But, first, the last bits from Prague.
On Thursday, May 19, when I was still in Prague, after consulting maps big and little, I headed for the Villla Bertramka, where Mozart stayed when he was in Prague. One guidebook describes the neighborhood surrounding the Villa Bertramka as “dilapidated”. I am pleased to report that this description is now entirely obsolete. In fact, as you climb out of the Andel metro stop, the Smichov quarter displays all the traits of a few years of accelerated gentrification: a giant Nike store, a cluster of boutiques, and a mall with a branch of the French Carrefour supermarket. Unfortunately, though, despite gentrification and globalization, the Nike people didn’t speak English, as I discovered when I tried to figure out how to find the villa; worse, they had no idea where Mozartova street was.
Distracted momentarily by my never-ending search for saffron (which I finally found in Vienna) and my map woes, I headed into Carrefour. It was jammed with people, and looked like an upscale Czech WalMart. The lines at the checkout stands stretched partway to the back wall of the store, and outside, on the mall’s benches, elderly ladies were loading their carts into sturdy-looking canvas bags with looks of unmitigated, hard-won triumph, like army generals. No saffron packet was worth it, I figured, and went back outside. Finally, I noticed a small sign to Villa Bertramka.
The redeveloped part of Smichov ends abruptly at a major intersection a couple of blocks south of the mall, and the Villa Bertramka is nestled on top of a steep climb up a hill, on Mozartova street. A pizzeria at the bottom of the hill offers tourists nourishment for the climb up to the villa; returning from the hike to the villa, perhaps, you might instead choose a celebratory drink to celebrate not having to hike up again. Since it was only ten in the morning, however, they were closed as I walked past. At the top of the hill, I sat down in a small, leafy park just outside the gate to the villa, and watched guests arrive for a wedding, picking their way among the hubcap-sized stones lining the walkway up to the villa.
I crept past the wedding party, who were gathering in the garden, and went up the small staircase to the entrance to the residence, which chronicles Mozart’s time in Prague from 1787 to 1791. In the foyer of the museum, the admissions man was engrossed in an online chat session at his desk computer, but he paused to sell me a ticket.
Mozart first visited Prague on January 8, 1787. He soon immersed himself among the city’s nobility, and met Mr. and Mrs. Dusek, who lived at Villa Bertramka, which was, at that time, on the very outskirts of Prague, surrounded by vineyards. On this first visit, however, Mozart stayed in Mala Strana. On January 19, 1787, Mozart’s “Symphony in D Major” (K504), had its world premiere in the Nostitz Theatre in Prague, and was thereafter known as the “Prague Symphony”.
Mozart finished “Don Giovanni” at Villa Bertramka on October 29, 1787, and the opera then premiered at the Nostitz Theatre with Italian singers, according to Mozart’s instructions. Three weeks later, Mozart visited Strahov Monastery with Mrs. Dusek and played the organ; the chief organist hid in the pews and recorded the music he heard by hand, on sheets.
In 1789, Mozart made two trips to Prague; in 1791, he returned to Bertramka. On December 14th of that year, Mozart conducted the music for a mass at St. Nicholas’s Cathedral with one hundred and twenty musicians.
After its world premiere in Vienna, Mozart’s “Magic Flute” premiered in 1794 in Prague, where you could hear it in three different languages: German, Czech, and Italian.
The illustrations in the exhibit panels all had a green tinge to them, as though everything had been reproduced through a layer of Bibb lettuce. This, along with the green-wallpapered interiors of many of the rooms, gave me the impression that Mozart’s life in Prague was one long spring.
When Mozart conducted “The Marriage of Figaro” in Vienna, the Viennese gave the opera a cold reception. Prague, on the other hand, received the work (and the rest of Mozart’s oeuvre) with delight. No doubt Mozart loved Prague because the audiences welcomed him warmly, but there was no real explanation of why, specifically, Prague esteemed Mozart and his works more than Vienna did. (The museum emphasizes that Prague loved the composer, but does not explain why.)
One panel offered this observation from the composer: “The passions, whether violent or not, must never be expressed to the point of disgust, and music must never offend the ear even in the most horrifying situation; rather, it must be pleasing and thus always remain music.”
In one room in Villa Bertramka sits a piano, about half the size of a baby grand, which Mozart used when he visited the Duseks. The room’s ceiling, exposed wooden beams, painted with scrolls, green vines, and flowers, gave the space a light, springlike atmosphere.
