The Duncan Coat
Not long before we left Chicago, Margaret Sloan gave me a Harris Tweed blazer that had belonged to Robert Duncan. She had been keeping it for years, since the time Duncan had passed away in 1988. Larry Casalino, her husband, had been Duncan’s physician (& Jess’s too); but the jacket didn’t quite fit Larry right. When Margaret & Larry moved into their new pad — in the old Montgomery Ward warehouse on the Chicago River — she rediscovered it & insisted I have it, talismanically, & that I take it to Vienna, where she had lived for a time as a girl. We both felt — implicitly — that the jacket should be taken to appropriate cultural locations, especially to the Viennese coffeehouses. Before leaving Margaret & Larry’s place, Larry mentioned that the jacket no longer smelled like Duncan, but I was pleased that it had its own distinctive wooly odor. I wear it shamanically, of course. I clothe my poetic self in it the way Paul enjoined the Galatians to clothe themselves in Christ. Pentecostally, that is.
Anyways, it’s been too cold to wear the jacket. After we returned from Venice, a foot of snow was dumped on Vienna; the world remained frost-driven until a thaw a week ago, when the temperatures soared, everything melted & became muddy, & the souls of the people sang glorious cantatas to the Lord Sun. Emerging into the new world, I wore the jacket.
We walked on Sunday afternoon to Türkenschantz Park, an Art Nouveau park in the center of the 18th District, where we live. This is one of the loveliest parks in any city I’ve ever been to, with beautiful curving paths, Jugendstil benches everywhere, & a terrific — and usually mobbed — Spielplatz. That Sunday, in Duncan’s jacket I made praises to the sun & to the melting snow. It’s a little small in the shoulders for me; & my steady diet of cream & butter has not made it any easier to pinch the jacket shut. But Duncan wouldn’t mind, would he? I mean, he’s taking a walk in park in Vienna on Sunday, after all. Weather-permitting, the jacket should be getting more exposure, more ceremonial uses, when we head down to Budapest next week. But for now, a portrait of the poet garbed in Duncan, absorbing the light of a very late winter sun.
Portrait of the Artist as Robert Duncan
• • •
Music
It’s hard to convey what it’s like to be here as a fan of classical music. Sure, there’s plenty of other interesting stuff that comes through town (though Britney Spears just cancelled her upcoming concert mysteriously), and that exists here natively; but the musical lifeblood is classical, orchestral music. Rather than draw a misleading or inaccurate analogy (say, Vienna is to classical music as Chicago is to architecture), let me just explain some geography:
Vienna has two full-time opera companies — the Staatsoper & the Volksoper — performing operas every night for ten months of the year. Add to this a full-time Chamber Opera, specializing in early opera & opera buffa, as well as several other less regularly performing troupes. Everyday at the side entrance to the Staatsoper, people wait in line to buy Stehplätze — standing-room seats — which go on sale an hour before the opera starts. They wait all day long, sometimes even through part of the night before. One of the jokes of the architect of the Staatsoper was to put the Stehplätze in the most acoustically perfect location in the building; these places (you stand in a row in which you can lean on a cushioned railing), which cost a couple of EUROS, are just underneath the most expensive seats, which cost several hundred EUROS. If you are unemployed, you qualify for free tickets to the opera. You simply have to present your unemployment card to the ticket agent, who will give you a seat for the performance. Shitting you not.
Likewise, Vienna has two top-shelf Concert Halls, the venerated Musikverein (It means something like “Music Club,” but club in the old school, exclusive sense), which is the home of the Vienna Philharmonica, & the Konzerthaus, which is one of my favorite places to go hear music. Last summer, when we were briefly here for two weeks during a swelting heatwave, I stole away one evening to hear Ars Antiqua Austria perform the violin sonatas of Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber, a Bohemian-born composer who lived in Salzburg in the early 1700s. The concert was in the lovely Schubertsaal, the smallest of the three concert rooms at the Konzerthaus. It was one of the best concerts I’ve ever heard — Biber is like Hopkins on a fiddle: total, overexcessive, unabashed praise. I gloried in it. Last week, I saw a terrific concert of Jordi Savall’s Hesperion XXI, playing pan-Arabic music, in Jewish (Sephardic) Christian (Spanish), & Islamic modes. It was heavy. Savall is probably my favorite musician — certainly in a classical idiom. There was a Grateful Dead vibe among the performers, which included an Afghani ensemble with a tabla player, a sarod player, & two ud players, one from Morocco, the other from Israel, both of whom were nimbly mind-blowing. And just last night, I heard Quatuor Mosaïques performing two Schubert string quartets, including one written when Schubert was 16, & Mozart’s “Dissonance” quartet, which is maybe one of the very finest pieces of music I know. I don’t read music, I don’t really understand the sonata form very well (This is the archetypal kernel around which so much of Mozart’s music was composed), & I lack the musical vocabulary to describe this music very well. But I’ve been reading Maynard Solomon’s biography of Mozart, a birthday gift from Michael & Una I received before we left Chicago, which is incredibly helpful, to me, because Solomon seeks to understand Mozart by fusing a musicologist’s knowledge with the imaginary language of Vienna’s other titanic figure, Freud. Here’s Solomon on the “Dissonance” quartet (K. 465):
The opening bars of the String Quartet… immediately plunge into the center of symbiotic terror. Here, Mozart has simulated the very process of creation, showing us the lineaments of chaos at the moment of its conversion into form. He has created an unprecedented network of disorientations, dissonances, rhythmic obscurities, and atmospheric dislocations. Without knowing precisely where we are, we know that we are in an alien universe. Laocoön is in the grip of the writhing serpents. Reality has been defamiliarized, the uncanny has supplanted the commonplace. In this introduction, Mozart has simulated the transitions from darkness to light, from the underworld to the surface, from the id to the ego. For, whatever our metaphoric frame, this music is ultimately about confinement and emergence. And now the Allegro theme emerges soaring and liberated, having already achieved release, transcended the fear of annihilation, freed itself from a burdensome confinement, shed the harmonic ambiguities, chromaticism, and pungent dissonances of the Adagio in favor of the simple brightness of an achieved C major. (Maynard Solomon, Mozart: A Life (HarperPerennial, 1995), pp. 200-2).
