Still on Our Honeymoon... Vienna, Day 7 (Stephansdom, Secession, Riesenrad)

Somehow, between our second and third day in Austria, I managed to pickup a Viennese head cold as souvenir so our final day in the city started with me making a hot cup of tea and popping in a "Krauter Bon-Bon," which was the only thing I could find in the drugstore that even mildly resembled a throat lozenge. If the store I visited was any indication, the Austrians are plagued by far fewer maladies than us Americans, or at least have the good sense to know that 50 brands of cough medicine and two dozen flavors of lozenges is overkill.

But this is beside the point.

The point it that my yin and I began our final day at Stephansdom, the very heart of Vienna's Innerstadt:

Now, it was once said of my grandfather Frank that "you couldn't get him to step foot inside a church in America and couldn't keep him out of one in Europe," and I suppose the very same thing could be said about me. Stephansdom first rose out of the earth in the 12th Century and has been the metaphysical and geographical center of Vienna ever since. Beginning as a Romanesque church, it has been built, rebuilt, destroyed, expanded, and renovated for the past 800 years and still towers over central Vienna as it has for centuries.

Before going inside, however, my yin and I decided to take our breakfast tin the square in front the cathedral. I, of course, enjoyed some mysterious, delicious bread from the bakery near our studio, and my yin boldly tried sheep's milk yogurt, which tasted surprisingly (and disturbingly) like sour cream:

Yum!

One thing I haven't mentioned yet is that Vienna was far and away the cleanest, most modern city we visited on our vacation, seamlessly integrating buildings from the Middle Ages with contemporary designs and architecture. So, for example, directly across the cobblestones from Stephansdom sits this building:

This was one of the most fascinating things about the city – the juxtaposition of old and new, the silent collision between the 21st Century and a thousand years of history. In fact, I felt a curious sense of repression throughout Vienna, almost as if the sparkling U-Bahn stations were trying to keep submerged a vast wellspring of anxiety. One must remember that the citizens of Vienna lined the streets to cheer the arrival of Hitler in 1938. So, although Heldenplatz ("Heroes Square") looks like this today:

Heldenplatz, 2012

You can almost feel the memory of this still lurking just beneath the surface:

Heldenplatz, 1938

Prague and Budapest, of course, were also under German control in the years leading up to World War II,  those cities have obviously made a conscious decision to engage with the recent past by cultivating and nurturing collective memory. This was most obvious by the prominence of vibrant Jewish districts (Josefov and Józsefváros, respectively), but was also apparent on a more subtle level. Perhaps after the decades of Soviet dominance following World War II, these nations are less willing to sweep things under the rug, or perhaps it has something to do with the overall cultural make-up of Slavic and Magyar peoples. Whatever it is, this wasn't the case in Vienna, which seemed perfectly content to fast forward from the dissolution of the Hapsburg empire in 1916 straight to the Allied liberation in 1945.

Anyway, all these things have bubbled up primarily in retrospect. On the day in question I was more concerned with taking it all in:

Looking towards the altar.

Beautiful organ with light from stained glass behind.

Creepiest crucifix of the entire vacation.

After Stephansdom, we walked by a house where Mozart once lived and which has now been turned into a museum. As you can imagine, Wolfgang is quite the industry in Vienna, but the reviews we read of this museum were lackluster so we decided to keep on moving, hopping on a bus and making our way back to the Ringstrasse. The next couple of hours were spent taking in the architecture and resting our feet:

Hofburg Palace

National Library

One of my favorites was the Rathaus, Vienna's awkwardly named city hall. This building was built at the end of the 19th Century in the neo-Gothic style and financed by Vienna's burghers. By this point, the imperial fortunes were waning, and Vienna's rising middle classes chose to build the Rathaus directly across from the Hofburg in a symbolic display of who was truly in control of the city:

Rathaus

After grabbing some lunch, we headed just outside the ring to go to the Secession:

"To each age its art, to art its freedom."

The Secession movement began in 1897 in reaction to Vienna's conservative art establishment and encompassed architecture, painting, sculpture, and philosophy. Gustav Klimt, Kolo Moser, and others were founding members, and Secession remains the world's oldest gallery devoted to contemporary art. The Secession movement is generally understood as a subset of my beloved art nouveau, and you could see this clearly in the buildings design, from the trio of owls perched on the side of the building:

These look to play prominently in our future...

To the engravings over the doorway and the turtles holding up this giant decorative urn:

Inside we saw video, photography, painting, and mixed media displays by a trio of contemporary artists, as well as the buildings only permanent exhibition, Klimt's Beethoven Frieze. We weren't allowed to take photos of this exhibit, but here is an image from the Secession website:

 
What you can't see in the photo above is the platform that had been erected in the center of the gallery, which allowed us to come face to face with the mural stretching around the room. Presumably, this was erected in coordination with the exhibit we saw at the Kunsthistorisches Museum two days before, but this is only an educated guess.

