“If you want to learn the music of Bach and Brahms properly, you have to go to Germany,” says Anna Kim. The 25-year-old Korean has found a place in Weimar – at the Liszt School of Music. She may not have arrived by a direct route, but she showed determination in getting here. Anna Kim stems from a family of music lovers. Her mother studied the organ, her father is a Protestant pastor. She began taking piano lessons at the age of six. But it was not really her instrument. At 13, her teacher told her she had no talent, but Anna had already begun to play the cello, which she much preferred. She practised with great enthusiasm, received private tuition and joined her school orchestra. After completing her secondary education, she decided to go to Germany. A friend of the family had spoken the possibility of studying at Karlsruhe University of Music. She took the plunge. “I had no idea about Germany, none at all.” So first of all she began learning the language. She stayed in Karlsruhe for 11 months, but was still not able to study music there. Then, however, an unusual opportunity opened up back home in Korea. She was interested in Germany and its culture and she heard about the newly opened German School of Music, an institute organized by the Weimar academy in Korea. It was a stroke of luck. Kim enrolled and proved a particularly talented cello student. Before completing her Bachelor’s degree she came to Weimar for a year with a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). “That was a very good opportunity,” she explains. Her concert examination in Korea in December 2008 was highly successful. And just a few months later Anna Kim returned to Weimar to continue her studies. Today she plays in the Stadtkapelle in Weimar and recently also began performing with the Philharmonic Orchestra in the neighbouring city of Jena.
Anna Kim is one of over 900 students currently studying at the Liszt School of Music, which was founded in 1872. Around a third of the student body come from abroad, and roughly half of them come from Asia. The largest group are Koreans: 65 of them at present. A substantial number! What makes Weimar so attractive for Asians? “There’s a genius loci,” says Christoph Stölzl, who became president of the school of music a few months ago. Weimar is the centre of German Classicism. The small town with 65,000 inhabitants can mainly thank Grand Duke Carl August of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach for that. He ruled the region from 1775 to 1828 and brought Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to his court, which established the impressive cultural tradition of this small royal seat. The presence of the already famous literary figure attracted two other intellectual greats to the town: Friedrich von Schiller and the philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder. Franz Liszt was director of Weimar’s court orchestra and music theatre for ten years from 1848. The revolutionary architecture of the Bauhaus movement in the early 20th century has its roots in Weimar. Furthermore, after the First World War, the first German democracy – the Weimar Republic – was founded in the town’s municipal theatre. Stölzl enthuses about the atmosphere of the town and its beautiful old buildings, like the Classical Fürstenhaus at Platz der Demokratie, which is today the music school’s main building. “Here you can learn music that was created in architecture like this.” He is pleased by Asians’ great interest. He has set himself the goal of building a link between the young musicians and the “spirit of Weimar”. “That is positive globalization,” says Stölzl. “I’m already half Weimarian,” says Anna Kim.////
