We started the day by going to church, an unusual event for us, but we were looking for something special. We love Gregorian chanting so we went at 10.30 to the yellow Theatine Church and had a wonderful time listening to what seemed to be deep echoes from the past. We then ventured further south to the Assam Church. It was an amazing Late Baroque or Rococo building where I could look at the ceiling all day but it really was a complete piece of intricate, decorative Rococo architecture inside and out.
We have heard that St Peters ceiling is also magnificent but went to the wrong number 5 on the map ie. the red colour instead of the blue. When a Munich woman twenty years younger pulled up on her bike, she never thought she would leave us thinking that she had learnt nothing about Munich. I even pointed to the map to show her we were going the right way and that she had it wrong. When I realised my mistake I called out to her, relieving her of her doubt that she lived here. We will complete our three church tour tomorrow by seeing the very long painted St Peters ceiling. Later another woman 10 years younger, pulled over on her bike, gave us the correct direction and took off as fast as she had stopped.
Then it was another self guided tour of the Alte Pinakothek art gallery. We had little time because lots of places are closed tomorrow, so we weren’t going through the four floors or the whole twenty or so rooms on one floor, so I chose Rubens with his extremely expressive art and followed their very large collection of his works. I spent time looking at his way of expressing his metaphors to heighten points he wanted to make even though a little too graphical at times.
“If you pay peanuts you get monkeys”, ie. if you pay your workers low wages, then they will repay you with low work output. I thought of this as we squeezed into the back row (standing). This was a statement made some years ago by an English tycoon, James Goldsmith. This was the back row of Munich’s National Theatre or Opera House where you stand for a 3 hour performance.
You can have a break and sit down on a sort of seat, it was a piece of good wood poked out about 100 mls just enough for half a bum to sit on; you could rest one foot at a two foot height; you could go the row behind where there were no wood pieces and it means you then also miss out on seeing yet another actor on stage. I had a footrest that wasn’t one, and I had heads that moved every time I thought I had a gap. The best thing to do, I learnt, was to become best friends of those close to you so you can laugh when something goes wrong. Otherwise it pays to pay your proper money and that is then all you have to do.
As you might have guessed we got a huge discount on the last 2 tickets (Corrie told me not to say because she said it was uncouth to do so). The opera was a little strange as many are and called – “Cosi fan tutte” (“Women are like that”) by Mozart. So some of the audience thought they’d become involved and act a little strange as well, and clap when they shouldn’t have. The actors acknowledged their support by continuing on. I have been told from reliable sources that the ones who clap are those who know only a little about opera and think they are clever in picking the ‘applause timing’. It has also been said that these people are first timers at the opera, have money but little knowledge, while we who know it all, are poor intellectuals showing the hardships we have to undergo in order to be ‘all over it’.
