At the train station in Venice, I was hoping to get a day train into Vienna -- roughly a seven-hour ride -- to see the Alps and countryside, listen to music, and get an idea for the distances. However, the only tickets were for a night train, so I ponied up 70 Euro and hopped on board at 9pm. I had an upper berth with four schoolteachers from Alberta chaperoning a school eurotrip, and their guide, Rossella. Rossella and I shared a love of electronic music and even had the same favorite Italian film: Fellini's Nights of Cabiria. We talked until we were tired, and went to sleep. Even in the cramped compartment, the gentle rhythm of the train helped me get a good night's rest.
In the middle of the night, I carefully climbed down from my berth and peered out the window in the train corridor, and the view was stunning: across a flowing river, I saw a mountain covered with pines underneath a dangling full moon, which gave the only light to the landscape; the rest was black as anything you ever saw.
When I arrived in Vienna, the train station was a stone's throw from my hostel, and I got my brain wrapped around the city plan somewhat. Vienna is near the Danube (the aforementioned Strauss) and roughly situated in concentric rings, with many of the sights in the southwest corner, as seen in the map above. I wandered into the center of town, about a 20-minute walk, and decided to take a tour of the Opera House first.
The back half of Vienna Opera House was destroyed by bombs in World War 2, but the front facade was intact. Therefore, the stage and technical areas were able to be modernized while keeping the glory of the historical architecture in front. Here is a picture of the hall from the main floor.
Other than the astonishing musicianship and history of the opera itself, there are a few things that I learned on the tour (and later on) that are worth noting about the Vienna Opera:
- Five or six different productions are mounted simultaneously, over the course of a month or so. You can go to the opera four times a week, and see a different production every night. This necessitates the most elite set and stage crew, because whole sets must be brought in by truck each day, raised, and struck each night so the next day's production can be ready.
- The device I'm showing off in the picture above displays personal supertitles for the opera's translation -- it comes in about half a dozen languages, and every seat has one. To change the language, press the red button. For an international arts hub of a city, this seems like an obvious innovation, but it still blew me away.
- The arts endowment from the government for the opera is some extremely generous figure in the tens of millions of euro, but I didn't write it down. To mount so many great productions, the government understands the value of the institution.
- People of all ages and income levels come to the opera -- there are seats in what used to be the Emperor's box for hundreds of euro per performance, and standing-room tickets in the eaves and gallery for 3 euro apiece (including a place to lean and the translation devices.
This is a shot from the grand staircase and, below, a bust of Mozart in the upper foyer.
"Wow" time: Gustav Mahler, the famous composer, was musical director of the Vienna Court Opera for ten years from 1897-1907. After a while, he had his personal apartments moved to a wing of the opera house so he could be close to "work". His apartments are now an intermission hall on the third floor with paintings, photographs, and dioramas of past productions, as well as other memorabilia. While he did most of his composing in the countryside, I like to think that he did some work on his 5th and 6th symphonies, two of his finest, in this space.
Mahler's portrait in the hall.
Above: two dioramas of the stage sets for past Vienna Opera productions. Below: Mahler's "star" outside the opera house. There are similar stars for musicians hidden all over Vienna, from Olivier Messiaen to Kurt Weill.
This is the most excellent pedestrian-only street leading to St. Stephen's Cathedral. My next stop was the Hausdermusik, or musical museum.
The Hausdermusik, located just south of Stephensplatz in a renovated apartment building, is a modern museum of all things musical, both historical and experiential. Think the Pacific Science Center with a musical angle. It is comprehensive, well-paced, full of information, and, above all, FUN. A few select things in the Haus:
Toscanini's baton. They also had sticks from Karl Bohm, Herbert Karajan, and Richard Strauss.
Leonard Bernstein's tuxedo from when he conducted the Vienna Phil.
There was a fantastic exhibit on the human perception of sound. This room, with surround sound speakers and a powerful subwoofer, simulated the soundscape of being in a mother's womb -- arguably the first sound experiences any of us had. Heartbeats and respiratory sounds, echoing in a watery mass.
The upper floors housed exhaustive and fascinating portraits of the famous European composers through original documents and artifacts, describing their daily lives, career progressions, and musical achievements. Above: Haydn's original marriage contract to Maria Anna Keller. Haydn, I'm convinced, was easily the happiest artist of the Classical era.
Brace yourself -- as I recall, this is Haydn's actual beloved pet parrot, which could whistle the theme from one of his symphonies, stuffed and displayed for posterity. He ain't whistlin' no more.
This is Mozart's death certificate, which records the location of his death, his marital and paternal status, and an itemized list of his estate. Apparently, he had loads of furniture for his small apartment.
This is the final door Beethoven entered before his death; belonging to the apartments in which he was living at the time. Beethoven lived in more than twenty locations in Vienna.