In the last room, next to a window that looked out on the terrace walkway, and, below, the garden, an elevated platform displayed another pianoforte Mozart used while at Bertramka. This “double-manual” harpsichord was built by Grabner the Elder in Dresden, in 1722. Mozart played it in 1787 at the Nostitz Theatre, in Prague. The keyboard of this instrument looked only as long as my arm; the instrument was lovely, but seemed a bit distorted to a modern eye, as though it had been squeezed and narrowed. The keyboard part was so small that it could have fit under the hood of a VW Beetle, but the strings section seemed to stretch at least six feet long.
While the museum exhibits offer little detail about how close Mozart’s relationship was with the Duseks, there’s one example that illustrates this completely: after Mozart died, the Duseks took charge of educating and raising the composer’s sons.
A narrow, sloping tunnel, lined with lighted glass display cases, leads you out of the residential rooms of Bertramka, to a final room, where the double-manual harpsichord sits. In the case that most caught my eye was a square-shaped porcelain object (the size of a small Whitman’s chocolates sampler), with a tiny telescope poking out: a combination candy-box-and-theatre-glass, which Mozart gave to Mrs. Dusek. The box is beautifully decorated, with a background the color of gingko leaves and an engraved thin brass ring around the telescope’s eyepiece. On the lid of the box, in miniature, is an illustration of playing cards, a map, and a sheet marked “Sonata”, with the first few bars of music.
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And then: “heuriger”.
Last Thursday (a holiday, here, in Austria), we went to the Stift Gottweig and met the Langes. Mrs. Lange, who was born abroad, but has an American accent, gave us a tour of the monastery, which sits on a small mountain outside of Mautern. Mr. Lange, a tall, distinguished-looking man, combating the sun via a hat, glasses, and a sportcoat, had heard the tour so many times that he waited in the monastery’s new restaurant while we visited the grounds. Mrs. Lange, with her gray curls and confiding way, took us to the main chapel, first. As a tour guide, she seemed like an instant friend who was letting you in on all the secrets and the really significant aspects of Gottweig. She has given tours in German and English at Gottweig to U.N. delegates, heads of state, and university students, and has no doubt charmed each of her listeners.
Gottweig is an ancient sacred place (the name itself connotes this), and traces of Celtic burials remain on it. Although its thirteenth-century foundations lie underneath centuries of construction, the chapel’s exterior remains unfinished, in parts, and some of its features, on closer inspection, turn out to be trompe l’oeil inventions. The clock, for example, is painted on, with its hands positioned eternally at about ten minutes to two o’clock.
“For a while,” Mrs. Lange mused, “there weren’t even any hands painted on, while they were restoring it.”
The church conceals a smaller chapel beneath the altar; two staircases on either side of the altar run down to it. Because it was (and still is) primarily a monk’s church, the main altar at Gottweig differs from other Austrian churches of this era and has four rows of seats on each side, where the monks are seated during mass. Below, in the smaller chapel that conceals the crypt, below it, is an unusual crucifix, which Mrs. Lange pointed out, through the bars to the chapel. On the right side of the figure of Christ, below the last rib, there is a small box; Mrs. Lange speculated that monks would write down the petitioners’ requests on slips of paper, and insert the paper behind the door in the figure’s chest. This statue’s bizarre combination of the practical and the symbolic. baffled me
“It’s the Christian equivalent of the Wailing Wall, in your part of the world, no?” she smiled.
Next to the small chapel lies the baptismal chapel, which, as Mrs. Lange noted, a monk’s church really shouldn’t have. “After all,” she said, her eyes twinkling, “there shouldn’t be any cause for baptism in a monastery.” When Gottweig became the seat of the dozens of parishes surrounding it, however, the baptismal font was constructed.
Across the circular courtyard from the church, the royal residential quarters stretch out in two stories. (Like all monasteries, Gottweig was required to have apartments constructed for royal visitors, originating with the Hapsburgs.) Inside, an immense marble staircase, with two flights at ninety-degree angles to each other, dominates the entrance. An eighteenth-century ceiling fresco by Paul Truger features the monarch at the center as a kind of sun god in his chariot; frankly, the monarch bears no resemblance to a god, and looks instead like a grumpy George Washington perched precariously on some clouds. The monarch, resplendent in gold and white light, shields the heavens from the demons at one side of the fresco, whose curly dark tails and horns don’t really look all that threatening. One of the most dazzling things about this fresco is the angels’ wings, some of which have blue eyes painted on them, so that the angels look phenomenal and truly otherworldly, rather than like impotent cherubs.
