December in Vienna: On Music, Memory and the Basilisk
As with all places that I visit, I soon find my fantasy narrow street (the one where poor Schumann lived, and where, in 1212, they found the basilisk, which could kill with a look, biding its time in a well beneath an ordinary house), my fantasy apartment building, local coffee shop, small restaurant, second hand book shop and so on.
...Soon this is extended to the relationships I shall have with figures who cross my path: the man with the coat as well-cut as his manners, the woman writing in a café, the friendly couple in the music shop.
...But I feel at home, gazing out on an alley through curtains that have been cut instead of hemmed and appear to have been fraying since the war, and surrounded by layers of ancient posters through which door knobs have torn their way out of the old paper.
...This was an opera I first heard in East Berlin when I was twenty and to go there through checkpoints bristling with dogs, guns, bored, cold soldiers, concrete, anti tank girders, mines and mutual suspicion, through unlit streets and thirty year-old war damage, was a journey in itself.
...The door opened and there was the Gothic nave transformed into a place of soft and shifting shadows of colour from a lantern in the main door, the golden sunburst at highest point of the altar glittering in candle light, the side aisles in darkness and from the distant choir, one of the choruses of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio being rehearsed for Christmas Eve.
...I stood for a while, invisible, lit a candle for my mother and my nephew, heard the conductor stop and start his musicians, as conductors must have done a thousand times, as they aimed for perfection on the day, and, finally, left.
...Soon this is extended to the relationships I shall have with figures who cross my path: the man with the coat as well-cut as his manners, the woman writing in a café, the friendly couple in the music shop.
...But I feel at home, gazing out on an alley through curtains that have been cut instead of hemmed and appear to have been fraying since the war, and surrounded by layers of ancient posters through which door knobs have torn their way out of the old paper.
...This was an opera I first heard in East Berlin when I was twenty and to go there through checkpoints bristling with dogs, guns, bored, cold soldiers, concrete, anti tank girders, mines and mutual suspicion, through unlit streets and thirty year-old war damage, was a journey in itself.
...The door opened and there was the Gothic nave transformed into a place of soft and shifting shadows of colour from a lantern in the main door, the golden sunburst at highest point of the altar glittering in candle light, the side aisles in darkness and from the distant choir, one of the choruses of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio being rehearsed for Christmas Eve.
...I stood for a while, invisible, lit a candle for my mother and my nephew, heard the conductor stop and start his musicians, as conductors must have done a thousand times, as they aimed for perfection on the day, and, finally, left.
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