Arthur Japin leads us through the Amsterdam of 1885 – and his new novel
Arthur Japin’s new novel is set in the changing Amsterdam of 1885, in which a quirky young singer finds her way. A tour of the writer through What silence wantspast old clubs, upcoming Tachtigers and the very first Amsterdam jogger.
Singing was Anna Witsen’s great happiness. She had the tribe, the education, and the talent. But at the time, a career as a singer was unthinkable for a girl from such an important Amsterdam family. her own way of action, strengthened by the willfulness and sense of freedom of writers such as Kloos, Verwey, Van Eeden and Van Deyssel, in whose entourage she ends up because of her brother Willem. Her death in 1889 inspired various artists from and around the Eighties Movement to create new work. The highlight of this is one of the explorations of Dutch poems, In the black night a man is switched on by Herman Gorter.
What silence wants is a novel about the hope and struggle that preceded Anna’s death and is largely set in Amsterdam. Here is a short guide to some places where the lives of Anna, her brother, visual artist Willem Witsen, and his Friends of the Eighties took place.
west end
The Witsen family lived on the corner, no. 28, until they were moved to the Gooi, because of the stench from the Heineken brewery and all the nuisance of the YY neighborhood, a new residential area under construction on the other side. They often produce concerts at home, sometimes together with their neighbour, Alphons Diepenbrock, an up-and-coming composer. Young musicians were given the opportunity to perform for and together with the big names of the time, including family friends such as the two Johannessen – Verhulst and Brahms – who made an appearance whenever their successful, international life allowed it. gave.
New Achtergracht 24
In the early years, this was where the Amsterdam Conservatory was located, which was founded partly at the insistence of Anna’s father. However, because of the good name of the family, she was not allowed to study there.
Mr Witsen had a passion for music. It was important to him that his children learn to make music. Willem turned out to have a talent for the cello, Anna for singing.
But Witsen’s influence in the Amsterdam music world reaches further.
As a member of the Richard Wagner Society during Jonas Jan, it was highly personal for his work to be crowned with a fresh laurel wreath in Felix Meritis Meritis and one evening in the Odeon, when Brahms had plowed his way through his own second piano concerto under the direction of Verhulst. , then reproached the wretchedness of the Dutch orchestras – ‘Ihr seit liebe Leute, aber schlechte Musikanten’, Witsen had set up to set up a company for the establishment of an Amsterdam Conservatory.
Shortly afterwards, with his help, the provisional committee for the construction of a concert hall was also set up, which ordered the design of a music building after a foreign example.:
The concert building
As an affordable location for the precious music temple, a piece of wetland just outside the city in the middle of the meadows of Nieuwer-Amstel was chosen.
‘At the Overtoomse polder?’ asked Cobi, Anna’s sister. ‘You didn’t expect your audience to go all the way through the mud in their good well, did you? Why not just have a building like this in the city?’
After the construction Anna was shown around by the composer Julius Röntgen, for whom she develops an impossible love: The Concertgebouw, which had been completed a week in advance, was empty for the time being. You had to be careful, because here and there there were still scaffolding planks or a ladder.
But Julius, proudly, was determined to show it to Anna and he had the key to watch out for master builder Van Gendt.
This will be the main hall, for chamber music there will be another smaller one upstairs. The basic design is that of my own design, concert hall in Leipzig, so I more or less have an idea: the chairs will be here, on top of the corridor as well, and that elevation there will soon become the stage. The orchestra sits ascending and when it fills up, audiences sit behind it, on either side of the stairs.’
Today, Röntgen’s name is prominently displayed in the Great Hall.
Lindengracht
On July 25, 1886, Anna witnesses the traditional eel pulling in the novel. A large eel was hung (at 119) above the – then unfilled – moat, and torn to pieces alive by young men. The municipality tried to realize that cruelty that year, which led to major riots in the Jordaan. In the space of two days, about a hundred were injured and twenty-six were killed. A popular uprising that would become known as The Palingo Rebellion.
That’s when the first shot rang out.
This was released as a warning by the reinforcements – twenty men from the Lijnbaangracht, twenty from the Brouwers with more on the way. Bricks were now being pulled from the streets everywhere. A window shattered, another, next it rained stones on both sides of the moat.
The patrol officer who had ruined all the fun was dragged into a basement and mauled so as to extend one eye, two fingers and the use of his left arm. The boy made for life so disfigured that his own mother could no longer recognize him.
Anna and her mother’s friend Thea Taets van Amerongen were late after the fighting on Rozengracht at a meeting for women’s rights, where Mina Drucker also spoke.