Classical Rock Star time -- this is a nifty installation where one can conduct the Vienna Philharmonic on one of six different tunes (Blue Danube, Radetsky March, etc.) with the aid of a Hi-Def screen and an electronic baton which controls the speed of the orchestra. This was a trip. I almost paid full admission again later in the week to do it again. Below, Lorin Maazel gives you some pointers on the how to conduct the piece before the simulation begins:
The square of St. Stephen's Cathedral, or "Stephansplatz". All pedestrian, all the time. A great place to walk and people-watch.
St. Stephen's proper. Some work was being performed on the south tower, and the scaffolding was, ingeniously, a photocopy of the tower underneath, so that part of the building wouldn't be missed -- it's the right side of the picture.
Dinner that evening in a local pub -- I had the potato and beef dumplings on the right, my hostel roommate had the meat platter on the left. Holy moly, what a meal.
Vienna has a "Museumplatz" or city block-long courtyard which contains four world-class museums. This is the relatively new Leopold Museum, which contains modern European paintings and other works.
Vienna's art scene is unapologetically (and wonderfully) quirky and subversive. Here is a giant bodily organ in the Museumplatz that is also a gift shop.
Culture for all!
This wonderful building is located just south of the Museum Quarter. Built in 1897 by Joseph Maria Albrich, it was intended as an architectural manifesto and exhibition hall for the Secession Group; a collective of artists who separated from the Austrian art establishment (among then: Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Rudolf von Alt, and Richard Gerstl.) The building has a distinct Art Deco style and a German inscription over the doorway which means: "to every age its art and to art its freedom".
The golden ball of leaves crowing the building is my favorite detail, and gives it just the right touch.
More ornament details on the side of the building.
This street, mere meters from the Secession, is the fabled Naschtmarkt, a boulevard where food of all kinds is found. I loved walking here and finding good schnitzel. Below, some of the architecture on the parallel street.
The Modern Art Museum, or MUMOK (also one of the "big three" in the Museumsquarter) had my favorite exhibition of any I saw on the trip: it was three floors of video installations exploring the artistic uses of television. I spent hours at a time seeing the different guerilla, recursive, ingenious uses of TV as a vehicle for art. See below:
This TV with the black-and-white spigot was one of a series of spots by the same artist that aired on local stations in Scotland in the late 1970s. In this spot, which aired in the "dead air" between programs, a gushing spigot slowly fills the screen with water over the course of five minutes, then tilted to a 45-degree angle, and drained again. These spots were aired without preparation or explanation for the viewers, and each was "slow" compared to normal programming, so I can imagine the perplexed and possibly delighted Scots seeing their TV tubes suddenly turned into reservoirs.
In the above piece, I entered a white room-sized cube in the exhibition hall, and saw a TV with an empty room displayed on it. 15 seconds later, I watched myself enter the same room on the TV, reacted with surprise at seeing myself on the screen, and saw my own surprise 15 seconds later. This room had mirrors on both sides, so I could see iterations of myself in 15-second increments, leading up to the "present" (note that I am taking a picture, and on the screen I am standing in the corner. On the smaller reflected screen, which is hard to make out, I am doing something else, 30 seconds in the past.
If these kinds of works are something you find interesting, one of the pieces in the exhibition, by sculptor and all-around mega-artist Richard Serra, can be found on YouTube: Television Delivers People (1973): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbvzbj4Nhtk
An Evening at the Ballet
That evening, I queued up for standing-room tickets at the opera house for the ballet, A Midsummer Night's Dream by Felix Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn, who was kind of like the Bill Gates of music composition back in the day (as far as talent, wealth, means, and a head-start on his career), turned out the main ideas in this gem of a ballet at the age of 17, an age well before Mozart was writing any of his great works. It is shimmering and full of fire and energy from beginning to end, and an excellent musical vehicle for a ballet company.
This is a zoom from my standing-room place in the right wing, during the curtain call for the company (and the solo violinist -- the last third or so of the work is an extended violin feature). The dancers were exceedingly well-rehearsed, and one in particular, who played Pan, was so good that he got numerous "BRAVO!"s and even bouquets of flowers flung from the upper boxes nearest the stage. I had always heard of those kinds of audience reactions, but never seen it happen. The fifth and sixth curtain calls were still happening as I left the main hall.
And, how sweet is this?
Just outside the south entrance of the opera house, with escalators directly to the parking and underground stations. Talk about good planning.
Looking East from the opera house, toward the pedestrian-only thoroughfare, where I went afterward to get my favorite Viennese food...
