This is a continuation of my first Substack series, which includes Above Bad Eisenkappel, Crumbling Borders, and Yugoslavia and Other Myths as well as my piece on Istanbul. Podcast versions also available here or via Spotify/ Apple Podcasts.
"Vienna is the faded old queen of Europe", enthuses a friend back at Cape Town airport as we meet up on one of those lovely chance encounters, waiting for our luggage. London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Moscow, Istanbul, Vienna. Capitals of the great nineteenth century empires: spot the odd one out? Vienna these days is the capital of a rather middling size central European state, so it is largely preserved at an almost manageable size. Then again, I'm not really in to "preservation" per se. In Cape Town for years we had a venue we all quietly moaned about playing at, in the main tourist district, whose proud claim was to be "dedicated to the preservation of jazz". As if jazz needed to be pickled in a jar, starved of fresh air.
Vienna's not quite as stuffy as all that these days. I do however manage an old-style coffee with cream and a Viennese pastry in a classic coffee shop opposite the design museum, though another friend offers me coffee and cream back in the Cape - claiming it's actually healthier than milk - so maybe it's the new fashion too. We're told later that the coffee shop in question got into trouble some years back for turfing out a lesbian couple; but these days the staff are diverse and the pastries are still soft and delicious. I sip and do my best Freudian angst face just for fun. The food is definitely better than "Viennas" in South Africa, the generic name for factory produced sausages boiled in water, on a par with "Russians". Having grown up in the UK only with "Hamburgers" and "Frankfurters" these names were new to me thirty years ago, but since I don't eat them anyway they remain linguistic curiosities rather than distinctive tastes. Here in the Austrian capital there's a wide range of dishes on offer, like any other big world city perhaps these days, including a fabulous and massive Italian pizza picked up next to the train station. Austria always had a strong link to Italy; but of course to a host of other places too. And the metro trains show me a Vienna that's a much more healthy mix of peoples than I had anticipated. Slovenia was noticeably pale in comparison, for all its cultural riches and flower boxes in every window. Here, social housing in unusual state blocks is bursting with greenery; and real Turkish fare is sold in the markets, that 1683 siege between the old clashing empires, Habsburg and Ottoman, now very distant.
I recall writing a university essay on the Turkish invasions of the South East, and somebody thought I was writing about takeaway kebab vans in Kent. There is a somewhat apocryphal story that suggests a Hapsburg spy, whose information was vital in lifting the siege, received confiscated coffee beans as reward, and opened the first Viennese coffee shop, leading to the craze taking off in central Europe and the first caffeine addicts (including JS Bach, composer of the "Coffee cantata"). Said spy also sold the (now-typical) Austrian breads in the shape of a crescent, to celebrate victory over the Ottomans. Later some French visitors took the idea home, involved puff pastry, and turned them into croissants instead.
One of the last things we saw in Slovenia was the interior of a church south of Ptuj, up in another pretty hilltop hamlet surrounded by forest. It was a Monday afternoon, yet there was a service happening, a priest speaking biblical passages in a feisty Slovenian while the congregation nodded on. We tourist interlopers were there for what stood behind him: the most extraordinary medieval altar, vivid, detailed, so voluptuosly carved you'd want to touch it, for all its chastity. And there was a clue, perhaps, to what happened next in Europe's cultural development, for later sculptors also adorned the interior with their commissioned works, attempting to compete and be seen in the face of this central masterpiece. The end result: a serious surfeit of baroque, dressed up in pilgrim's clothes.
I first became aware of the exquisite interiors of many old churches, when in Prague and Budapest in my twenties; then it was the contrast I felt, compared to England. I love the great English Gothic cathedrals, and their crisp feel inside, but of course that's a result of Cromwell destroying icons, frescoes, art in general, a wild protest against what came before. In Vienna, St Stephen's is a radically different experience. Here one feels the heart of an ancient empire, every corner competing for the eye, every Holy Roman Emperor making a mark with the aid of those artists willing to describe the stories sanctioned by their patrons. The place drips with serious power. It is not the only such example: the columns outside Karlskirche are far too big to have any practical purpose. Instead they say, we're the ones in control, ancient-Roman-style. The entrance to the Hofburg says much the same, and the grand Platz separating the natural history museum (science) from the art history museum. Inside there's definitely a surfeit of baroque: but my takeaways are a far greater appreciation for the incredible level of detail and sophistication put into the paintings; Raphael's colours so much more impressive in real bold canvases, than in the same flattened, overused images in print or on screen. I appreciate too (both here and in the design museum, MAK) the clever curation: another kind of art in itself. Here the names flash past me, but a baroque woman painting herself, naked, into an otherwise surprisingly masculine scene of Bacchanal is a bit of quiet provocation amongst the excesses of male-gaze rococo flesh. Of course there's been restoration too, another painstaking piece of artistic endeavour, carrying things on: no Raphael painting was ever just his work anyway, all of it born from great studios of production, chef and sous-chefs. And this is old Vienna, too, writ large. Extraordinary, though it must have sometimes felt a stifling place to be a radical in the run-up to world war. And it all still stands, remarkably un-bombed.
