Home Brew: Vienna in a Cup

Vienna, you very nearly failed me.

I approached you with the same wide-eyed wonder with which I’ve approached the rest of Europe: quivering with anticipation at the thought of having an Authentic Cultural Experience in a city Steeped in History like a well-brewed cup of tea – a classy, temporal tea made of Stately Buildings and the Important People who once inhabited them. Oh, I would imbibe this heady tea, I thought. I would establish a mystical connection with the legendary masters who created the music that has so inspired me all my life. I would enter and inhabit their lofty, artistic world.

Vienna! You tease.

What I got instead was a whole lot of kitsch: bewigged men in velvet breeches handing out glossy pamphlets advertising cotton-candy concerts in gaudy palaces; church cantors with nasal voices, leading quartets instead of choirs; museum exhibits with nothing but facsimiles and gift shops; and Strauss. Oh, the Strauss. And not the good kind, either. Waltzen-Strauss. Vienna, you and I both know that there’s more to you than triple time, treble clef trinkets and musical ties. But where to find it?

I did not locate the elusive muse at any of the usual places. The opera house and the symphony hall were shut down for the summer. The free concert at the “Haus der Musik” was “nice,” but that is all. I didn’t even bother going to the “Mozart House.” I was certain that nothing but truffles and fridge magnets would greet me there.

The exhibit of ancient musical instruments at the Hofburg Imperial Palace, though promising, was closed for the day. Disappointed tourists wandered in and out of the lobby in search of their own Authentic Cultural Experiences, and I sat down to read my map. Where to next? Vienna, you were beginning to vex me.

And then I heard a most unanticipated sound: the tentative quaver of an adolescent in casual clothes, experimenting with acoustics.

It started with a few spontaneous phrases, which gradually ripened into longer excerpts of ageless music meant for monasteries and masses. The young singer’s friends tried their voices out as well, gaining confidence as the room emptied of disillusioned museum-goers; I folded up my map, hid behind a pillar, and savoured not the dead, historical tea of the distant past, but the living, resonant cocktail of the unexpected present. Soon, every valley was being exalted in the round, full-bodied praise of exultant youth in a space that they themselves had rendered sacred. I closed my eyes, leaned against the cool, white column, and breathed.

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Vienna, I think we tricked you. You probably didn’t even notice the Real Artists in your midst. They found your essence, despite yourself. No brochures. No box office. No profit. Just the pure, uninhibited love of spacious sounds that enthralled the Great Masters long before they became Great.

The siren song dissolved naturally into idle teenage chatter; I spread out my map and planned my next move. I would continue my quest outside of this palatial postcard district. And tram 71 would be my gallant steed.

I disembarked in a blessedly ordinary neighbourhood, walked a block or two on blessedly unpopulated sidewalks, and entered the blessedly empty St. Marx cemetery. Mozart’s remains were interred here, centuries ago, but pretty much nobody cares about that. In fact, his resting place is now cordoned off with ugly metal fencing and a glaring German sign prohibiting entry into a restoration site. Restoration of what? The humble soil of a commoner’s grave, into which the most pretentious of men was lowered, penniless and without pomp.

No glittering monuments here. No gilded shrines. No marble edifices or hallowed cathedral crypts. Just a scattered collection of weathered stones, nestled comfortably under unkempt trees, in the loveliest Vienna I have seen yet. Even the few unassuming statues at the entrance were posed casually, as if to say, “Nothing to see here. Carry on.” And, Mozart being happily inaccessible to me, carry on I did.

The grandest resting places in this pleasant paradise were surrounded by ivy and wrought-iron; the humblest, marked only by piles of stones or teetering crosses. Some slabs were eroded, broken, moss-covered, and those with legible inscriptions were refreshingly unfamiliar. There, among this haphazard collection of forgotten nonentities, stood the tombstone of one Julius Egghard, who was once recognized by someone as a “Klaviervirtuose” and “Komponist,” but is pretty much unknown today.

Whose ears did his music touch, I wondered, that he would be remembered as a keyboard virtuoso and accompanist? Did he long for the adulation of his contemporaries, or was he content to simply accompany those with greater aspirations? Would he care that his little plot of earth has escaped the restorers’ attention?

Someone, back in 1867, was sufficiently inspired by Herr Egghard’s talents to memorialize him as a musician, and so he remains centuries later, long after his personhood and performances have settled into obscurity. Perhaps his music was the real, authentic art of his age, and not the pop schmaltz of the dance hall. Perhaps the strains emanating from his fingers moved listeners in common clothes and ordinary places, just as the voices of the unnamed adolescents moved me in an empty lobby of a dormant museum.

It could be that he was a pretentious prig like many of his contemporaries, and that he dictated his epitaph to stroke his own ego, even in death; but I prefer the more endearing story: that of the unknown musician, appreciated by few and memorialized far, far away from the starched hedges and soulless gardens of the imperial court.

The lesson from Vienna, then, is this: Learn to regard the disregarded. Learn to listen for the voices of the uncelebrated and overlooked. Leave your Euros in your wallet and your preconceptions at the tourist booth.

If you are a traveller, hop on a tram, and then another tram, and then a bus, with the help of no fewer than nine ordinary citizens (none of whom speak English, because they have no interest in persuading you to enter their polished pavilions). Eat a plain, boiled sausage in an unimpressive café run by people working thankless jobs. Say “danke” when you think of it, and watch their smiles emerge. Find your music among these people. Skip the wigs and apple strudel.

And if you are at home, working at your own thankless job as ordinary people do, find your music where you are as well. Make it yourself if you must, in empty places devoid of applause; or find it accidentally, in the voices of children at play. They sing, you know, without even realizing it.

Don’t worry about names. They are meaningless. And when you think about yourself, and how you will one day be remembered, remember the wrought iron and ivy, the weathering of time, and the harmony of living and once-living things.

Vienna, I did not need to go to Austria to find you; your truer spirit is everywhere that people live and die and sing their simple, unassuming songs. Stop chasing after tourists and their Culture-seeking wallets; we like you better the way you would have been without us.

Mozart has his historical significance, to be sure, but your city-for-profit has reduced him to catchy jingles cranked out of shiny music boxes. So do the noble thing, Vienna, and forsake history for a moment. Put away your teapot, and go and find yourself!

*Afterword: Two weeks later, from the comfort of my living room, I had the liberty of googling Julius Egghard, only to find that he was neither humble nor obscure in his time, and that he retains enough significance to be forever memorialized in the sacred annals of Wikipedia and YouTube.  Oops.