Destination: Vienna

As I walked out of my hotel in Vienna on Sunday morning, I realized I was in a city with a rich culture you can almost inhale, and a vivid history you can almost touch. I decided to max out on culture.

At about 9:00, I dropped by the Hofburg’s Imperial Music Chapel. The Vienna Boys’ Choir was singing, as they do each Sunday morning throughout their season. I didn’t actually see the boys — no one in the church did — as they sang like angels from the loft in the rear. But, like you don’t need to look at the sun to know it’s there on a beautiful day, you don’t need to see the boys to enjoy their delicately beautiful music. Their voices blended perfectly with the scene in front of us, as sunshine streaming through the windows made the Baroque starburst of gilded statuary truly seem to burst over the altar.

Energized, I ducked through a royal passageway and paid about €20 for a standing-room spot to see the much-loved Lipizzaner Stallions prance to some more music in the Emperor’s chandeliered Baroque riding hall. (It occurred to me that they prance in 4:4 time, but not 3:4 — even though this is the city of the waltz.) I enjoyed the show as much — and with a view just as good — as those who booked far more expensive seats long in advance.

Ready for more music, I strolled a hundred yards to the Augustinian church for Mass, where I sat above silver urns containing the hearts of centuries of Habsburg emperors. This being Vienna, the service came with a complete choir and an orchestra, and today wowed worshippers with the spiritual confidence of Anton Bruckner’s Mass No. 3 in F Minor.

After lunch under palm trees in the emperors’ conservatory, I dropped into the adjacent hothouse, a wonderland of butterflies. Enjoying the fluttering antics of these butterflies — most of which seemed drunk on the fermented banana juice they licked from the brown and sweating banana slices in their breakfast dish — is a Vienna tradition for me.

Enlarge photo

Enlarge photo

Then, for coffee, I pulled up a chair in the smoke-and-coffee-stained Café Hawelka, where intellectuals like Leon Trotsky once stewed. The decor was circa-1900. Old man Hawelka himself was snoozing on a Biedermeier chair near the bar. His granddad could well have served a Mélange (as they would have called their cappuccino) to Trotsky, Hitler, Stalin, Klimt, or Freud — all of whom were rattling around Vienna when the chair I was sitting on was made, bought, and put in this café. I pondered how, in the last days of the era of Europe’s family-run empires (essentially all of which died with the end of World War I), Vienna was a place of intellectual tumult.

And my day was just half over. The Vienna Opera — arguably the world’s greatest — was performing Wagner’s Tannhäuser in the afternoon. No ticket? No problem. In good Vienna style, it was being projected outdoors for the rest of us in all its Teutonic glory, live on a huge screen. Arriving early to get a good seat, I waited with the people of Vienna — marveling at the potential richness of life, and how as I travel, I can experience much of its best.

Awaiting the start of Tannhäuser, I thought about how accessible all this was. Two musical Masses and this opera experience — free. Horses — $30. Butterflies — $6. Lunch under the palms — $20. Coffee and cake with sleeping Herr Hawelka — $7. As I reviewed all I had experienced today and the people I had rubbed shoulders with, I thought again — a theme for me this month — how much happiness there is in our world if you choose to see it. I’m not saying to ignore the problems. I’m saying to get out there, strive to keep things in perspective, and embrace not what turns you off, but what turns you on.

As I ponder my passion for Europe and why I’m a Europhile, I’ve recently been writing about my experience as a schoolboy visiting the Vienna factory of the most luxurious and expensive pianos in the world, Bösendorfer. Two blog entries ago, I mused that the old-fashioned quality of those pianos, built so lovingly that they were almost birthed and each had its own personality, likely is no longer the case in our fast-food world.

It’s exciting (or perhaps scary) how one’s writing can spread these days. I just received this email from Rupert Loeschnauer in Vienna, who assured me that their pianos are made “faithful to their traditional heritage.” (I’ll have to take him up on his offer next time I’m in Vienna.) Here’s his letter:

Dear Rick,

I found your interesting article (October 18) on HeraldNet. With great curiosity I read about your visit to Bösendorfer in Vienna back in the late 1960s and early ’70s and about your fear that old-time quality might have gone.

Don’t worry, Rick, the loving care for making our wonderful grands and pianos hasn’t gone. The employees in Bösendorfer factory, who are without exception great masters of their trade, have remained faithful to their traditional heritage. Still more than 10.000 production steps – most of them still done by hand – are executed per instrument to create a true work or art. Still we use the best materials for our pianos. And when it comes to the unique singing tone: we still treat the entire instrument as a resonating body, thereby achieving Bösendorfer’s unique richness of tone color and its typical singing timbre.

We would be glad, Rick, if we could host you another time in Vienna and show you that within our fast moving, mass-produced modern world you still can find traditional quality: products that are not manufactured but being birthed. How I like your words!

With best regards from Vienna Rupert Loeschnauer

I have a habit when I travel that I must open the keylid on any piano I see. The make of the piano gives me an indication of the values and priorities and appreciation of quality an establishment will have. While cheap Asian pianos dominate these days (I remember doing the math once and finding that one big Asian piano company produces as many pianos in a month as Bösendorfer does in 30 years), I’m always pleased (and impressed) to open the lid and see that classic Bösendorfer emblem. (In case you wondered, the Beatles played a Blutner, from East Germany.)

Working with my film crew here in Vienna, I’m trying to get the straight story on so much history. I keep remembering Napoleon’s quote: “What is history but a legend agreed upon.”

This afternoon, I dropped into a famous cafe with my cameraman. My hope: to find its rare surviving example of the Vienna coffee menu with a dozen or so shades of brown for customers to order exactly the milkiness of the coffee they desired. The waiter laughed in a snide way, saying some stupid travel writer cooked up that legend decades ago and journalists like you keep coming here looking for a color-coded menu that never existed.

To make my point, I too often accept false history and flat out wrong “factoids.” And, my worst fear is adding to the mess.

For centuries, French was Europe’s common language. I just assumed the term for common language, linguafranca, was literally “French Language.” For a decade that’s what I’ve been “teaching,” and suddenly someone emails me the truth: ‘franca’ is Latin for free or common. The French were named for a gang of barbarians who called themselves “free people” or Franks.

For twenty years I called Paolo, the big never-smiling grumpy man who ran my favorite guest house in the Cinque Terra, Sr. Sorriso. His place was, after all, “Pension Sorriso.” I must have introduced a hundred tour groups to Paolo Sorriso at check-in time. Then Paolo died, and I read his death notice: Paolo Favetta. I ask his brother, “what’s the deal? Favetta? You never told me. All these years I called your brother Sr. Sorriso. He never corrected me!” What’s with Sorriso? His brother, just as grim as Paolo, explained Sorriso means smile. All that time I was sleeping at Pension Smile.