1. We arrive in Alsace

Friday, 29 August 

Everybody probably knows that Bob loves Early Music. He loves to sing it. He loves to listen to it both live and recorded. And he loves to pick out Early Music Festivals to attend. And there are so many of them.  So when our autumn trip to the States was pushed off because of commitments here, and he read about the Festival Voix et Route Romane, 10 concerts, over 3 weekends, in Romanesque churches in the Alsace region of France, we were booked and ticketed and ready to go.

Lunch!

Alsace is the region of eastern France best known for being passed back and forth between France and Germany from the Prussian War of 1870 when victorious Germany won the region, only to lose it in the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the First World War, and to regain it with the Occupation of France in 1940, and finally the permanent reversion to France in 1945. The European Parliament sits in the Alsatian city of Strasbourg as a symbol of the unification of purpose brought about by the European Union.

We flew into Basel, an airport that straddles the borders of Switzerland, Germany, and France. In fact  passport control offers separate lines for entering each country, and airport exits are marked for your country of choice. We picked up our rental car and headed out the French exit.

The Route Romane or Romanesque Road is a tourist marketing tool devised some 20 years ago to raise the tourism interest in Alsace beyond the popular Wine Route. Twenty-two Romanesque churches of the 12th century have been linked in the route. Some are much older, but were modernized in the new style. Most have been modernized in the following centuries with Gothic, Baroque, and later additions. Some were wiped out in wars and have been completely rebuilt.

From the airport we headed into the Sundgau, the southern region of Alsace that lies in the Jura  mountains, the foothills of the Alps. Something I did not know is that the Jura is the root of the geologic term Jurassic . . . a great lunch in the charming town of Ferrette, but no dinosaurs. Up on the hillside is the ruin of the castle belonging to the Counts of Ferrette. Through marriages, treaties, family connections, the title of Count of Ferrette belongs to the Prince of Monaco.

The first of the Romanesque churches on our route was Saint-Jacques-le-Majeur in Feldbach, built around 1145 by the Count of Ferrette when he established a Benedictine Convent here.  A very plain exterior of Jura limestone . . .

. . . but an interesting interior arrangement. Entering the front door in the west end, there are three bays of rounded Romanesque arches . . .

. . . each with lovely carved capitals. This end of the church was the parish church for the residents of Feldbach.

. . . looking toward the east end, past the arches, the walls are solid stone, and this is where the nuns of the convent would have worshipped in the enclosed space. A wall across the nave, now removed, would have held the parishoners altar. The tiny porthole windows are the only source of natural light.

The theme of this year's festival is D'un jardin l'autre, so it was fitting the first concert was in the church of a former monastery at Eschau on the outskirts of Strasbourg with a historic garden.

A Great Pumpkin gets special treatment.

The crowd is queuing for our first concert at Eschau's church, built in the 11th century after an earlier church was destroyed "during the Hungarian invasions of 926," according to our helpful guide to the Festival churches. The church needed rebuilding after it was damaged in 1944-1945, and the reconstruction stripped it back to its Romanesque beginnings.

The problem with concerts in churches is that you can't see very much of the church. The apse with dramatic lighting effects await our first concert by an Estonian group, Heinavanker, who "sang Estonian chants and variations on them that were quite interesting." So says my resident music critic. And it was a terrific concert.