Episode 8: The Circus of Sören Sieg

EPISODE 8: THE CIRCUS OF SÖREN SIEG

After Belgium, after Mia — and the memories of Goga and that fateful border crossing — I keep moving.

I walk out the doors of Warsaw Chopin Airport, and there’s a black cab purring at the curb. The cab’s for me. I open the door.

A black cab. I would never order myself a cab. But Sören has called one for me. And what Sören says goes.

The cab slides forward into Warsaw. My hair’s still wet from the Belgian rain. And I did this to myself.

I stare out the window as the city moves past: the wide boulevards and glass towers streaked with neon. Rain beads against the window without a sound.

I’m wet because I tried to save a few bucks.

For some reason the possibility of losing money is way more significant than the possibility of making money. To make 100 bucks is nothing, but to lose 100 bucks is about as bad as getting cancer. When it comes to money, winning doesn’t matter; I just really want to not lose.

So in order to not lose 6 bucks on the train, I decided to take buses to the airport, in the rain. And that worked out about as well as you’d think.

But seriously, I’m stupid around money. This time it landed me with wet clothes and a heart closer to high blood pressure, but I’ve seen worse. It’s something I’ve never understood about myself.

My thoughts turn back to Sören Sieg. Composer. Comedian. Eccentric. Friend? Maybe. (You’re hearing one of his compositions.)

I’m on my way to spend a week at his villa. We’ll be making music. But I’m not entirely sure where I stand with Sören. Are we friends? Or collaborators?

After all, this wasn’t my world. The money, and the villa, and the velvet touch of wealth. I’m stepping into a world I don’t fully trust.

What I do know is this: from the first time I met him, I’ve felt the same tugging question. That when I zoom in on Sören, when I ask who he really is, what makes him tick, there’s a black hole at the center that I can’t make sense of.

I’ve always had this feeling—like there’s something he’s trying to outrun. And I’ve never been able to quite see what it is.

You gotta meet him. Otherwise, you won’t understand.

“Hey! Jonny! How is it? I’m recording!”

Yes. That’s the voice of Sören Sieg.

Welcome to Go and Find Out. I’m Jonny Wright.

This is a story of losing yourself in the world.

I left my home, my job, and the USA in order to learn the old-fashioned way: with first-hand experience.

Some people go on a journey to find themselves. I went on a journey to lose myself—and instead find the world.

In these episodes, I ask big questions about life, not from an armchair but from roadsides and mountaintops, from temple halls and dance halls.

Join me as I hitchhike around the world, embrace the unexpected, and let go, one step at a time.

If you’ve ever thought about living a life outside the box, keep listening.

Because this isn’t just my story. It’s about what happens when you start to wonder what your story could be.

You don’t need to hitchhike around the world. There are ways you can choose to live with more courage, more curiosity, and more adventure, right here, right now.

Let’s go and find out.

It was a year earlier that I first arrived at the stately villa in a neighborhood of manicured hedges and pastel buildings. I rang the bell.

The door flew open.

A glowing round face greeted me, with an impresario’s flourish and a very nasal voice. He ushered me in, talking at full speed, breath coming in huge gulps.

The first thing you notice about Sören is his sheer force of personality. The second thing you notice is how impossible it is to match.

In the face of his torrent of words, I fell back on simple American superlatives.

Sören caught on immediately. And like any good comic, he seized the bit.

“Amazing, interesting, amazing!” he’d mimic, laughing.

I didn’t mind it. But I noticed how small I felt beside his constant talk. mute.

You might remember Mia from a couple episodes ago, with the blueberries in the Brussels park. Well, Mia and Sören dated, on and off. This is one of the great things about travel, the way people connect one place with another. I asked Mia for her description of Sören:

“He definitely is a person that is extremely extravert, in the sense that he’s not afraid of sharing his inner thoughts and feelings with others to the extent that I have never known before.”

Inside the villa: high ceilings, wood-paneled foyer, upright and grand pianos, recorders taller than I am, sheet music and books stuffed into every cubby, and music stands clustered like guests waiting for the concert to begin.

The next evening, Sören’s villa transformed.

I walk downstairs to find chairs squeezed into every corner. A trickle of musicians come through the front door. Each one grabs my hand, says hello, and hurries into the music room to tune up their instrument.

Sören’s feet can’t carry him fast enough. He darts from person to person, conducting a complicated social choreography. He runs up and down the stairs to print out new scores.

I’m not quite sure why I’m here. I’ve been invited. And Sören’s being painfully kind and enthusiastic, but what exactly am I to him? Am I a guest or a collaborator? Or maybe just a prop, an American curiosity to be paraded up and down the stage?