Schonbrunn Palace, the Habsburg Versailles, with Kew-style greenhouses, and wide passages for carriages, is a dominant and dominating statement: at least as vast, in its attempt to geometrically control landscapes, and say "you're nothing, I'm everything", as any Pharaoh's pyramid. And all dressed up, no doubt, since European kings invented drag and high heels. I like getting into my feminine lipstick side as much as the next male drama teacher but anybody who thinks it's somehow inherently transgressive should see what Louis XIV looked like in his portraits, while he was encouraging young women into ballet contortions for his edification. Personally liberating for us blokes these days, perhaps, after a century or two of dour Western men's clothing, but male desire to wear skirts and tights is clearly neither a sign of being disadvantaged, nor especially dangerous to the patriarchy.
Since 1900 or before, architects have had to eke something new out in between these admittedly impressive hulks, just like the artists I seek out as my own relief: Klimt and Schiele and a bunch of less celebrated ones (some women, largely in the past kept out of the galleries, unless of course they took their clothes off for male painters). While the first psychoanalysts were wondering why everybody was feeling neurotic. With Hitler wandering the culturally extravagant streets. Of course, the large Jewish portion of the financing that lifted cultural possibility in Vienna was brutally snuffed out, and a more broken, initially occupied, post war Viennese culture took shape. Hitler's own eerie sketches, of buildings and gardens emptied of people, any human tension left unexpressed, are thankfully nowhere to be seen.
Next to St Stephen's there are art deco religious frescoes over old shops that now disastrously show off yellow M signs. I take myself on a tour by the Danube canal, looking for the breath of fresh city air that is Hundertwasser: his buildings inspiring so many quirky designers since, including (however subconsciously) all over South Africa's cultural refuges, though maybe he just picked up on the collective unconscious and its need for a bit more colour, for mixing plant life back into the walls, for mixing up shapes so there's minarets on apartment blocks and mosaics on power stations. Elsewhere there's a one storey with a golden cabbage on top, the Secession art movement's building still flying one of the obligatory "we're tolerant, see" corporate Pride month flags, although it's now July so they're late. In South Africa things move on: July is Mandela month (he was born on the 18th) for other kinds of charity, before August, women's month, with a public holiday on the 9th, that remembers the non racial Women's March for justice in the 1950s. Here in Vienna things are still a bit stuck sometimes it seems. My father, remembering vehement Austrian police in the past arresting folk for jaywalking, warns me against stepping out of line: I however watch for skateboarders and Italians on cellphones, who don't seem to mind crossing before the more law-abiding locals, and I semi-innocently follow their lead.
"Oh, Vienna" sang English New Romantics with tinny synths in the background, in what must be one of the most ubiquitous and least inspiring examples of this city's worldwide cultural reach. I had hoped to catch some live classical music, given the number of violins arriving at the airport, but the summer season seems more aimed at pickled Mozart than any cutting edge presentations by the Vienna Phil. Not surprising really, this city is the ultimate Disneyland for those skating the surface of the classical, but there is a musical edge a little out of reach on such a short visit; including jazz again, which I can imagine is often intricate and heartfelt. The intense creativity of the Swiss musical world (invested in thoroughly, of course) completely belies their reputation for staidness, and things look to be similar here in neighbouring Austria. There's a conscious dance the day after I leave; there are modern esoteric gatherings in the woods, which even here in Vienna aren't far away at all. A deer leaps in front of me, in the last woody visit for this trip. Catholic sensibilities can definitely be escaped with a little determination; I'm intrigued. Very happy to be returning home, but full of gratitude for the multiple tastes in Vienna and on this whole European trip. It's time to leave the baroque behind for a while: I'll be back in a few years perhaps when I've digested it all!
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