Me and Jonas and Dmitri

Kaufmann and Hvorostovsky in Moscow
singing the Pearl Fishers' Duet

You know all about "six degrees of separation," right? Pick somebody you know and call them Somebody 1. They are connected to Somebody2, who is connected to Somebody3, who is connected to Somebody4, who is connected to Somebody 5, who is connected to Somebody6.  Each somebody becomes a Somebody 1 and if you add up all the connections you are connected to every other human being on the planet. You just don't know where all the connections are.

I remember the time I was at a New Year's Party with the British Commander in Berlin. This was in the early 1960s, and there wasn't much for him to do by this stage in history, with Germany well on its way to becoming the free modern democracy it is today, so he found time to play chess regularly with Rudolf Hess, who was in Spandau Prison, in the British Sector and therefore directly in his charge. He was a delightful conversationalist, way out of my social league. He probably would not have engaged in conversation with me, an American soldier in his early 20s, except that he and I were both members of the occupying forces - him at the top of the totem pole, me at the bottom - and it's possible he was relieved to find a native speaker of English in the crowd.

I don't know if it was right then I realized this meeting put me within three degrees of separation to Adolf Hitler - and everybody I knew within four. I could see how this six degrees of separation thing worked.

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From left to right: Giuseppe De Luca (Zurga), 
Frieda Hempel (Leila) and Enrico Caruso
 (Nadir), in the New York Met
 1916 production

I discovered another way you can play the six degrees game yesterday. I had been listening to one of my favorite pieces of
music - the Pearl Fishers Duet from Bizet's opera, The Pearl Fishers. I keep going back to it because it's a recording made by Dmitri Hvorostovsky, my favorite singer of all time, and Jonas Kaufmann, whom I'll go ahead and say is Number Two.

In chasing down Kaufmann's history, I learned that he got his start at the Munich Conservatory (official name: Hochschule für Musik und Theater München, or, in English, the University of Music and Performing Arts in Munich), just 600 meters down the street from the dormitory I lived in in 1960 and 1961. The address of the Munich Conservatory is Arcisstrasse 12; I lived at Arcisstrasse 31.  Practically neighbors.

Except for a couple complicating details. The Music Conservatory only moved into that building in recent times.  At the end of the war, the Americans used it as one of two storage locations for Hitler's loot, the paintings and other treasures Hitler had taken from all over Europe.  And more interestingly, before that, it was the building in which Neville Chamberlin and Hitler signed the Munich Agreement of 1938, giving a meaning to the word appeasement that would go down in history.

left: The Führerbau - (Führer's Building) in its present day form as the University of Music and Performing Arts, at Arcisstrasse 12.

Hitler's office was on the second floor in a room now used as a rehearsing room.

right: The Führerbau as it was all gussied up for Chamberlin's arrival for the signing of the Munich Agreement in 1938.

photo credits:

Kaufmann and Hvorostovsky

Caruso and company in a performance at the Met of Pearl Fishers in 1916

Führerbau, (both photos) and more recently the Hochschule für Music und Theater (Music Conservatory)

my room, 62 years since I occupied it

Meanwhile, in another room just a block up, I shared space first with a guy who lived on one boiled egg and a slice of dry bread with lard for lunch, while I, with my $80 a month stipend, was able to dine out on Wienerschnitzel every night if I wanted to. Then with a guy three friends of mine and I bought a '48 Volkswagen with and totaled one night in Strasbourg. We argued over whether we should reimburse him his share. I'd like to think we did, but I live with doubt. $40 was half a month's income. If I knew how to find him, I'd contact him and ask, but the only other thing I ever knew about him was that he would lay his socks on the window sill to air at night. I think he only had one pair and he washed them maybe once a week, if that. I can still see them in that window above. And I don't remember the radiator.

Above: My room (or one identical to it) in the dormitory of the Evangelisches Studenten-wohnheim in der Arcisstraße as it looks today. In my day, there was no built-in closet or bath in the room, only a table under the window with two chairs and two beds along the right wall, and closets along the left wall.  All rooms were double rooms. I can still get the feel of the room from the picture, despite the 62 years that have transpired between this photo and the one in my memory. The building is no longer a church-owned dormitory. Today the building is (part of?) the Collegium Oecumenicum.

Finding this connection, this "x degrees of separation", with Jonas Kaufmann (and thus also with Dmitri Hvorostovsky, of course) is a bit of a stretch, I know. But only if you make a big deal out of time.

And while we're wallowing in trivia, all this googling made me realize I might get an answer to a question I had sixty years ago that nobody I knew could answer. Where does the name Arcis, as in Arcis Street, come from? (It's pronounced AR-TSIS in German.)

Still don't know for sure, but there was a battle in the town of Arcis-sur-Aube in France where the Austrians clobbered Napoleon in 1814. Among the forces line up fighting with the Austrians against Napoleon were the first and third Bavarian divisions. That's my best guess of why Munich would name a street after the place.

What did we do with our time before Google?