It was like swinging on a trapeze. A new musical experience this week--a mix of the Vienna Philharmonic, Lawrence Welk, a German beer garden, and a touch of Vaudeville--was more fun than a circus. On Tuesday evening we attended a show by Andre Rieu and the Johann Strauss Orchestra, whose productions we had seen in the States on PBS a number of times. Like every opera and concert in Vienna, it was sold out, and the crowd was as joyful and enthusiastic as any we have been a part of. The crowd reminded us of the audience we saw at the large harvest festival downtown last fall, only the beer steins were missing, and here they were slightly better dressed.
The show opened with Rieu, his lion's mane bouncing to his Stradivarius, and his orchestra of 40-50 members and 7 singers marching to the stage from the back of the hall, playing "76 Trombones." The chorus and the women in his orchestra, looking quite floral, wore pastel gowns of yellow, orange, lavender, blue, and red, with the men dressed in black tie. Show tunes, waltzes, arias, and marches followed each other in rapid suggestion, with the audience clapping rhythmically and sometimes singing along and swaying in unison. Three tenors and three sopranos revolved on and off the stage to perform solos or to sing together. We counted more than a dozen large tv cameras--on a catwalk, on booms, on the edges of the orchestra, and with crews roving around the auditorium. One crew, crouching, moved stealthily through the aisles and even up on stage, right around Rieu, during the performance, like they were stalking him. At times, too, my eyes followed a camera attached to a long boom, positioned near the front row of the audience, moving like hummingbird over a garden: it floated, rose, and descended, sometimes over the audience and sometimes over the orchestra, invariably drawn back to the lovely pianist; for much of the show, it hovered over that particular flower. From time to time, vendors appeared in the aisles selling red and white paper boxes of some snack, not popcorn, but probably red meat or the two national vegetables: potatoes and salt. Beer, wine, and water were available at concession stands behind the seating; despite the atmosphere of exuberance, no one seemed to be drinking to excess.
The decorum of Strauss and other formal, though light, music had a special counterpoint. During a song about winter in Vienna, artificial snow drifted down on a portion of the spectators as flood lights shone through it to create a wintry backdrop of the orchestra; toward the end of the song, a great mass of faux snow dropped on the audience's heads, much to the delight of Rieu, the orchestra, and the rest of the crowd. And there were other antics. Besides orchestra members being blatantly obvious about passing around liquor and foaming champagne bottles, stripping to t-shirts for one musical skit, and otherwise performing bits of slapstick, some members of the audience inadvertently complemented the circuslike fun. During The Blue Danube Waltz, several couples got up to twirl to the music in the rapid Vienna waltzing style. The aisles, however, were narrow and crowded, and fast-moving couples turned into bumper cars. The inevitable happened: one couple toppled, essentially flattening four people in a row of seats. Although the woman got up immediately, the man had great difficulty untangling himself from the jungle of legs and arms he had fallen into. The process of getting to his feet probably took 20 seconds, but it seemed like an hour. With his partner supporting him, he limped out of the hall, looking far more embarrassed than in pain, and it occurred to me he might have been faking the limp just to dampen the amusement.
Balloons dropped from the ceiling of the auditorium at what Rieu announced as the closing number, but the show went on more than another 30 minutes with the same energy with which it had opened. It finally concluded after some 10 encores and, finally, Brahms' Lullaby.
Filler
-- Sunday morning we drove along the "High Road," which, like a miniature version of Skyline Drive, connects Cobenzl, Khalenberg, and Leopoldsberg, three mountains (hills) north of Grinzing, and looks out over one of the larger stretches of the Vienna Woods. Leopoldsberg, which we had not visited before, offered fine views of Vienna and the Danube Valley, and the river, from that elevation, actually looked blue rather than gray-green. At the very top of the hill a wall enclosed a crumbling 18th-century church and a tumble-down two-story house, which had once served as a restaurant. This peak, like the other two, was an important staging area for Polish and other forces that arrived barely in time to save Vienna from the Turks besieging the city in 1683. Beethoven, we read, used to stroll the paths on the slopes of Leopoldsberg.
-- In nearby Nussdorf, I looked for the path Beethoven used to take up the mountain and the stream by which he found inspiration. I did not find the path, but I will go stroll-searching for it again. I did find an old, boarded-up roundhouse for a cogwheel train now long gone, and a street named for the stretch it once traversed. There is more to discover in the area, with its rough cobblestone streets and walks, and low-roofed yellow and blue houses with projecting stone bumps to guard against damage from carriage wheels. Beethoven occupied at least two residences in this area, which has many houses and other structures dating to at least the 18th century. And in this village tuberculosis took the last breath of Franz Kafka.
-- On Sunday afternoon we visited Simmering, south of the city. The huge Central Cemetery, which opened in 1874, holds more than 2 and a half million graves; among them are those of famous musicians of the 18th and 19th centuries, and Austria's most prominent statesmen. Some are beautiful, and some are bizarre. An arcade holds several memorials, including one of a miner, whose grave entrance is designed as the entrance to an old mine, complete with Disneylike dwarves posed at the door, holding tools. The cemetery is well tended, with one exception. The old Jewish section looks like a setting for a horror movie, with toppled and teetering marble stones, slick with mossy patches; large clumps of overgrown grass, dark green, matted, bent, damp with dew, grieve over the stones and plots. We presume that these graves are in this state because the families were deported or killed during the war, or fled the city, and there is no one left to tend them.
