The End of Adina in Vienna

Today I went out to Schonbrunn palace, built for the Hapsburgs by Fischer von Erlach. Maria Theresa made a few renovations, and it was also famous for having Empress Elizabeth (“Sisi”), the wife of Franz Joseph, living there. I don’t like all the hype about her; I wanted to hear more about the amazing Maria Theresa. I feel like there should be an entire Humanities lecture just about her, as a representative of the Enlightenment. There’s a famous portrait of her son, Joseph II, standing at a desk where Montesquieu’s “Spirit of the Law” is unrolled so the viewer can read it.

The entire palace was incredible. The funniest part of the garden was the “Roman Ruin” that was built in the 19th century, during the time when they thought it would be nice to pretend they were hanging around in some Roman ruins. Here’s a photo.

From Schonbrunn you can look back and see all of Vienna, especially from this lovely little mini palace called the “Gloriette” that sits on the hill above.

Mary and I are on the same flight to Heathrow in the morning, and our taxi leaves the hotel at 5. It’s boiling hot here, about 90 degrees, so we’re waiting for a few hours in our air-conditioned hotel room, cleaning up and packing, before heading out for our final evening in Vienna.

Thanks to everyone who has been reading my blog; I know it sort of wound down this past week as I was getting ready to leave, but I have many pictures to show and stories to tell when I return, and if you’re lucky I will have brought you a souvenir! Those of you who are taking my 12th grade “Literature and the Arts” class will be having a 5 week Don Giovanni fest as a result of this project, and I am sure next year’s tenth graders will get a lot of new information also.

Thanks to all my colleagues here at the institute, thanks to Dick Benedum and Julane Rogers and all the other teachers here, thanks to Marilyn and Alan for giving lectures that I will be ripping off next year, special thanks to Mary for being such a great roommate, thanks to all the Hapsburgs for providing so much history, thanks to Napoleon for invading, to Emperor Charles VI for creating such an amazing dynasty, thanks to Charlemagne for being the first Holy Roman Emperor, to Franz I for being the last Holy Roman Emperor, thanks to Leopold Mozart for schlepping your son around so everyone could hear him and he could then be exposed to other cultures of Europe, thanks to Baron von Swieten for giving Wolfgang all that Bach and other pieces of music, thanks to Lorenzo da Ponte for writing such funny lyrics to the operas, special thanks to National Endowment for Humanities for making this possible, huge thanks to Jim Schindler for encouraging me to apply and writing me a letter of recommendation (which obviously had great influence), thanks to Tintoretto for painting such amazing paintings, to Wagner, Verdi, and Donizetti for writing the amazing operas I saw while here, and most of all to WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART for providing the reason why we were all here!

We just finished our last class and listened to “Soave Sia Il Vento” (my idea) to wish everyone a pleasant journey home. My colleagues are all scurrying around trying to see one last church, or one last museum, but Jim and I went and took photos of ourselves eating bananas in front of Freud’s house, which is on Berg street. I also stopped by the café Berg to buy some t-shirts as presents for people who have that last name.

There’s not much else to report. I am going out to Schonbrunn tomorrow to see the room where Mozart jumped onto Maria Theresa’s lap, get lost in the garden maze, and sit for hours at Café Dommayer. Here are some photos from last night and today: Me and Mary at Café Mozart (of Third Man fame); Berggasse, and the only Freud photo that was decent enough to put on the web.

The comments on my blog seem to have died way down. I guess the novelty has worn off for everyone. Oh, well. It’s just as well I’m coming back. A huge tour bus of Italians just arrived at the hotel; I congratulated them on their country winning the World Cup.

As I said, the time is running out and my activities are winding down. Yesterday Karen and I went to Café Central for several hours to plan our projects. The quality of service at Viennese cafes is measured by how slow it is. They will never bring you the check until you ask for it, and even then it will take at least 20 minutes. That’s because once you sit down you have rented that space in the booth and it would be incredibly rude of the waiter to rush you. I will definitely miss this concept when I return to the much faster pace of life in Seattle.

In the evening, Mary and I went out for our final “roommate date.” She took me to see The Third Man, and boy am I glad I went while I was still here. It would have been incredibly depressing to rent it in a few weeks and not be able to walk around Vienna looking at all the places that are in the film. There’s a scene where they run into a movie theater, and that’s the theater where we were watching it! And right at the beginning the “count” says something like, “Meet me at Café Mozart,” so after the movie that was the first place we went. We spent the rest of the date walking across Vienna, stopping at various places, until we finally ended up back at our hotel, watching the moon travel across the top of Stephansdom.

My project is now called, “Don Giovanni through the ages,” and involves looking at some of the Don Juan archetypes and seeing how they are manifested based on the time period in which each adaptation of the story has been set. Are the rules that Don Juan breaks different in the Baroque Era than they are in the Modern Age? This is the question I will be asking as I used the myth of Don Juan to examine each major time period. Doesn’t that sound interesting? That’s just the kind of idea you can come up with when sitting in a Viennese café for hours. If only we had someplace like that in Seattle.

