Viva Vienna: Capital of Music

Story and photography by
Nancy & Eric Anderson 

 

It's not easy, even after three visits, to get the feel for Austria’s capital city. In some ways Vienna is rather formal with its constant reminder it was, after all, the Imperial city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire for, what, 640 years. Not only that, it was where Mozart flourished and composed his magic, and where, at Bergasse 19, Sigmund Freud tried to unravel the besieged souls of his tormented patients – and in so doing arguably set psychoanalysis off in the wrong direction.

All very serious yet one of the items in the Freudhaus is a collection of psychiatry cartoons from The New Yorker. Artist Whitney Darrow, Jr., for example, has a patient telling the psychiatrist, “Oh, and speaking of mother, just send her the bills. She takes care of all these things.” And cartoonist Chon Day has a psychiatrist giving the patient his diagnosis: “Offhand, Mrs. Wheelwright, I’d say you’re as nutty as a fruitcake.”

Such irreverence is unexpected in such a place -- and delightful -- but it surely contrasts with the scholarly book lying beside the cartoon anthology, Barbara Sternthal’s Sigmund Freud. Life and Work 1856-1939. 

To have the Viennese not taking themselves too seriously is charming we think when we sit with a cup of coffee, as Freud did daily, a few blocks south of his apartment at the Café Landtmann.

More than 2,000 cafés blanket Vienna, cafés so different from the Easy Eats fast service places of the United States. Vienna’s cafés don’t require you to eat fast and leave. You can dawdle and even spend the day there, an attitude stemming from the immigrants who’d come from all over Europe to be employed by the Habsburg Dynasty. The foreigners were poor and lived packed in crowded apartments. They missed the space they’d left behind and used the cafés as the living rooms they no longer had. For visitors, almost any café will give the ambiance of the past from the Café Museum near the Church of St. Charles to the Café Sperl that even has the furniture of the 1880s.

The great immigration to Vienna was in the past. The Habsburg Empire was broken up in 1918 at the end of the Great War. In 1900 Vienna had a population of 2 million and was the 7^th largest city in the world; now it has 1.6 million. But the streets are still crowded and tourists will benefit from the maps and information they can pick up at Vienna Tourism at its location in the square called the Albertinaplatz at the corner of Maysedergasse.

Finding Your Way

One evening you should attend some musical function, either a Mozart event or a Strauss concert. Mozart seems to get all the exposure in this Capital of Music but the role of Johann Strauss and his family in our musical lives has to be acknowledged: Strauss the Elder had 17 descendants with significant musical talent -- from his son, Johann Strauss, the Younger, the best known to the 17^th, to the present heir who plays in the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.

You may want to buy a Vienna Card (€18,50) which gives you unlimited travel for any form of public transportation within the city limits. The card also gives you varying discount admissions, some insignificant, for attractions and shopping. You can buy the card at your hotel.

The inner city is eminently walk-able but if you’d like a preview of the layout of the land you may want to look for the yellow and green busses of Vienna Sightseeing for its Hop On Hop Off service (a day ticket currently costs €20, a one hour tour €13, this at a time, however, when the US$ is at the lowest against European currency in a year).

Vienna has 100 museums and 650 palaces so wherever you are walking, at least once you need to walk into one the Habsburg Palaces, either the convenient Hofburg Winter Palace or farther out -- but still accessible by public transport – the Schönbrunn Summer Palace. Allow a full day; the Hofburg, for example, has 2,600 rooms. You may want to decide in advance what you‘d want to see. The Hofburg Treasury is popular though it may leave some visitors wondering whom was exploited for such wealth to be accumulated. At a similar place in St. Petersburg in Russia, as we gazed at the extravaganza that is the Hermitage, a local Russian sidled up to us, smiled and said in fairly good English, “Now you know why Russia went Communist!”

The Treasury exhibits at 2860 carats the world’s largest cut emerald and other priceless items like the Reichskrone, the Imperial Crown of the Holy Roman Empire that probably dates back to the 10^th century. Octagonal in shape its outer surface is studded with 144 precious stones.

