Stockholm, Sweden
Sunday, June 5, 2022
Stockholm, Sweden
This morning we visited the Vasa Museum to see the resurrected ship of that name, which sank on its maiden voyage in 1628 and was salvaged in 1956. Because of the low salinity of the Baltic Sea and the absence of a shipworm called Teredo Navalis, the ship was very much intact, and has been further preserved by the museum. It is astonishing! Built by Gustav II Adolf, it was a state-of-the-art warship, but beyond that, it was fabulously decorated. Lots of information is here: https://www.vasamuseet.se/en/vasa-history . We had a museum docent show us around; here are a few photos:
Our destination was the island of Skeppsholmen, where our ethnomusicologist had arranged a concert for us from the Swedish contemporary folk quartet Kolonien. They were wonderful! The lead string player uses a 10-string modern viola which she calls a viola d’amore, based on the viola da gamba of old. She plays on five of the strings, and the other five, which are under the played strings, are resonators which add to the sound.
I don’t have the bandwith to upload the video clips I took, but the group is on YouTube. Here’s one sample: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xba0VldTpFw
We went back to the ship for lunch, and afterwards had a walking tour of the old medieval part of the city, known as Gamla Stan. There were crowds in the central square on a beautiful sunny Sunday afternoon:
We then visited an extensive history museum housed in the armory of the palace. Perhaps the most intriguing story was of the 19th c. Queen Kristina who refused to be queen and insisted that she was King Kristina. Here’s her regal armor and horse’s decoration:
Back at the ship we had a
talk on the “Rise and fall of the Pleistocene Megafauna” which was
fascinating! The quality of the
instruction we’ve been receiving has been very, very high.
In 1964 we were on our honeymoon in Northern Europe and we saw the Vasa Ship as it was being prepared for long term preservation. My pictures are slides! They were spraying the ship with a mixture of water and a preservative to prevent the wood from drying out and crumbling. The intent was to replace the water in the wood cells with the preservative (no memory of what it was).
ReplyDeleteYes, they explained the process to us; it took many years to accomplish, and it requires continuous upkeep. It's a pretty phenomenal piece of work!
DeleteThanks for the photos and the various explanations (incl. by xctraveler here in the Comments) about techniques of preservation.
ReplyDeleteThe viola d'amore was used in eighteenth-century music (Vivaldi has some concertos for it) and then got revived in a few works ca. 1900 by the Boston-based composer Charles Martin Loeffler. I'm not surprised that a Swedish string player gravitates to it, because the basic construction (and hence sound) is similar to that of a hardanger fiddle, which is omnipresent in Norwegian folk music and I suppose is known in Sweden as well. Grieg made some arrangements of hardanger fiddle tunes for piano solo, and the drone notes from those unfingered strings can be heard, usually assigned to the pianist's left hand.