"Peter is ever so old, but he is really always the same age, so that does not matter in the least." J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan
On a sunny but chilly Friday afternoon in early May we toured the Augarten Palace, home of the Vienna Boys Choir. This opportunity, seldom available, had been arranged by one of the teachers in the Embassy's German language training program. I thought of the disciplined ranks of the children in the choir, whom we had seen in two concerts in recent months. The Choir has had mythic status for me since I was a child. My mother loved choirs of children above all others, and from time to time she would express a wish to attend a concert by the Vienna Boys Choir someday, though she never did. The Choir was something I would occasionally hear on the radio and later in recordings. It had always seemed to me to be the same entity, a group persona, like a mask behind which little boys came and went over the centuries. Until this visit to the Augarten, they were never really children to me, but voices of some eternally young singers.
Order and Disorder
We joined a group of other students from the language program at a metro stop downtown, and we loitered at a busy street corner while we waited for laggards to join us. As we bunched in threes and fours to allow local pedestrian traffic to work its way through, chit-chatting and blinking into the sun, the #2 tram rolled past, and cars and delivery vans clogged and crept through the noisy, grimy intersection. The German teachers stood opposite us, grouped like a clique of foreigners in their own country, while the instructor who had arranged the tour worked her cell phone to determine whether the absent were still coming, and when. Once the last straggler appeared, we shuffled off down the sidewalk in small groups, like 20-30 cows moseying along an alpine hillside. In a few short blocks we arrived at the 400-year-old Augarten Palace, home of the Vienna Boys Choir.
Boarding School
The Palace, enlarged during the reign of Maria Theresa and heavily restored after the bombing of World War II, was a self-contained boarding school: a dormitory, cafeteria, classrooms, rehearsal rooms, and music practice rooms. Our tour guide, an affable former member of the Choir, mentioned that the organization is operating in the red, and the opening of the Choir residence to tours was intended to give the group further publicity about the organization and its financial needs. The Choir, he noted, had served the Hapsburg monarchy for several centuries and continues to sing at the court chapel in Vienna on Sundays. There are, we learned, four choir groups of about 20 children each that rotate touring in Europe, the US, and Asia, with concerts and services in Vienna. Although some questions caused the guide to launch into riffs that at times went on until the melody was not even a distant echo, there were some that I was glad were asked. Chief of those: How does a boy get to be a member of the choir? The children apply from all over the world, he said, and the chief requirement for acceptance is not quality of voice but rather simply a love of singing. If a child loves to sing, our host said, the rest can be learned--and they spend at least 4 hours a day singing. Some of the boys are as young as 7 or 8. They live at the school and sometimes have family visits on weekends, but when they are on tour they may go 8 weeks without seeing family. For some few of those accepted, they find that this is not the life they want, and they drop out. Most, however, remain until about age 14. Like the military, the boys put on uniforms for a fixed number of years to denote the roles they are assuming, and then they must put off the uniforms and return to civilian life. The choice of sailor suits for a group that represents a land-locked country was not entirely clear to me, and I saw nothing of a nautical theme anywhere in the Augarten, but I understood the uniform choice to be related to legal prohibitions concerning army uniforms after World War I. A badge with the Habsburg eagle, the national symbol, decorates each, and recalls the Choir's service to the monarchy from the time of the late Middle Ages.
The few times before that I had seen the Choir boys they were in regimented rows, dressed all alike in their sailor suits, like well-drilled military units singing with clarity and precision. Here, however, they were little boys, and some raced past us on their way to kick soccer balls on the playground, weaving through our group, as small boys will do, to get past us as we moved through the hallways. I thought back to our own disorderly procession along the sidewalk earlier in the afternoon. The dining hall, too, was noisy with children's voices, and their classroom desks and floors were cluttered with books, papers, cell phones, notebooks, backpacks, and shoes. After a stroll through the residential rooms--all much like a college dormitory--we were led to the practice room, where one group was doing its final rehearsal before our afternoon concert. Here the discipline returned, and our host asked that we be perfectly quiet as we watched. The director first led the boys through a set of facial exercises in which they uniformly contorted their features as only children could do, looking like 20 chimpanzees yawning and smiling and baring their teeth in hopes of bananas, then through a vocal range, and then into musical passages, sometimes repeated, and then into entire songs. After we were dismissed following the first several minutes of the practice, our guide led us to a hallway and thanked us for our visit. Our group wandered out various exits with even less a sense of order than we had come in with. The sun was still out, the wind had died down, and it felt warmer.
Linda and I and a friend went from the Augarten to the sidewalk tables of the Schwarzenberg Cafe for a drink before heading to the nearby Musikverein, the hall where, less than an hour later, we would attend a concert by the Choir. We watched the people going past in the afternoon sunshine, some strolling, some striding rapidly--and it was like watching time passing, each person a clock running at its own pace. The first half of the performance was a mix of religious and folk music; the second, in which the Choir was joined by the Vienna Chamber Music Orchestra, was Haydn and Mozart and other timeless pieces. At the concert, the boys seemed more than a choir; they were children--the ones I'd seen hurrying through the hallways and laughing over their lunch trays. And the voices were so very old, yet always the same age.
Filler
We were sad to see our final set of visitors to our place here in Wiener World depart on May 9. I'm so glad I had the chance to get to know Katie and Mike better and to help show them some of our favorite spots--Mariazell, Rust with its storks, Kahlenberg, Schonbrunn with its gardens, the old city...and the 38 Tram, Nino's, Figls, Schwedenplatz beer and brats, the Grinzing kebap wagon.... And Jonathan...we miss his happy energy and his ready smile.