I walk into the kitchen to find bottles of prosecco, dessert wines, liquor-filled chocolates.

The front door keeps opening and closing, now with a flood of guests, blockading the rooms with their big hand gestures and perfumes.

Sören pulls me aside. He hands me a perfectly ironed white dress shirt to replace my faded travel tee. But he has no time to talk; it’s as if he stopped moving, something might catch up to him. He hands me the old violin of his grandfather and I rush into a bedroom to tune it up.

Well, looks like I’ll be on the program!

Polish voices and accents from around the globe cascade around the rooms unwilling to quiet even though they’ve been warned it’s time to start.

Sören stomps to the front and lifts his arms, and silence falls.

Who is this guy anyway?

The music began.

Eighty people packed into the music room, spilling out into the foyer, the livingroom, extending even up onto the staircase. It’s the kind of event that a mainstay of Warsaw high society might throw…

But Sören isn’t from Warsaw.

Sören isn’t from Poland at all.

And strangest of all, he isn’t a mainstay. He only arrived in the country a year ago.

Sören is German. Back in Germany he’d published twelve books, written theater plays, and toured the country for eighteen years leading a comedic a capella group. Yes, you heard that right. But, he’d become restless.

He’d quit the group and moved to Poland, but not because of a plan. He’d come for a woman: Katerina Wolska:

“So I came for her, but the funny thing is she left me before I arrived, she left me six weeks before I arrived, so everybody in Germany was asking me where are you going?”

But underneath the way he says it was the same gamble I recognized from my own life: leaving behind the known world for something uncertain and risky.

And yet, Sören didn’t arrive empty-handed.

“We sold the family apartment in Hamburg. With quite a profit. You buy something valuable and then you wait for sixteen years. So I had all this money, and I bought a very good grand piano. A Fazioli grand piano. I spent three months testing pianos. And then I bought this world-class instrument—and basically I was looking for a house to put around the piano.”

He’s not joking.

“I can live in a two-room apartment, but the Fazioli really needs a big room, right?”

Most people find a house and fill it with what they love. Sören finds what he loves and puts a house around it.

He rented a neoclassical villa once occupied by the American ambassador, tucked away behind tall hedges on a quiet street.

“I decided to rent it for two years, live like King Louis for two years. That was my decision.”

The largest room—glass doors, hardwood floors—became the natural stage.

So, starting with knowing one person in the whole city–his ex–he began to hold performances, once every few weeks.

“In the first ten concerts, it was just my piano pieces, and then more and more artists were joining.”

The chairs filled, then multiplied. But these concerts were not what people expected from a classical composer.

“Because usually if you go to a classical concert, you go there, you put your jacket to the, you give it away, right? And then you go into the room, you listen, then there’s a break, and then you listen to the second part, you give applause, and then you go home. And you have not met anyone, you have not got to know anyone, you cannot spoken to the artist. It’s basically there’s basically zero communication. Here at the house concerts, people got to know each other. There’s a party afterwards—for two, three, four, five hours. It became a huge community around it, you know. Because it’s so crowded people are sitting on the floor and they’re sitting on the stairs.”

The image of a circus ringmaster came to mind. But a ringmaster with a tissue box in one hand:

“You know, I am overwhelmed with gratitude afterwards. My ex-wife is a psychologist, and she always tells me the two best things in life are generosity and gratitude. And this is what these concerts feel like. It’s kind of a generous thing for me to organize. But what I get back is an enormous amount of gratitude, of friendliness, of people who say that they cannot believe that this happens in the suburbs of Warsaw.”

It was easy to admire Sören’s exuberance. And just as easy to feel skeptical. Was this generosity or self-indulgence?

Sören plays piano, I play violin, and singers and wind players all play. Applause. The last bow of the evening. It was a full house. Every chair occupied. Every silence filled.

And yet... I couldn’t quite tell if Sören felt fulfilled. So I watch.

The party begins. I meet a chinese-American professor, an Indian businessman, a Polish architect, a Russian software engineer, a Slovakian flautist. There are artists and adventurers too. One woman tells me about how she hitchhiked through Tanzania with a group of drunk men who were on a three day bender of a road trip, returning from a funeral.

The party spreads and shifts: People carry their wine into the backyard. Others gather at the piano to sing.

Sören moves from person to person, cracking jokes like a jester throwing fire crackers into what has been up till now a perfectly civil conversation. I can see from here that he’s a man who enjoys life. He’s frank about his pleasures, unashamed of what gives him a kick. And mostly, what gives him a kick is turning everything into a joke.