Thea Taets mounted the pulpit unadorned and disheveled as she was.
‘As you can see, I come straight from the Jordaan.’ She knocked some dust off her skirt. “Some of you have already prepared a huge judgment on the instigators. That is why I want to bear witness to the inequality and injustice done to the people who live there; near here in their extreme poverty…’
Gradually she improvised a rendered speech about the importance of social equality and pay to sanitation and medical care, education and vegetarianism, that many abuses could occur if women had a tribe at all.
The Port of Cleve, Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal 176-180
The friends of Anna’s brother Willem, the group of up-and-coming artists, writers and students we now know as De Tachtigers frequented many establishments in the city. Here too they sat and planned their literary revolt.
It was more than half past twelve when Willem arrived at the Nieuwe Zijds, but in Die port van Cleve they were still hanging around the reading table, his friends.
“Tuesday evening, I was expecting you at Flanor.”
‘Science evening’, Van Looy sighed.
‘Our digestion would have been better off there,’ Kloos interjected, ‘here the stew is nothing but cowardly onion.’
‘Both true, at Flanor we get our dinner, but today the conversation is too bland.’
A few years later, when ideals and friendships cooled, there are considerably fewer Eighties to be found here.
‘If you enter Die Port van Cleve now,’ says Van Eeden, when Anna longs for those times, ‘Then no one will be there. Yes, Verwey at most, in particular.’
Kalverstraat 23-25
Café-restaurant De Karseboom is located on this spot, where the literary company Flanor met. Almost all Eighties die in What silence wants to play a role have often been here, from Frederik van Eeden, Albert Verweij and Willem Kloos to Aletrino, Hein Boeken and the rest of Willem Witsen’s friends. Here they already wanted to deal with the old guard and full, they plan for their own magazine The New Guide.
They often sat on the Rokin at the Polen (back entrance: Kalverstraat 15-17), but usually above restaurant De Karseboom, one of the oldest buildings on the Kalverstraat. In the eighteenth century, the patriots had gathered in the room they rented under heavy beams and dark brown ceilings. Every day bought his own pot and Friday there was barley with raisins.
The Nes
That long, little street was full of tingles from front to back, and as enticingly lively at this late hour as the Rokin on market day.
The Tachtigers can be found here in the novel with, by name on the corner of the Kuipersteeg, where Variététheater Tivoli is located and Willem Witsen found his future girlfriend Blanche.
“Blanche Ford, ladies and gentlemen,” the Tivoli bouncer blared. He, like all his colleagues, stood at the door in a military quilted double-breasted ankle-length coat and touted her like a market trader with fresh dates: “Only with us, alone tonight, Blanche Ford!” And for passers-by who were still in doubt, the man gave a rope to the rope that hung behind his back. A hatch then flew open and in the evening cold allowed the gentlemen even a view of the cozy warm entertainment inside.
Odeon, Singel 460
Anna’s first professional performance took place in November 1888, thanks to the special practice of Julius Röntgen, who accompanied her evening on the piano. That night, her big chance, was disastrous.
Rehearsals took place at twelve o’clock in the Odeon, not in the hall because it was preparing men for tonight, but in the basement.
This is where Anna got a little uncomfortable for the first time.
Not out of fear that these seasoned musicians, played successfully tonight after night and throughout Europe, won’t take her seriously, but perhaps precisely because they succeeded so indiscriminately.
Old Sconce 5
This is where the studio that Willem Witsen had found for the painter Breitner, and then rented it himself for some time.
The materials in Breitner’s studio had inspired Willem to make more etchings. He brought his prints with him when he visited Anna in the Utrecht asylum where she was imprisoned for a while, only in the hope of keeping her in line. Each time had tried to be brought along, but to be enlightened by her because his prints offered a view, behavior of the world outside. Especially on the Montelbaanstoren, straight forward like Willem Hemm through the window. Then Anna could think of the seagulls she had seen there, how high they circled above the water, swarmed out, screeching away over the IJ.
There is a good chance that Herman Gorter also ran past here. He who wrote his poem about Anna briefly all he with his May had debuted in The New Guidewas the very first Amsterdam jogger:
‘New guy, friend of Diepenbrock, classical language student, I don’t know anything else. It seems that Van Looy sometimes runs him along the canals in the evenings.’
‘Where to?’
“Going nowhere, receiving the sport, I guess.”
Who knows, it might have been on one of his rounds through the dark that he thought of Anna, of her talent, and of her struggle to be heard, and some sentences came to his mind about her singing:
the voice above the forests
still sang in the night –
he had always been alive
her only lamb.
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