Churches and cathedrals somehow become more visible when you’re on holiday. You’d definitely struggle to accurately locate the nearest ones in your neighbourhood without cheating. But the sun is out, and an exemplary pile of vertiginous blackened Gothic is exactly what 6.45pm calls for as you wander around Cologne.
You’ve had three ice creams in as many days, drunk espressos prepped by experts from the Ankara diaspora and, weirder still, the sun has billboarded the sky all week. Relaxation, that goal that must never consciously be a goal, seems dangerously close at hand.
With its place on the skyline unassailed by the functional but colourful low-rises of Cologne’s post-war streets, the Dom is an ever-present pin on the map. A friend had recommended the weekly organ recital – perhaps as the best bait for a musician without spiritual leanings. And what a sound system the after-worldly would put together back then. It’s all cone.
As you walk in, the priests, like cinema ushers, are winnowing out the concert-goers from the general tourists. You walk through the chill, still air of the nave, the immense space unfolding in scale with every step.
Most people look up, of course. The combination of a cathedral’s way with soaring verticals and the fact that the organist remains physically obscured throughout the performance prompts a certain restless tilting of the head. The pews’ commitment to 90-degree angles also settles the mind/body problem in favour of the mind for now. Free your mind and your behind will hopefully forgive you in the next life.
The organ itself is massive, daringly attached halfway up the cathedral’s northern side, adding to the already considerable sum of the upwardly impressive. It’s almost a museum of organs: they appear like outcroppings from the building’s rock, in front, aside and, most grandly, to the rear. It occurs to you that you don’t have a programme and yet, in this tourist mood, like a paper hat bobbing on a stream, it doesn’t seem to matter. There really aren’t any opinions to be formed or further crystallised. It would be in German and it’s not like you could name any organ music, in any case. Perhaps kicking away props and distractions is a bit more in keeping with what it is to be in a cathedral for an extended period. When were you even last in one to sit and listen to something?
There was that wedding about six years ago where everyone seemed to be a health-care professional, possibly the safest location in which to need the Heimlich manoeuvre after too many profiteroles. And that wasn’t a cathedral, more a church that had just got a bit out of hand.
A disappointingly electronic beep announces that the concert is about to start. The Dom is now so full that folding chairs are being hastily arranged at the edges. Your mind quickly discards an obvious observation about the average age of those present and as the first deep bass notes flood the chamber you too look up.
The summer evening light is strong, the brightness and your stillness mean you actually spend a good five minutes trying to make sense of that early cinema, the stained-glass window. Bach’s rotational melodies start to form complex waves of sound. You assume it’s Bach; even though you can’t name any Bach pieces in the actual here and now, it’s certainly behaving in what you take to be a Bach-ian manner. Brilliant interlocking harmonic gambits that somehow conspire to render any response redundant. But the organ’s near-endless reverberation is also narcotic and you try to read the stained-glass scenes to stave off sleep.
The overarching theme seems to be woe. Tribulation also gets a look-in, stalking characters in the various tableaux. Doubling down on an effortlessly maintained ignorance of biblical details, you carry out the thought experiment that this is your first encounter with the culture of Christianity, that you must – as a stranger in a strange land – make sudden sense of these pivotal narratives.
Women are mothers, or unhappy, or unhappy mothers. Young men are either proud with power, agricultural without speaking parts, or being put upon by rock-carrying peers. One chap in particular seems to be honoured or condemned to stand up on a wooden cross. Whether he’s pro or anti isn’t entirely clear. Certain people get to glow, others less so. As in the building itself, there’s an appeal to light sources from on high, although power itself and the better part of the drama tellingly comes not from above but down on the ground.
But now the invisible hands of the organist are making stabbier chords and more defined melodic directions, you’re all woken up and can’t resist a smile. History is in the air, and on the move in the cathedral. What a fitting place to become subtly aware of unseen guiding hands with a story to share. Somehow the programme’s dance through musical time chimes with some enjoyably vague ideas you have about post-war German character. Above right, you spot the pixellated replacement stained-glass window by Gerhard Richter. Its dotty schematic colours are childlike and computational, its modernity sweet yet somehow stately enough for its setting.
The programme feels like it’s now charging through the latter 20th century, and even though you don’t recognise the pieces you know the world that birthed them. With the organ now sounding simultaneously like a horn section, cinema strings and glockenspiel, you look back and down and around you.
Finally the waves of sound fade away, applause breaks out and a small man in a brown suit makes an Oz-like appearance up on the balcony, confirming the towering nature of the instrument above. People cheer and he gives two thumbs up, smiling broadly. Human scale is restored, it’s a show, a physical play – people, patience and sound.