting little spot. The pictures below can help to tell the story.
We were shown to our room upstairs. Clearly, massive renovations were underway, and our host was disappointed by their slow progress. Encumbered with backpacks and handluggage, we negotiated around improvised scaffolding and narrow stairways with impossible headroom. The carpenter was at fault here, according to Kiki. He'd built the stairs 'wrong'. The upstairs landing was adrift in drywall dust, and a tiny dropcloth made a flimsy attempt at shielding what was left of the carpet from the white footprints with which an additional four visitors now would regularly mark their comings and goings. Our four cheek-by-jowl mattresses were, thankfully, free of this white dust, but little else was. No matter, if this was part of life in a genuine Romanian village, then we'd come here to experience it!
One morning we were greeted with screams and squeals from outside. We observed that two enormous pigs had been enjoying an unaccustomed freedom to forage and root in the garden, and that two young men were now persuasively beating them with sticks to encourage them to find their way back to their pen. Clearly, the porcine squealing indicated an indignant disapproval of the wretched treatment. All too soon, the show was over.
Later that morning, a smartly trotting horse with wagon held up beside where I worked at packing the car. A youngish woman with her three children was headed on some errand, but stopped her charger to indicate in no uncertain gestures that I was to take a photo. I rummaged, found necessary camera, clicked (see below) and she held out her hand for payment for services rendered! 2 RON happily clutched in the baby's grubby fist later, they resumed smartly trotting off to complete their errand. A win-win situation, I guess—I did have a nice picture—but I still had the feeling of being duped.
Village kids: some of the clientelle of the European House of Arts day camp
OK, no jokes now about the old Gong Show from the 70s! Maddy was scheduled to perform in the unfortunately named Gong Theatre in the heart of the old town in Sibiu/Hermannstadt. In spite of the fact that the piano was a relic from happier times and badly in need of repairs and a tuning (partially supplied just hours before the concert), Maddy, as per usual, pulled it all off with aplomb and her signature abandon. Her opening Morale was a proverbial kick to the heart, her Debussy preludes vivdly told their musical stories, her Chopin exquisite, and the closing Ginistera pieces nicely stirred the pot to a roiling boil. Prolonged and heartfelt Romanian-style applause kept her bowing for several curtain calls.
Matt needed to disappear from the audience of Maddy's performance just a bit early to get ready for his own show just down the road, at the Atrium Café.
Playing his borrowed guitar (from the director of our school, no less; thanks, Arnie!), perched upon the stool á la every cliché of every coffee house singer from the 60s, he launched into his considerable repertoire of original tunes. He was as well received as Maddy had been, although their performances could hardly have been less similar. Whether he crooned a jazzy ballad about life and young romance, or sang some hard-hitting social commentary, the audience loved him. Of course, noteworthy was the fact that the band he was opening for were all there rootin' tootin' for him all the way, and the rest of the patrons had no trouble agreeing with them! Matt noted later, this was WAY better than those times when the only members of the audience at the gig you're playing were the band members of the other bands that would play that night. The other band in this case was Carrantuohill, a six-man Polish Celtic band that played traditional Irish music, currently on tour through Europe. Polish Celtic?? I reason, if Mennonites can play jazz, then surely, Poles can play Irish Celtic. They'd been together with all six original members for the past 20 years and showed later that they really knew how to kickstart a crowd.
Matt played the following evening at an outdoor venue in the shadow of the bell tower of a grand old church. The audience he collected was very different, a middle-aged crowd of about 40 listeners, but no less enthusiastic. Maddy's second audience was much smaller, but again, she poured her artistic heart into it, to great response. Even the theatre custodian gave her a bouquet of flowers, likely picked out of her own garden.
Romanian Orthodox Cathedral, Sibiu
In my initial conversation with Randy about Sibiu, he had commented that he'd been there last summer, and it was pretty much covered in scaffolding, street repairs and construction barriers. He couldn't imagine how they could possibly be ready for the summer festivals of 2007. Well, they DID manage to finish it, and wonderfully so! These days, the main square is all abuzz with tourists both domestic and foreign; there are sidewalk cafés up and down the cobbled pedestrian centre of town, spilling into thoroughfares; every store, church and museum is tarted up in newly painted finery; there’s nary a scrap of litter, and Sibian/Hermannstaedtler pride is palpable in the perfect summer air, and well-deservedly so. Thanks, Bob, for the invitation for our kids to be part of the summer festival for Sibiu, European Capital of Culture, 2007!
And of course, BRAVO!!! to Maddy and Matt.