A walk through the inner city may be the highlight of a visit to Vienna. You’ll see a lot of statues some better labeled and more understandable than others.

A guide told us once in Europe, “ The bishops over the centuries built numerous palaces and fortresses to show the peasants and city councils the power of the church. At the same time the aristocracy was engaged in similar activities. Not much fun in Medieval Europe to be a peasant. Indeed those in power never lost an opportunity for self-aggrandizement.”

An example would be the Plague Memorial, the Pestsäule, erected after the plague of 1679. The Emperor Leopold I fled the city but decreed if God stopped the plague he’d put up a monument to the victims. By the time the monument was finally completed in 1693, the focus had changed: it seemed not to address those who suffered that terrible death but instead showed the Emperor kneeling in prayer and stopping the plague by the very power of his devotion.

Vienna’s architecture is stunning, much of it recent after the destruction in World War II. Some of it is fun: the contrast between old and new and color in the most unexpected places. You’ll want a good travel guide and walking map of the city. Many of the maps available from tourist centers are too comprehensive and perhaps attempt to cover too large a city area.

We may be reaching the stage in European tourism where tourists should make their life easy by studying their guide books before they come, then deciding what they might want to see -- either before leaving home or sitting at an Internet Café in Europe –printing Google or equivalent maps showing where an attraction exactly is because the position is not always found in some free maps they find on location.

In Vienna you’ll find something of interest in every street in the Old City. From the massive Karlskirche, the Church of St. Charles, completed in 1737 now called “the most impressive Baroque building in Austria,” with its Henry Moore sculpture outside, to the tiny -- only 30 foot wide – Maria am Gestade at Salvatorgasse 1. Stop and ask passersby for directions once you are in the general area; the small church is not easy to find.

Finding Your Hotel

Rooms for the night are easy to find also given the strength of the internet as resource for checking up on hotels, Given, too, the weakness of the US dollar against the Euro, Vienna’s famous hotels are priced beyond the average American’s budget. They are famous: the Hotel Imperial is so elegant Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain was put up there in 1969 when a Royal Palace wasn’t available.

Two contrasting hotels might at first be Pension Dr. Geissler at Postgasse 14 near the Schwedenplatz by the Danube Canal. We got an Internet special rate of €72 for a double bedded room with wash-basin in the room and a shared toilet in the corridor but with a substantial breakfast. As we write this there’s something funny going on with its website that wasn’t a problem at the time of booking. The 32-roomed hotel is worth more than a glance.

Our second suggestion more in keeping with American visitors who want more comfort but at “fair value” would be the still moderately priced Hotel Altstadt at Kirchengasse 41 in the southwest part of the old city. The front door opens on to a formidable staircase but there’s an elevator at ground level that goes up to the lobby on the first flight up where an English-speaking very friendly staff waits your bidding.

The 42-roomed Altstadt has many advantages: the location is five minutes walk to the Museum Quartier (where many museums have been converted from the Habsburg stables). Five minutes walk in several directions to many restaurants, some inexpensive. Huge magnificent cooked breakfasts. Free use of a desktop computer with fast connections. Beautiful art, the personal collection of an extraordinary hotelier, Otto Ernest Wiesenthal, who used to be an executive for Wang Computers. His staff has almost no turnover – he takes his 24 employees once a year in the off season, at his expense, for three days to a European city (last year it was Paris!) Most of his people have been with him 10 to 13 years. Herr Wiesenthal is a character; his grandmother Greta was an “avant garde” opera dancer in the 1930s and his great, great grandfather was an artist whose paintings hang in the Vienna Historic Museum and also in the hotel.

This is not an American-style hotel but one owned by a man who runs his hotel, he says, for the enjoyment of his guests He also needs, he says, to have space to put up his pictures -- to get a home for his art.

For us the night appearance of this city was like a painting. We felt quite safe on the streets around the Altstadt. The hotel is an older building now restored with fancy rooms and cool funky bathrooms. A plus for us was that most of its guests were Europeans so you really feel you are in a foreign country. Prices may vary although it has a reputation for not hiking its rates up on special occasions when the city is busy -- so check it out. And check out Herr Wiesenthal’s art collection.