Vienna Week Three

Beethoven, Mozart & Shubert

We have continued our pilgrimages to the graves and monuments of composers and other famous Viennese.  This post opens with monuments to Beethoven, Mozart and Shubert.  In the same part of the city cemetery are graves for Brahms and three Strausses.  The golden Johann Straus is in the City Park. 

Johann Struass

We have started going to art museums, of which there are many in Vienna.  We began with the Kunsthistorische (Kunst = art), which is part of a grand museum district.  A great deal of the fun of these museums is the building itself – great monumental affairs with high ornate ceilings, marble columns, magnificent staircases, etc.  The Kunsthistorische has a large frieze around the top of its stairwell created by Gustav Klimt, among others, representing the different areas and time periods of art, such as ancient Egypt or Renaissance Italy. 

Theseus & Centaur

This is the 150^th anniversary year of Klimt’s birth, so there is a city wide emphasis on his work.  In order to make it easier to view the frieze, they have created an eye level platform along the section he painted, so that was interesting.  It is also good that a hundred years ago they were supporting contemporary artists.  It also has a statue of Theseus fighting a Centaur that was originally made for the Theseus Temple.

The museum has a wide variety of European art, including a good selection of Breughel; the most well-known is the Tower of Babel, but also winter scenes, weddings, fairs. 

Museum cafe

There are also Rubens, Raphael, and Titian.  I did get very tired of all the crucifixions, scourgings, bloody heads of John the Baptist, etc., so that I found simple cityscapes by Canaletto quite refreshing and relaxing.  There are also, of course, many portraits, some of which make you wonder more about the persons represented.  I am sorry that so many are now nameless.  There was a quote from a painter that after religious art, he thought portraiture was the most important because it produced a sort of immortality.  It feels like you are less immortal if only your image goes down to posterity without your name.  So my recommendation is to always have your name painted onto the portrait.  Why should it just be signed by the artist?

 

The museum has probably the most ornate cafe I have ever eaten in – a two story rotunda with 3 or 4 different kinds of marble making up the columns and walls, and lots of folk statues in niches around the rotunda.  The food was good too.  It is interesting that, at least in Vienna, and I gather this is true in most of Europe, once you are seated, there is no effort to get you to leave.  Most of the time, the service for taking orders and delivering the food is reasonably speedy, but it can take forever to get someone’s attention to get the bill.  This can make waiting for a seat fairly long. 

After lunch we did the Greek, Roman and Egyptian rooms.  Lots of Greek vases in an amazingly good state of preservation, lots of little bronze statues, and Egyptian mummies and sarcophagi.

Maximilian by Durer

The next museum on the list was the Albertina.  This is next to the Hofburg Palace in what had once been a Duke’s residence.  It had a major exhibit on Emperor Maximilian I, a founding father of the Hapsburg dynasty, Holy roman Emperor in the early 1500s.  The exhibit is also about Albrecht Durer and the art of the woodcut.  Maximilian is particularly well known, both in image and history, because he made a great effort to do so – what might these days be termed branding.  In particular, he had many images made using the relatively new technology of the woodcut.  From the new studies of the classic world, people were aware of the Roman Emperor’s use of triumphant parades and arches to celebrate great victories.  Rather than actually have a march or a triumphant arch, Maximilian just commissioned huge pictorial scrolls and large wall prints and had them distributed around his kingdom.  Much less work and expense, especially since the procession is led by a mythic herald riding a chariot pulled by a gryphon. 

Belevedere

The Albertina, as I said above, used to be a Duke’s residence, so we also went through some of the apartments.  Mostly, we have not been making an effort to see royal dwellings.  The other big exhibit at the museum shows the recent donation of a collection of 19^th and 20^th century work from Monet to Picasso.  There were a lot of lovely and/or interesting works, but it was one of those exhibits where I got distracted by the exhibit itself.  There was an extravagant use of space – large rooms with only a few pictures on each wall (and very few places to sit).  It made me feel as though they wanted me to think the exhibit was bigger than it really was.  The other thing that can sometimes distract me in a museum is the picture frames.  I love most of the ornate classical picture frames, but a lot of modern art does not look good in it, and is better off in minimalist frames.  I have also enjoyed a lot of these exhibits where most of the writing is in German, so I don’t have to read the text.  I really prefer to try and experience the work directly, but usually get sucked into the text anyway.

