Dreaming of a Yoga Mat

The intermittent search finally ended. There are no easy ways to find yoga mats to buy in Vienna, and the towel I've been using on the wooden floor was a drastic last measure. An angel led me on a walk to a serendipitous encounter, a sign for the Sivananda Yoga Center, pointing the way through a courtyard, up a funky elevator, and into the friendly shop. Behold, an array of colorful yoga mats, including saffron-colored biologic ones that decompose. Now I have a way to balance indulgences, and will be embellishing my asanas with the powerful, overtone-laden throat singing of my friend Gary Hassay (soon to be released for public consumption). I share with you my new teal-colored mat relaxing and ready for action, on the beautiful wood floors in the apartment here.

Jon Rose as a Drunken Sailor

For the encore of the assorted musicians assembled to perform with him yesterday evening at Porgy & Bess, the inimitable Jon Rose turned what had been a respectful, ambient-oriented, meditative semi-large group improvisation into a noise fest. Slamming the back of his violin into the monitor to generate feedback (at which point I retreated from the second row to the back row), he launched into a rowdy and spontaneous rendition Ye Olde English Sea Shanty, “What Do You Do With a Drunken Sailor,” with gusto and perfect intonation---he was far from drunk!

After many years of corresponding via email and post, I finally met the Slovakian journalist, philosopher of art, sound artist, and producer---might as well say Renaissance Man---Jozef Cseres. We convened for a late morning face-to-face at the Café Prückel, both sleep-deprived, where he he handed me two relatively rare recordings. “The Genetic Tendency in Violin Music,” on his own esoteric label, HEyeRMEarS, has Jon Rose playing the Ten-String Double Violin of Dr. Johannes Rosenberg. This endeavor is one where it’s impossible to ascertain where the truth ends and fantasy begins---a mind game with Siamese twins. The second recording, of works by Evgeny Irshai, a Russian composer now living in the Slovak Republic, is saturated with music that, to my ears, carries the essence of Russia (he trained at the St. Petersburg Conservatory), modified by a wicked sense of humor that transports one to an entirely separate reality.

The Rape of Lucretia

The renowned contemporary music ensemble based in Vienna, Klangforum Wien, along with eight singers, gave a spectacular concert performance of Benjamin Britten’s first chamber opera at the Wiener Konzerthaus tonight. In The Rape of Lucretia, Britten’s skilled, economical orchestration elicits a vast spectrum of colors, ranging from the most intimate sonorities from the strings and harp, to a full-fledged fusillade when necessary---like the suicide of Lucretia, who is overcome with shame.

The opera functions as a parable, a reflection that mankind invariably destroys virtue and beauty. The opera Britten had a knack for selecting gifted librettists. Ronald Duncan based his libretto, in verse form, on the play, “Le viol de Lucrèce” by André Obey. Here are some quotes of lines that I found especially striking:
“Home is what man leaves to seek. What is home but women?”

“Oh Christ heal our blindness which we mistake for sight,
And show us your day for ours is endless night.”

“So will my pretty vase enclose
The sun’s extravagance
which is the rose.”

Rudolf Steiner / "Die Loa"

Tonight I had the privilege of hearing the Rudolf Steiner-Schule Wien-Mauer spring concert, with orchestra and enormous chorus, at the school on the outskirts of Vienna that Yvonne attends as an exchange student. An up-and-coming specialist on the altblockflöte (aka recorder), Matthias Knopp, took center stage in Telemann’s Concerto in C Major, for recorder, string quartet, and basso continuo. Joseph Haydn’s Te Deum, written for the first Nicolaus Esterházy, was sung with great spirit by the sonorous choir of students, friends, alums, and teachers.

Yvonne is a tenth-grader at Highland Hall, a Steiner school in Northridge, CA. In America, Steiner schools are more commonly known as Waldorf schools. There are many such schools in the world, principally in Germany, Austria, and the U.S., grounded in the anthroposophic research and beliefs of the Austrian esoteric philosopher, Rudolf Steiner (that's him in the photograph). Todd Oppenheimer wrote about the unique blend of traditional and progressive methods used in these schools in The Atlantic: “Schooling the Imagination.”

Another serendipitous discovery last night, at a gallery featuring the work of the Salzburg-based artist Eva Kaiser, was her intensely energetic painting entitled ‘Die Loa.’ My opera-in-progress, Crescent City, (one of the projects I’m working on while living in Vienna), is populated by several loa (gods of the Voodoo pantheon), who inhabit the bodies of regular folk at the bequest of Marie Laveau. It’s not every day that you run across another artist in another discipline and another country who even knows about the loa. It was my favorite painting in the gallery. Alas, doesn’t exist on the artist's website.

