Vienna

Ok, it looks like I strayed a bit from "what I learned" in the Salzburg entry. Sorry to waste your time, everyone. Here is Vienna.
We were in Vienna for three nights. I think, for this entry, chronology will not be important, so I'll just talk. Our hostel "Wombats" was enormous and well run. I have mixed feelings about our stay there. The staff was very helpful and gave great information whenever we needed it, which was often. Breakfast cost 3.50 euro in the morning, all you can eat. They had peanut butter and a panini press, both of which I abused to no end. Everything was clean and comfortable, as well.

On the other hand, it had that party atmosphere I think I've mentioned before. There was a huge bar downstairs, and in the stairwell were those 20's spoof ads for binge drinking, like "have you hugged your toilet today?" I noticed that not all of the lodgers were college students - I saw numerous older couples and even a family with young kids. Not very tactful, I think. The nice desk folks provided us with maps of greater Vienna, which we appreciated to some degree. It had a good layout of the city with roads and major transportation lines, but I found the 100 item "tourist key" kind of a sell-out. The first twenty listings were for museums, sights, cultural landmarks and the like, but the remaining items were devoted to restaurants, bars, cafés, clubs... Places every city has were time and money can be lost. The reason I found this so appalling was because they were listed at the expense of Viennese cultural attractions which deserved the space. There is amazing history in this city in all aspects. I need someone to tell me why Murphy's Irish Pub is included while St. Stephen's church is left out.

Anyway, we had a little culture book with us Jack's friend Diana had lent us during her visit to Budapest. We took a great walk along the ring road around the city. Many of the big sights are here, including the museum quarter, parliament (top photo), the old town hall, the national theater, and Vienna University. This last one was particularly interesting. We pretended to be students and slipped into the courtyard in the center of the complex. Lining this beautiful area are busts of academics who studied or taught there. It was fun to name-hunt, trying to find ones that looked familiar. I found Schrödinger, Doppler, Freud and Martini, who I assume invented the martini. All dead white guys. Gorgeous place, though.

Our big concert experience of the city was seeing Wagner's Parsifal at the Staatsoper. It was an incredible event. Only the 3rd full opera I've ever attended (if you count Porgy and Bess at the Maine Center for the Arts... which I do), and I'm not sure if I was fully ready for it. I guess I think of opera as something you have to train for, like a race. You need to review the synopsis, learn about the composer, and know something about the time and events surrounding it. I think it makes the experience richer, anyway. Wagner is a marathon. I knew enough general information to enjoy it, but I could have studied harder for that richer experience. However, academic knowledge isn't a requirement to enjoy the wealth of music Parsifal has to offer, of course.
Tower of Babel, Pieter Brughel the Elder
Vienna for me was mostly about the museums, however. Over two days I went to five, and spent good time at each. The Kunst Historisches (Art History) museum had three of the five remaining landscape paintings by the famous (and Flemish) Pieter Bruegel (the elder). His paintings are really interesting because they are the first landscape paintings to focus on day-to-day life instead of being in a religious context. Also, sometimes he paints famous events while putting them in a larger picture - for example, painting the crucifixion of Jesus in the midst of people carrying on with their lives, and the fall of Icarus in the corner of a grand seascape. We saw his "harvest" landscape in Prague, and the final one on our little pilgrimage is in the met in New York. Also in this museum were paintings by Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto, contemporaries of El Greco. We saw an El Greco exhibit at the museum of fine arts here in Budapest earlier this semester, and it was interesting to see some of his characteristics in the paintings here.

