AMD 4

For this AMD, I watched a documentary in german about the late Karl Richter (I mentioned him in my Bach post). Richter was a German conductor, organist, and harpsichordist. While he is often lauded as one of the greatest interpreter of Bach (specifically for his directing/conducting of the Münchener Bach-Chor and Münchener Bach-Orchester), he was also a prodigious instrumentalist. At the age of 23 he was appointed as an organist for the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, one of the most prestigious organist positions in the world- partly because the Thomaskirche was the church where Bach was Musical Director in the 1700s. His renditions of Bach's greatest works (the Passions, the Mass, Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor, etc.) are known by Bach experts as intense, deep, and expressive. One thing that makes Richter so unique is that he did not conduct Bach in a Romantic manner, as many of his contemporaries did. He avoided drastic fluctuation in tempo, and kept the sound balanced throughout the orchestras that he conducted. Richter died of a heart attack in München in 1981, at the age of 55.

Listening to the documentary and reading the subtitles, I was able to pick out some of the subjects we have gone over in class. What I found really interesting was how different the construction of sentences in german is compared to English. It seemed as though what was being spoken was incredibly scrambled, when compared to the english sentences. While I notice this in class, I was surprised by the degree of which it can seem "scrambled".