On Tuesday we had to drag ourselves away from the Haus Hainstein to drive to Arnstadt. There the Hotel Krone beside the railway station had to be a come down, but actually it served us well for our stay of two nights. First we visited the Bach Kirche where Bach spent 3 years as organist in the newly rebuilt church. It is a very large church with wooden galleries in three stories on either side of the nave. All the pews and woodwork are painted white in Baroque style, with the huge, relatively new Romantic organ also painted in white and gold at the back. I found all the white paint rather overwhelming and was relieved to find out later that it was added a few years after Bach's time there. In the Bach museum the next day we found a model of how it would have looked in natural wood. Also there I was quite moved to see the actual original organ keyboard which Bach used in the church. Those fingers played on those keys.
