11/25/2005
To Be in Vienna, by Laurel Kenner

To be in Vienna is to walk in the footsteps of Beethoven, Strauss, Mozart, Haydn, Brahms, Wagner.

To see what Klimt and Schiele saw.

To sit in the coffeehouses.

To see where the Polish general Sobieski turned back the Turks.

To make a pilgrimage by subway to Niederhofstrasse.

To visit Brueghel the elder's marvelous paintings, including Childrens' Games and Winter Scene, in the Kunsthistorische Museum.

To be amazed at the sweet politeness of the Viennese, who stop and help if you look befuddled at the subway and apologize profusely for coughing during the opera.

To walk along the massively elegant opera house, city hall, museums and other public buildings on the giant Ringstrasse, built in the 19th century at no expense to taxpayers. The emperor ordered the old wall around the inner city to be destroyed, opening vast spaces. The land not used for public buildings sold to private developers.

To learn about the immensely wealthy aristocracy and the court life impenetrable except by birth, How can one not sympathize with Beethoven, who defended his artistic and human aristocracy against these hereditary nobles. And things were much worse after Napoleon's defeat and the emperors began clamping down on thought.

To marvel at the conservatism of the last major emperor, (1848 to 1916) who only installed bathrooms in the Schonbrunn after the empress insisted.

To learn that the famous balls of Vienna allowed commoners to mix with noble ladies (who would cut them dead the next morning).

To eat the best cake.
To drink the best hot cherry juice at street stalls.
To see children dressed in down like little spacemen.
To walk about in gently falling snow like in a snow globe that you turn upside down.
To eat the best sausage (I read that Beethoven prophesied that the Viennese would never rebel against the aristocracy so long as they had their sausage and beer, and after sampling the local fare at the outdoor street stalls, I know what he means)
To eat the best venison and perch.
To live in the most perfectly constructed buildings.
To sit in the most sonorous orchestral concert hall.
To be at the doorway to Eastern Europe.
To understand a little better what the hades happened in the 19th century.
To learn that Mozart liked to gamble.
To be tantalized by references to a stock market crash in 1873 that marred the World Expo here.
To learn that speculation was a big form of entertainment in the late 1800s.
To play on Bosendorfers like Liszt did and start to warm to their virtuosic qualities after a few doyen repetitions.

Recommended reading -- The Austrian Mind, and Neurosis and Human Growth, recommended on this List a few weeks ago and a perfect companion in Freud's town.

Laurel's photographs of Vienna