By now it was late afternoon so my yin and I headed back to the studio to rest briefly, then headed out for dinner at a nearby restaurant that supposedly has the best pizza in all of Austria. We weren't disappointed:

(The irony, of course, is that after struggling to find non-smoking restaurants the entire time we were in Vienna, we chose to eat in a place that uses an actual wood-burning oven.)

After dinner, we headed back to Praterstern station where we arrived a scant 60 hours earlier and walked to the park that has amused the Viennese since the 1800s. The impetus for this adventure was Orson Welles' The Third Man, which is set in post-war Vienna and climaxes on the Riesenrad:

We were fortunate enough to be there on a weeknight and shared the ride with four other passengers, an older German-speaking couple and a Spanish-speaking couple about our age. From the top of the ride, one can see all of Vienna as well as the colorful expanse of the park itself:

View from the top of the Riesenrad.

Of course, as beautiful as this was, my yin made it even better:

Still on Our Honeymoon... Vienna, Day 6 (Schõnbrunn Palace, Staatsoper)

My yin and I started off our second day in Vienna at one of the umpteen small bakeries that are all over the city. In fact, Austria seemed to be something of a bread nirvana, and I counted no less than three high-quality chains. I made it a mission to sample each of them over our time there, and I'm happy to report that each of them was excellent.

Tummies full, we hopped on the U-Bahn (Vienna's subway) and headed to the morning's main event, Schõnbrunn Palace:

Where, unsurprisingly, we were greeted by more statues of men clubbing one another:

For those who still remember their high school AP European class (i.e., no one), you will recall that Schõnbrunn was the summer palace of the Hapsburgs. Once comfortably outside the city, it now sits on the outskirts of Vienna and is greeted by more visitors each year than any other site in Austria. We went prepared to do our best sheep impersonation (in-animal-ation?), but although it was busy, I was pleasantly surprised to find it less crowded than Prague Castle the week before.

The only benchmark I have for Schõnbrunn is its French equivalent Versailles although in reality I'm really not sure if "equivalent" is the appropriate word. Unlike this journey, my trip to Paris more than a decade ago passed without so much as a single photo so I have no idea which palace was bigger, which was more opulent, or which was more beautiful.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that, as Gary Snyder once said (at least according to Dharma Bums), "Comparisons are odious." Suffice to say that Schõnbrunn is more impressive than any estate in America. It's fancier than Biltmore, it dwarfs Newport's famed mansions, and it even trumps Hearst Castle if for no other reason than it carries with it the incomprehensible weight of 400+ years of history. This estate has seen everything from imperial balls to honor Maria Theresa to the unbearable vanity and ankle-length hair of Franz Joseph's wife "Zizi" to Kennedy and Khrushchev's 1961 summit in Vienna. Walking through American palaces, one gets the sense of a nation trying to catch up to history; walking through Schõnbrunn one gets the sense of nation who not only has history knocking at its doorstep, but asks it to wait in the salon while the host makes his way from the other end of the building.

No pictures were allowed inside, presumably to keep the throngs of people moving at a reasonably quick pace, but my yin and I spent at least an hour listening to our audio guides and trying to wrap our heads around the fact that so few people could have so much: 

The arbor leading around the Privy Garden.

View of the Privy Garden.

View of the main garden and rear of palace.

View towards the Gloriette on the hill.

View from the Gloriette with Vienna in the background.

Of course no estate would be complete without those absurdly large statues that inevitably serves as lawn ornaments for the super-wealthy. This gave my yin and I perfect chance to indulge in our hobby of creating real life reenactments, which goes to show how ridiculous the difference is between the imagined ideal and the performative real:

If only we had our tripod, this would have been even better...

My best impression of Perseus.

For the record, there is also a zoo on the grounds, but not just a zoo. This was the first zoo (at least in Europe), and it is to the Hapsburgs' penchant for collecting the rare and exotic that we owe today's institution. Plus there was a labyrinth, which members of the court once used to stage clandestine meetings and trade in gossip about the ruling family.