The Naturhistorisches (Natural History... duh) museum was full of fascination! They had rooms full of rocks! Fossils! Huge crystals! Global warming information! Dinosaur bones! I lost ten years when I walked into the museum and got a hug from the huge lion in the lobby. Jack was pretty bored here, I think, and followed my prancing self around reluctantly for three hours. One of the most incredible things here was the Venus of Willendorf, a statuette over 20,000 years old! I read about this in my cartoon history of the universe book when I was younger, and it was a complete surprise to find it here. Another happy surprise was a small exhibit about deep sea vents! These were the painful subject of my first research paper in 5th grade for Mrs. Bickford (who I am told is now frantically catching up with my blog). Deep sea vents form on the very bottom of the deepest parts of the ocean floor, where water is superheated beneath the earth's crust and jets up through massive stalagmites. This water carries minerals and nutrients with it, and makes it possible for a limited ecosystem to exist in this extreme part of the world. Giant tube worms and crabs are the most interesting to look at. The cool thing is that this life is almost completely cut off from the rest of the world. Just a few meters above this, the crushing cold of the ocean takes control. COOL!

Besides those, the 2nd floor was full of animals from all over the world. They had microscopic bugs swimming around little bits of food. That was really gross. Then all kinds of pinned and labeled bugs, sea animals, amphibians, birds, and larger land mammals. I'm pretty sure the elephants were artificial models, but I think the birds were stuffed. Most of the writing was in German, though. I know there is some little Austrian kid who goes there every weekend to wander around. I'm so jealous. This place is so cool.



For something completely different, the Leopold Museum houses contemporary Austrian artworks. I got a good education here about the works of Klimt (above), Schiele (right), Kokoschka, Egger-Lienz, Gerstl and Moser, just to name a few and sound like a pretentious terd while doing so. This is a fantastic museum for the artistically uneducated like myself, because they often divide galleries by artist and give brief bios on each, to give an idea of where they're coming from. I find I really like how Klimt paints people, but not so much his landscapes. Trees and fields and sky kind of blend into each other, and it throws me off. Schiele paints and sketches nudes in a kind of unnerving way, but I love his facial expressions. Gerstl was interesting to me because the history I know of him and the Schöenbergs. He ran off with Arnold Schöenberg's wife Mathilde for a while, and after she returned to her husband, Gerstl killed himself. The self-portrait you see to the left is one he did in that year, and it gets top marks on my grippingly-creepy scale.

The Belvedere palaces were spectacular on their own. A museum in addition to the incredible architecture and gardens was almost too much. In the upper Belvedere we saw the works of some French impressionists, including the famous Napoleon Crossing the Alps by Jacques-Louis David. I spent most of my time getting more acquainted with the Viennese painters, however. There were many Schiele and Klimt works, including Klimt's masterpiece The Kiss.

Our last museum was the Schöenberg Center. This building is not just a gallery but a great resource for learning about the Second Viennese school. Besides a library of Schöenberg's scores and recordings, there are reproductions of things he actually used in composition, or just random things he made for fun. This guy was the grandfather of thrift. He used tape and heavy brown paper to make all kinds of things. Did you know that he is the inventor of the tape dispenser? There was a reproduction of his study in Los Angeles, timelines of his life side by side with a timeline of musical landmarks of the time. Replicas of address books, sketchbooks, composition tools, photo albums, his art gallery, a film about his family, radio interviews and lectures... on and on. It was the most thorough exhibit on a particular person I think I've ever seen. I see now the importance of learning about him, even though his music is... thick. He was a fascinating human being.

That's what we did in Vienna. The Staatsoper is running a lot of Wagner in May, and I hope to go back to see some, as well as more museums. I missed so many! But in the meantime, I will be reminded of what Budapest has to offer. There are a lot of museums here as well, and I've been to only one. This trip reminded me of the massive collective experience humanity has. I loved seeing such amazing buildings in Prague. The instruments in Nürnberg captivated me. The sounds of the churches in Salzburg will ring in my memories for years. And Vienna... you just read about Vienna. It made me want to paint all the ideas the previous three cities gave me. It's too bad the pinnacle of my artistic career was in 8th grade.

Well, it's happened again. I've dissipated another perfectly good evening writing in this blog. Tomorrow - more practice and classes. Lesson at 7:30pm. Wheee...