Baroque Hamburg

The Park Hyatt Hotel in Hamburg is a special place. I discovered it in November last year, and I had the opportunity to stay there again two weeks ago.

Inside the hotel, all is calm, beauty, luxury and exquisite pleasure.



But it is not only the choice of furniture, wood paneling and art hanging on the walls that seduces me, it is also the extraordinarily charming and attentive service of the staff. There are not many places in the world where, at the end of a meal, a beautiful and impeccably but soberly dressed hostess asks you in perfect English: "Are there any more wishes that I can fulfill for you?" I could have thought of a few ... but the manner of the young woman did not invite the utterance of them, and I simply had to say "No thank you, I am perfectly satisfied", and it was true ...

The back entrance of the hotel is on a circular lobby to a gallery inside the "Levantehaus" (I suppose this means "the house of the Orient", probably the historical location of stores selling goods from the Orient), full of interesting shops. This lobby's ceiling has a circular opening to an upper level gallery, adorned with the most baroque and realistic plaster sculptures of wild animals.






Somehow, the juxtaposition of this hotel's luxury and comfort with the baroque character of this glorification of wild life makes a powerful impression on me. Perhaps it exemplifies the ambivalence of man: the sophisticated human search for beauty and truth and the scream of the savage beast.

Indeed, that theme could not be better summarized than in the powerful bronze centaur hanging at the top of the street entrance to the gallery leading to the hotel.


But inside the gallery, the most sophisticated shop windows, full of sweet, beautiful and precious things could be seen, in contrast to this forbidding and wildly Dyonisiac ensign.







Sometimes with an unintended ironic touch: A "Christ" ensign on a Gucci store ...


A block away from the hotel, there was a large department store called "Saturn". It was full of electronic goods at all levels. On the top floor, dedicated to CDs and DVDs, there was a huge section reserved for classical music. This surprised me. It is increasingly rare to find such stores. I saw Tower Records' classical section shrink 15 years ago in California. Then HMV in Singapore, which used to have a large enclosed section for classical music, let that space be invaded by other music as well several years ago. Presumably, there is not enough demand for this music and commercial imperatives dictate that floor space reserved to it be reduced.

But here in Germany, the country of many great composers (Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, Schubert and more), this store at least preserves the heritage of classical music. I was so pleased that I bought new recordings by Ton Koopman and the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra of vocal and harpsichord works of Buxtehude, another 17th century German composer who inspired Bach.