Vienna Braces for Advent

I like Vienna a lot. Who doesn’t like Vienna? We try to visit at least once a year, sometimes just for a day trip, which is entirely practical since the train only takes 3 hours now. I particularly enjoy visiting this time of year. The weather is a bit gloomy but nothing that a mug of steaming glühwein or punch in one of the many Christmas markets won’t disperse. I’m pretty sure that the Viennese didn’t always open their advent markets this early, but in a couple weeks they will be inundated by day-tripping shoppers and tourists from elsewhere in Austria and the surrounding countries, so this is the time when Vienna seems more Viennese.

In September Móni bought tickets for Tannhäuser at the Wiener Staatsoper (reviewed separately) as a birthday present, so we decided to make a long weekend of it – probably our last trip abroad for the year, or for forever if somebody doesn’t do something about the forint exchange rate – giving us three and a half days to wander around town.

 

History has twinned Budapest and Vienna to each other. In many ways the two cities are similar, even complementary cities, but where they diverge, in most but not all respects, Vienna comes off looking the better of two: transportation, public order, cleanliness, even the alpine tap water tastes better. This is nothing to get too upset about, since it’s in part owing to the vagaries of recent history (Austria got very, very lucky in the post WWII shakeout) and also in part because the Viennese have been so successful in building a livable a city over the centuries that, if the city where you live were repositioned 3 hours away from Vienna, chances are pretty good it would seem a bit shabby by comparison too. So we should take it as inspiration.

These will be pretty well-worn tourist routes we take this weekend, but they never get old. Friday we start with a walk around the old downtown, where Christmas decorations are going up on the pedestrianized Kartnerstrasse.

And then to the coffee shops for einspänners. Someone once told me that these are named after some kind of carriage because the coachman, the taxi driver of his day, would order one to warm up his hands with the glass, but if a fare arrived suddenly, he could stir in the thick whipped cream, cooling it down enough so he could drink it down quickly and be on his way.

Ending at the main Christmas market in front of the City Hall. Here you can get every kind of overpriced sweets, fruitcakes, Christmas knickknack, sausage, potato pancake, mulled wine or hot punch.

The smaller Christmas markets further away from the tourist areas, like this one close to the Schottentor are less touristy and less crowded, a bit cheaper, and have more specialized quality products – like this fine frau who serves up various cheering concoctions laced with apple schnapps (from day 4, that’s why it’s light again). You put a 2 euro deposit on the mug, and either give it back or forego the deposit and provide the mug with a loving home.  

Day 2 takes us on a walk through the Prater, which is roughly analogous to Budapest’s Városliget: bigger and more wooded, but also with amenities for the entertainment of the masses. There’s something poignant about an amusement park largely in winter lock-down. It’s the pay-per-ride type of amusement park that seems to have fallen out of fashion everywhere else where you pay through the nose just to get in through the front gate. I like the Prater model better, since it brings the park into the urban fabric, so casual visitors can enjoy it on a summer evening’s stroll.

Then we skirted the center along the Donaukanall. A very pleasant channel of the Danube, but sunken into a giant graffiti-covered (mostly the more thoughtful kind of creative and brightly colored graffiti) culvert, where you don’t really experience it as part of the urban landscape. The main channel of the Danube might as well be in Czechoslovakia. This is a common criticism from supercilious Budapesters, Parisians and inhabitants of other elegantly riparian settlements when searching for something nasty to say about Vienna: Here you have this magnificent city and this fantastic waterway suitable for framing flowing through the area along numerous riverbeds. Do they hate each other? or How do you know when you’re crossing a bridge?

And then on to the world’s most delightful garbage incinerator. This is an environmentally friendly garbage incinerator, powering a generator and district heating and emitting (I think) only steam. If it was the polluting kind of garbage incinerator, Hundertwasser in his earth-father wisdom wouldn’t have decorated it for them and they would build it right upwind from the Hungarian border, not in the middle of the capital.

Another plus point for Vienna is its modern architecture at every level and its integration into the existing urban fabric. I (sort of) studied architectural history as an undergraduate, and find the vast majority of all architecture from 1960 or so to be objectionable on the grounds of its egotism, dullness, or failure to take its surroundings into account. For me, Vienna is an exception to this rule on a city-wide scale. And it’s not just the Hundertwassers and Gasometers: simple modern glass office buildings and public housing looks like they were built with great attention to the integrity of the whole, at least so it seems to an outsider. I’m sure I would join the fray and grow more critical of individual aspects if I actually lived there. Hmm, and I neglected my old friends the Gasometers on this trip.

