The Glass Room

In the late summer of 2021, we took a long weekend trip through the midwestern United States: Milwaukee, over to Iowa and then back east to Chicago. We went on that vacation to get out of town after just being too long IN town for the middle part of 2021. We ended up unexpectedly falling in love with Milwaukee and got rewarded at the end of it by rekindling our love for Chicago with a couple of nights in one of our favorite cities that we probably don't visit often enough.

On the way from Cedar Rapids to Chicago, we stopped at Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House, one of two houses that Mies, who is generally acknowledged as one of the best architects of the 20th century, designed in his life. The Farnsworth House property is now open to the public under the guardianship of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. 

That stop in the Illinois countryside was intended to be the first of a two-part series in late 2021. Three months after that, we were supposed to have visited Mies' second (but earlier) house in Brno, Czechia, the incomparable (or so I assumed) Villa Tugendhat designed for the Tugendhat family between the two World Wars and which is also now open to the public for tours. We didn't go in 2021. COVID pushed our plans a year. But last December we did make it to Brno to complete our Mies doubleheader. Sometimes life makes you wait for the good stuff.

In my post about the Farnsworth House that I wrote about 18 months ago, I started with an account of the emotions of visiting a famous building that I'd admired for a long time and then went on to decry Mies' place in the canon of the greats of modern architecture. I'm going to do no such thing this time for two reasons: (1) I've already covered the emotional part and suffice it to say there was no less excitement or anticipation on our approach to the Villa Tugendhat than there was in Plano, IL in 2021; and (2) the Farnsworth House changed my opinion of Mies; I'm still not on board with him being at the very top of any sorts of lists out there but he has my respect.

The Farnsworth House put me in a very different state of mind for my visit to the Villa Tugendhat. I was very much looking forward to this one.

We actually got lucky with our trip to Villa Tugendhat.

When we finalized (before ultimately postponing) our trip to Vienna in 2021, Villa Tugendhat was one of the first agenda items I added to our itinerary even though it was in a completely different country than Vienna and it was historically off limits behind the Iron Curtain, the very real barrier set up by the Soviet Union after World War II to cut off eastern Europe from the rest of the world. The Iron Curtain turned out to be no barrier in 2022, as I suspect it would have been a similar non-barrier a year earlier. Brno is extremely accessible by train at about an hour's ride from Vienna's Hauptbanhof and the public transportation infrastructure within Brno itself was extremely easy and convenient to use.

But we definitely benefitted from the year's postponement in one very significant way. When we were finalizing the schedule for our trip in 2021, I hemmed and hawed so much with the date that when we nailed down our plans to get to Brno, all the English language tour slots of the Villa were sold out for the duration of our time in Vienna. A year later, I planned better and grabbed a slot as soon as tours for the month of December were added to the calendar. If we hadn't had to postpone the trip by a year, we wouldn't have visited the Villa Tugendhat at all.

Details: door handle, light switches, door stop.

When I committed to writing this post about the Villa Tugendhat, I considered consciously NOT writing a comparison piece between the two Mies-designed houses. It turned out to be virtually impossible to approach this post that way. We are dealing with two houses designed by the same world-famous architect for two wealthy patrons. There is no doubt that the average client would struggle to afford these luxury residences that were created deliberately for their owners as non-traditional living spaces.

Beyond that though, the circumstances surrounding the creation of the two buildings were extremely different. One was a weekend house that slept one in the middle of the country in the United States. The other was a primary residence for a family with two kids, a nanny and a houseful of servants in a city that was destined to be invaded and then freed and then kept hostage by its liberators in and around one of the worst events in human history. The design intent and siting and historical context are night and day.

They were also both very different commissions for the architect involved. The Farnsworth House was very much a side project for Mies (and maybe also for Edith Farnsworth) which he dabbled in while hoping he would have ultimate control over every detail (he didn't!). The commission involved a lot of fighting, a lot of dishonesty (particularly about the construction cost) and ultimately at least one lawsuit from both sides.

Not so with the Villa Tugendhat. The house was a wedding gift from Greta Tugendhat's parents who (it appears from walking through the house) spared no expense. Mies operated without restraint on this one, procuring the most luxurious materials from wherever he wanted. Sure, there were some attempts by Fritz Tugendhat to influence the design (notably the full height doors that Mies insisted on) but those objections soon disappeared when Mies threatened to walk. What is with these architects?