This morning I woke up and realized I was really HUNGRY for some Wiener Schnitzel!!! Apologies to you vegetarian readers, but my colleagues and I are going to have some serious schnitzel withdrawl when we come back to the states. Mary said she’s eaten it about 7 times this week. Well, after my trip yesterday when I felt really nauseated the entire day (gee, I wonder why?) and didn’t eat anything except for some trail mix on the train, I was ready to go to Figlmueller, the most famous Wiener Schnitzel place in town. Luckily for me, Jim and Alan were easy to persuade to accompany me. I told them I was excited to order the exact same thing that they did.

Here we are with our frighteningly large Wiener Schnitzels. Alan and I had no trouble polishing ours off but Jim is a rather more dainty eater and had to wrap the rest of his up to take home.

After that excellent lunch, I decided more excess was in order and went to the Hofburg to see the Imperial Treasury. This part of the palace contains centuries of loot from the Holy Roman Empire and the Austrian Empire from the past 1200 or so years. Highlights were the reliquary of St. Stephen which was made at the court of Charlemagne and was supposed to contain some blood-soaked earth from where Stephen was stoned to death (I have seen pictures of this so-called “St. Stephen’s Purse” but never thought to see the real thing in person); other reliquaries which contained things like a piece of Jesus’ loincloth, a piece of the tablecloth they used for the Last Supper, a piece of straw from the manger (you know how much I love this kind of stuff), a HUGE piece of the True Cross, and also the True Lance, which I had thought was “discovered” at Antioch during the first Crusade, but this particular True Lance (which had some part of some of the True Nails welded onto it) had been used sometime around 955 to defeat some Magyars, so I don’t see how it could have been the same one that later ended up at Antioch. At any rate, the jewels were fabulous, and they also had a bunch of stuff from Napoleon, from around 1804-1810 when he had defeated the Austrians and they had to make deals with him. They had this amazing cradle that someone gave to him for his son, after he married the daughter of the Austrian emperor. Of course, after the Austrians got rid of him and put everything back the way they wanted it in the Congress of Vienna in 1815, they kept a lot of the stuff they had originally given to Napoleon. He didn’t really need it anymore where he was.

This morning we completed our study of Don Giovanni. What a great opera. I can’t wait to see it in Seattle in January with all my students from 12th grade. Time is running out here in Vienna – I hate even to say that – and people are making frenzied lists of things they have to see before they go. I don’t really have one because there’s no way I can see everything I want. But whatever I see, you know I will tell you about it, dear readers.



The outside of the Hofburg

Niemen Vergessen...

Why is The White Hotel my favorite book? Because it seems to come close to allowing me to see the intensity of the Holocaust, seeing each individual as a whole world, as Nietzsche (ironically) said. This seems to be what the Austrian government has attempted with its “Letters to the Stars” project. 30,000 Austrian schoolchildren each chose one person who died in the Holocaust and wrote a letter to him or her after doing detailed research, and in many cases contact surviving family members. Each letter was tied to a while balloon and all the balloons were released at once. I am trying to put a link to the project down below but so far it doesn't work. Try it again in a couple of days if you are interested.

As I rode out to Mauthausen this morning, reading Tirzo de Molina’s play about Don Juan, dozing on and off, I tried to imagine being on a different sort of train from Vienna to Mauthausen, perhaps swelteringly hot, perhaps standing up, perhaps surrounded by loved ones, more likely alone. Over 200,000 went to Mauthausen this way. Is this kind of imagining fruitful? I don’t know. What other Holocausts are going on right now? Who is standing somewhere sweltering or shivering, watching someone they love die? I don’t know and I don’t have any answers. The entire trip was pretty surreal – blazing hot sun, light coming through the windows of the barracks, standing in the gas chamber, walking down the Stairway of Death, taking a ton of photos, meeting this guy called Jurgen who was from Linz and shared a taxi with me. I told him in my bad German that he should come over and travel around the US. He told me in his bad English that he had to improve his English first. The main word we used was “schlecht.”

Back on the train to Vienna, reading the Cambridge Opera Handbook, my feet up on the opposite seat in an air-conditioned compartment, watching the pretty countryside roll past, it’s almost impossible to believe in Mauthausen. I never understood that lack of belief before, and have often taken my faith in God for granted. Yet as I stood in a real gas chamber for the first time in my life I understood how my sister could be an atheist. Of course, I do continue to believe in a loving God and continue to attempt some kind of reconciliation of my belief with the ovens and places they did horrible experiments and the incredibly orderly way they ranked people. I suppose that’s also why I like The White Hotel, because it offers such a profound vision of some kind of justice at the end of everything – a justice I have to believe in or I would not have been able to stand there in the gas chamber.

In some ways the gift of Mauthausen to me today was the gift of that brief glimpse nihilism. It’s a hard vision to have but I intend to hold onto it if possible, never to forget. I came back and realized I hadn’t eaten anything all day and wanted to take about 80 showers. Jim called me to make sure I was okay and had me come up and sit on the roof and watch the full moon over Vienna, and he told me that he and Alan ordered different entrees at dinner tonight (I was laughing at them because they always order the same thing), and I laughed some more, and came down and watched ITALY win the World Cup in a penalty shootout.