Day 3 it’s up to twee little Grinzing, bucolic stamping grounds of Beethoven and Schubert. Vienna prides itself on being the only big city in the whole world where wine is grown commercially inside the city limits, for which Grinzing, where the vineyards meet the Vienna Woods, is the best known spot to sample them. First we hiked up through the woods to the Kahlenberg Heights, which is where Jan Sobieski started his charge in 1683 to lift the Turkish siege of the city, one of the major turning points in modern history. The Austrians thanked him by dismembering Poland 90 years later.

Then out into the vineyards close to Nussburg, still inside the city limits of Vienna. 

And back down to Grinzing for some well-earned liver dumpling soup and an enormous shared kaiserschmarrn, the emperor’s crumbs, which was Franz Josef’s favorite dessert but I don’t believe is well known outside the old Empire. This house-specialty version is bolstered with meringue filling along with the traditional raisins and plum jam, so it’s a good thing we didn’t order an entrée. As usual after a long hike,  I ordered a beer.

But now we have to hurry back for Tannhäuser!

Tannhäuser at the Wiener Staatsoper

 

I have really only started attending the opera regularly since I moved to Budapest. I had been to the Washington Opera a few times way back when, and the Met once, the Deutsche Oper Berlin on a guest performance in DC, and maybe to a couple student / summer tourist performances here and there, but for the last 12 (12!) years it’s only been Budapest.

So, I know that in the grand scheme of things Budapest is considered a perfectly respectable opera company, with performances ranging from competent to brilliant on a given night, but as an ensemble company in a cash-strapped small country, it simply can’t afford the kind of talent that would place it consistently in the very top tier. It’s probably a bit better than the Washington Opera ever was, but how do I compare it to the likes of a hazily remembered performance of the Met or Deutsche Oper?

For some time I’ve been meaning to branch out and watch a performance in Vienna, among other cities. Actually they have (at least) two operas there. The Staatsoper does serious productions, while the Volksoper generally produces lighter fare.  And, so for my birthday Móni got us tickets to see Wagner’s Tannhäuser. Móni let me choose the performance, and I chose this one because a) I like it a lot and b) I have seen it three times in Budapest, which should serve as a good basis of comparison.

So how does Vienna stack up against Budapest? First, it’s 10 times as expensive. The price of our seats in the rafters would have gotten us pretty close to the front rows in the stalls in Budapest. Of course, low prices mean that you sometimes have to suffer sitting near chatty tourists, and high prices presumably mean you are paying for quality, but on the whole, let’s call Budapest the winner.

Second, our opera house is much nicer than theirs. It just is. In part this is because the Americans bombed the Vienna opera house in the war and much of it had to be rebuilt in the 1950s. So the lower foyer has a rebuilt grand staircase, but the theater itself looks like a giant Tastee Diner dressed up as a napoleon pastry. 

There are advantages to forced rebuilding, though. In Budapest we get a bit ashamed when our fellow patrons who use wheelchairs cannot be given the proper treatment that they deserve. Sadly, the same is true for our Metro system. Vienna trumps us with elevators in both.

Apart from the wheelchair issue, so far Budapest 2-0. Now the overture starts. The overture to Tannhaüser, clocking in at just under 20 minutes, is one of the greatest pieces of orchestral music ever written. In Budapest, sometimes you don’t get to hear the first couple minutes properly, but here the whispers cut off as soon as the first, or maybe second, note of the horn sounds, which is one of the things I’m listening for, since sometimes I think Budapest has a slightly dodgy brass section. But this might be because I listen to a lot of Wagner and Richard Strauss, who both wrote very difficult horn parts. And indeed the Viennese horns do their job without the slightest falter or blemish.  But the strings, by contrast, are played a bit too tightly by the more expressive standards of Budapest, which is fine when the singing starts but sounds too robotic for the overture. So we’ll call this one a tie.