Bathroom (above) and bathroom detail (below).

Edith Farnsworth lived in her Mies van der Rohe-designed weekend house on and off for a little more than 20 years before she sold the place and moved to Italy full time in 1982. The Tugendhats lasted eight years after their house was finished in 1930. They didn't sell. They didn't find a responsible owner to take care of what they had created. They didn't take anything inside the house when they left. They fled. For their lives.

Both Fritz and Greta Tugendhat were Jewish. Admittedly non-practicing but they didn't figure (and they were probably correct) that a detail like that would amount to much in the eyes of the Nazis who took control of the Sudetenland portion of Czechoslovakia after the signature of the Munich Agreement in September 1938. They fled to Switzerland and then to Venezuela, abandoning their lives and their property and all connection they had to their pasts. They were probably, all things considered, very lucky they could do that, even as horrific as it might have been to have to leave everything behind and just go. Certainly, Josef and Josefine Eckstein were not as lucky, as we found out when we visited the Beethoven Pasqualithaus museum later in the week.

I think it would be crass to lament the fate of an architectural icon like the Villa Tugendhat following the departure of its owners, particularly considering what the house looks like today, which is very much a fully restored masterpiece. I've certainly been in famous houses that would struggle to live up to the Villa's current condition. So I won't do any lamenting here. But after the Tugendhats left Czechoslovakia, the place did have a bit of a patchwork history.

When the Nazis finally occupied Brno in a semi-permanent way, they moved into the Villa. Later, they turned it over to the Messerschmitt company (the one that made airplanes for the Nazis) where Willy Messerschmitt himself actually lived (Messerschmitt probably saved one of the house's marquee design elements but we'll get to that...). When the Red Army rid Brno of the Nazis, they used the Villa for soldiers' housing. The soldiers quartered there used the Tugendhat's furniture as firewood.

After the war, the house became some things different entirely than the place was intended to be, including a children's physiotherapy center and a dance studio. Ultimately, it survived intact until 1993 when the Friends of the Tugendhat House (which included as a member one Greta Tugendhat) was formed.  They made sure they got involved in preserving the house as a museum, which of course it still is to this date.

Garage (top) and entrance hall with full height rosewood paneling (bottom).

When we got out of our car at the Farnsworth House property in Illinois, we crossed over the Fox River and walked down a wooded path along that same river until the house revealed itself to us. We did no such thing at Villa Tugendhat. Take the bus from central Brno and you are in a neighborhood that looks like it was at one time made up entirely of very similar-looking nineteenth century houses. And most of them, in fact, are still there. Take a right at the end the road and the Villa Tugendhat is obviously there because it is obviously different from all the other houses in the neighborhood. It is clearly non-traditional and in many senses a lot more private that its neighbors. The Villa Tugendhat does not look out over the street it is sited on.

The house itself is upside down. Or maybe not, depending on your perspective. Maybe it's just slid down the hill a bit. You enter on the bedroom level and then go downstairs to the main living floor of the house. Maybe you just enter the house upside down. It's a little odd to go past bedrooms to get to someone's living room, I suppose.

The entrance level of the Villa Tugendhat is interesting but maybe nothing more than that. If there's anything to get excited about here it's the outside terrace that surrounds the bedroom level, with some bedrooms opening directly onto the patio that wraps the house and overlooks the garden and the city of Brno. The view is admittedly spectacular.

I know, I know...I totally just pooh-poohed one half of one of the most lauded Modern architecture residences ever built. It's my blog and that's how I felt.

The Villa Tugendhat master bedroom suite. Two rooms, of course. I mean, why would you sleep with your spouse?

The good stuff is downstairs.

The living level (for lack of a better term here) of the Villa Tugendhat has to be one of the most famous and influential floors of a private residence ever to come out of the 20th century. There are no real rooms on the floor. Space is defined by a series of carefully placed walls and a grid of Mies' famous cruciform columns.

It totally works. 

There are two main seating areas plus a library area and dining area in the main space of the living level. There is also a winter garden flanking one side of the floor. The winter garden and dining area are defined with fairly traditional methods of dividing space, namely a glazed wall and a curved, wood-clad partition. While they don't necessarily relate to the building structure in a traditional way, they nonetheless define space by imposing a barrier that you cannot walk through. It's straightforward and obvious as to what is going on. 

