Yesterday was the day to visit the rebuilt Bach Museum, opposite the Thomaskirche, which was closed for the building work last time I was here in 2008. Thursday's sunshine and humidity had given way to rain over breakfast, but the sky was merely dark grey as I arrived at the 10:00 opening time.
The museum is very spacious and elegant, if tending slightly towards being clinical, but many of the visitors are school parties so it has to be robust. A good overview of Bach's life, very well presented, with the final large room naturally being about his life and work here in Leipzig. Much additional and fascinating information behind the main story is available on pull-out panels. Touch screen listening stations with headphones provide access to recordings of all of Bach's works.
Outside the Bach timeline a small display describes some of the recent scientific techniques used by researchers to analyse paper and inks to work out when a manuscript was created, and which of Bach's copyists, or Bach himself, produced it.
After an hour and three-quarters of Bach I rested over a coffee in the nice Gloria cafe attached to the museum before taking a couple of trams out of the city centre to the Museum für Druckkunst (Museum for the Printing Arts). This is in a very pleasant area to the south west of the centre where I've not been before, close to the huge Clara-Zetkin-Park. The sky was now blue and the sun was shining.
The museum has a huge collection of working printing presses - more than 90 apparently - plus hot-metal typesetting machines and hand setting stations, all housed in a listed industrial building that has been in use as a print works since the late 19th century. I was free to wander among them, taking in the smell of printing ink and oil. Well, this is a print junkie's dream!
But the highlight came when I and the two other visitors yesterday afternoon were given an impromptu and incredibly informative tour of an area not normally open, where top class facsimiles are produced of historically important documents that are too fragile to be handled or displayed, using the traditional collotype method - sometimes printing just one sheet from a huge and painstakingly prepared glass plate. Our guide speaking in German and my two colleagues kindly translating for me.
The three of us emerged nearly two and a half hours after I arrived, better informed and in need of coffee. Later I went back for another 30 minutes to see the temporary 'Typography in Contemporary Art' exhibition on the top floor, which was excellent; contemporary art I can understand! Much of it very clever and inventive.
It was too late, again, to visit the Schumann-Haus as planned, so I spent half an hour and €3.00 going up to the 27th floor of the Panorama Tower, near the Gewandhaus, for some views over the city in the late afternoon sun.
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