Pink Hydrangeas on the Ring

Nothing like hydrangeas to make a slightly homesick Southerner pause during an energy walk along the Ringstrasse, to admire the clarity of the reflected light from the more unusual pink variety, just after the sudden afternoon shower (escaped by ducking into the mom and pop-style Café Sinfonia to partake of their luscious warm apfelstrudel). Luigi Nono's introspective string quartet, "Fragmente---Stille, An Diotima," has been my exquisite musical treat today, on a newly acquired WDR recording, performed by the Arditti String Quartet. There are some fifty fragments of Friedrich Hölderlin's poems festooning the notes of his score, meant for the performers only - a technique I first encountered with Erik Satie's piano works, and later observed in original manuscripts of Charles Mingus at theLibrary of Congress, where the inscriptions were personal messages to his players.

Laundromats and Schönberg

My thoughtful artist-landlord installed a washing machine in the apartment prior to our arrival. However, due to various complications I wasn’t able to use it until now, three weeks after moving in. I’ve been searching everywhere for a Waschsalon (laundromat), on the internet, in the streets, in the yellow pages; imploring people if they knew of one. Evidently even the good citizens of Vienna find it difficult to locate laundromats. Low and behold, on a stroll last night, in perfectly delicious cool weather, I decided not to return to my apartment after sampling the galleries in the inner city, but to walk right past it in a quest to discover what the opposite direction might turn up. (I’m usually headed toward the alte Stadt (the old inner city). Lo and behold, practically around the corner, a veritable army of washing machines, a dry cleaning operation, and an offer to do it all for you if you can’t be bothered to do it yourself. But the little home washing machine makes all manner of rough, gruff sounds, with the clothes magically emerging in a nearly dry state. So I asked myself, what would John Cage do? (My guess: his own).

In the same way, before locating it on the map, I unexpectedly encountered the Arnold Schönberg Center---one of the top ten places on my list. Lisztstraße (sorry, couldn't resist) intersects with my street, Traungasse. Out for a walk last week, I simply had to walk on this street named after Liszt, and suddenly there was the striking building, the Palais Fanto (housing the Schönberg Center), a disorienting reminder of New York's Flatiron Building. In her immensely engaging book, The Vienna Paradox: A Memoir, Marjorie Perloff writes about the Palais Fanto in Vienna, with gripping stories detailing its history---and her own, originating in Vienna and later in the U.S.

Banned in Vienna

As if there weren’t enough delectable distractions everywhere, The Metrokino, a few minutes from my apartment, has been screening historic Austrian films. I’ve seen two rarities that were shown in English: Dishonored, with Marlene Dietrich (I’ll return to this one in a subsequent post), and Jew Süss, banned in Vienna when it was released in 1934. Based on the novel of the same name, by Lion Feuchtwanger, it stars the actor Conrad Veidt (in photo; also find him fifteen years earlier in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) in the part of Joseph Süß Oppenheimer, the Finance Minister serving the Catholic Duke, Karl Alexander von Wüttemberg---a despotic drunkard. When the Duke meets Naomi, the beloved fifteen-year old daughter of Süß, he attempts to molest her. She escapes momentarily, only to plunge to her death from the rooftop in her haste to get away. Süß, now a broken man, schemes to cause the downfall of his former sponsor. He betrays the Duke’s planned coup d'etat, but before the Duke could have him arrested, the Duke dies of a sudden fit---a stroke or heart attack. Although Süß discovered that he was an illegitimate child and was not Jewish after all, he was noble-minded and responsible to his people. In the end, he was hung (for 'carnal relations' with a non-Jewish woman), and went to his death as a hero and a martyr.

I had read that this film was intended as a satire of the Nazis and their racism. In fact it gives the unsettling appearance, especially in the first thirty minutes, of an early Mel Brooks film, with the stark lighting (a la Young Frankenstein), the silences between the spoken lines, and various eccentricities of the characters. Both the book and the film were condemnations of anti-Semitism. As for the ban, some Viennese periodicals wrote of the film’s “offense to the entire Christian faith” as well as “blasphemy,” and requested the authorities to forbid the screening of the film. In response, the Vice-Chancellor, Starhemberg, actually issued a prohibition. The British, who made the film, were unable to convince the Austrians to abolish this resolution. The Germans considered the Austrian reaction to be exemplary.