Weimar—the peaceful, but culturally rich town on the Ilm river in former East Germany where Goethe made his adult life, and Bach, Herder, Schiller, Hummel, Liszt built their lives and careers.   Weimar fostered the modern design school known as the Bauhaus movement, and also hosted the meetings that led to Germany’s one true democracy, the Weimar Republic of the 1920s.  Not far from Weimar is the Wartburg Castle, where Martin Luther hid himself while translating the New Testament, and where the medieval “Singers’ Wars” immortalized in Wagner’s Tannhäuser actually took place!  Over the hill from Weimar in a thick birch forest where one finds a different kind of memorial to German history: the Buchenwald Concentration Camp—an insidious shadow that still affects Weimar citizens in their daily lives.  

In short, with its 45,000 inhabitants, Weimar is an extraordinary place to take SMU students for a summer semester of study abroad.  My dear husband Hank first realized Weimar’s possibilities when we drove through during the summer of 1998.  After we hatched the idea (and he convinced me to do it!), I found a terrific colleague and cohort in Dr. Marlies Gaettens, associate professor of German and literature.  Together, we direct the program and have brought nearly 50 students to study in Goethe’s city.  

This year, we wanted to give something “back” to the Weimar residents, and so on June 16 we presented a concert of American vocal and chamber music in a Baroque church adjacent to the Tiefurt Chatteau—a small palace that once belong to Herzogin Maria Pavlovna—sister to two Tsars who married into Weimar nobility in 1804.   We packed the church, bringing the roof down with a violin-piano arrangement of Copland’s “Hoedown” from Rodeo! 

You won’t believe the performances our students were able to attend this summer!  Let me list the major ones: the Berlin Philharmonic, the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig with Herbert Blomstedt conducting, Richard Strauss’ Cappricio at the Semper Opera in Dresden and his Ariadne auf Naxos in the Berlin Staatsoper.  And the three crowning jewels (for me, at least) were Berg’s Lulu at the Berlin Staatsoper, Baldassare Galuppi's Il mondo al troverso (an eighteenth-century rarity “top hit” by Mozart’s predecessor), and an absolutely nutty, brilliant Barber of Seville, these latter two in Weimar’s German National Theater.  I haven’t even counted the museums, the plays, or the concerts at the Liszt Musikhochschule!  Am I spoiled now?  Yes, a thousand times yes!