On Sunday, January 17th, Gabriele Sichler-Karle will organize a church service for the last time in Paderborn Cathedral. On February 1st, the 63-year-old cathedral cantor will start the rest phase of her partial retirement. Gabriele Sichler-Karle actually wanted to walk the Franziskusweg with her sister, learn to play the cello and hike extensively with her husband Michael, but then a colleague contacted her and things turned out differently.
“She asked me if I could represent her as cathedral cantor in Trier for 15 months during her parental leave,” says Gabriele Sichler-Karle. And because the mother of a daughter and a son knows how difficult it is to combine work and family, she said yes to Christina Elting. She had sung with the Paderborn Girls’ Choir in 2015 in Trier Cathedral, and in future she will take care of the singers there.
Gabriele Sichler-Karle continues to consider choral singing to be contemporary and enriching: “We educate young people musically, but also personally. And here we have a great responsibility. By singing the choir, the young people learn that it is worth working on something together. ”When a girls’ choir was to be set up in Paderborn, Gabriele Sichler-Karle, who comes from Tuttlingen in Swabia, applied for the attractive task.
Before that she had studied church music in Rottenburg and conducting at the Musikhochschule in Karlsruhe with the aim of working on a cathedral. In October 2008 she was able to get started in Paderborn. “We started from scratch, now there are 170 girls and young women, and the choir is not only known nationally but also internationally,” she looks back. The girls’ choir also survived the first Corona year without any significant losses, says Gabriele Sichler-Karle with relief.
