Cultural cruises - music, art, churches, castles and wine!

From the time my late parents retired at 60, until their 85^th birthday, they went on a different cruise each year that was filled with music, literature, art, architecture or history. Thank you to Jeremy Seal for beautifully writing up one of the trips my parents loved.

In Wurzburg, guests on the Renaissance Tours river voyage were being treated to a private concert by the University of Music Wurzburg’s Baroque Orchestra. In a programme that included Handel and Vivaldi, Carlo Tessarini and Giuseppe Alberti, the orchestra’s period instruments and the intimate pavilion-style surroundings brought the audience close to the authentic spirit of mid-C18th chamber music.

And most of the orchestra accompanied us back to our luxury cruiser, MS Amadeus Elegant, to spend a few days on board. The programme secured us our own classical music troupe as we journeyed down Germany’s Main and Rhine rivers towards The Netherlands. It is no surprise these adjoining rivers, historic trade arteries on the great transcontinental waterway between the North and Black seas, should draw cultured types; the Main and Rhine valleys are positively crammed with the art and music of Central Europe.

Those who voyaged down these famously scenic waterways were spoiled for choice when it came to renowned Philharmonic orchestras (Munich, Cologne), national opera and ballet houses (Amsterdam) and world class art collections (Nuremberg’s Germanic National Museum, Amster­dam’s Rijksmuseum). Plus architectural highlights such as Cologne’s soaring Gothic cathedral!

Also important was the expertise and approachability of the accomp­any­ing lecturers, a distinguished Australian trio comprising two leading art critics and a music broadcaster.

Then there was the engaging and erudite company of the 80 or so guests, including architects and academics, a retired ballet dancer and an antiquarian bookseller. Plus excellent dinners and local wines.

After Wurzburg, the 110m Amadeus Elegant wound smoothly through the Franconia region. Beyond the expansive windows we admired the neat riverbank vineyards of the white Silvaner grape and a skyline studded with fairytale castles. One such castle tottered above Wertheim, where we put ashore to explore this delightful town of half-timbered houses at the confluence of the Main and the Tauber rivers. The town, with its maze of medieval alleys and rose gardens, was regularly devastated by floods, so there are old high-water marks etched in meticulous Gothic script.

MS Amadeus Elegant 
1. cruising down the Rhine
2. enjoying a guided tour in a Rhenish city

Photo credit: The Australian newspaper, 27th Aug 2016

The ship squeezes its capacious beam into the 40 locks that punctuate the descent from Nuremberg to Mainz.

After breakfast we left the Main for the wider expanses of the Middle Rhine, a UNESCO World Heritage-listed region where romantic valley landscapes inspired Wagner’s operas, Heine’s poetry and Turner’s paintings. Most passengers gathered on the upper deck to admire the churches and monasteries. Note the spectacular castles, among them the ship-shaped and bay-windowed Pfalzgrafenstein, which was constructed midstream, the better to extract the tolls from passing vessels.

At the picturesque Lorelei, where the pinched current boils beneath the legendary siren's home, wonderful Wurzburg musicians capped the moment with their own arrangement of the famous eponymous folk song. Passing barges, carrying coal and scrap iron, brought us back to reality.

Next stop was Bonn where our mooring was mere metres from Beethoven’s birthplace. The city is also home to architect Axel Schultes’s cel­ebrated Kunstmuseum. This idiosyncratic building has a comprehensive collection of the city’s own artist, the acclaimed Rhenish Express­ionist August Macke, and a focus on contemporary German art. That evening, the acclaimed Beethoven Bonn Trio set up in the ship’s lounge to perform a series of magnificent piano pieces (Beethoven, Shostakovich, Brahms).

In the night we docked at Cologne; I disembarked at dawn to visit the Dom/great Gothic cathedral where German artist Gerhard Richter’s magnificent 2007 stained-glass window dominates the soaring south transept. There was more of the compelling Richter at Cologne’s Museum Ludwig.

We saw the art at the city’s Wallraf-Richartz Museum, with its wonder­fully vivid collection of medieval devotional paintings. And noted the altarpiece treatments of popular martyr narrat­ives such as St Ursula, who was hacked to pieces along with her virgin retinue at the gates of Cologne while on pilgrimage to Rome. The Australian’s art critic Christopher Allen was on hand to mediate the visit with a stream of welcome insights.

In the evening, speakers previewed the next day’s packed programme. ABC Classic FM’s Christopher Lawrence extolled Tchaik­ovsky’s The Queen of Spades at Amsterdam’s Dutch National Opera; Sydney Morning Herald art critic John McDonald spoke about Franz Hals, whom we’d encounter on a visit to Haarlem. When we reached the town, just a short drive from our berth in Central Amsterdam, Haarlem appeared to have dissolved beneath a quintessentially Dutch sky. We took shelter in the Great Church, where Mozart and Handel once played the celebrated organ, and where artist Frans Hals was one of about 1500 local notables to have been buried beneath the numbered grave slabs that cover every last centimetre of the floor.

McDonald discussed Still Life, the Dutch Golden Age's memento mori, particularly Pieter Claesz, C17th Haarlem artist who liked to include a skull and other emblems of mortality in his tableaus. A visit to the nearby Frans Hals Museum soon cheered us up. The gloom of Claesz could not compete with the sheer energy of Hals’s famously vivid group portraits, notably of Haarlem’s Civic Guard. Hals’s works, brimming with unguarded life, confirmed him as a genius to rank with Vermeer and Rembrandt.

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The range of cultural cruises is wide. Late last year Renaissance Tours did a 17-night art and music-themed tour called A Panorama of Eastern Europe: From Poland to the Black Sea. The October 2016 itinerary included Poland, Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania and covered a chartered seven-night Danube cruise aboard MS Amadeus Royal. Plus there was a series of presentations and talks by leaders Christopher Lawrence of ABC Classic FM.

Concert in the Imperial Hall of the Würzburg Residence.

Photo credit: Ombiasy Tours

In April 2017, Mediterranean Opera and Music Cruise will offer a luxury cruise filled with opera, music and art. The ship will set sail from Lisbon and will stop at the Spanish ports of Cadiz, Malaga, Valencia and Mallorca, before arrival in Nice (9 nights). On board, guests will enjoy a special programme of opera and music. Ashore they will indulge themselves in art, history and culture around the Iberian Peninsula and across the Mediterranean.