Wien (and Salzburg)

One of the consequences of the Visa Snafu of 2022 was that S and I missed out on a chance we had been toying with to hear Cecilia Bartoli at the Wiener Staatsoper. Last summer, for S's birthday, I put our names on a wait list to hear her this summer. This past spring, we found out we got tickets.

Thus it was that we took a 4-day trip to Vienna. S had been there before, about 40 years ago; I had never been.

When I was an undergrad at UIUC, I took a creative non-fiction writing course with Daniel Curley. Although I was a physics major, he knew I was also an avid musician. I don't remember how the topic of Bach's Brandenburg Concerti came up, but one day we were talking before class about Brandenburg #2, which has some almost painfully gorgeous sequences with trumpet and oboe in the first and third movements, and he asked my opinion about why the music couldn't be that gorgeous all the way through. I was, I dunno, maybe 18 years old, and I suggested that ever-present gorgeousness would make nothing gorgeous: gorgeous without contrasting less-than-gorgeous lessens the gorgeous.

That was the impression I had of Vienna: all gorgeous, all the time, and consequently challenging to tell the spectacular from the trees. The city is about 2,000 years old, but was largely rebuilt after the Turkish Wars in an ecstatic effusion of monumental baroquisieren, and further expanded in the 19th century with Neoclassical and Jugendstil exuberance. Almost everything broadcasts wealth and power out the wazoo. It's no wonder that UNESCO has declared Viennese coffee house culture part of Austria's intangible cultural heritage, because coffee and cake are possibly the closest things to cozy that Vienna has to offer (and even that is often extravagant). To be clear, I'm not complaining--it's just that Vienna is...a lot.

We saw two vocal performances: Their Master's Voice, billed as a "gender duel" between Cecilia Bartoli and John Malkovich, but more an exploration of voice and gender roles and who gets to perform whom; and Farinelli and Friends, a gala concert featuring multiple singers, including a slate of countertenors and male sopranos, with almost everyone flashing their flashiest most of the time, so very Vienna. It was wonderful to hear Cecilia Bartoli in person--I've never heard a more expressive, flexible, acrobatic voice able to project so emotively and  powerfully even when pianissimo. And the orchestra of Baroque instruments, played by Les Musiciens du Prince - Monaco, was outstanding. Just amazing.

Day 1, July 9: Salzburg (mostly)

The Deutschland Ticket got us all the way from Steinebach to Salzburg on regional trains without any additional charge. We had a few hours to hang out in Salzburg before catching an express train to Wien (45 Euros RT per person).

Mozart's birth house:

Franziskanerkirche:

St. Peter Kirche:

A patch of medieval frescoes remains amid the Baroque!

Catacombs on the cliffside behind St. Peter:

Hiking up the hill to the Festung (didn't go in):

View of the Festung from the Richterhoehe:

The manor on the pond below the Richterhoehe was used as Baron von Trapp's estate in The Sound of Music:

It was a hot day. We appreciated the public Trinkwasser!

More ramparts...

Gherkin by Erwin Wurm, next to a statue of Schiller:

Kollegienkirche:

Looking back at Bayern atop the the Kapizinerberg: 

Bicycle storage (with security guard) at the train station:

Coupling two trains together before heading to Wien:

Day 2, July 10: Wien!

Carly's a rule-breaker.

The Minoritenkirche has a mosaic replica of Da Vinci's Last Supper by Giacomo Raffaelli, commissioned by Napoleon. Big mosaic, teeny tiny tiles!

S's brother R told us to stop by Cafe Hawelka for coffee. No decaf, so S drank alone. 

Friedensreich Hundertwasser drank coffee here...

Dom Kirche St. Stephan:

Manner Waffel selfie station. The factory is in Vienna. All the way through Gymnasium, S's staple lunch was a pint of buttermilk and a pack of Manner Waffel.

St. Rupert's Kirche is the oldest church in Vienna, founded ca. 800 CE. The doors were locked when we walked by, but Wikipedia says it was barokisiert in the 17th c. Outside the church, this tree was ingesting a fence.

Wien has Stolpersteine:

The best way to get the lay of the land is to walk. We ended up walking all the way to the Danube. The odd landscape here is a double row of long lines of Danube tour boats.

And here's the Danube. Note the tour boats to the left.

Our Pension host had advised us the night before to purchase a three-day mass-transit pass for our stay in Wien, so we could hop on a train or bus whenever we got tired of walking. In retrospect, we aren't typical walkers, and it would have been cheaper to skip the ticket; but having purchased it, we felt a need to use it, so we took a train two stops back in the direction of the Altstadt. 

We aimed first for the Hunderwasser Haus...

...then paused for a much needed tasty vegetarian lunch at Cafe das Goldstueck. From there, more walking, through the Stadtpark to pay homage at all the composer monuments:

Schubert...

Bruckner...

Strauss (clearly a cool guy)...

and Beethoven (just outside the park).

Given the number of tourists in Vienna, as in Verona, most of the churches require tickets. Thus we did not go inside the Karlskirche on our way back to our Pension. 

After a quick change of clothes, we headed to the Wiener Staatsoper.

We had amazingly good seats! This was because we misunderstood the balcony naming system and the usher's directions and sat two stories lower than we were supposed to. By some stroke of luck, no other ticket holders ever showed up to boot us out.

