KOCHEL-AM-SEE
Kochel-am-See, situated in the area of Upper Bavaria known as Tölzer Land, is a wonderful place for outdoor recreation, on the lake or in the surrounding mountains. The scenery is fabulous and Kochel is within very easy reach from Kloster Benediktbeuern, where the Chamber Musicians mostly stayed when visiting Bavaria in 2003, and again in 2004. Members of the party made several excursions to Kochel, either hiring bikes, or making the five minute journey by train, and then exploring on foot. There are numerous walking trails in the mountains and around the lake.	Kochel-am-See, an arial view with the Kochelsee and a small glimpse of the larger Walchensee between the mountains
Looking across the water of the Kochelsee in late afternoon light			The natural beauty of this area attracted a number of German Expressionist painters associated with the movement known as Der Blaue Reiter (after the famous pianting by Vassily Kandinsky). They first visited the area and later bought property and came to live here. The painter Franz Marc 1880 – 1916) settled in Kochel-am-See, before the First World War, and Gabriele Münter and Vassily Kandinsky shared a house in Murnau, not very far away. Franz Marc’s house is now a museum where you can see some twenty of his paintings, as well as numerous sketches and drawings, paintings by other Blaue Reiter artists, including Gabriele Münter, Kandinsky, and Jawlensky, and various memorabilia. The villa itself is very attractive.
The shore of the Kochelsee			Our first German tour, in 2003 was partly a study tour, with the composer Richard Strauss as its main focus. We were interested in these painters who, although they have no obvious connection with Strauss, were his contemporaries and fairly near neighbours. The lecture series which we organised as preparation for the tour, and which took place in the months preceding it, included a talk on German Expressionism by Dr. Aya Soika, then at New Hall. Aya is a specialist on this subject and her lecture covered both of the two main movements within German Expressionism: Die Brücke , mainly associated with Berlin, and Der Blaue Reiter centred around Kandinsky and his friends in Bavaria. What is of interest in connection with Strauss, is that at the start of his career he was in Berlin, and did seem to have an affinity with Die Brücke, who, like Strauss at that time, were out to shock. The movement was a reaction against the stuffy Wilhelmine morality of the time. The painters’ scenes of nude bathers (shocking to their contemporaries) have their counterpart in a work such as Strauss’s Salome. However later in life Strauss really became a late Romantic. He was a keenly interested in painting and a great collector, but there appears to be no evidence that he had any interest in the Blaue Reiter movement on his doorstep in Bavaria. There are some German impressionist paintings in his villa, but his main interest seems to have been in Bavarian religious paintings of a much earlier period, and he collected verre eglomise. This probably does tell us something about Strauss, especially since the main pre-occupation of the Blaue Reiter painters was colour, and Kandinsky thought in terms of colour harmony on an analogy with musical harmony. This clearly did not interest the composer. Franz Marc (1880 – 1916) is best known for his paintings featuring animals. He was a founding member of the group of German Expressionist painters known as Der Blaue Reiter. He was a student at the Munich Academy of Arts where his father was a professor, and at that time he used to visit Kochel-am See. From 1908 he lived there on and off, and in 1914 he bought the house which is now the Franc Marc Museum. Within a few months, at the outbreak of the First World War Marc joined the army as a volunteer and he was killed in action in 1916.
The Franz Marc Museum in Kochel-am-See
Franz Marc paintings on view in his house in Kochel-am-See, now the Franz Marc Museum
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