36 hours in NYC

Day 1, Feb. 28

Turns out that when you tell people that you're heading to/are in NYC to see the Caspar David Friedrich retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 9 out of 10 people say "how nice--who's that?"

Those of us who grew up playing from the very affordable two-volume Dover reprint of Beethoven's piano sonatas know who Caspar David Friedrich is...

Mondaufgang am Meer (1822)

Mann und Frau in Betrachtung des Mondes (ca 1824).
And Beethoven sonatas edited by Heinrich Schenker, which I'd never noticed before...

...so "how nice--who's that?" confirms not only that liberal arts education relating to European history and art history has dwindled in the past 40 years, but so has the number of USAmerican kids taking piano lessons. Ah well.

Gentle Reader(s), Der Wanderer ueber dem Nebelmeer was there, inviting us across two or so centuries to share in the sublime, to feel the intimate human connection (and disconnection) of Wanderlust and the appeal and immensity of nature both conquerable (as viewed from atop the hill) and distantly out of reach.

We're going to that hill in June.

Immensity...

...intimacy...

Wanderlust

We were in NYC to see Der Wanderer, but one of our favorite paintings at the Met turned out to be Berglandschaft in Böhmen (Mountain Landscape in Bohemia, ca. 1830). 

As a landscape amongst other 1830s landscapes, it was apparently a revelation. The Met's accompanying text borrowed from an 1833 review: "The most striking, and the most interesting thing about the painting, is its very sparsity....Three colors and two lines, is that a landscape?... And why so extraordinary?... What emerges in this picture is the abstraction of the artist himself, his choice."  

And yet what we saw wasn't sparsity or abstraction, but so much attention to detail that our 21st-century eyes saw it almost as a photograph, with the familiar, vivid, green and yellow fields that we see all over Germany.

From the Querweg hike in 2022... 

On the wall opposite the Bohemian landscape was an unfinished work, with layers and layers of surface detail still waiting to be filled in, looking flat and decidedly non-photographic in comparison.

Das brennende Neubrandenburg, ca. 1834

Ruine Oybin (1835) glowed. How does one make paint glow?

In addition to oil paintings, the exhibit featured numerous sketches and watercolors. Two faves:

This looks like a good spot for casting
magic bullets, a la the image below...

...which is not by Friedrich--the 1822 Weimar set
design for the Wolf's Glen scene in Der Freischuetz

This watercolor of a cave looked more detailed from a distance than up close

By the time we finished wandering through the Friedrich exhibit, we were a little overwhelmed by the quantity of art that still laid before us at the Met. We took a quick zip through a few more rooms, then headed up the street to the Neue Gallerie and its basement cafe that had been recommended by friends. Therein we partook of the most ridiculously expensive Kaffee und Kuchen we are likely to ever encounter in our lives. Nonetheless, it gave us the energy to return to the Met on our way back to our hotel, to check out some of the other exhibits and take a quick look at the Friedrich exhibit one more time (carpe diem).

Some additional Met highlights:

Before we ingested cake, we felt about as tired as this scribe looks.

Tiffany

Part of a ca. -10 BCE temple relocated from an area that flooded thanks to the Aswan Dam

Closeup to show the graffiti. People have been jerks for centuries...

Zoom in to see the surface-decoration pubic hair.

We saw a similar hippo last year in Vienna's Kunsthistoriches Museum

In the evening, we met up with a dear friend from grad school, J.H., and I can't believe we didn't think to take a single photo together.

Day 2, March 1

J.H. works in a building called The Spiral, and she invited us up to the 52 floor to admire the views.

The Spiral has terraces that spiral down the outside of the building

The Spiral is near the Vessel. J.H. said it had only recently re-opened after a series of deaths by suicide. We didn't climb it, but it offered some fun photo ops. You can't see the new safety nets in the photo below.

The Vessel, looking up from below

After forgetting to take selfies again and then parting ways with J.H., S and I headed to the TKTS booth to look for discounted tickets to a Broadway show. So did a mile or so of other tourists, motivating us to walk to the August Wilson Theater, where we did not have to wait in line and found affordable last-minute tickets to Cabaret, starring Adam Lambert and Auli'i Cravalho.