The main seating areas are defined spatially by the chrome-clad, cruciform-shaped columns and the onyx wall that separates the window side of the space from the non-window side (or the side that is buried beneath the street where the main entrance to the property is). It is odd to think that the tiniest corner formed by these mirrored columns can actually define and confine space in any way but it does. These things actually do define corners on the spaces on either side of the wall, which for its part actually extends beyond the column grid. I'm telling you...it totally works.

You also get a sense of the amount of money poured into this residence. The main floor of the Villa Tugendhat is huge. It's about 2,800 square feet, which is almost 20% larger than the entire three-story townhouse that I live in. That's comparing one level of a house with no bedrooms or kitchen to my entire dwelling. It's enormous. The library shelves, relatively inconsequential in terms of the character of the spaces on the floor, are made from Macassar ebony wood, which is sourced from a single island in Indonesia.

But the costliest piece of the entire house is that onyx wall, which is a beige-yellow color at most times but apparently glows a fiery red-orange when the sunlight hits it just right. It came from closer than Indonesia. Mies found the stone in Morocco's Atlas Mountains. The reported price of the onyx was 250,000 Czech Crowns, which at the time the Villa Tugendhat was built was the cost of about five entire homes. One wall in one room cost five times the amount required to purchase a house in the surrounding area. Crazy, right?

After the Tugendhats left the house in 1938, there was a lot in the house that was pillaged and sold or burned so its transient residents could stay warm in the winter. But the onyx wall, which was worth far more than most men could earn in years of work or maybe even a whole lifetime stayed intact. We might have Willy Messerschmitt to thank for that. Seems Willy covered the wall in wood when he left town so that whoever found the house wouldn't be able to see how spectacular and spectacularly valuable that wall was. Turns out it worked. He may have made machines that destroyed a lot of Europe during World War II, but at least he saved a wall made out of stone in a house in Brno.

The very thin and very expensive onyx wall.

Now as an architect I should have gushed the most about the way space is defined on the Villa Tugendhat's main floor. But I'm not going to. The main takeaway from the Villa Tugendhat for me and by far the best thing about the house is window wall and the view and the way that Mies frames that view from the main room.

So, no, I'm not giving the architect credit for the view. Not really. I mean, it's pretty obvious that it's there and it's pretty obvious that the house should be oriented so that you are looking at the view from pretty much anywhere in the house that it can be seen. But I do think you can still appreciate the way that the view is framed and how much the Villa Tugendhat pushed the limits of materials in the 1930s. 

Check out the first picture below. How large is that pane of glass? I struggle to imagine another building either of this house's vintage or anywhere else for that matter with a piece of glazing that size. The view is framed by the floor, the ceiling and as few columns as possible. It's incredible. All the focus is where it should be. Namely...outside.

I know...that pesky horizontal railing gets in the way. BUT that was a later add-on to the house. Mies' original design didn't have any such rail to obscure (no matter how small a distraction it might have been) that amazing vista. The railing, by the way, was added not to prevent someone from walking into the glass, but to prevent someone out of the house itself if the window is open.

You read that right. That ginormous pane of glass opens. By retracting into the floor. This notion in and of itself seems ludicrous but it's true. Those windows open. Down. We didn't get to see them that way. We had no expectation that we would in mid-December. I don't know if they ever open these things for tours. Given the fragile nature of some of the contents of the Villa Tugendhat, I can't imagine they ever do. But the audacity to pull this off is just impressive.

That window wall and what it frames. Spectacular. 

There are shades integral to the exterior wall system to block the sun also. I'd love to see those in action as much as I'd love to see those windows disappear into the floor.

Before we visited the Farnsworth House, I read Alex Beam's book, Broken Glass, detailing the history of the house and the relationship between Edith Farnsworth and Mies van der Rohe. When we decided to visit Vienna in 2020, I bought Simon Mawer's book, The Glass Room, and read that in the month or so before we visited the Villa Tugendhat. The Glass Room is not a book about the design and creation of the Villa Tugendhat. Nor is it about Mies van der Rohe or the Tugendhats. Not really. Although it totally is really. 

The book is a work of fiction about a family (the Landauers) living in an avant garde house in Mesto, Czechoslovakia (there is no actual city of Mesto) with their housekeepers and nanny who have to leave behind their house in the face of the advancing Nazi army. While there is an acknowledgment that the house in the book is the Villa Tugendhat (without naming the house itself), the rest of the story is labeled as fiction, right down to the house being used as a dance studio and a children's hospital after the Landauers flee the German army.

