Gone With the Wind (page 16)
When not on The King’s Stone, August held his Saxon court at his royal palace in Dresden. Dresden, whose Baroque splendour will be destroyed in the Seven Years’ War, then destroyed anew when the bombs fly over in February 1945. Whose children, those not dead, will come out of the split apart buildings, covered in ash, whose mothers, those not dead, will pick up the rubble. And the rebuilt Semper Opera, in February 1985, will reopen, with the same opera it closed with forty years earlier, before the bombs fell. A performance of Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz, itself a story after the end of the Thirty Years’ War.
But not yet.
Right now Clara Schumann is practicing the music of her friends Mendelssohn and Chopin. And Wagner, Liszt, and Jean Paul are in Bayreuth. Right now Goethe and Schiller are in Weimar. And Caspar David Friedrich is standing on a summit above a sea of mist. Right now Theodor Fontane is taking his walks in Mark Brandenburg. And Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm are collecting stories in Hessen. Right now Virchow and Koch are in their laboratories in Berlin. And Curie and Becquerel are in theirs in Paris. Right now Li Bai and Du Fu are writing poetry. And Qi Baishi is painting shuǐmòhuà.
For the future has not yet come, with the wind.
(Beethoven's sketches for the quartet no. 11, op. 95)
(Mendelssohn's piano concerto no. 2)