Wow. Just wow. "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" was particularly bone-chilling, with the line "but soon says a whisper, arise, arise" extending into a Nazi salute, as though we were watching Elon Musk saluting behind the presidential seal of the United States. Later, Lambert--as he apparently had done in previous performances--paused near the end of "If You Could See Her Through My Eyes" to call out audience members who laughed at an anti-Semitic line. "No," he said slowly and clearly. "This is not a joke. Pay attention." When uncomfortable giggles followed, he repeated the message.

After the show, we swung back toward our hotel to find an early dinner before heading to the airport. We ended up at Sicily Osteria, to which we enthusiastically give all thumbs up, from the Finocchio salad (repeat at home!: arugula, shaved fennel, toasted hazelnuts, fileted orange segments, and pomegranate seeds) to the beautiful signature dessert, Limone di Sicilia (a bed of lemon jam and lemon creme with streusel crumbs, on which sat a yellow white-chocolate shell filled with lemon vanilla mousse and lemon confit). Hard to imagine we'll ever eat a more beautiful or gustatorily satisfying dessert.

At first, we thought this was a real lemon. Amazingly delicious.

We walked an extra long route to the Metro to get a few more miles in, then headed to JFK and home to Durham.

Lenggries to Brannenburg, Day 3: Rottach-Egern to Albert Link Huette

I had three different options pre-planned in Komoot for our hike from Rottach-Egern to the Spitzingsee. We settled on one, and were headed out of town when a gentleman spotted us and said, "Stoppp! Are you hiking? Why are you on this ugly busy street instead of the scenic route thattaway that we locals recommend?" So of course, we took the scenic route instead. And while walking on the scenic route, we spied a sign pointing to Bodenschneid, our peak of the day, thisaway, so we decided to be spontaneous, ditched the planned route, and followed the signs instead. 

This fortuitous change meant that we not only passed the Bodenschneidhaus below the peak, but we passed it at just the right time mid-morning to fortify ourselves with tasty Kaiserschmarrn and Schorle while enjoying live music. The musicians were supposed to be at the hut on Sunday, but played on Saturday instead because the forecast for Sunday was for rain all day. Oh dear.

It took a few attempts, but the carefully framed photo below captures many essential aspects of the ideal Bavarian hiking experience: mountains, of course, plus livestock grazing nearby, plus good company, plus Kaiserschmarrn, plus trusty hiking gear, plus live songs auf Bayrisch (that I could understand, no less!), plus beer in cup holders attached to the music stands.

After refueling, we continued up...

...and up...

...and up some more. That's the Tegernsee behind us to the northwest...

...and the Bodenschneidhaus down in the meadow to the north.

A more explicit than usual metal Gipfelkreuz marked the peak...

...while storms brewed above the next mountain to the south.

Since lingering next to a metal lightning rod on the highest hill around listening to thunder seemed like a bad idea, we skedaddled down...

...and down...

...and down some more. We ran into some other hikers who were heading up, who alerted us to a trail closed for forestry work, but they noted that the trail was passable because work was halted for the weekend. So we continued down...

...and down. My camera, as always, failed to capture the steepness of the descent.

Looking down...

At the bottom of the hill was a sign noting the trail closure. There was no sign at the top of the hill. This seems to be the norm of trail-closure signage in Europe. Perhaps if I hiked in the other direction, the signage would have been unhelpfully at the top of the hill instead of the bottom. (This happens to me regularly in Durham too. Maybe signage-too-late-to-be-helpful is my superpower.)

We emerged from the woods to this view...

...then continued down, now on a gravel road rather than wooded trail. Once the road leveled out, the hike past the Spitzingsee to the Albert Link Huette was relatively straightforward.

The hut host's first question for us, upon noting we were from the U.S., was "you have a big election coming up, don't you; are you going to vote? And are you going to vote for the right person?" He had studied abroad in Alabama for a year. We assured him YES and YES.

After a short break in our room, we went outside to the garden for dinner. Our server had lived for a few years in Chicago, a city she loved, and she too noted the world was holding its breath for the upcoming election.

After dinner, we took a backpackless stroll as the skies prepped for Sunday's rain:

Back at the hut, we enjoyed the decor, both manmade...

...and Earth-made. The mountains in the distance are in Austria, where a pot of gold waited to be found.

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.