It's a great introduction to the house and there are so many parts that mirror the actual history of the house that I found it extremely useful to know so of the history without having checked out how much of the alleged fictional story actually mimicked reality. Simon Mawer does an excellent job in that book and not just with evoking the spirit of that house. There is a lot that is extremely unpleasant in that book to read and I couldn't put down at all. The Villa Tugendhat exceeded my expectations set by the descriptions of the Landauer House, however. It was lighter and brighter and more open than I ever imagined it would be either from reading that book or by learning about the place earlier in my life in architecture school.

My recommendation is if you are anywhere near Brno and you are remotely interested in modern architecture, you should go here.

The Villa Tugendhat winter garden.

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How We Did It

Visiting the Villa Tugendhat likely requires that you make reservations some time ahead of your actual visit via their website. There are two tour options: Basic and Extended. The Basic tour lasts 60 minutes and gets you into the bedroom and living room levels. The Extended tour gets you onto the third level (called the technical floor) which houses some of the back of house spaces including the mechanical spaces and an exhibit about the house. It lasts 30 minutes longer than the Basic. Both tours end up outside in the garden. From there you are on your own and can take as much time as you want looking around the exterior of the Villa. We opted for the Extended Tour (of course we did) which costs as of this writing 400 Czech Crowns per person which is about $18. The Basic tour is 100 Crowns cheaper.

Tours are offered in Czech, English and German and they sell out quickly. If you select the tour you want to take, the website will tell you when that particular date and time is on sale. That's different than how the site operated when we bought our tickets. The current setup seems to allow better planning by indication the exact day and time when tours are on sale.

Photography is not supposed to be permitted on the tour without the purchase of a photography pass which gives you a sticker to wear to indicate you have purchased the right to take pics. I bought one for 300 Crowns but there were plenty of others who didn't buy and still took photographs anyway. Our guide didn't seem interested in enforcing the rule. Call me a sucker for paying when I didn't have to but I'm happy to give the house an additional $14 or so. I'm sure they need it for something. On a sunny day, the house photographs beautifully. I hope that's evident by the pictures on this post.

Getting to the Villa by public transportation is super easy. We walked into the center of Brno from the main train station and then hopped on the Number 9 tram which runs every 10 minutes. It's about a 12 minute ride.

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Piano Sonata No. 17

This is the story of a single piece of music and why travel is so valuable for me. Although it honestly might take me a few more stories than that one to get to the story that I really want to tell. Buckle up for this one!

We went to Vienna right before Christmas to visit their many, many world-famous Christmas markets. That was without a doubt the number one reason we hopped on a plane and flew across the Atlantic Ocean in December of last year. But I can't think of a single trip of even a few days that we've ever taken that is just focused on one thing. There are always usually a lot of sub-themes that fill out our time in between the main attraction or attractions. Vienna here was no exception.

One of our interests we had to explore in Vienna was music. Had to!

Now, I am no stranger to music trips. I've been to Chicago, Memphis, Nashville, Austin, New Orleans and Los Angeles specifically to hang out in bars or clubs or concert halls or just outdoors listening to music. Music that I've loved for decades, music that I've never heard before, music that's stuck with me after the trips, music that I've forgotten about as soon as I've heard it. Rock, pop, blues, country. All of it.

Vienna was none of that. Vienna was all about classical music. Remember when classical music was dominant? Probably not, because pretty much nobody on this planet was alive back then.

Vienna's Staatsoper (or State Opera).

I'd like to think on a typical music trip (especially one where I was staying in the same city for eight nights) that I could explore pretty much everything significant related to music while I was in town. I'd like to visit the major places to listen to live music. I'd like to see all the museums that the city offers about music. I'd like to see all the historical shrines and statues and whatever else there is to commemorate this place as a mover and/or shaker on the worldwide music scene.

It became pretty apparent pretty quickly when we started planning this trip that doing that in Vienna was just not going to work. Hitting every sight, every statue, every museum, every hall and salon and room and closet that is relevant to the history or the now of classical music in Vienna is impossible in a bit more than a week. It's completely infeasible to take in everything because it is absolutely everywhere. And I really do mean that. Everywhere.

