Vienna: Anne-Sophie Mutter; 9 May 2019

We picked Vienna, for this trip, in part for the grand hotel availability and also because it is feet away from the Musikverein concert hall which is a hive of outstanding classical music events.

When I was a boy of ten I heard live and up close a violin. It was played in a small elementary school auditorium. The player was a girl two years older than me. I loved the sound from the first note. A year later, I lived across the street from a public library. After I discovered they had a listening section where I could enjoy their classical recordings through their headphones, I spent as much of my free time there. I could tell you the exact pieces I listened to. I listened to them over and over. Each time, I noticed more details. Eventually, they became my agreeable friends. They brought enormous comfort, pleasure and satisfaction.  Classical music still does that for me.

Our first concert was the violinist, Anne-Sophie Mutter. The first time I hear her, thirty years ago, was on a car radio. I was rapt and enthralled enough that I pulled over and parked the car to be able to focus entirely on her. It was a thrill to hear her here.

The Musikverein was built in 1870. Vienna had an Emperor, Franz Joseph. A music club, formed in 1812, the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, asked him for permission to acquire land and funds. 1870 was the year in which the Emperor decided to pull down the medieval fortified wall that had encircled old Vienna for 500 years. He was aware of what urban renewal had recently done for Paris and Barcelona when the ancient crooked narrow streets were replaced with straight wide boulevards.  The medieval wall came down. In it's place was the elegant "Ringstrasse," ring road. Extra wide. With rows of trees. It became the place to be. The elite, the wealthy, the aristocrats races to build palaces their. Our hotel, the Imperial is one of those buildings. And the Musikverein, next door, is another.

The Musikverein creates an immediate impression. You cannot enter the grand hall and remain calm. It is splendid and gold leafed and hung with crystal chandeliers. Your eyes never rest, there is so much to see and it is all so gold. The architect spent eight years in Athens. If you have been to the Acropolis to see the Parthenon the you know the basis for the Musikverein's design aesthetic. Today, the Parthenon is a unadorned structure with many missing parts. In it's day, it was heavy laden inside and out with statues and brilliant surfaces. It's inner sanctum was a temple, a shrine, a sacred place. That describes the Musikverein's interior. It is quite over the top, but it's splendor impresses that you are in a special place.

Anne-Sophie Mutter is 56 years old, slender and blond. She always wears a gown without arms or straps. The wood of her Stradivarius rests directly on her bare shoulder. She is not a showman, which is to say, she does not smile, nor does she put on an extrovert show of movement for effect. Playing a violin concerto, particularly at her superior level, is a highly precise, athletic, technical feat. You could say, it is walking a tight rope without a net. I am not bothered, nor disappointed by her serious demeanor.

She was accompanied, in her Mozart program, by the Kammerorchester Wien-Berlin, which is an elite small group of players drawn from the Vienna Philharmonic and from the Berlin Philharmonic. The Kammerorchester is what they do in their time off.

The orchestra played a few pieces alone then were joined by soloist. They played Mozart's first symphony. He wrote it when he was eight years old. Mozart was a local composer in his day in Vienna. (So were Beethoven and Mahler and Schubert and Korngold.) Anne Sophie played Mozart's second and fifth violin concertos.

Her sound is easy on the ear. Often, she will play at whisper, so softly you could wonder if she would be heard by the back rows. But her touch, her way of pulling the bow across the string coupled with her magnificent Stradivari violin, (she owns two,) ensures her sound floats like a ray of golden light into every ear in every seat. After her last notes, the audience, which in Vienna, to me, seems reserved and a bit unsmiling, loved her. The applause would not stop. And finally she gave us her own smile.

An hour before the concert, I sat in our windowsill, looking across the road at the artist's entrance for the Musikverein, when she arrived. She was in casual clothes, maybe jeans. She had two men with her. One carried her garment bag. The other had her pair of small dogs. She gave them kisses then went inside to play.

Marlow and Wes
Vienna, 9 May 2019


Two of our concerts.


A handsome concert goer.


A Stradivari and a smile.


This is a photo from the Musikverein website. In person, the gold leaf, on every surface, shimmers and gleems.