WINTER IN VIENNA: COLD TO THE BODY, BUT WARM TO THE SPIRIT

By Todd Buell

When my girlfriend suggested in December that we spend our entire February holiday in Vienna, I was skeptical. Would we find enough to do to fill a week’s time? Would it not be better to split the week between two cities that neither of us had seen before? These were two questions that were circling through my head before we committed to our journey. However, after finishing a fulfilling and fun week in one of the world’s greatest capitals, I cannot believe that I ever doubted our choice.

We began our holiday in earnest on a Saturday and scouted out the Belvedere Palace in the southern part of the city. This palace was originally built by the Hapsburg Prince Eugène in the seventeenth century. Though first used as a residence for royalty, it now serves as a museum with mostly nineteenth- and twentieth-century art. My girlfriend, Una, is a great fan of the nineteenth-century painter Gustav Klimt, and inside the Belvedere we were able to see his legendary painting The Kiss. There were also, of course, numerous paintings by Rodin, Monet, and Manet.

The Belvedere Palace also has historical significance besides the artwork that now resides there. In 1955, following the final departure of all allied troops, Austrian state leaders met there to agree to a new constitution forming Austria’s “Second Republic.” (The first was between the First and Second World Wars.) At the conclusion of the meeting, on October 26, 1955, the foreign minister of Austria leaned over a balcony and unveiled the new constitution to the assembled public announcing “Österreich ist frei” (Austria is free).

After visiting the museum, we strolled through the Belvedere gardens. It was twilight as we were leaving, and the weather was awful (steady rain and about 34°F). Therefore we were nearly the only people on the grounds, which was both an eerie and romantic feeling.

Thankfully, before we melted or froze, we were able to attend Saturday evening mass in the spacious and beautiful Karlskirche (Karl’s Church) on Karlsplatz. Those who wish to maintain religious discipline while overseas should bear in mind that in much of Central and Eastern Europe churches are not heated. Though as I jokingly jibed to my girlfriend, who is Catholic, my denomination’s (Anglican/Episcopalian) church that we visited on Sunday was heated and comfortable.

One could spend practically all of one’s time in Vienna at museums and concerts. The Hapsburg family, whose emperors and empresses ruled Vienna, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and at times the Holy Roman Empire from Vienna from the thirteenth century all the way until the end of World War I, were great supporters of art and music. This tradition has continued into Austria’s republican era.
On Sunday, after church, we visited another one of Vienna’s museum gems—the Albertina. This was one of my favorite museums. On the ground floor there was an exhibition of the contemporary American photographer William Eggleston. Most of the photographs were taken between 1966 and 1974 and were in rural and impoverished parts of the American South and West. The photographs often were of apparently simple subjects (e.g., a bed in a hotel room, a woman standing near a beach, or a dilapidated petrol station in Alabama). Yet Una and I constantly found ourselves lingering near a portrait for minutes, asking questions about the circumstances behind each photograph.

Then we went upstairs and encountered what a university German professor of mine would have called “heavy pizza”—an exhibition of the works of Marc Chagall. This exhibit featured works on display for the first time. That fact coupled with Chagall’s popularity caused the exhibit rooms to be crowded, which did detract from the experience. We were still able to view his remarkable series of paintings depicting scenes from the bible. For those not familiar with Chagall’s work, they can be dizzying in their complexity. There were moments when Una and I spent nearly a half-hour standing in front of one painting, and we didn’t take in all of the details.

The Albertina and Belvedere museums are on all “must see” lists in Vienna. However two other museums that are less well known, yet equally worth seeing, are the Stadtmuseum (city museum) and the Haus der Musik (House of Music). The Stadtmuseum is located near the Karlsplatz subway station. The permanent exhibition consists of ruins and artifacts from the Roman era through the Middle Ages, but we nailed a neat special exhibit dedicated to the life of John F. Kennedy and his 1961 summit meeting with Soviet Premier Kruschev in Vienna. Though I was familiar with most of the facts surrounding Kennedy’s life and death, the information was well presented for non-Americans, and it was interesting for me to see German-language coverage of both his assassination and his visits to Vienna and Berlin.

There is also a German phonetics chart that Kennedy used to help say “Ich bin ein Berliner” during his 1963 speech at Checkpoint Charlie in West Berlin. (The phrase drew polite laughter then because the sentence literally means, “I am a jelly doughnut.”)

The Haus der Musik is one of the most schizophrenic museums I have ever visited. Part of it is a standard and traditional museum dedicated to the history of the Vienna Philharmonic and the most famous composers and conductors from the 1730s to today. In this part of the museum, you can get your picture taken “conducting” the Philharmonic in front of a picture of the orchestra. You can hear stories from actual Philharmonic members about conductors or strange occurrences that have taken place during the history of this musical organization. For example, moments prior to Leonard Bernstein’s conducting an especially difficult piece, a rare earthquake hit Vienna, forcing the cancellation of the concert.
One other entertaining part of the museum is an interactive section that allows the visitor to conduct the orchestra “virtually.” The baton is programmed in sync with a projected screen of a virtual orchestra. Therefore, if you lose the beat, which amateur conductors often do, the orchestra makes prerecorded snide comments at you such as, “have you not really learned the piece?” Or the ultimate insult: “we don’t really need a conductor, we can do this on our own.”

The rest of the museum dealt mostly with the science of sound and acoustics. There was a room that played the sounds that babies hear while inside the womb. In general, I found that in order to appreciate this part of the museum fully, one needs a background in science, especially physics, that exceeds my own.

Vienna also has a great theater scene—though this facet of its life may be difficult for those who cannot speak German. We were lucky to see two plays that dealt with the always relevant issue of religious tolerance.

The first play was a work by the Brazilian playwright João Bethencourt and is called, in English, The Day They Kidnapped the Pope. It is about a Jewish taxi driver in New York in the 1950s who kidnaps the fictitious Pope Albert IV. (The character is loosely based on Pope John XXIII, who inaugurated the second Vatican council.) However, all the taxi driver wants in ransom is twenty-four hours of peace across the world.

I imagine that some readers of Wolf Moon Press Journal are connected to theater or stage companies. The Day They Kidnapped the Pope is a fun, light, and profound work that is a joy to watch and would not be difficult to stage. The play’s conclusion is a transcendent message of tolerance between Christians and Jews that reminded me of a play that I studied in university called Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise) by G. E. Lessing (1729–1781). Fortunately, we were able to see this play as well at the world-famous Burgtheater across the street from Vienna’s beautiful Rathaus (city hall). This drama, though written in 1779, is a tour de force advocating tolerance among all three Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Islam, and Christianity.

We finished our stay in Vienna by visiting the Schönbrunn Palace. This is the jewel of Vienna’s tourist attractions. It was built by the Hapsburg royalty as a hunting lodge in the seventeenth century but quickly became the opulent home to the royal family until the dissolution of the monarchy in 1918. It was in this building’s hall of mirrors where John F. Kennedy and Nikita Kruschev met at their aforementioned 1961 summit. Though the bitter weather essentially forbade us from seeing it, the garden of Schönbrunn is a beautiful and majestic walk that a visitor should take the time to experience.

As we boarded the train heading back to Villach, three things shocked us: the holiday had gone by so quickly, there were places that we had wanted to visit, but didn’t, and how much we both enjoyed spending a week in this great world capital. I almost felt ashamed to think that I had ever believed that spending a week there was a bad idea.

 

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