The “hidden” place in Vienna to hear classical music is at mass on Sundays. Many churches, especially those in the older, historic parts of town, sponsor huge choruses & musicians — many of whom are members in the professional groups in town — who perform the sacred music of the Church canon. So far, I’ve heard a couple of Haydn masses, Mozart’s “Coronation” Mass, & Schubert’s “Deutsche Messe,” which is stunning & compact in its scale. There’s something moving, to me, about hearing this music in the context of the mass, even with my patchy German, something a recording can’t simulate. Hearing the Credo after the mystery of the Gospel, for instance. The various affirmation of it.
• • •
Prague
After all our time living here in the lap of Zentraleuropa, we still had never been to Prague. Mention the name of this city to people who have been there & they will invariably intone, “You must go” (or, if you will, “ihr mußt hin gehen”). Enough to make you not necessarily want to go. But then you do, because you know it’s stupid not to go & because in a week you will be living in a city eight hours away rather than four. So. You go.
What can I say? Is it the most beautiful city in Central Europe? Yes. The most beautiful in Europe? This, I can’t say with authority but surely it must be in medal contention. Prague is like one’s fantasy of a European capital — epochally cubist, so that Baroque, medieval, & Art Nouveau features dovetail into each other, nicely preserved, prettier than you expect, & confusingly — thus pleasingly — navigable. Add to this a Bohemian density of speech & diet, a veneer of communist chic, & the advent of the new “New Europe,” & there you have a (er, this) tourist’s ideal city.
Austria is the obtrusion of Western Europe that presses into the ribcage of Eastern Europe. It’s a spectacularly affluent country, with one of the highest standards of living in the world. Everything here is expensive, especially — for us — now that the EURO is so strong & the dollar so weak. Six years ago, when we first went to Budapest, it was like going to Mexico from the US — everything was so cheap it was practically free. Last summer, prices had noticeably risen, in creeping expectation of the entry of Hungary into the European Union this May. Well, crossing over into the Czech Republic, there was really no difference in price or economy at all — at least not in the tourist heart of Prague. There’s just a different currency — for now. I imagine Prague will be the capital — perhaps with Budapest — of the “new” Eastern Europe, which will be, after all, simply Europe. Even in our mere forty-eight hours there, we could feel the money flowing through the economy, could see the tourists from all over the world visiting the cultural shrines. On the train, returning home, there was a man sitting near us. He was Czech. He wore winningly tasteful clothes — not glamorous, just very nice. He was very kempt, with a well-trimmed beard, nice reading glasses, but nothing obtrusive. He had an extremely slick laptop — one of those microthin units — & the most Dick Tracy object I’ve ever seen: a combination palm pilot-cellphone-internet browser-camera that he manipulated like an abacus. Looking at this man, I thought: he’s been making a lot of money in the New Europe. This guy is living all over the New Europe.
G. on the Charles Bridge, 7 a.m.
The most beautiful feature of Prague is the stately Vltava that flows through it, necessitating all of the lovely bridges that need to be traversed constantly, including the famous Charles Bridge, which we were staying at the foot of. This embodiment — enriverment — of the geography into the city, I think, is what gives Prague so much of its charm, makes it so pleasant to stroll through. (Wait a couple weeks to hear what I have to say about Budapest & the Danube). The secret of Vienna that most characterizes this city to me is its relation to the Danube. Glorified by Strauss in his waltz, the Danube itself does not exist in Vienna. There is no river that runs through the Old City; rather, in a feat of sanitation engineering, the river was moved to the northeast of the city a long time ago, allowing only the trench of a canal to cut through. There isn’t really even a memory of the Danube here: it’s lost. Vienna is a lovely city, but one can only imagine how its bridges would look were the city still embracing its native waters.
• • •
Anyways, let me now add to the chorus: if in Central Europe, you must go to Prague.
The next Postcard will come from Budapest. Auf Wiedersehen from Wien. But not before a herzliche Willkommen to the world’s newest O’Leary: Margaret Anne, born on March 22 in Richland, Washington to Debbie & John O’Leary (Debbie is Rebecca’s sister; John is related to me only as an inlaw — our shared name is simply a part of the world-domination plan of the clan O’Leary to completely absorb the clan Houze into its gene pool).
Welcome to this sweet old world, Maggie!