No orgy ballet! In Budapest we always get to see the writhing debauchery of Venusberg as the curtain rises (the result of a little contretemps between Wagner and the French), a good reason to bring your opera glasses. But the prudish Austrians stuck to the Master’s original intentions. Budapest 3-0-1. Out comes Tannhaüser, dressed up in cca 1900 clothing. (with Venus in evening wear, sultrily sucking down – is that 2 cigarettes? – with Tannhäuser nattily dressed for travel with a boxy suitcase – coz he’s hitting the road, you know.) The opera itself takes place in the 14^th century. I don’t know if I like this. All the more surprisingly because I thought Vienna was conservative about stuff like this. Later we get young pilgrims dressed in tails and old pilgrims shambling around in hospital gowns, one in a straightjacket. OK, it’s just the costumes. We’ll let it slide. 3-0-2.

But then the singing starts and it’s clear that we are on a different level. Tannhaüser is played by American Stephen Gould who flies around the world as a heldentenor-for-hire. Vienna uses guest principals for a given performance, but I think he sings in Vienna quite often because I listened to an interview on Radio Stephensdom a few years ago where he said so (I listen to Radio Stephensdom, Vienna’s fantastic classical radio station on the Internet when I work because I can tune out the German when they start to blabber but I can’t tune out the Hungarian when Hungary’s equally fabulous Bártok Rádio starts to blabber, except Gould’s German was sufficiently rudimentary that I couldn’t tune it out either and I had to stop and listen). Anyways, he’s really good at singing in German. Simply this huge and amazingly controlled voice.

What really struck me about the performance was not only the technical quality of the singing and the timbres of the voices, but the level of nuance not just of Gould, but of all the other principals, especially Matthias Goerne as Wolfram, which added an extra dimension to the story that I had never experienced before. For example, the minstrels with their singing contest debating the nature of love in the 2^nd act is a bit of a dull litany in the Budapest production, but here becomes a taut psychodrama.

So final score is 5-3-2 Vienna. It isn’t streets ahead of Budapest on a good night but it is in a different category. For all I know this was a stellar night for the Staatsoper, but if this the average level of quality, then I’ll be visiting more frequently. It could be the comparison isn’t quite fair because the Budapest Tannhäuser is an old warhorse, and the best singers tend to go toward the higher profile nearly revamped productions. So I propose that the Hungarian government follow the lead of our western neighbors and disburse an extra 50 million euros to the Hungarian State Opera so that we can also find ourselves on a solid financial footing for enjoying world-class opera. It will be money better spent than whatever else it is they are spending our money on. And Stephen, if you come to Budapest, send me an email and I'll buy you a beer.

Finally, as for the audience, there was great consideration, even in the attic. Of course, the fact that half of Vienna has the ague reverberates up there in the rafters better than anyone else, but egregious cases were swiftly dealt with by the guardians of the audience, without the need for the operpolizei. We happened to have Herr Postnasaldrippen sitting behind us, but after a couple dirty looks he managed to restrain his snorts until the moments after the orchestra took up at the end of the aria. Gesundheit!

La Cenerentola

This week's opera was Rossini's La Cenerentola, which is a lot of fun. Strong ensemble performance, with  Lucia Schwartz Megyesi as Cinderella. It's not an opera that showcases a lot of individual virtuousity, but there are some devilishly intricate quintets and sextets. My guess is it's a lot of fun for the cast, too.

Rossini is probably one of the composers one would like to have supper with. He didn't like supernatural elements though. So instead of a fairy godmother, a pumpkin, and rodent coachmen in livery, we get a wise philosopher/tudor/benefactor and a cohor of clowns pushing around a pimped-up Studebaker and even cooking up a giant spaghetti dinner for the ball. (I wonder if the cast got to eat it after curtain.)

No videos up from this production, so I have to Youtube other productions to point out my favorite bits.

 Here in this rodent endowed performance from, I think, Barcelona, starting around 17:00 we get a good debate, alternating between lyrical longing (reminds me of the fabulous accordian music from Amélie) and rapid-fire Italian, as to whether or not Cinderella is going to go to the ball.

And then of course, we have Questo è un nodo avviluppato "this is a tangled knot". How can you not love this? Also, I'm going to start saying Questo è un nodo avviluppato more often when I want to irritate people who are concentrating on a difficult matter.