Mia says:

“You know, people love categorizing, right? So there are extraverts and introverts, and so on and so on. And all these categories exist, and then we are trying to put everybody in a drawer, and normally people fit in one drawer or another. Where Sören Sieg does not fit in any drawer.”

This I was starting to see. But not always in a way that made me comfortable.

I catch his eye and he calls me over, compliments my playing, introduces a couple of cheerful poles, but he’s off in the next second.

He can’t stand to not be in the middle of everything.

Mia knows this better than anybody:

“He can be restless. You would say, ‘Ok, and now we’re just relaxing, we’re not thinking.’ Well… he cannot not think.”

Then, I saw it.

A wine glass was teetering at the edge of a bookshelf. A careless elbow and it would’ve crashed.

Sören sweeps through — and in one fast motion, snatches it up. A sharp exhale through his nose. His face clenches. For that half-second, something flares. He grumbles under his breath.

Then — as if flipping a switch — his voice turns cheerful again.

He says, “Can we please hold on to our wine glasses? You never know where they’ll end up.”

The room laughs. The tension slips back under the surface.

But I see his fingers gripping the stem too tightly. The muscles in his jaw, still taught.

It was one AM. The house had finally emptied. The front door was shut. The guests were gone. What remained were remnants: plates, and crumbs, and open bottles.

Sören stood at the sink, white sleeves rolled, rinsing wine glasses. His movements were forced and exaggerated — like someone trying to outrun exhaustion.

And yet he still wasn’t willing to let go of the performance. He was talking a mile a minute:

“Why are there so many songs about Johnny?” he asked the air. “‘Johnny B. Goode,’ ‘Johnny Come Home,’

He turned to me with a dripping hand.

“It’s always Johnny. No one writes ballads for a guy named Sören. Doesn’t rhyme with anything.”

He gave a loud laugh but the humor stalled mid-air.

The dishwasher clattered open and echoed loud against the emptied house.

I offered to help. He waved me off.

I could feel it now, clearer than before: the brittle edge behind the jokes. The strain under the mask. Each new joke was thinner than the last, like a teabag reused again and again.

And beneath all of it: a quiet desperation to keep the air moving. To keep the silence at bay.

We’re both tired. Why try to keep the party going? Who’s he trying to impress?

He began humming — a small unresolved melody under his breath, circling like a trapped bird.

I was starting to think this was less a habit than a need.

He wasn’t performing for applause now.

He was performing against the silence.

The black car slows as we pull up to the familiar villa. I grab my little backpack that’s been sustaining me these last months, and step onto the sidewalk, my clothes still damp from the rain, and still with questions about Sören.

A year has passed since I first stepped into his world. And now I’m stepping in again.

Before I can even ring the bell, the door flies open.

Sören’s unmistakable voice rings out, followed by his rapid-fire laughter. He pulls me into a hug and ushers me inside, already talking a mile a minute about the night ahead.

The feelings rush back, as his wave of words threatens to overwhelm me.

Upstairs, I unpack his grandfather’s violin. The case still smells faintly of dust and wood polish. There’s a performance tonight.

From below, voices echo: coats being shuffled, corks popping, laughter spilling up the staircase.

The house is waking up.

Downstairs, it’s packed.

I find a spot on the staircase, half-hidden but with a clear view of the room. This is where I sat a year ago, watching this same scene unfold.

Across the room I see an American couple, filmmakers. We’d been introduced earlier, and there’d been a strange spark of connection.

Sören is mid-story now, onstage, and as he speaks I feel his impulsiveness, his emotionality, his frustration, his loneliness, his exuberance, and I can’t make sense of them all.

What’s all this about? In some ways, the whole thing is ridiculous.

A man builds a room around a piano. Fills it with strangers. With music. With food and laughter. And for what?

Whatever this is—this whole circus—it didn’t start here. What was he trying to outrun? Or undo?

To understand Sören, to get beyond the image of him as an eccentric artist, I needed to look further back. Back behind the curtain, back into the performer’s dressing room.

Back to his childhood in the north of Germany. It was anything but social. In fact, it was totally isolated.

“My parents wanted to give us a house with a big music room. And there it was, but the price was we were in the middle of nowhere. There were no other children, and there were no cultural things, there was nothing, you know? there was only the music. It was so much countryside that there was not even a village. The only thing we had was a gas station. So there was no church, or no shops, nothing.”

He says it lightly enough, but I feel a weight behind his words.