By this point, my yin and I had spent hours walking around the grounds and were exhausted. We made our way back to the U-Bahn and hopped on, stopping on the way back to the studio to grab lunch and two tickets for Budapest. We recharged for a couple of hours before making our way to the night's main event:

Staatsoper (Vienna State Opera)

Incredibly, my yin had never been to the opera, and I took great pleasure in teasing her about it during the months leading up to our trip.  I would tell anyone who would listen that I was "making her go to the opera," and in turn she would reply, "I hate when you say that. It's not like I just fell off the turnip truck." When the night finally arrived, she proved me wrong once and for all:

And we had the best time, watching Fidelio, Beethoven's only opera, and exploring the various alcoves and dining areas during the intermission:

Suffice to say that she loved it:

Still on Our Honeymoon... Vienna, Day 5 (Kunsthistorisches Museum)

My yin and I woke early on a Sunday morning and took the 6:48 train from Prague to Vienna. Over the next four hours, I enjoyed watching the rail yards pass by the window as the Bohemian countryside dissolved imperceptibly into Austrian farmlands:

And it gave me a chance to catch up on my journaling before the experiences of the past few days disappeared into the fog of memory:

 My yin, on the other hand, took the opportunity to catch up on her sleep:
 

We arrived in Vienna shortly after noon, hopped a suburban train from Wien Meidling in the south to Wien Praterstern in the north. From there we were a single metro stop away from our next destination, a small studio apartment we found on a website:

Unfortunately, the owner of the studio wasn't there when we arrived so, after giving him a call to remind him that he was supposed to be there, we took a chance to check out the neighborhood, which lies just north of the Danube and appeared to be something of an artist's commune:

Our next door neighbor.

Anyway, our host soon arrived with the key, and after dropped our things, my yin and I were off to the Kunsthistorisches Museum:

Like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Kunsthistorisches is built on a scale that can be intimidating, with labyrinth galleries twisting and turning endlessly. One could easily spend an entire day walking around and still not see everything. Unlike the Metropolitan, the artworks in the Kunsthistorisches were not assembled by curators or obtained from philanthropic benefactors. No, the art – like almost everything else in Vienna – belonged almost exclusively to a single family: the House of Hapsburg, who ruled huge swaths of Europe (primarily through marriage and incest) for more than 800 years. During this time, they amassed a collection of art rivaled only by the Vatican and British Monarcny:

 

Allegory of Vanitas by Antonia de Pereda

St. Jerome by Guido Reni

The Capture of Sampson by Anthonis van Dyck

Venusfest by Peter Paul Reubens

Not only is the breadth of their collection amazing:

So, too, is the scale of the galleries in which these Old World masterpieces are housed:

Walking around the Kunsthistorisches, one feels incredibly small, and I have no doubt that this was the very effect that the Hapsburgs were trying to achieve as they built up the city.  Keep in mind that this building, impressive as it is, has a twin (now the Museum of Natural History) siting across the quad. Ultimately, the scope of the museum metamorphoses from enormousness to enormity, which may have been why American artist Ed Ruscha, when asked to curate an exhibit encompassing all of the Kunsthistorisches treasures, named it: 

This was one of two special exhibits on display while we were there, and inside this relatively small room (i.e., 50 meters by 20 meters), one could see that the imperial taste extended beyond painting to include not only earthly specimens:

A ginormous piece of quartz.

But also fragments from the furthest reaches of the solar system:

Meteorite from Arizona, 1891.

And this doesn't even touch their collection of furniture:

 Egyptian sarcophagi:

Roman sarcophagi:

Roman busts:

Sculptures of, you guessed it, clubbing by Napoleon:
 

And Greek tilework:

In fact, one of my favorite things about the Kunsthistorishes' collection of Western antiquities was the way it mixed the ancient with the contemporary. So, in the image below, you can see an abstract modern sculpture by Joannis Avramidis in the foreground and two thousand year-old fragments from a Greek temple in the background:

Finally, there was the second special exhibit in the main stairway of the museum, which allowed visitors to climb scaffolding and see eye-to-eye with the amazing paintings on the archways by Gustave Klimt:

Egyptian-inspired representations of Life and Death.

Life

   

Death

Needless to say, my yin and I were on stim-overload and left the Kunsthistorisches as little before it closed at 6 o'clock. We hopped a tram (the Viennese love their trams) and circled around the Ringstrasse:

The Ringstrasse is a curious boulevard that circles the entirety of central Vienna. It exists because Vienna was the last major European city to tear down its walls. In 1857, Franz Joseph I (who was ruling the Austro-Hungarian for ten years before the American Civil War began and still ruling it at the onset of World War I over 60 years later) decreed that the wall was to come down, freeing up a wide swath of land all the way around the city. Today a pair of trams forms a complete loop, while the Innere Stadt itself remains largely free of trams, subways, and buses.

Anyway, my yin and I took the tram to the west side of town and then hoofed it to a small restaurant that served vegetarian versions of goulash and wiener schnitzel. We ate slowly, resting our legs from the long day of travel and sightseeing. We returned back to the studio around nightfall and went to be relatively early, resting ourselves for the big plans we had on tap for the following day...