Lohengrin

I've just returned from Lohengrin.  First of all, the singing and orchestra were absolutely marvelous, quite an experience. I especially like the huge choral parts, and hearing the original context of "Here comes the bride" was of course fun.  I don't know what else to say about the music; it was superb and very enjoyable.

The interesting, disappointing, and distracting thing was the set/production.  Because I am apparently a "sissy" and didn't want to stand for 4.5 hours, I got a 53 euro ticket which was in the Gallery, 3rd row, 1 seat right of the center.  It was an excellent view of the stage, which was the unfortunate thing.  I should have bought the 9 euro ticket with a view of less than a third of the stage.  For some reason the producer felt the need to make the set modern.  The costumes were mostly fine, just simple black or grey suits and black or silver dresses, white for the wedding.  The physical set was eye-searing.  The first act opened with a mostly black stage with 3 strange circles that I thought were supposed to be water until Lohengrin and the Count walked on them during the duel.  There were greyish wooden poles rising at various points, and at their tops were spokes pointed in four directions - perhaps somebody's idea of trees.  But weirdest of all was the neon yellow toy truck, about 1.5 feet long.  Just sitting on stage with no explaination.  Oh, scratch that, weirdest of all might have been the fact that Elsa was apparently blind for this production, walking with a cane, though I'm pretty sure the singer could see based on her behavior during her bows after each act.  She had a white cane that would be taken from her in moments of anger by Ortrud, etc.  It was truly bizarre, along with her groping the air (in a manner I think a woman of 30 who was actually blind would not have done) and singing about seeing a knight, etc.  The second act opened, and the curtain rose, and I was nearly blinded.  A huge neon yellow house sat in the center of the stage, Elsa appeared at its window for the balcony scene and later in the act it developed a steeple and turned into the church.  The inexplicable truck was still there, along with neon yellow stepping stones around the house, 2 lines of neon yellow picket fence, a neon yellow swan the size of the truck (interesting that the only act in which there is no swan in the script was the only act in which a swan appeared on stage!!), a neon yellow flower the size of a person, a neon yellow rabbit the size of the truck, and some sort of hoop or ring, in guess what...neon yellow!  Also, when Elsa left her house and made her way to the church outside the wedding for the scene where the Count and Ortrud ask for Lohengrin's name, she was wearing her white dress and a white fur coat.  And accompanied by about 10 people in white feather pantsuits wearing masks of birds' heads.  I was relieved that at least the wedding chamber scene of the first act was conducted in front of a pleasant purple-lit curtain and was very watchable, but for the end the weird trees, pools that were not water, and yellow truck were back.  Also a neon yellow chain, each link the size of a forearm.  And as I said, no swan appeared, but Gottfried was lowered from the ceiling inside of a raindrop in the final moments of the show.

So, somebody deserves to be fired for that one. I saw nothing but disturbed looks and confused mumbling in reaction to the set, and it certainly was distracting from a most beautiful performance.  I wish I could have closed my eyes, but I wouldn t have been able to read the subtitles.  I actually considered leaving my 53 euro seat to sit in the back on a standing room platform where I'd have been able to see the subtitles but not the stage.  Though, having been confused about who was singing which lines when I saw La Boheme and couldn't see all the stage, I stayed where I was.  I don't want to have my discription of the weird production take away from how beautiful and amazing the opera was, but I had to share because it was so strange and confusing (why was she blind? what was a small truck doing on stage? neon yellow????).

Anyway, I'm off for my trip to parts of Croatia, Sarajevo, and western Slovenia during my week-long break.  I'll try to write but I'm not sure how much time I'll have, and I'll probably want to spend way too much of my online time (and time in general) reading about the Sept 19 primary.

Realtime post

So....

The intensive German period is almost over, with our oral tomorrow and written final Friday. It's been enjoyable, and the weather save for rain the first week has been gorgeous. I've done a lot of studying or pleasure-reading outside, exploring random parts of the city (but I can never do enough of that). Yesterday Tara (my roommate) and I got on a train and rode it to the end to Nussdorf, where there are lots of heuriges, or winehouses. It is the season for a Viennese favorite, Sturm, which is new wine that is partially fermented and therefore very sweet but more alcoholic than you realize. I haven't spent much time inside of museums because it's been so nice out and I'm waiting for my museum pass that comes with my history class.