Do our eyes look a little red? We both cried a bit when Cecilia Bartoli sang Lascia la spina. She makes such expressively beautiful use of her instrument.

Donausteig - Day 5 - Eferding to Ottensheim & Linz preview

Day 5: Eferding to Ottensheim

A mile or so beyond Eferding is the thatched-roofed Scharmüller Häusl, built in 1722 and continuously occupied until 1970. About 33 years ago, S and I played a game of Scrabble in which we allowed German words as long as S told me what they meant and used them in a sentence. Thus one of the first German words I learned from him was Dach, as in "Das Dach ist nicht Reet gedeckt" ("The roof is not reed-covered, i.e. thatched"). Here we see that Das Dach ist Reet gedeckt. 

After my Day 4 Burgruinen detour, I was back on the Donausteig. For Day 5, to make up for my absence along the river on Day 4, my plan was to follow bike paths along the Danube all the way to Ottensheim. 

Here, one last look at the Aschach before switching over to the Donau.

The Donau is wider than the Aschach...

The Danube was the northern border of the Roman Empire. This informational marker had a visiting legionnaire... 

Took me about a week, but I finally posted photos of this stone on Facebook, as the stone requested.

I left the Roman legionnaire stone further downstream for someone else to find. 

Never forget. The marker below says:

In Hartheim Castle, in Alkoven [a town above the Danube just south of here], as part of the so-called Euthanasia Action during the reign of National Socialism between 1940 and 1944, nearly 30,000 people with disabilities and illnesses were murdered and burned. Their ashes were thrown into the Danube at this location. In Schloss Hartheim is a memorial site and an exhibit, "Value of Life," dedicated to past and present questions about the value of human life. This stone is meant to commemorate the victims. --The Association of Schloss Hartheim (www.schloss-hartheim.at)  

I crossed back to the north side of the Danube on foot, on the bridge over a hydroelectric power system and some locks. The signage as I approached made clear that there should be no goofing around here. 

The castle on the left bank lies above Ottensheim, the town that was my destination for the day. It's privately owned, so I couldn't get any up-close shots.

Walk walkity walk walk walk. I passed a huge rowing/sculling center that has hosted numerous world championships, and didn't think to take a single photo.

Obligatory organ photos at the 15th-c. late-Gothic/early-Baroque church in Ottensheim:

Note the assymetry:

Ta da! 11.9 miles walked, ~250 elevation gain. You can see the impressive length of the sculling center on the right side of the map. It extends pretty much from the kink in my route just left of the two red dots all the way east to the next kink in my route just to the right of the spit of land extending into the Donau.

I arrived in Ottensheim shortly after noon, thanks to flat terrain plus fewer than usual miles, and my hotel didn't open until 3pm. I decided to eat a quick lunch in Ottensheim, then take the Donau Bus ferry to Linz. The ferry driver saw my backpack and hiking poles and asked if I was hiking the Donausteig--the first person on my trip who seemed familiar with the hiking trails, as opposed to the biking trails--and offered suggestions about which route to hike into Linz the next day.

I spent a few hours wandering around touristy sites in Linz, then caught the ferry back to Ottensheim.

Anton Bruckner was the organist at the Old Cathedral from 1855-1868. The organ he played, originally designed and built by Franz Xaver Chrismann for a different church ca. 1760, moved to Linz in 1790, and was tonally redesigned and expanded by organ builder Leopold Breinbauer according to Bruckner's wishes during his tenure as organist.

I was delighted to be able to see the organ, because most of the big churches I stepped into in Linz looked more like the one below. You can't see the organs if you can't walk in farther than the space under organ loft. Locked gates probably make it hard to meet the needs of folks who want to pray or whose souls need saving, but what do I know... 

One of the reasons I was excited to choose Linz as my final destination for my multi-day hike was to follow up on questions about Linzer Torte that arose during our 2009 sabbatical in Freiburg. A lot of signs advertised Original Linzertorte, so I was hard pressed to decide where to buy some. I figured I could decide on Day 6, plus it was very hot on Day 5, so I gave up and instead enjoyed some gelato made from recipes of unknown but probably originally Italian.

The Martin Luther Kirche had text on its inner doors in in-your-face Hebrew, as well as Latin, Greek, and German--but the inner doors were locked nonetheless. 

This sign says it's forbidden to post signs here:

The Mariendom, Austria's largest cathedral, was pretty snazzy inside and out. I assumed it was contemporaneous with Freiburg's 13th-c. Muenster and Strassbourg's 13th-c. cathedrals, but it was built in the 1860s, while Bruckner was playing the organ over at the Alter Dom. 

Behind the Dom was the cathedral's stonework workshop.

A photo, through a bakery window, of "original Linzer Torte."

The Mozarthaus: Mozart composed the Linzer Symphonie here in just 3 days during a 1783 stopover in Linz. 

Christian Doppler, who discovered the Doppler Effect, went to 4th grade here:

Architectural design--or street art--on a building wall a few steps below the Linzer Schloss:

View from the Schloss:

The 15th-c. Martinskirche--another gated church:

Heading back down to Linz from the Schloss...

Views from the Donau Bus...