Vienna First Things

Settling in to any place can be difficult but the knowledge that I will not have to move on after a week or even a few days makes settling in to Vienna a little easier.

My ‘apartment’ is really a large room which has been converted into a bedroom and bathroom with a kitchen separated from the bedroom by a partition. It is built exactly on the same lines as the small Mozart house in Salzburg. The block has a extremely large imposing door leading into a tunnel which emerges into a tiny court around which the apartments are arranged off an external walkway. You walk up a tiny stone spiral staircase to reach the second floor where my apartment is situated. You then go along the open walkway within the interior court to reach the door of the apartment.

The block must be older than the seventeeth century as the building next door proudly announces that the first crescent-shaped biscuit was made there during the siege of Vienna in 1683. Making these biscuits was considered an act of defiance by the population. The narrow lane outside is cobbled and the building opposite seems considerably more ‘grand’ than this one.

First things first. I must find a place where I get my food supplies. Renting in the centre of a city could mean a long walk to the supermarket. But there is an enormous BILLA supermarket just round the corner. As I arrive on Saturday and everything closes on Sunday, I visit BILLA immediately and stock up with supplies of all kinds almost at random. It turns out that, because All Saints Day is tomorrow Sunday, the following day Monday will be a national holiday. So I need supplies for two days.

Because this is the centre of the city, this BILLA does not carry toiletries or even a bar of soap, let alone a packet of soap powder. It is aimed mainly at visitors and there are ample amounts of prepared foods especially those large lumps of pork and leberkase. I do try some of these prepared meals as I have a microwave oven. They turn out to be excellent. In Australia, I have never found them to be even bearable but I do remember using prepared meals in France when camping and being very pleased with the result.

As soon as the national holiday is over, I set out to find more items. I find two even larger BILLA shops in the Opera House area which stock many of the items I need but it is in a BIPA shop that I find all the items for which I am looking. I soon replenish my supplies using shops in the centre of Vienna unlike in Florence, where I had to travel out into the suburbs.But Florence is a tiny city in comparison to Vienna.

First District Vienna is relatively small. You can walk across it in half an hour. (Freud said he could walk round it in an hour but that sounds more like jogging to me.) There is very little surface public transport in first District. Two S-bahns have one main station by the Cathedral and a few smaller stations on the periphery. There are tiny buses which negotiate the lanes but the only other transport are the beautiful carriages drawn by pairs of horses waiting at the Cathedral and the Peterskirche. Unlike Florence, where carriages are drawn by just one horse, Austrian carriages are drawn by pairs of horses. When I spoke to the drivers, they simply explained how much better control they have driving with two horses rather than one. But I was pleased to see happy pairs of horses that obviously like working with a ‘friend’.

The reason I have come here is because Vienna has been the centre of music in the past and so much music has been composed here. If you turn right out of my building and turn right again, you pass the house Mozart was living in before he finally managed to get fired from service to his archbishop. If you turn left out of my building, then left again, you are in front of the building in which Mozart wrote “The Marriage of Figaro”. Walk a little further in the opposite direction, and you are in front of the building where Mozart died.

In the adjoining building to mine is a pub on the ground floor where Schubert, Beethoven and the gang would meet. Above the pub are rooms where Carl Maria von Weber stayed when preparing a performance of ‘Freishutz’. But these place are just a few of the establishments known to have been enjoyed by some of our greatest composers.

My apartment is in one of the few parts of Vienna which survived, one way or the other, in the same shape as they were before the second world war. On the other side of the lane is a very different type of house altogether. The rooms there, even today, are arranged in a palatial way with a single corridor going from room to room along the whole length of the building.

Thanks to some very kind people, I was lucky enough to be invited to an evening of music in this very apartment directly opposite mine. The evening centred around a soprano who had recently arrived in Vienna looking for major roles in opera. She had been performing these roles in Russia but thought that Vienna was her next port of call.

If you’ve ever heard an opera singer up close, you’ll know they put out a good level of sound. But even in the large rooms of the ‘palace’ opposite the sound level of this fine voice was incredibly high. The singing was excellent but her encores from operas which she had sung in St Petersburg showed that she had a good future in front of her.

At the same party, I met an Australian soprano not long out of college but already doing small roles in the Staatsoper. These included that week the first Norn in Gotterdamerung – small but quite exposed – and the first Hiyotoyo in the Valkyrie, alas without her horse. Not bad for a beginner, I say!!

In historical terms, Vienna was the centre of a vast empire not too long ago. The scale of the palace buildings is incredible. It is still difficult to realise the power that the occupants of these buildings possessed. Between them and the church – often the same people – musicians had almost their only chance of permanent rewarding employment. Even private musical enterprise relied heavily on patronage of these wealthy members of society. Wandering around Vienna, you aften come across plaques announcing a place where great first performances were staged. Many of these places are so small that it is difficult to understand how they could have staged the performances AND fitted an audience into the place.

If ghosts exist, then there will be many ghosts of musicians floating along these lanes. But I cannot help but be aware of the great music that was written in the area surrounding my apartment.