Break begins Friday after the final. I've got a sit-down ticket to Wagner's Lohengrin, which is 4.5 hours long. Saturday I'll take the bus to the Bratislava airport and go to Croatia (except that I was really dumb and waited too long to buy the ticket and even from last night to just now it's gone up another 10 euro, dumb dumb me), where I'll hang out in Split and/or the islands for a while until I get bored and decide to take the train up through Bosnia to Zagreb (Croatia again). Then I'll go up to Slovenia, particularly the coast and Julian Alps region, and hike and perhaps look at caves and former Italian seaports and such. Then a series of trains back to Vienna. I've bought a 20 euro card that gives me a 50% off discount on trains in Austria and 25% off in/to surrounding countries, making me question whether or not my Eurail pass was actually a good deal, but alas what is done is done.

I'm a bit nervous because the MA primarly election falls while I'll be traveling, and I don't know how available the internet will be for me to anxiously follow results or more like it curse the lack of non-televised results.

Alright I ought to go somewhere nice (perhaps the Schoenbrun) and study...

Email Sept 5

On Tuesday I attended opening night of the opera, and they performed La Boheme. They ran out of the best standing room just before we got to the front of the line, but we were up in the Gallery and over to the right. It was beautiful, and at points I was forced to really concentrate on the music and watch the orchestra because I could see none of the action on stage. They have made an addition to the opera house since the last time you guys were probably there. Each seat, and each standing room position, has its own little screen that shows 3 lines of text at a time. You can select Deutsch or English. It was a great tool in understanding what was going on! They are pretty subtle as well.

Email from Sept 4

I wanted to let you know about the changes with IES - as you may have seen from my mailing address and google, they now have the center at Palais Corbelli on Johannesgasse, right in the 1st district off of Karntnerstrasse, which is a little too touristy for my tastes. Nearby can be found a convenient postoffice, the best ice cream in town, and a wide variety of restaurants that I have yet to try. For the first week, the film festival at the Rathaus was still playing. Every night they show an opera (though often strange versions; I watched The Marriage of Figero set on the 40th story of a 1980s New York appartment building, which made all the funnier the scene in which Cherubino jumps from the window and breaks nothing but the angry gardener's plant pots). They also have international food booths.

We went to Mariazel for orientation, and returned to Vienna last Sunday, so I have had just over a week here. We have 3 hours of German classes daily, and plenty of homework and vocabulary. Still there is lots of time to explore the city. I have spent a good deal of time just wandering around, especially near my house in the 8th district (Josefstadt), around the center, and from the Naschmarkt all the way home, past Mariahilferstrasse. To go to class, I can take the streetcar too and from the center, but it is also a 25 minute walk that I do whenever it isn't raining and I have time before class. My walk takes me from my appartment on Strozzigasse, a street with beautiful old buildings sandwiched between the inner and outer rings and Josefstradtenstrasse and Lerchenfelderstrasse. If I want to take the scenic route, I can walk up past the Rathaus and Parliament, through the Volksgarten and Heldenplatz, and then I have a choice. I either go the long way through the Hofburg to the left, which takes me by the roman ruins, down Kohlmarkt to Graben, where I then go by the statue of the Plague and St Stephens before turning down Karntnerstrasse to Johannesgasse. (Next time I will look for Meinl's.) Or, I walk around the ringstrasse along the route of the streetcar, past the Naturalhistorisches Museum and Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Opera, then up Karntnerstrasse. Sadly my signal to turn is the McDonald's sign: McDonald's is a few doors down from the center. If I want fastfood lunch, though, I go get Pizza or Falaful or Donner Kebab or of course a kasekraner or other sausage.

My German teacher is wonderful. Her husband is a curator at the Natural History museum so he took us on a private tour after our exam Friday morning. We saw the gems and minerals, the dinosaurs, a rotating hologram of various views of the world, and a machine with a wheel that you spin to see the continents from way before pangea to 150m years in the future (they will apparently end up all together again and shaped like a donut with one central sea). Most interestingly, he took us up to the roof (through a hallway that they use for storing hundreds of skulls on glassed-in shelves!). The views were beautiful, I have attatched a few pictures. Today as we began our unit on foods she brought various Austrian pastries in for us to try, and her own delicious homemade Liptauer. Having Austrian relatives, I already had tasted it (and in fact have been having some from the supermarket every day for breakfast) but everybody in the class was very impressed with it. Hers is very good, I might attempt to use her recipe to make some but I'd love to be emailed everybody else's recipe for it.

