The Habsburg Cafe by Andrew Riemer Page B
Authors: Andrew Riemer
Tags: Biography/Autobiography
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Austrians, represents a reconciliation of the two most important and influential territories of this Empire. If a gypsy may become a baron, even if only on theoperetta stage, Austrians and Hungarians, Bohemians and Slovaks, Serbs and Croats may also live peacefully under the aegis of the double-headed eagle.
In these entertainments the impossible idealism of this worldâan idealism that probably no-one took seriously by 1914âwas given a spurious validity. Their titles reveal all. The Hungarian Emmerich Kalman, composer of a series of phenomenally successful Viennese operettas, seems to have had a particular gift for finding subjects and titles to promote that dream. One of his operettas, still in the repertoire of companies all over the world is usually known in English as
The Gypsy Princess
. The German title,
Die Csardasfürstin
, yoking together the
csardas
, the most popular of Hungarian dances, with an exalted rank of the Austro-Hungarian nobility, is particularly eloquent, speaking of those pious fantasies that these trivial entertainments embody.
Here at least the fond hope of the Habsburgs, that they could somehow forge a harmonious supranational community out of people who had in certain instances been enemies for a thousand years or more, received a tiny fragment of confirmation. Operetta became an astonishingly popular form of entertainment in almost every one of the Habsburg lands. In the theatre, provisionally and briefly, a Hungarian or a Ruthenian could agree with the implicit assumption that under the benevolent dispensation of the Father-Emperor (who could make barons out of gypsies) this was the best of all possible worlds. Outside the theatre, though, the fiction was much harder to maintain. As I stand in front of the Volksoper, waiting for the traffic lights to change, I begin to wonder whether operettas are still being performed in Zagreb and Sarajevo, cities where the old hatreds of this world have been given once more a new lease of life.
T HE L AST B ANANA
A tram rattling through the grey streets of the real Vienna, away from the theme park, the kitsch, the sentimental fantasies, takes you to the edge of the Wienerwald, the Vienna Woods, site of another set of nostalgic dreams. The woods begin at Grinzing, nowadays no more than a suburb of the metropolis, its houses displaying plaques commemorating those famous citizens of Vienna who lived along these twisting lanes. A hundred years ago Grinzing was a village surrounded by the vineyards that supplied the vine-covered taverns which purvey the local vintage throughout the late summer and the long autumn of this part of the world. In the gaps between the villas of the rich and the famous you may glimpse vine-covered hills, heavy with yet-to-be-harvested grapes.
The taverns come to life late in the day. Throughout the balmy nights of late summer, and under the chilly skies of autumn, the people of Vienna drink, eat, sing and dance, surrounded by carefully contrived rusticity. The good life, pursued so assiduously amidst the imperial grandeur of the inner city, here takes on another colouration, a fantasy of the simple rural life, its joys and its wine, idylls of well-being and companionshipâin other words, wine, women and song, and tales from the Vienna Woods. The celebration of new wine and rustic simplicity is a profoundly characteristic Viennese pursuit. No other metropolis has striven so hard as this city to evolve a fantasy of rural life amidst the marble and granite of imperial pomp. Vienna constantly conjures up images of the countryside, even in the heart of the inner city. At one corner of the great irregularly shaped space around the cathedral, an ancient piece of wood preserved behind shatter-proof glass displays hundreds of embedded rusty nails, which had been driven into the living tree by shepherds and countryfolk to commemorate their visit to the imperial city.
Nowhere else is this sentimental amalgam of city and
In these entertainments the impossible idealism of this worldâan idealism that probably no-one took seriously by 1914âwas given a spurious validity. Their titles reveal all. The Hungarian Emmerich Kalman, composer of a series of phenomenally successful Viennese operettas, seems to have had a particular gift for finding subjects and titles to promote that dream. One of his operettas, still in the repertoire of companies all over the world is usually known in English as
The Gypsy Princess
. The German title,
Die Csardasfürstin
, yoking together the
csardas
, the most popular of Hungarian dances, with an exalted rank of the Austro-Hungarian nobility, is particularly eloquent, speaking of those pious fantasies that these trivial entertainments embody.
Here at least the fond hope of the Habsburgs, that they could somehow forge a harmonious supranational community out of people who had in certain instances been enemies for a thousand years or more, received a tiny fragment of confirmation. Operetta became an astonishingly popular form of entertainment in almost every one of the Habsburg lands. In the theatre, provisionally and briefly, a Hungarian or a Ruthenian could agree with the implicit assumption that under the benevolent dispensation of the Father-Emperor (who could make barons out of gypsies) this was the best of all possible worlds. Outside the theatre, though, the fiction was much harder to maintain. As I stand in front of the Volksoper, waiting for the traffic lights to change, I begin to wonder whether operettas are still being performed in Zagreb and Sarajevo, cities where the old hatreds of this world have been given once more a new lease of life.
T HE L AST B ANANA
A tram rattling through the grey streets of the real Vienna, away from the theme park, the kitsch, the sentimental fantasies, takes you to the edge of the Wienerwald, the Vienna Woods, site of another set of nostalgic dreams. The woods begin at Grinzing, nowadays no more than a suburb of the metropolis, its houses displaying plaques commemorating those famous citizens of Vienna who lived along these twisting lanes. A hundred years ago Grinzing was a village surrounded by the vineyards that supplied the vine-covered taverns which purvey the local vintage throughout the late summer and the long autumn of this part of the world. In the gaps between the villas of the rich and the famous you may glimpse vine-covered hills, heavy with yet-to-be-harvested grapes.
The taverns come to life late in the day. Throughout the balmy nights of late summer, and under the chilly skies of autumn, the people of Vienna drink, eat, sing and dance, surrounded by carefully contrived rusticity. The good life, pursued so assiduously amidst the imperial grandeur of the inner city, here takes on another colouration, a fantasy of the simple rural life, its joys and its wine, idylls of well-being and companionshipâin other words, wine, women and song, and tales from the Vienna Woods. The celebration of new wine and rustic simplicity is a profoundly characteristic Viennese pursuit. No other metropolis has striven so hard as this city to evolve a fantasy of rural life amidst the marble and granite of imperial pomp. Vienna constantly conjures up images of the countryside, even in the heart of the inner city. At one corner of the great irregularly shaped space around the cathedral, an ancient piece of wood preserved behind shatter-proof glass displays hundreds of embedded rusty nails, which had been driven into the living tree by shepherds and countryfolk to commemorate their visit to the imperial city.
Nowhere else is this sentimental amalgam of city and
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