Vienna My First Day

Arriving late on Saturday, I was surprised to see so many people in the centre of Vienna. “This is a holiday weekend”, said the agent from whom I am renting my apartment. I was not too pleased about that as this usually means that all the shops will be closed. So I immediately rushed out and filled a couple of bags with food from the enormous BILLA round the corner

BILLA is the most common supermarket I have encountered since I arrived in Austria. My BILLA is huge on two floors. There’s a clever escalator which grabs your shopping trolley and whisks it upstairs or downstairs. People are a little cautious of it but I did see it used successfully a number of times, usually with the clients gazing at it while it disappeared from view.

When I return, I switch on the television to see whether I will be condemned to watching CNN for the next few months and I discover that I will be treated to “BBC PRIME”. It seems to consist of hours of soaps and will, in fact, be renamed something like “BBC ENTERTAINMENT” very soon. So I switched to “3SAT” and watched “Das Rheingold”. With horror, I discovered that it was the production, whose final opera, I had seen in Florence. With great satisfaction, I noticed that Zubin Mehta took the whole orchestra up on stage with him to take a bow. Also with great satisfaction, I saw that the orchestra received the biggest ovation of all!!! Sad for the Principles, I presume that they were telling the production team that the music was fine but the production was rubbish.

I awake to the sound of bells and, for one moment, I think I am back in Florence. No!! I am definitely in Vienna and I want to attend High Mass in the Cathedral. When I arrive, I see a group of chairs next to one of the organs and I sit there. It’s about three metres from the orchestra and arms length from the organ. I literally get a blast as soon as the organist begins his improvisation for the entry of the procession.

I haven’t counted the number of organs in the cathedral yet but, in this starboard quarter, there is a large organ with up to16 foot stops and, in the orchestra area, is a huge chamber organ with up to 8 foots. There is the usual enormous instrument at the stern of the cathedral, but thankfully that was not used in this service. The choir numbers over sixty plus four soloists and there is a full orchestra. Like us, they all wear warm coats except the Contrabass player who has to strip down to play his instrument – probably why they only have one contrabass player in this ample orchestra!!

I love Haydn’s Masses. And his ‘Heilig-Messe’ (It is ‘All Saints’ day) is no exception. They have four good soloists with a very fine strong soprano. The chorus looks like a group of opera pros and students plus some hangers on. But they sound good and respond well to the young conductor and leader. They sing from the starboard side transept except that there isn’t much of a starboard side transept. If there were, that’s where they would be. The local Archbishop, who is Cardinal Schönborn, is presiding over the Mass. He is one of the youngest Cardinals at the age of sixty four and is considered “popeable”. His nickname is “The Healer” and is untainted by any Ratzinger type of Nazi past. In fact he is involved in the reconciliation with the Jews. I am pleased to hear that his plainsong is excellent with almost perfect intonation. Just think!!! We might even have a Pope who can sing!!! The ‘Graduale’ is by Mendelssohn and the Offertorium is by Salieri.

The afternoon ‘Feierliche Pontifikalvesper zum Hochfest Allerheiligen’ is equally exciting. The service is Mozart’s ‘Vesperae de Domenica’ (KV 321) together with his ‘Kirchensonate C-Dur’ (KV336) and a very pleasant late romantic ‘Ave Maria’ by Rudolf Weinwurm (1835 – 1911) whose music I have never heard before. The huge chamber organ has been moved so that the organist’s mirror exactly reflects an image of the conductor’s baton. I cannot understand why this was not done in the morning when the organist was playing continuo with the instrument at ninety degrees to the conductor. Probably something to do with the CCT.

There’s a mean brass section for this gig. There are four trombones. The first trombone is doubling on small alto and I notice that the fourth has a large bass. There is also a trumpet section doubling on piccolo trumpets. There are thirty singers this afternoon but they give as good an account of themselves as the sixty in the morning. I’m rather wary of sitting close to the larger organ but I do sit near the orchestra. I notice a couple nearby worming their way towards the orchestra. I’m not the only music-crazy person here!

I obviously talk to fellow music-crazy people! It turns out that Larry and LaVonne are from the states. We talk furiously as music-crazy people do then make our way out of the Cathedral and up the pedestrian way that leads to the Vienna Staatsoper. I tell them that I intend to join the line for the standing tickets and they are so delighted that they come along to show me the ropes.