On a sunny but chilly Friday afternoon in early May we toured the Augarten Palace, home of the Vienna Boys Choir. This opportunity, seldom available, had been arranged by one of the teachers in the Embassy's German language training program. I thought of the disciplined ranks of the children in the choir, whom we had seen in two concerts in recent months. The Choir has had mythic status for me since I was a child. My mother loved choirs of children above all others, and from time to time she would express a wish to attend a concert by the Vienna Boys Choir someday, though she never did. The Choir was something I would occasionally hear on the radio and later in recordings. It had always seemed to me to be the same entity, a group persona, like a mask behind which little boys came and went over the centuries. Until this visit to the Augarten, they were never really children to me, but voices of some eternally young singers.
Order and Disorder
We joined a group of other students from the language program at a metro stop downtown, and we loitered at a busy street corner while we waited for laggards to join us. As we bunched in threes and fours to allow local pedestrian traffic to work its way through, chit-chatting and blinking into the sun, the #2 tram rolled past, and cars and delivery vans clogged and crept through the noisy, grimy intersection. The German teachers stood opposite us, grouped like a clique of foreigners in their own country, while the instructor who had arranged the tour worked her cell phone to determine whether the absent were still coming, and when. Once the last straggler appeared, we shuffled off down the sidewalk in small groups, like 20-30 cows moseying along an alpine hillside. In a few short blocks we arrived at the 400-year-old Augarten Palace, home of the Vienna Boys Choir.
Boarding School
The Palace, enlarged during the reign of Maria Theresa and heavily restored after the bombing of World War II, was a self-contained boarding school: a dormitory, cafeteria, classrooms, rehearsal rooms, and music practice rooms. Our tour guide, an affable former member of the Choir, mentioned that the organization is operating in the red, and the opening of the Choir residence to tours was intended to give the group further publicity about the organization and its financial needs. The Choir, he noted, had served the Hapsburg monarchy for several centuries and continues to sing at the court chapel in Vienna on Sundays. There are, we learned, four choir groups of about 20 children each that rotate touring in Europe, the US, and Asia, with concerts and services in Vienna. Although some questions caused the guide to launch into riffs that at times went on until the melody was not even a distant echo, there were some that I was glad were asked. Chief of those: How does a boy get to be a member of the choir? The children apply from all over the world, he said, and the chief requirement for acceptance is not quality of voice but rather simply a love of singing. If a child loves to sing, our host said, the rest can be learned--and they spend at least 4 hours a day singing. Some of the boys are as young as 7 or 8. They live at the school and sometimes have family visits on weekends, but when they are on tour they may go 8 weeks without seeing family. For some few of those accepted, they find that this is not the life they want, and they drop out. Most, however, remain until about age 14. Like the military, the boys put on uniforms for a fixed number of years to denote the roles they are assuming, and then they must put off the uniforms and return to civilian life. The choice of sailor suits for a group that represents a land-locked country was not entirely clear to me, and I saw nothing of a nautical theme anywhere in the Augarten, but I understood the uniform choice to be related to legal prohibitions concerning army uniforms after World War I. A badge with the Habsburg eagle, the national symbol, decorates each, and recalls the Choir's service to the monarchy from the time of the late Middle Ages.
The few times before that I had seen the Choir boys they were in regimented rows, dressed all alike in their sailor suits, like well-drilled military units singing with clarity and precision. Here, however, they were little boys, and some raced past us on their way to kick soccer balls on the playground, weaving through our group, as small boys will do, to get past us as we moved through the hallways. I thought back to our own disorderly procession along the sidewalk earlier in the afternoon. The dining hall, too, was noisy with children's voices, and their classroom desks and floors were cluttered with books, papers, cell phones, notebooks, backpacks, and shoes. After a stroll through the residential rooms--all much like a college dormitory--we were led to the practice room, where one group was doing its final rehearsal before our afternoon concert. Here the discipline returned, and our host asked that we be perfectly quiet as we watched. The director first led the boys through a set of facial exercises in which they uniformly contorted their features as only children could do, looking like 20 chimpanzees yawning and smiling and baring their teeth in hopes of bananas, then through a vocal range, and then into musical passages, sometimes repeated, and then into entire songs. After we were dismissed following the first several minutes of the practice, our guide led us to a hallway and thanked us for our visit. Our group wandered out various exits with even less a sense of order than we had come in with. The sun was still out, the wind had died down, and it felt warmer.
Linda and I and a friend went from the Augarten to the sidewalk tables of the Schwarzenberg Cafe for a drink before heading to the nearby Musikverein, the hall where, less than an hour later, we would attend a concert by the Choir. We watched the people going past in the afternoon sunshine, some strolling, some striding rapidly--and it was like watching time passing, each person a clock running at its own pace. The first half of the performance was a mix of religious and folk music; the second, in which the Choir was joined by the Vienna Chamber Music Orchestra, was Haydn and Mozart and other timeless pieces. At the concert, the boys seemed more than a choir; they were children--the ones I'd seen hurrying through the hallways and laughing over their lunch trays. And the voices were so very old, yet always the same age.
Filler
We were sad to see our final set of visitors to our place here in Wiener World depart on May 9. I'm so glad I had the chance to get to know Katie and Mike better and to help show them some of our favorite spots--Mariazell, Rust with its storks, Kahlenberg, Schonbrunn with its gardens, the old city...and the 38 Tram, Nino's, Figls, Schwedenplatz beer and brats, the Grinzing kebap wagon.... And Jonathan...we miss his happy energy and his ready smile.
