Vienna 2

June 4, 2014

Abstemious breakfast, then I lit out for the Albertina under the most perfect of all skies. The Albertina was a consolation prize to the Archduke Albert for losing the governorship of Belgium, and I think he came out on the better side. What a gracious building, among the most gracious art museums in the world, if you consider the building’s own self. As for the collection, it was refreshing and fascinating, partially because it was new to me. Wrote down what I thought of the paintings in my little blue journal. It is heavily German, and that is somewhat the way my tastes in visual art run, so all was well. Had white wine in the shade after the Albertina, then moseyed over to the Theater Museum, which I did not understand. Meant to hit the great mass of museums lying just beyond the Heldenplatz, but instead met there a boy of the most fetching energy and directness, who wanted to take me on a tour (he being a guide for Alte Stadt Tours) on a kind of adapted fire truck. Took the tour. As he promised, his narrative was lively and richly wrought. As near as I could tell his German and his English presentations were identical. He got only a few things wrong, and one was asserting that Urania was the Muse of Entertainment. In some ways that’s bettering the fact. I’m glad I took the tour, not only for his diverting presence, but in that it helped me orient in this intricate city. Specifically, it helped me find the Muzikvereins, in whose golden concert hall I attended a concert which in substance was largely last night’s, except that the musicians wore brocade and powdered wigs. Both were more tourist events than concerts, so I tried to (and succeeded in) tamping down my fury at the audience’s crassness. About 60 percent of the audience was Japanese. One sad truth I know about the world is that the Japanese take to many pictures. There are no events and no places, only settings for Japanese people to be gazing into phone cameras. During the exit after the concert, one gentleman stopped five hundred people pouring down the staircase so he could snap a shot of the bust of Clara Schuman.  Both nights the bassoonist has been seven layers of handsome. I assumed it was the same one, but decided it wasn’t. Maybe there’s something about the bassoon.

You can take a Third Man tour of the Viennese sewers.

How lovely Imperial Austria would have been if it had not also been a political reality, if the emperor had been just a kind old man who watched people dance. SiSi, Franz Joseph’s Kaiserin, is hugely popular, I suppose a little like Lady Di, both unconventional reluctant royals and violently dead.

Caught a glimpse of my legs in the full-length hotel mirror. They qualify as a hideous deformity. I suppose I’m glad that they still work, after a fashioned, like an old beat-up jalopy damaged almost beyond recognition, but still running.

The hotel has no bar–a misfortune, for a nightcap would end the night perfectly.