Vienna was boring in a good way. Predictable like the end of a romantic comedy, you know what is going to happen and you couldn’t be happier. In Vienna, you feel the comforting joy of the Christmas holidays all year round. Visiting Schönbrunn, you imagine yourself walking in the footsteps of Romy Schneider as Sissi, conquering Franz’s heart with her bold purity and tireless good nature. Passing the Wiener Musikverein, the Blue Danube and Radetzky March start playing in your head, followed by New Year’s fireworks.
For anyone not familiar with this tradition, the Vienna New Year’s Concert is broadcast worldwide every year on New Year’s Day, live from the Musikverein’s Golden Hall. For the occasion, the hall is dressed in a sea of flowers, beautifully setting off the gilded walls, painted plafonds and golden caryatids. The audience consists of film stars, prime ministers, royalty and basically anyone fancy enough to wear a Rolex. Once the Wiener Philharmoniker start playing their Strauss waltzes, intertwined with ballet scenes recorded at palaces in the area, the fairytale is complete. For two hours, the world is a peaceful place, where everyone is kind and sweet to each other and nothing cruel could ever take place. Maybe this is how it improved morale at the front lines, when the tradition was initiated in 1939 by the Nazis for this very purpose.
I decided to try and go to a concert in the Golden Hall, not for the music, but for the hall. Pouring wet, I arrived ten minutes before the concert would start. I quickly bought my cheap standing ticket and tried to dry up a bit in the ladies’ room. When I got out and went to find my place, my shoes still soaking, a man in uniform approached me. “Stehplatz?” he said with a thunder in his voice that made me wonder which crime I had committed. “Y-yes,” I stumbled. He ripped a piece of carton from a pack of cards and pushed it in my hands. I looked at it. Was this a ticket for a seat? A real seat?
As I entered the hall, I squeaked with joy, my earliest memories crashing into my current reality. I was as happy as a child in a sweetshop. No, I was happier. Still looking as if I had just entered Wonderland itself, I found my seat, fourth row from the front, slightly left of the middle. My first rank chair in the concert hall of my dreams was real. Right of me sat a lady who was clearly experienced and had probably paid six times as much as I had. Her dressing suited the place much better than mine. Left of me sat a young expat who had been as lucky as me, though he looked a bit surprised at my state of ecstasy.
And then we waited. The last people were entering the hall. The seats in front of us were suddenly occupied by two very tall people, blocking our view. I was bummed and yet determined to let nothing get in the way of my feeling in heaven, not even something as annoying as this. The lady next to me, however, was not going to take this. She had noticed the people were not in their right seats either. Decidedly, she pointed them in the correct direction. Then, rolling her eyes, she gave me this look of “thank God I saved us that disaster”. I told her that nothing was going to ruin my bliss. Inside, I sighed a little sigh of relief. Two rather small people now took their places in front of us and the concert could begin.
Musicians entered the stage, followed by our conductor for the evening. A young Swiss, dark, handsome and sexless. He did the unforgivable. Breaking the magic silence of expectation, he started explaining the music he was going to play. I was aghast. If the music doesn’t touch you, it’s not worth it. Period. I wasn’t here for a musical lecture, I was here to be thrilled to my bones. If my conductor didn’t feel confident he would be able to do that, he shouldn’t be here.
The music started. I had not bought a programme to save a bit of money, yet I was curious after the background information. By now though, my lady neighbour had adopted me. Endeared by my naive enthusiasm, she took care of me like I was a niece she had taken to the concert for some cultural education. And so she let me read from her programme, earnestly pointing out which parts to read next. She also addressed me at certain moments during the concert. “Very beautiful, isn’t it?” she would say, as if checking whether her pupil had understood the material in the right way. I just said “yes” and “I very much liked the Hebrew sounds in this cello concerto.”
In fact, I didn’t like the music very much, or rather, the execution of it. The programme was exciting enough. However, my talkative conductor directed the concert, as if he would be picking up his children from daycare straight after work. No sex, no danger. I wished he would have listened to the late Austrian conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt who said that “when you seek beauty, you have to forget security, and you have to go to the rim of catastrophe.”
Then there was the cello soloist, an equally handsome Frenchman who played the sexy/depressed card. The concerto being full of war references, this might have served the music indeed, were it not for the fact that he was a very bad actor and mainly blowing his own horn. When he had a break in his solo, the orchestra playing, he cringed his face into a brooding look with small eyes and piercingly started looking around the orchestra and audience with this supposedly important expression. It was funny. I didn’t believe any of it.
That said, I had a great time. When the concert ended, I returned to the hotel, still in my happy bliss, already dreaming about the day I would come back for the New Year’s Concert.
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