The best place to eat in Vienna is a hot dog stand between the opera house and Stephensplatz. They sell four kinds of wieners (spicy, medium spicy, cheese-filled, and mild) as well as enormous slices of pizza and beer and soda. The wieners are outstanding and filling, and served in the above ingenious way, where they hollow out a baguette, add some ketchup and mustard inside, then the dog itself. You can eat them one-handed with no problem, and that is like solving the Fermat's Last Theorem of the hot dog world.
The dogs on display.
The stand at night, with a retro Americana diner vibe. If you're ever here, seek it out.
Schonbrunn Palace
After a night of music and hot dogs, it was time for some strolling. The underground goes directly to Schonbrunn Palace, the summer palace of the Habsburg dynasties since about 1700. It is very close to the central portion of the city, and is an important cultural landmark in Austria. Just approaching the palace from the roads has a feeling of great gravitas.
Imagine walking directly toward and through the palace in the above picture, and this is where you would end up -- in the gardens on the other side. These extensive, forested, symmetrical pathways are wonderful for walking in, and large and wide enough to feel somewhat isolated, even on a crowded spring weekend. I imagined what it must have been like to be either alone or with a few other people in these gardens when the palace was a royal residence. Below, a photo taken from the back balcony of the palace of the Gloriette, which was a dining hall, festival hall, and breakfast room for Joseph I, and situated on a steep hill behind the palace.
About a 15-minute walk west from the palace was this incredible conservatory, and an interesting sundial.
The Gloriette up close, after I finished sweating from climbing the hill.
When I turned around, this stunning view of the palace and Vienna beyond. Well worth the climb.
Another view from the Gloriette itself.
Close-ups of the Gloriette's ornate statuary.
Leopold Museum
The Leopold Museum, named after its benefactor and a recent addition to the Museumsquarter, was an excellent and spacious museum of modern Euro-Austrian artists. I did not record the information for each painting I liked, but some examples are below. I know the painting above is Mother with Two Children, by Egon Schiele, who was part of the Austrian Secession movement.
Hardcore music scholars may recognize the couple in the above painting as Arnold Schoenberg and his wife Mathilde. This was painted by Richard Gerstl, the young artist who had an affair with Mathilde for several months. When she finally returned to Arnold, the distraught Gerstl killed himself. This painting was from when they were all still friends.
This is a rendering of the exterior of the Doge's Palace in Venice. Not a lot has changed there in 150 years.
Last Bits Around Town
This theater near the Museumsquarter is perpetually playing the classic 1949 film The Third Man, starring Joseph Cotten and a dastardly Orson Welles in postwar Vienna. There has never been a more definitive film for the city, and a great film it is. I've seen it many times, and I had to see it again here.
A park near the parliament buildings on a Spring afternoon.
A section of downtown where ancient ruins were in the process of excavation beneath the modern surface streets.
Old and new.
The security center in the Karlsplatz underground station is up for public observation. (A note on the underground: the Vienna subway was the cleanest, fastest, most abundant and convenient mass transit I've experienced. A five-day pass was cheap, and there were times when I would ride the escalator underground and get on my preferred train without breaking stride.)
The street where Mozart lived for many years. I saw his apartments, preserved as a historical museum, but was not allowed any photographs. He had this marvelous view of the street and a central location, and I could almost feel his crowded, busy household with his family, servants, guests, and musical recitals.
The back of Mozart's apartments (2nd floor, in the grey building.)
This is what the standing-room places look like -- they're a practical spot for standing room because the lip of the balcony comes down so low that sitting wouldn't afford a view of the stage. This night was a deeply-felt production of La Boheme, with sets by Franco Zeffirelli. I hadn't seen it before, and it was riveting.
The stage door, with what I believe are the mopeds of the orchestra, singers, and stage crew.
Another gallery, this time for experimental and vernacular art -- the true voice of the modern Austrian art community, as far as I could tell. Above, my very favorite piece, titled Road Trip: the viewer places his eye at a certain level next to the rotating disc, and it looks exactly like looking out a rolled-down car window as a desert landscape passes with a mountain in the distance (there's even a mounted electric fan to simulate the wind). Truly ingenious.
The square just off of Stephensplatz.
The view from the Stephensplatz North tower.
Finally, the day before my train, a visit to the amusement park where the famous ferris wheel from The Third Man is still in operation. Above, there is a bumper car arena wonderfully called "Chauffer School".
I think this ride would scare me if I were still young.
And, the famous wheel. Ah.
The next morning, another brief train trip, and my last location. Coming soon, so stay tuned..
2 comments:
Great pictures (again) and commentary. It's fun to read your take on a city I've been to several times. In the summer they have a movie festival outside with a big screen put up on the side of the Rathaus. They show different operas and symphony concerts, plus there's bier and schnitzel. Awesome city!
I LOVE VIENNA! Thanks for taking me there again. I enjoyed seeing some of my favorite spots as well as some new ones.
Your commentary is always delightful.
Thanks for sharing.
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