After the morning service I had already walked up to the Staatsoper and asked about the routine for getting a standing ticket. The lady on the door explained the system but it seemed very strange. They do not number the places as they do in Munich where I had been in the fourth gallery standing. This seems silly. But they do insist that each person is entitled to only one ticket. This make sense when, on leaving, I am confronted by a man offering me eleven euro tickets for fifty euros each! So any strange system that stops this type of behaviour must be good if tiring.

This is how it works. You can line up for tickets at any time by the “standing door”. Three hours before the performance, the door is opened. You go into the warmth and you can ‘camp’ on the floor while you wait for them to start selling the tickets. Cue Sony Walkmen, iPhones, netbooks etc … When we turn up, Larry and LaVonne are amazed to see hardly any people waiting. “We can get a good place if we hang on here!”, they say and we join the line, extremely well organised by the Opera House staff. “When we started coming here, they carrried guns!”, says LaVonne.

About an hour or so before the performance, they start selling tickets and suddenly a group of people emerge from a room beside the ticket office where they had been placed by kindly opera staff. I presume they came in looking very cold!!

Luckily for me, Larry and LaVonne know the ropes. “We can get some good parterre places with this number of people in front of us.” says LaVonne. So we each buy the more expensive “Stehplatz Parterre” tickets. The gallery standing tickets cost three euros but our more expensive places cost four euros.

Now the third row of the Stehplatz Parterre is well known for having the best sightlines and sound in the whole opera house. Why they have given the best part of the house to students and music-crazy people like us is a mystery but a good mystery because we manage to get fourth row places which suits us better as we can see the eight Contrabassi, some of the rest of the orchestra and get a bit more orchestral sound.

The reason that they are the best places is because there is a very small rake on the floor of the Vienna Opera House. But, in the standing places, there is a very steep rake so you do not spend all your time trying to look through the head of the person in front of you. From our row, we can see the whole of the floor seating, half the orchestra and the whole of the stage, as we are not too far above the stage level. Larry points out that we are “just” ahead of the front of the first gallery above us and that is good.

The whole process of choosing places is closely supervised by very domineering and officious woman. She may not be ‘armed’ (could well be though in these threatening times!) but she makes us all line up in pairs. This means that I have to borrow somebody’s wife but her husband  doesn’t seem to mind! We then have to ‘reserve’ our places using scarves and she assures us that, where there are scarves she will see to it that nobody but nobody will take our places while we go out and have a drink. Larry stretches his scarf over my place and we obey her by going into the bar for drinks. We believe her!!!! And everybody loves her for her strong organisation!!! By the way, if you drink enough beer (can’t get Paracelsus here!), you cannot feel the pain in your knees!

It’s very difficult to mount a performance of Fidelio which fails to please. We enjoy very good performances from Leonora/Fidelio and Rocco and a very strong performance from Florestan. The famous ‘Prisoners’ Chorus’ is a little weird because the conductor has them enter singing loudly fairly early instead of the gradual crescendo we are used to. He reserves the quiet section for when the prisoners say “Walls have ears” or something like that. It makes sense but I don’t think the audience appreciated the thinking. Also entries were ragged because the chorus had no sightlines to conductor or repetiteurs because of the production. At least the production was traditional, thank goodness. There is a fine chorus in the Vienna Opera House and that is evident in the final yell for freedom at the end.

I suppose I should mention that the opera ‘FIDELIO’ has a little more meaning for me than for most people. We named our Herreshoff sloop FIDELIO and I and a friend survived a force ten Bass Strait storm in her. We limped into Eden with nearly all the rivets torn off the boom with a fully reefed main. Other boats were not so lucky and some were lost. So our FIDELIO was certainly faithful to us. But when Italians used to ask me why we had broken the rule of always giving a female name to a boat, I would simply tell the story of the ever faithful wife who dressed as a man in order to rescue her husband and was prepared to die rather than let him be killed. The freedom that the opera calls for has caught the imagination of many since it was written. Before Kurt Masur emerged at the recent celebration of the ‘Friedliche Revolution’ in Leipzig during my stay there, he conducted the Fidelio Overture and I am sure we will hear it again and again when we celebrate our freedom in the future As LaVonne points out, “Nobody dies in the opera.”