Flowers & Flutes

I went on two different tours this week. Tuesday I went on a tour of the Herrenhauser Garden with the International Women's Association of Hannover. There are actually 4 gardens, but our tour guide just took us through a small part of the baroque Great Garden, built by Sophia in the 17th century. Lots of statues in a Greek style, formal knot gardens, fountains, grottoes, an outdoor theater, with a moat running round the whole garden. Leibnitz helped design the waterworks for the great fountain, which, depending on the water pressure, can reach 70-80 meters. Because the winter was so long and it suddenly became warm, all the spring flowers are in bloom at once: lilacs, tulips, rhododendrons, pansies, and peonies are all in full bloom.

Hercules Statue, Großer Garten

 

Knot Garden, Großer Garten

 

I was taking this picture, and, all of sudden, I saw a palm tree moving along. Very strange. Then the tractor emerged from behind the hedge. It's finally warm enough to bring the palm trees out from winter greenhouses.

Tractor Pulling Palm Tree Out For Summer Display



At lunch, I sat next to someone whose husband had worked in Houston for several years. She invited me to join her and some other members for a tour of the Berggarten and then on to her house for a meeting of their English reading group. The Berggarten is a smaller, but less formal and more varied garden with a rhododendron garden, a marsh, and greenhouses. I had always wondered why it was called the Berg Garden, since berg means mountain in German and there is certainly no mountain there. In fact, if anything, it has a slump in the middle. Anyway, originally there was a small hill, but it subsided with all the digging. The building was built to house the master gardener, but he decided it was too small (!) and lived somewhere else, so other gardeners lived there.

Berg Garden Building

The English reading group is reading West Side Story aloud and listening to some of the songs on CD. We each read parts and sang some of the songs. I can still remember most of the words to all of the musicals we sang growing up. The text had footnotes to translate 50s slang into German, so I learned some new German vocabulary. Although they read English books aloud, the discussion is in German. The members are from Peru, Russia, and Germany. I asked if there were German musicals that most Germans know and can sing the songs to, which started a discussion of how the Nazis used the popular German folk songs and culture for Hitler youth, so after the war no one sang them anymore. Very sad to have one's culture hijacked for evil. Also, they said the  stereotype of Germans singing while hiking is false, since most Germans are too private to sing aloud in public.

Yesterday someone from my recorder orchestra took me and the French mathematician upstairs with whom I have been playing duets to the Moeck factory in Celle. We had a detailed 2 1/2 hour tour with lots of information on the qualities of the different woods, why the Germans have their own fingering system, and the history of the recorder. I felt like a pilgrim on a visit to the Vatican, since I already owned a soprano and alto Moeck. He gave 4 of us unfinished recorders, and we got to walk them through the process of stamping the name on and getting the holes drilled and the cedar inserted for the mouthpiece. We even got to push the buttons on some of the machines. I wasn't allowed to take any pictures in the factory where the machines are, since they adapted and invented some of the machines themselves. There is a lot of specialized hand labor, and I was impressed that he did a lot of the steps himself on the recorders we were carrying through the process.

Tour Guide with Subbass

 

 Here are a series of pictures of the instrument I walked through to the final quality control and note test with a strobe.

Without holes

 

Before Cedar Insert

With Cedar Mouthpiece Insert

Cutting the Mouthpiece

Last Clean-up

Testing the sound quality and note accuracy with a strobe

 

Margrit had called ahead to say that I was interested in perhaps buying a tenor. We were given boxes of different tenors in different kinds of wood in a private room. Both Margrit and Isabella were very patient as I played them over and over before (with much trepidation) finally deciding on one. I'm thrilled! Everyone who knows me knows how hard it is for me to spend money on myself, so I'm still in shock that I bought myself such an expensive birthday present when I have years of gift cards at home that I've never used. Maybe old dogs can learn new tricks. 

My New Tenor