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.