An jenem Tag im blauen Mond September 

I came across the Salzburg actor Georg Schuchter one Istanbul evening late in 2000, not so long before his death in a mountaineering  accident in the Berchtesgaden Alps the following year. His cover of Brecht's Erinnerung an die Marie A, from a 1998 cabaret at the Wiener Metropol, coloured those days. Poorly lit, the long 19th century corridors and towers of the Technical University in Maçka were forbidding and desolate, my room a studio of bleak ambience. Two-and-a-half minutes of this music, the words written a century before on a train to Berlin, and the world was another place. A melody that turned summer nights by the Bosphorus into entwining fantasies of the soul. And autumn evenings, off the Sunday plane from Heathrow, into evocations and chalices of what had once been and might yet be again. I never met him, though for a brief moment we breathed the same air in the same streets, a 'pale and silent' girl binding us. He lost his life on a Friday. 29 September 2001. Two people in a meyhane down an alley Pera Palas way. Tears and sunsets to the call of the muezzin. 

It was a day in that blue month September

Silent beneath the plum trees' slender shade

I held her there

My love, so pale and silent

As if she were a dream that must not fade

Above us in the shining summer heaven

There was a cloud my eyes dwelled long upon

It was quite white and very high above us

Then I looked up

And found that it had gone

29 September 2021

GEORG SCHUCHTER 1952-2001