Belvedere & garden

After the museum, we went around the corner to the Palmen Haus, a restaurant in the glass conservatory of the Hapsburg Palace.  Definitely the best food of the trip so far, and lovely setting and service.  We finally had a Viennese dessert – a chocolate/banana torte – with Viennese coffee (mélange, which is coffee with steamed milk).  We have gone back since.

Historic Belvedere view

Our last museum of the week was the Belvedere Palace, which actually took two days because there is an upper and a lower palace, separated by a huge garden with fountains and statuary that we walked through every day on our way to the German classes.  At the Lower Belvedere we started off in the stables with an exhibit of medieval panels and statues.  I find the statuary very expressive, and most of the panels were amazingly vivid and well preserved in their colors.  Then there were a number of rooms devoted to Carl Schuch, a little known Austrian contemporary of the Impressionists.  This is partly because he was rich and didn’t have to sell his paintings, and partly because he was a perfectionist who never liked to exhibit.  He did know a lot of contemporary artists and was respected by them.  His work is very good, and I actually appreciated a lot of the text (in English) because it did tell me what he was striving for – an accurate rendition of what he saw, but also recognizing that a 2 dimensional representation is never accurate, and must work on its own terms also.

Musikverein

Finally, in the main halls, there was an exhibit of 19^th century Austrian paintings depicting scenes from Hungary to India – the exotic Orient.  There were a variety of styles, and it was fun to just view all the locals.  One interesting picture was painted underwater in a diving bell the artist had made for him.  Actually it was sketched under water and completed on land.  We also enjoyed strolling thru the side garden that is not available for public access.

Cruise boats on the Danube

The Upper Belvedere is even bigger than the Lower, with 3 floors of exhibits.  They also do a good job with the rooms themselves, with pictures of how they looked when occupied.  The 2 palaces were built as a summer residence for Prince Eugene (pronounced Oigun in German) of Saxony around 1715, being on a slight rise and well outside the city walls.  A number of the rooms still have their original ceilings and statuary, but a number do not.  The Belvedere has perhaps the largest of the Klimt exhibits currently going on in the city, including his famous Kiss.  Klimt is currently so popular, and his work is so decorative, that it is hard to take a fresh look at it.  I did find his landscapes to be interesting, and different from his more well-known work.  I also enjoyed some of the contemporaneous art work.   There was another exhibit of medieval art, and many rooms of 19^th century art, and some 20^th century.  It got quite exhausting actually.

Wachau view

More music: We are still going to concerts every second or third evening.  Not only is the music and performance brilliant, but it is still just so exciting to be in Vienna to hear it!  We returned to the Jesuitenkirche to hear Bach’s St. John’s Passion.  We went to the Vienna Musikverein (Music Society) for Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra.  And the Volksopera to hear La Traviata.  There isn’t much point in me trying to describe these experiences except that I have become a fan of live music.  It is great to have recordings to listen to at will, but live is just really different.

Melk monastary

We took a cruise up the Danube River one day – through the Wachau Valley, which is a world famous scenic stretch.  It started with a bus trip past Krems, where many Neolithic treasures have been excavated, and the ruined castle of Durnstein where King Richard the Lionheart was held captive.  I had expected more time on the river, but as it worked out, this was ok.  We had booked this particular day, Friday, because on the long term forecast it looked the warmest, but it turned out overcast and fairly cool.  It was not only overcast, but with low enough clouds that the tops of the hills were obscured.  The bus was warm and had a multilingual guide to tell us about the sites. 

Inside Melk church

We boarded our boat at Spitz and continued up the river to Melk, about an hour.  We had a very pleasant lunch on board.  This allowed us to take time to go into the village of Melk before touring the Abbey, the high point of the day.  We did have dessert in Melk though, apricot crepes and an apricot cake.  The Wachau is famous for both wine and apricots, including apricot liqueur, which we bought a small bottle of.  The Abbey, most of which is run as a school for about 700 students, currently has about 30 monks.  The tour went through what used to be the guest wing and is now a small museum.  There were lots of religious treasures – chalices and vestments and statues.  The great room/reception hall is another room with a great trompe l’oiel ceiling painting which makes it look like a much higher dome than it really is. 

Alex & Goethe

As I am running late on posting this entry, which only covers week 3, I am not including any of what we have done this week.  Stay tuned!