Wiener Blut

Dear Friends and Family,

I'm writing now from Vienna, Austria where I'm singing in the Opera, "Tales of Hoffmann." Actually, I'm not in Vienna, but in Klosterneuburg, which is a small town five miles North of Vienna. I'm staying with an older woman named Heidi. She lives alone in a large country house with two dogs named Shiro and Benny. Benny likes to play Frisbee and Shiro likes to try to eat my food.

Upon my acceptance of this job, my agent Sophie, who is based in Vienna, asked me if I would like to rent an apartment in Vienna or stay with her friend Heidi for free. I usually don't like living with strangers, but "free" is a nice price. The house is comfortable and the neighbourhood is affluent. Heidi is about 60+ years old. Her husband was a professional artist/ painter named Martin Esslinger and died about 10 years ago. Heidi has a son named Martin jr. (an electronic engineer), and a daughter named Anja (pronounced An-ya), who lives in Vienna and attends University. Anja had an accident two weeks ago when she was walking one of the dogs and stepped in an unseen pothole covered with foliage. She twisted and bruised her right ankle and has had to use crutches since. 'Poor girl.

I've been here since May 29th. It took me roughly a week to get over my jet lag and it rained that whole time. Now it's sunny and quite hot. The natural surroundings here are remarkably verdant compared to anything I've seen before. There are flowers everywhere and residents are experienced gardeners. It's popular for people to grow, if not vegetables, at least an herb garden in addition to various flowers, ivy and different species of trees and shrubbery. If one has a balcony or windowsill, one is obliged to grow a row of flowers thereon, especially ones which cascade. Lily ponds are also popular. Each day, on my way to rehearsal, I pass one particular house that ivy has overtaken, such that the colour of the outer walls and roof are indiscernible.

The "Stift," a large Church and Monastery from the Baroque period, is Klosterneuburg's big tourist attraction. Its characteristic shape includes two high-pointed, green copper turrets and a large basilica-type dome, including the shape of a crown at its apex; also, entirely, of green copper. The church's interior artwork rivals any cathedral pomp I've ever encountered. It is absolutely overpowering and moving. Every inch of it is painted, scrolled, sculpted or gilded. At my first visit, my hair stood on end and I swear that I rose two centimetres off the ground. The contributing artists and builders must really have loved God, (or were handsomely compensated).

Speaking of hair-raising experiences, I want to talk about my trip to Vienna yesterday to see the famous Leopold Museum. To get there, I take a ten-minute bus ride from Klosterneuburg to the Heiligenstadt station on the North of town. Then I take the U4 train to Spittelau station and transfer to the U2 where I arrive at the Volkstheater station. In this same place is the Maria Theresienplatz, home to the Natural History Museum and the Art History Museum. Across the street to the West are the Volksoper and the Volkstheater. Across the street to the South is the 'Museumsquartier,' where one may find the Leopold Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Kunsthalle – home of the Wiener Festwochen and other organizations. All of the Museumsquartier buildings are part of one larger edifice called the 'Messe Palast,' or, what was known previously as, the Emperor's Royal Stables. The whole thing takes up about fifteen of what I would consider, American Blocks.

At the center of the Palast is a large Courtyard full of approximately one hundred modern sculptures upon which young people are encouraged to sit, eat lunch, sunbathe, and surf on the free wireless Internet and hangout. There are several cafés with hundreds of tables where tourists lunch and waiters translate their orders from English, French and whatever else. There are some cool summer festivals here including the Festwochen, which I already mentioned (featuring, this year: Alfred Brendel, Barbara Bonney, Paul Badura-Skoda and others) and the Vienna Jazz Festival (featuring Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea and others).

Before arriving at the Leopold, I felt quite in my element; part of a "world clique," where everyone was just cool, relaxed and enjoyed the singularity of the day. I bought my museum pass for 9.5 € and proceeded to the first exhibit: works by Egon Schiele (1890-1918, pronounced 'Shee-leh'). As soon as I entered the gallery, I felt overwhelmed by his virtuosity. His style is so indelible and expressive. My favourite was a painting of his hometown of Tulln and of his home itself. Looking at the portrayal of that house, every small portion had a new character and colour. He used a mixture of techniques: knife, brush, water and finger to, not just depict each slat in the shutters; each flake of decaying mortar, but to tell a story about each square centimetre and how he felt about every piece in his own sublimely distorted manner. He had many nudes and a few stills of gnarled trees and the like. Everything spoke to me. I'm very much drawn to his style. I feel a connection from his colour choices and hard etched lines to my own way of singing – choosing sounds, emphasizing consonants, straightening or swelling tones, etc.

Tragically, Schiele died at age twenty-eight of the Spanish flu, as did about twenty thousand other Europeans at the time. During his twenties, he was imprisoned for employing underage girls to model for him and the contemporary local government considered his work "pornographic."

Another favourite of mine was a twenty-foot tall, black and white painting by Gustav Klimt called "Medezin," which, I understand, used to be a ceiling panel at the University of Vienna. I suppose you could look it up in a book or on the Internet, but you have to see it in person to believe it – breathtaking. It’s a verismo progression of human suffering, joy and death in this neo-illumination-style column of floating figures with a Medicine woman at the bottom holding a smoking mortar. I'm not doing it justice by trying to describe it. I wish everyone could come to see it.

In another exhibit of mostly renaissance paintings (Gainsborough, etc.), centered in the gallery, hung a large ring, ten metres in diameter and four metres off the ground. Along this ring were eight motors, spaced equally, and attached to their undersides were eight dress forms, each wearing a red dress. The skirt on each was so long that its hem touched the floor. Every five minutes the motors would spin the dress forms for 30 seconds so that the three metre dress skirts would swell up into these enormous red spheres and then fall back to the floor when the motors stopped.

My visit to the Leopold Museum was cut short by my having to return to Klosterneuburg for an afternoon rehearsal. However brief those few hours were, my experience there lifted me up to a new level of feeling, inner-peace, emotional energy and a host of other good feelings, all afternoon.



Links:

http://www.mqw.at/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria-Theresien-Platz

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/15/world/15prexy.html?ex=1308024000&en=26baaa15aabecaaf&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/14/world/middleeast/14iraq.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&fta=y

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/1130-09.htm