The fresco took only forty-eight days to complete, and Truger’s contract for the artwork stipulated that he be paid, in part, in local wines–but he designated the acceptable vintages. One of the other remarkable things about the fresco, aside from the fact that it was completed in such a relatively short time by one artist and two assistants (whom he also chose, something he did for no other work of his), is how it makes the ceiling appear to curve, at the edges. Although the wall meets the ceiling at a regular ninety-degree angle, Truger’s keen use of lines of perspective in columns at the edge of the fresco turn the ceiling into a dome worthy of a cathedral.
In the royal apartments off the main hallways, on the second floor, Mrs. Lange pointed out the tall porcelain stove in the corner of each room. They look more like giant Limoges coffee pots than stoves, with their ornate curls and decorated curved edges. But, Mrs. Lange said, if your stove was only white with gold decoration, it meant that you were really just a minor noble. (The stove in one of the blue rooms, in which Napoleon stayed, is turquoise blue.)
In a small green-wallpapered apartment attached to a larger room, down the hallway, there were eighteenth- and nineteenth-century paintings of all kinds of waterfowl and water emblems. For years, Mrs. Lange said, when she gave tours, she called this room the bathroom, referring to all the water references. One time, however, she gave a tour to American astronauts, including Buzz Aldrin. (The Russian cosmonauts, she noted, were in another group.) When they got to this room, and she gave her explanation, Aldrin looked down at the floor critically, and snorted.
“Lady,” he said, “this ain’t a bathroom. This is the powder room!” The astronaut was right. In the eighteenth century and earlier, people used powders more copiously than water and soap to ward off odors. If they had really used water, Aldrin reasoned, the floor would show it, and be warped or rotted. Instead, the inlaid sun design with dark woods was in pristine condition.
We went on to a room covered with tapestries in shades of olive green. This was the ladies reception room; the men’s smoking room lay just ahead of it. (After royal dinners during the Hapsburg era, the groups would adjourn for discussion, Mrs. Lange noted. “The men always ‘discuss’ and when the women ‘discuss,’ it’s called ‘gossip’,” she noted with an ironic grin.) The tapestries showed wear, particularly at the same level on all of them. Somehow, the Russians occupied these apartments immediately after the end of World War II, Mrs. Lange pointed out, and chose this room for target practice.
“They would sit around this room and try to hit the center of the scenes,” she said. “As you can see, their aim wasn’t very good.” The Russians also drank up most of the liquor they could find–not only at Gottweig, but elsewhere; in some cases, some drank some near-lethal and completely lethal stuff, as Viktor noted, and then blamed the village residents when the concoctions killed some of the soldiers unlucky enough to drink them.
A smaller tapestry in the room, unharmed, was more valuable than the vast, bullet-marked ones covering the wall; Mrs. Lange showed us where it was hanging, to the side of the doorway into the next room. The narrow tapestry, in a myriad of reds, was embroidered rather than woven, and was thus more valuable. It was actually two long strips with an almost indiscernible separation. The sixteenth-century (I think) tapestry illustrated scenes from a Flemish market, with shopkeepers positioned behind their wooden-roofed stands, where their goods (candles, boxes, vegetables) seemed to be so new they glowed. My favorite section of the tapestry features a dollmaker’s stand: behind her dolls, attired in different white costumes, the dollmaker wears a kind, slightly mischievous smile. Her eyes look to the left, as though someone from that direction has just told her a marvelous joke.
About an hour and a half later, we finally came downstairs and found Mr. Lange sitting on a cushion outside the monastery’s new restaurant, rescued him from his seat, and spirited him off to a heuriger, a small, usually family-run restaurant that is only open a few times during the year, and features the proprietor’s own wines.
We settled at a table and benches; it was late afternoon, and most of the twenty or so outdoor tables were occupied by groups of friends, old and young, enjoying white wines in the small garden, under the trees. We ordered wines (or, rather, my husband’s aunt and uncle ordered wines for us) and plates of bread, meat, and cheese. My husband and I split one the size of a hubcap, which was outfitted with circles of dark sausage, salami, slices of ham, roast pork, and slices and wedges of all sorts of cheese. In the middle, was a small pile of freshly-grated horseradish, along with mustards, and soft cheese spreads. We passed around baskets of white, salty, circular rolls, cheese rolls, dark bread, and nut bread.
Sitting in a heuriger for an evening, sipping half a dozen different kinds of white wine, convinces you that the Austrians invented the axiom, “Eat, drink, and be merry!”
