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