I have indeed seen the works of Otto Wagner around town, and they are fascinating and beautiful. This weekend we went on a bus tour of the major sights; up a mountain for a city view, to the Hundertwasserhaus, which I find quite fascinating, and to the Belvedere gardens. It was basically a tour to orient us. I loved my tourguide so much that I have changed my schedule to take her class (more below). Sunday I went with friends to the Donau Insel where we studied and enjoyed the nice weather. The train ride took us past the incinerator (I believe that's what it is) that Hundertwasser designed. Next weekend I will rent a bike on the insel and explore further before it gets cold. I have also found a swimming pool with a good price, and I will probably take a dance class and perhaps an additional recreation class at the University, both to learn to waltz and to meet Austrian students. When the semester starts up at the end of September I will get an art museum pass with one of my classes and will be able to stop into many of the museums whenever I like. Unfortunately the Leopald, Wien, Natural History, and several others aren't included; it only covers federally owned museums, but I will still be sure to see everything.

I am also planning to attend my first opera with standing room tickets tomorrow. It is opening night and La Boheme is showing. I know that Otto is a great Opera fan, so in case he (or you, or my grandmother, or my mothers) has any recommendations I will tell you all that they are showing while I am here: Il Barbiere Di Siviglia, Lohengrin (I suspect he will recommend the Wagner!), Osud/ Le Villi, Onegin, Le Nozze Di Figaro, Robert Devereux, I vespri Siciliani, Copelia, Die Sauberflote, Peter Grimes, Madame Butterfly, Rigoletto, Carmen, Giselle, Otello, Tosca, Nabucco, La Sonnambula, La Traviata, Der Rosenkavalier, Arabella, Requiem, Der Nussknacker, Don Carlo, und Romeo et Juliette. Quite a few choices!

As for my classes, I will be taking German (of course), a politics class (Post Cold War European Security), an economics class (Transitions to Market Economies in Central and Eastern Europe), and my newly added history course, Vienna Past and Present, which goes over the history of the city and includes a substantial amount of touring museums and other historical sites. I believe I'll see everything from the Roman ruins to St. Stephens to the Belvedere to the museum that houses the car in which Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated. All of this with the very knowledgable guide who seems to be an excellent lecturer. Also I am applying for an internship; if I don't get one that interests me enough then I will take a class called Nations and Religions: Minorities and Majorities, a small part of which is focused on Jewish history.

That's all for now. I'll send another update when there's more to report. Enjoy the attatched pictures; sorry there were so many but they were hard to pick out of so many I've taken! I made them poor quality so they'd be small enough to email in mass quantity, but if you'd like to see a better copy of anything, let me know. A little caption for two of them (the rest should be self explainatory): "now you see it" and "now you don't" are of the statue that the Russians built as part of the treaty after WWII. The Viennese were required to keep it up, but it is truly ugly, so they spend what I can only imagine is tens of thousands a year maintaining the fountain they built that goes perhaps 3 stories in the air to hide the statute!

Email I sent Aug 27

Vienna is awesome. Actually I haven't seen any of the city yet, just had a 3 day orientation in the Alps. People are pretty cool. My roommate is a Tennessee girl who goes to Wellesley and is very sweet and we had the 2nd to worst number but somehow lucked out because there were two of us instead of the big groups other people had. I am in the nicest two person appartment (that should have been three) with wireless!! and it is huge and old and beautiful and it couldn't be more convenient; it's right between the inner ring and outer ring in a district full of students with streetcar, grocery store and wiener (sausage) stand all visible from the front door. Also my landlord is a student coordinator for the program and doesn't charge us the fees the other land lords do (that means, I have an extra bed in my appartment that anyone can crash at for free). I start 3 weeks of intensive German tomorrow which will include tours of the city, then a week break, then classes. Admittedly I haven't had to cook for myself yet but I'll be hitting up the Wiener stand a lot and all the jazz clubs that are 2 blocks away.

Back by popular demand...

Ok, not actually that popular of a demand, but I figure in 10 years if blogger hasn't started charging people to access their accounts I'll want to look back on my 4 months in Vienna and Europe and remember what exactly those pictures are of. The title of this blog is Deutsch for "to Vienna," except I'm still totally confused by German prepositions so it also might translate to "in Vienna." Regardless, here it is, with a few backdated entries (if I can figure out how to backdate them) that are copies of emails I've sent my family.