“I had two older siblings. But the siblings were not happy about me. Because I was a little genius, and my parents were always praising me about the violin and the recorder, and the piano, and the school and so on. So my siblings naturally hated me. They wouldn’t play with me. So I was this lonely genius child. At the age of six, I was already in the third class at school, and I was still always the best in class, so you can see how much of an alien I was. I felt like an alien, and I was seen as an alien.”

I picture him, small and disconnected. The room full of instruments, but no friends to share it with. There weren’t sleepovers or backyard roughhousing.

And then there was his father.

“So he educated us children to be the discussion partners for him. So he was always discussing social and political and historical questions with us. And he wanted to make us debaters, and he was very successful with this.”

So even conversation was performance. But his father’s plan worked. He became articulate and argumentative. Able to hold a room by the time most kids were still learning how to share toys.

“I remember the other children were showing me some cartoons they found funny, and because I had just heard it from my father, I said ‘Oh, cartoons, they are supporting black-and-white thinking. The world is much more complex than black and white.’ Probably I was six or seven years old, so probably that was not a good answer to make friends in the village.”

I look around the room at the audience.

The tall ceilings.

The polished wood floors.

The grand piano anchored at the center.

The way the music spills through every corner.

The voices pouring from the kitchen.

The way no one seems in a hurry to leave.

And suddenly, it clicks. I see it — not as mere eccentricity, but as a reconstruction.

That house from his childhood.

The big music room.

The instruments.

And the emptiness.

He’s rebuilt it.

But this time, the room is full.

Full of music. And full of people.

Full enough to keep the silence out.

It’s like every choice — city, house, piano, parties, stories — has been pulling him toward these moments. Not just to create beauty. But to fill what was empty.

The long ribbon stretches backward. All the way to that first music room.

And in seeing it, I see a little more of myself.

The part of me that stresses in the rain to save a few bucks. That stingy part I want to rail against at times.

I’ve wondered why I am the way I am.

I still don’t know most of the reasons.

Maybe it’s enough for me to see the outlines — to recognize that some part of me is trying, in its own odd way, to keep me safe.

To admit that there might be a ribbon threading back a long long way to some scene I can’t remember.

Sören launches into one final punchline. The room erupts.

Without missing a beat, he turns and slides onto the piano bench.

The laughter continues, but his fingers are already moving. The chords spread through the room like warm light.

A deeper silence settles over the audience.

Not the silence of emptiness.

The silence of listening.

I tilt my head back, resting against the stair behind me. The notes wash through the air, and I listen to Sören play the piano.

I didn’t see it coming. But in that very room was someone who was about to pull me sideways—into a whole other world. It was the kind of ambush only artists know how to stage. And honestly, I’m a sucker for it.

That’s it for this episode of Go and Find Out. Thanks for spending this time with me—seriously. It means a lot that you’re here, listening to this story.

Today I’ve got some mail from Phoebe. Here’s what she writes:

“I come to your podcast after I’ve done the big irreversible action and left a company after 11 years, forcing myself out of financial comfort but soul-deep unhappiness, and into… I’m not sure what. Certainly headlong into my fear of not knowing what to do next, and into needing to confront my childhood financial traumas. I leapt, in the hopes that I’d prove to myself I could find or build a life I actually like living.”

She goes on to ask: “How do I make a decision for myself that doesn’t blow up my chances of ever being happy, or feeling safe?”

Phoebe, I really don’t have an answer for you.

But it reminds me of something by Anne Dufourmantelle, which goes, “We can always recover from pain, catastrophe, or mourning, but evil will always claim a share. We will never be saved in advance.” It’s easy to feel like a happy and safe life is a fragile possibility. Like one wrong move and we dash it. But Dufourmantelle says: there’s no life that can insure us from pain. BUT we’re resilient, we can recover from loss.

What if we dashed our hopes of a happy and safe life. What if we did that right now, and then proceeded with a trust that we can and will recover from whatever happens?

Because in the end, happiness comes and goes. But resilience is a quality we can build that sticks with us until the end, and allows us to lose over and over and over again.

I’d love to hear from you—thoughts, stories, weird travel tips, whatever’s on your mind. Drop me a line at goandfindoutpod@gmail.com, and I’ll do my best to write you back.

This show is created by me, Jonny Wright, and this episode features a piece written and performed by Sören Sieg himself, called “The White Nile.” There’s a link in the show notes to listen.

If you’re enjoying the ride, follow along so new episodes come straight to you every Thursday. And hey—if you’ve got a second, leaving a quick review or rating really helps spread the word.

But more than anything, I hope this episode sparked something—however small.

A question, a dream, a reminder that your life is still unfolding.

The only real adventure we have is right now.