I took a photo of the light coming into the barracks, and you might be able to see the chimney from the crematorium through the window. It’s kind of a companion photo to my artsy Venice picture with the light coming through from the Grand Canal. Is that pretentious or what? The landscape and the light were amazingly beautiful there.

Just look at that sky.

The trip up the Danube to the Benedictine monastery of Melk was unbelievable today. Most people take a combination of train and boat, and that’s what we did, zipping up on the train then cruising down the Danube on the way back. The banks of the river are covered with two things: Gothic churches and vineyards. Words cannot describe the experience, so I will just post as many photos as I can.

The organizers of the trip were Jim and Alan, the featured guests on my blog today. I think I have mentioned them both before; Alan gave two dynamite lectures on comedy and Don Giovanni which I plan to rip off almost word for word next year, and Jim teaches at Woodinville HS and is the reason I am here. Aren’t they cute?

Every night in the summer they play outdoor movies here in Vienna, but usually not just any movies. Tonight they are showing L’Elisir D’Amore, which you will recognize as the opera in which the heroine is called Adina. So I’m off to see it.

This last photo on the lower right is a castle we saw on the Danube, where Leopold of Austria imprisoned Richard I on his way back from the Crusades and held him for ransom. After he was released, he supposedly came back in disguise to meet - you guessed it - Robin Hood!

Addendum to this blog: just got back from the Rathousplatz where we watched L'Elisir D'Amore on a huge screen with thousands of people. The moon came up over Vienna as we watched. There was all kinds of food, kind of like Bite of Seattle, and beer, but nobody got rowdy or made a mess. They just sat outside watching a beautiful opera on a giant screen. Could you imagine something like that happening in the US?

This morning we continued our intensive study of Don Giovanni, going more and more deeply into the opera without seeming to make any forward progress. We spent three hours studying La Ci Darem La Mano, and it was fascinating. We heard more from Marilyn Fischer and I found out that not only does she have the amazing talents I listed yesterday, she is also a violinist for the Dayton Philharmonic! Anyway, she related Don Giovanni to Dante, to Mary Wollstonecraft, and most of all to the 21st century consumerism and objectification that may have arisen (at least, in a Marxist reading) from our “Enlightenment” based free-market society.

The four bases, she claims, of stability in our post-feudal rational society are 1) contracts (as in the Social Contract); 2) enlightened self-interest (as in getting a good education like Maria Theresa wanted you to so you could learn to postpone your desire for self-gratification in service to the General Will which would, ultimately, lead to something better for you); 3) religion (either the rational deism of Jefferson or the more conventional superstition that many enlightenment philosophers believed was necessary for the masses); and 4) marriage. Don Giovanni clearly attacks and cuts down all of these. He is out of control. Pure id, we might say.

We then spent an hour looking at the music of La Ci Darem with this amazing music professor from Brandeis named Allan something (can’t remember his last name and don’t want to identify him on this blog in case someone googles him). Up until his lecture, some people had been referring to him as the “comb-over guy” for reasons you can guess. Now I would refer to him as the amazing brilliant music guy. I tried to get him to go to Café Demel with me and Laura but he had to go do some kind of serious and sophisticated music stuff.

So here we are at Demel, probably the most famous and most fancy among a dozen famous and fancy Vienna coffeehouses and confectionaries. I have never taken so many photos of food! But look, they had a giant marzipan Bill Clinton and a Nelson Mandela cake filled with a light meringue. Need I say more?

I was too tired to go see the fabulous jewels this afternoon, especially because we had a 6 am fire alarm where everyone had to exit the hotel after we had stayed up till midnight on the terrace. Jim and Alan (the one who lectured about comedy last week, not the comb-over guy, whose name is spelled differently) invited people to go to Melk with them tomorrow and I decided to go, even though I had originally planned on going to Schonnbrun with Mary, Pete, and Ed. But then we found out that Andre Rieu is going to be there, so we had to avoid it until he blew over, and they decided to go to Melk with me. It is supposed to be a magnificent abbey and church, and a lovely boat ride down the Danube on the way back.

After a little nap (which I needed after my late night and early morning) I went to the Prater with some of the gals. Mozart used to go there with Constanze when they were living here, and he has one letter to his dad where he says he went there while she was pregnant and he was “fat and happy.” (I can’t find the reference right now.) They had some good times there, and there’s an old ferris wheel from 1896 that was the one from The Third Man where they’re fighting at the end, and it’s supposed to have a great view. I think we’re going to see The Third Man at the movies here (they show it three times a week or something) before we go so for all those reasons I felt it was time to go up there. We rode the ferris wheel, I ate some greasy bratwurst and frites (the ones at that place in Seattle are actually better!) and we walked around looking at the cheesy souvenirs and buying a few. I got a Vienna Swatch, a Mozart Christmas ornament, and a really hot t-shirt. I came back here to show everything off, but everyone else went to sleep early after their late night and no nap.

My featured person of the day is Barb, a math teacher who also has a degree in German from Heidelberg, a Master’s in counseling, and went whale watching with Victor Frankl. The people here are amazing. Can you find Barb in this photo? She's taking our picture from the ground!