Swan Tower |
My regular operatic
visits to the Ruhr and Lower Rhine areas of Germany leave me plenty
of time to kill between evening performances, and I am always on the
lookout for new places to visit during the daytime. Recently I was in
Düsseldorf for a couple of nights, so on a very murky mid-October
day I took the Regio Express train for 90 minutes to the end of its
line at Kleve, just short of the Dutch border. Better known in
English as Cleves (it was spelt as Cleve in Germany until spelling
reform in the 1930s), it is probably most familiar as the home town
of King Henry VIII’s fourth wife, Anne – the one whom he divorced
after a mere six months when her visage proved to be nowhere near as
pulchritudinous as Holbein’s portrait of her. But the town itself
sets much greater store by a more mythical former inhabitant, the
swan knight Lohengrin.
In Wagner’s version
of the story, Lohengrin reveals in his Narration in Act III that he
has come all the way from Montsalvat, which is presumed to be
Montserrat in the mountains outside Barcelona. Given that Kleve is a
mere 5km from the Rhine it makes for a far more plausible swan
journey to leave his castle, travel down the great river to the North
Sea and take the Scheldt up-river to the Brabantine court in Antwerp.
Obvious, really. (Quite coincidentally, I had been in Antwerp the day
before, following the previous evening’s performance of another
Wagner opera, Tannhäuser, though my journey to the Rhineland
had been more conventionally land-based.)
Kleve pictured in 1945, after its air-raids |
The line of the Counts
and the Dukes of Cleve, who were ruling over much of the lower
Rhineland by the time of Anna’s marriage to Henry VIII in 1540,
eventually died out in the early 17th century and the dukedom was
swallowed up by Brandenburg and, much later, by Prussia. Besieged by
the Spanish in 1635 and occupied by the French during the Napoleonic
wars, Kleve then enjoyed a century or more as a leading spa town,
thanks to a mineral spring that had been discovered in the 18th
century, and it became a favoured place for Rhineland/Ruhr
industrialists to build their weekend villas. These are some of the
only buildings in Kleve to have survived two heavy Allied air-raids,
in October 1944 and February 1945, which destroyed 90 per cent of the
town, including the castle.
One of the grandest of
the 19th-century villas is now the Museum Kurhaus Kleve, an art
gallery whose collection spans some five centuries and has an
important focus on the work of the leading modernist performance
artist Joseph Beuys (1921–86), who spent much of his early life in
and around Kleve. The work of another local artist, Dutch landscape
painter Barend Cornelis Koekkoek (1803–62), is celebrated in the
villa he built in the centre of the town, one of the few in that area
to survive the air-raids, which briefly stood in as a postwar town
hall and is now the BC Koekkoek Museum. Otherwise, the architecture
in much of the town centre, especially its shopping streets, is
blandly 1950s–70s, though the hillier area around the castle at
least maintains its historic feel and the original street plan
survives.
The area in which Kleve
sits, hard by the Dutch border and bound by hills in the west and the
Rhine to the east, is known as Cleverland. It’s a popular draw for
Netherlanders from over the border, attracted by its lower property
prices and cost of living, which I suppose is why the locals
call themselves Cleverlanders.