Sitting On the Floor in Very Nice Rooms (or, Classical Music in Vienna)

a picture of the Vienna Symphony in the Konzerthaus, "illegally" captured by my Canadian friend

I made friends with a girl at a concert because we were both sitting on the floor. Also on the floor: a portly blond woman in a poodle skirt sitting in a straddle position, a dude who could've been either thirty or fifty, I don’t know, and an East Asian woman with a clear plastic purse.

The concert was the Vienna Symphony playing Schubert, Mahler, and some other guy at the Musikverein, Vienna’s Society of Music. They were performing in the (rather small) main hall, gilded with gold and decorated with columns shaped like angels holding lyres. The seats were red velvet, the refreshments were served in glass stemware and on porcelain plates, and it cost me two euro to check my black purse and my grey coat. I was wearing my (slightly smelly, dry cleaning is hard to come by while traveling so don’t judge) navy blazer. Very fancy. It does not sound like an event where you’d find this many people on the floor.

one of Brahms's manuscripts in the Leopold Museum

In Vienna, classical music is part of the fabric of the city. Symphony concerts—and the opera, choir and chamber concerts, and the ballet—aren’t just date-night luxuries or places for the wealthy to hobnob. Instead, they’re the Viennese equivalent of watching the Cowboys play every Sunday, or of going to the movie theater. Lots and lots of people go because they care about what they’re listening to and who’s playing. When I went to see Bruckner’s eighth symphony with a friend I met in Crete, many of the people around us were proudly by themselves, separated from other concertgoers by three or four or five seats. Some were reacting to the music, grimacing (it’s easy to be an armchair critic) or faux conducting with a limp hand, and some were still.

When my dad goes to watch a basketball game or a football game, he likes to sit high up in the stands, out of the crowds of fans, and watch in absolute silence. No talking, no distractions from his very high-brow, intellectual assessing of the game (or, as German-speakers might say, shport). Those solo concertgoers reminded me of my dad at one of my brother’s high school volleyball games. Locked in.   

Back to why I was sitting on the floor. Because music is so democratic in Vienna, you can find very cheap tickets to almost anything. I’m going to see Coppèlia tomorrow for five euro, I heard that Schubert and Mahler for ten euro, and I'm planning on seeing Sibelius’s violin concerto (paired with some Grieg, for irony, because remember I broke my wrist by his grave) for seven euro next week. The catch? I don't have a seat. This isn't true for all the concerts I’m going to in Vienna. My brother and I have actual seats for La Bohème. The guy from Crete (although he’s not from Crete, he’s from Canada) and I had seats when we saw Bruckner eight.

But the cheapest tickets are “standing” or “stehplatz” tickets, where you stand at the back of the theater behind the bourgeoisie in their cushy velvet seats and jostle for a place with a good view. If you don’t get there early enough to score a spot at the railing, you do what I did and just sit your ass down against the wall in the back to listen, wondering if the violas’ bows match (probably, they're professionals) or if the principal cellist is hot (probably not) or why the conductor takes such long pauses between movements (and you certainly don’t clap between movements, you might be a member of the proletariat but you’re not a plebeian).

the Grand Hall in the Musikverein

It’s like being in the student section. When you’re in the student section at a UNC basketball game, you’re shepherded into your seats by people wearing windbreakers and then you’re watched constantly by security guards who have their backs to the action. It wasn’t that extreme, but there was a woman pacing up and down the stehplatz area, making sure none of us snuck into an empty seat, scolding anyone who dared to take a picture of the orchestra.

What is it about Vienna and classical music? Why is there so much of it here? I told my new friend at the Mahler/Schubert concert (who was from Istanbul, ironically, in Vienna for her master’s degree) that I was in Vienna for a month, just for fun. She seemed perplexed. About five minutes later, I told her I’d been a violinist for many years, and she nodded. “Now it makes more sense why you picked Vienna,” she said.

Vienna was the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire for centuries, an empire that, at its largest, encompassed part or all of modern-day Serbia, Croatia, Slovakia, Romania, Poland, the Czech Republic, northern Italy, Ukraine, Bosnia, and, of course, Austria and Hungary. The empire’s ruling family, the Habsburgs, were so wealthy and large that they were linked by blood or marriage to practically every royal family in Europe. They were known for a few things: inbreeding (Google “the Habsburg jaw”), extreme wealth, and a general appreciation for the arts.

Franz Josef, the last great Habsburg emperor

Much like the Medicis in Florence, the Habsburgs used their wealth to patronize art in their empire, especially in their capital city, where they could enjoy it. They established academies and societies and built concert halls and opera houses. For three hundred years, Vienna was one of the best places in Europe for composers, musicians, and artists to establish themselves and their careers. Mozart is probably the most famous. He was Austrian (born in Salzburg), and spent the last ten years of his career in Vienna. Every year on the night of December 4, the anniversary of Mozart’s death at age thirty-five, his Requiem is performed in St. Stephen’s Cathedral. The Requiem is the funeral mass that Mozart was working on when he died. I’ll be honest, Mozart’s music is not my favorite.

But to only talk about Mozart is to simply scratch the surface of Viennese musical history. Haydn, Mozart’s contemporary, began his music career in Vienna as a choirboy at St. Stephen’s. Beethoven, despite being born in Bonn, Germany, lived here for thirty-five years, and Brahms for at least thirty. Schubert was born and died in Vienna. The two Johann Strausses, father and son, wrote hundreds of waltzes for the Viennese to dance to (including the Blue Danube waltz, you know it, Google it). A composer of much moodier and darker music, Richard Strauss (no relation), conducted the State Opera for five years. Liszt of piano literature fame spent his early years here, and Mahler, giant of twentieth-century music that he was, made a splash in Viennese erudite circles along with his wife Alma, plus he conducted the State Opera for ten years.

memorial to Mozart in the gardens of the Hofburg Palace

After the Austro-Hungarian Empire lost World War I and consequently fell apart, Vienna lost its status as one of Europe’s cultural capitals. But music remained and remains an indelible part of Viennese life, for the young and old, wealthy and broke, professional and student. Dancing to it, playing it, listening to it, in all forms and fashions. There's always somebody dashing through the metro station with a violin or a horn case. There are men in costume outside of the opera house trying to recruit you to see The Magic Flute later that day. So it feels only right to listen to Elgar or Tchaikovsky even as I do something as boring as buying tofu and dish soap at the grocery store. If you add the right soundtrack, anything feels dramatic and romantic. The Viennese know that better than anyone.

This is all the music I’ll be seeing performed while I’m in Vienna if you’d like to listen along with me.

Anton Bruckner: Symphony No. 8

Giacomo Puccini: La Bohème (three great songs from this are “Che gelida manina,” “Mi chiamano Mimi,” and “O soave fanciulla”)

Jean Sibelius: Violin Concerto in D Minor

Leo Délibes: Coppélia (try “Waltz of the Hours” or the famous Mazurka)

Gustav Mahler: Five Rückert Songs (aka, the “Rückert-Lieder”)

Franz Schubert: Entr’acte Nrs. 1-3 and Ballet Music No. 2 from the incidental music "Rosamunde, Princess of Cyprus"

Edvard Grieg: Peer Gynt Suite No. 1

Witold Lutosławski: Concerto for Orchestra