-- Tail high, and near the end of his ninth life, Earl the Cat still wobbles slowly to the door to greet us when we come home.
The show opened with Rieu, his lion's mane bouncing to his Stradivarius, and his orchestra of 40-50 members and 7 singers marching to the stage from the back of the hall, playing "76 Trombones." The chorus and the women in his orchestra, looking quite floral, wore pastel gowns of yellow, orange, lavender, blue, and red, with the men dressed in black tie. Show tunes, waltzes, arias, and marches followed each other in rapid suggestion, with the audience clapping rhythmically and sometimes singing along and swaying in unison. Three tenors and three sopranos revolved on and off the stage to perform solos or to sing together. We counted more than a dozen large tv cameras--on a catwalk, on booms, on the edges of the orchestra, and with crews roving around the auditorium. One crew, crouching, moved stealthily through the aisles and even up on stage, right around Rieu, during the performance, like they were stalking him. At times, too, my eyes followed a camera attached to a long boom, positioned near the front row of the audience, moving like hummingbird over a garden: it floated, rose, and descended, sometimes over the audience and sometimes over the orchestra, invariably drawn back to the lovely pianist; for much of the show, it hovered over that particular flower. From time to time, vendors appeared in the aisles selling red and white paper boxes of some snack, not popcorn, but probably red meat or the two national vegetables: potatoes and salt. Beer, wine, and water were available at concession stands behind the seating; despite the atmosphere of exuberance, no one seemed to be drinking to excess.
The decorum of Strauss and other formal, though light, music had a special counterpoint. During a song about winter in Vienna, artificial snow drifted down on a portion of the spectators as flood lights shone through it to create a wintry backdrop of the orchestra; toward the end of the song, a great mass of faux snow dropped on the audience's heads, much to the delight of Rieu, the orchestra, and the rest of the crowd. And there were other antics. Besides orchestra members being blatantly obvious about passing around liquor and foaming champagne bottles, stripping to t-shirts for one musical skit, and otherwise performing bits of slapstick, some members of the audience inadvertently complemented the circuslike fun. During The Blue Danube Waltz, several couples got up to twirl to the music in the rapid Vienna waltzing style. The aisles, however, were narrow and crowded, and fast-moving couples turned into bumper cars. The inevitable happened: one couple toppled, essentially flattening four people in a row of seats. Although the woman got up immediately, the man had great difficulty untangling himself from the jungle of legs and arms he had fallen into. The process of getting to his feet probably took 20 seconds, but it seemed like an hour. With his partner supporting him, he limped out of the hall, looking far more embarrassed than in pain, and it occurred to me he might have been faking the limp just to dampen the amusement.
Balloons dropped from the ceiling of the auditorium at what Rieu announced as the closing number, but the show went on more than another 30 minutes with the same energy with which it had opened. It finally concluded after some 10 encores and, finally, Brahms' Lullaby.
Filler
-- Sunday morning we drove along the "High Road," which, like a miniature version of Skyline Drive, connects Cobenzl, Khalenberg, and Leopoldsberg, three mountains (hills) north of Grinzing, and looks out over one of the larger stretches of the Vienna Woods. Leopoldsberg, which we had not visited before, offered fine views of Vienna and the Danube Valley, and the river, from that elevation, actually looked blue rather than gray-green. At the very top of the hill a wall enclosed a crumbling 18th-century church and a tumble-down two-story house, which had once served as a restaurant. This peak, like the other two, was an important staging area for Polish and other forces that arrived barely in time to save Vienna from the Turks besieging the city in 1683. Beethoven, we read, used to stroll the paths on the slopes of Leopoldsberg.
-- In nearby Nussdorf, I looked for the path Beethoven used to take up the mountain and the stream by which he found inspiration. I did not find the path, but I will go stroll-searching for it again. I did find an old, boarded-up roundhouse for a cogwheel train now long gone, and a street named for the stretch it once traversed. There is more to discover in the area, with its rough cobblestone streets and walks, and low-roofed yellow and blue houses with projecting stone bumps to guard against damage from carriage wheels. Beethoven occupied at least two residences in this area, which has many houses and other structures dating to at least the 18th century. And in this village tuberculosis took the last breath of Franz Kafka.
-- On Sunday afternoon we visited Simmering, south of the city. The huge Central Cemetery, which opened in 1874, holds more than 2 and a half million graves; among them are those of famous musicians of the 18th and 19th centuries, and Austria's most prominent statesmen. Some are beautiful, and some are bizarre. An arcade holds several memorials, including one of a miner, whose grave entrance is designed as the entrance to an old mine, complete with Disneylike dwarves posed at the door, holding tools. The cemetery is well tended, with one exception. The old Jewish section looks like a setting for a horror movie, with toppled and teetering marble stones, slick with mossy patches; large clumps of overgrown grass, dark green, matted, bent, damp with dew, grieve over the stones and plots. We presume that these graves are in this state because the families were deported or killed during the war, or fled the city, and there is no one left to tend them.
-- Tail high, and near the end of his ninth life, Earl the Cat still wobbles slowly to the door to greet us when we come home.
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