I guess the logical question to address at this point is...why? Well quite simply, for a long time (and admittedly a long time ago), Vienna was the most important city in the world when it came to music. Combine a royal family interested in sponsoring and nurturing the arts with enough talent and a couple of superstars (either homegrown or imported from elsewhere) and Vienna from the mid-eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century was exactly the right environment to create some of the best works of music ever.

So who are we talking about here? Well, briefly (and sticking with the undoubtedly great...), Haydn, Schubert, two Joseph Strausses, Beethoven and Mozart. 

Now, I know...six major composers in about 150 years doesn't seem like a lot. Heck, I could easily identify more than six major bands or artists coming out of London in the 1960s or New York in the 1970s but we are talking about a totally different time here. There was no vinyl or cassettes or CDs or MTV or YouTube or any other quick way to get music out to enough people to sustain hundreds or thousands of artists. Not to mention the fact that most people spent all or almost all of their time trying to just survive. The only people who really had the time to listen to music as a hobby were the aristocracy. And there's only so much music they needed, I guess.

Beethovenplatz, Vienna.

A quick look at what there was to see music-wise in Vienna got us a list of at least seven museums housed in spaces where some of Vienna's most famous composers once lived and probably way more spots than that where we could hear some music live and in person. There was no way we'd have time to get to all seven museums and we decided to settle for just three live music experiences. Since, you know, most of our nights were already booked at Christmas markets throughout the city. 

Museum-wise, we decided to skip the former residences of Joseph Haydn and Johann Strauss along with the birth and death places of Franz Schubert and concentrate instead on Beethoven and Mozart (sticking with the most famous there). Performance-wise, we decided on a variety of experiences in places small and large with crowds small and large, from the very fanciest to the most intimate. We had to do a lot of editing here to get to those three. 

I have to say it must be amazing for a classically trained musician to be in Vienna. I know my perspective is tainted by living in the United States on this issue but it must be incredible to have so many places to play and so many people (even if a lot of them are tourists in some spots) who appreciate what you are doing. I imagine the life of a musician playing in an orchestra in America is an underappreciated, underpaid profession. I imagine (with no real insight or knowledge here) that doing the same thing in Vienna is completely different as a career.

Beethoven Museum, Vienna. Yes, there's going to be a lot of Beethoven stuff here.

All three museums that we had on our list (the Beethoven Museum, the Mozart's Apartment and the Beethoven Pasqualithaus) which we made it to were apartments that either Beethoven or Mozart definitely or probably lived in at one time in their lives. All three were filled with exhibits about the composers which were informative and gave us a lot of details about the composers. But they lacked something which I'll get to in a bit and unless the museums dedicated to Haydn, Strauss and Schubert are substantially different than the two former Beethoven and one former Mozart residences we visited, I'm probably pretty glad that we skipped those other four. 

So what did we learn? Well, big picture it sounds to me like Mozart was kind of a spoiled brat who felt the rules just didn't apply to him while Beethoven was a demanding and frustrated perfectionist who had extreme difficulty dealing with his early deafness. Both were clearly geniuses who were able to channel their gifts into useful output that sticks with us gloriously today and both seemed to be well aware of their genius. That may be a little too simplistic and broad brush but that's what I got out of these three museums. I am sure I missed many subtleties about their lives. For me, by the way, Beethoven is way better than Mozart.

I really appreciated the light these museums shed on Beethoven's working methodology. He clearly started and stopped projects while he worked on other symphonies or concertos or sonatas as they came to him and he asked a ton of his musicians technically, including having them on standby while he finished composing so they could play the piece right after he was done. It actually reminded me of stories about Bob Dylan in the studio prepping his musicians to play with little direction and adjusting after each take. I think the comparison is potentially a pretty good one.

I also appreciated the information in the Beethoven Museum about the spaces where some of Beethoven's symphonies were played. They were tiny. Remember, there was no real commercial market and no real concert halls for regular people to go to listen to symphonies back then so these loud bombastic symphonies were rehearsed and played in spaces that were altogether too small. The volume must have been extreme. No wonder Beethoven went deaf.

Views of the outside of the Beethoven Pasqualithaus.

But the real problem I had with these museums is that there was nothing about being in the former apartments that added anything to the experience, except for realizing where in the city of Vienna they used to live. None of the interior is restored to the appearance of when Mozart or Beethoven lived there and there were no real original objects or written music owned or produced by either man. In fact, historians don't even know which room in at least Mozart's former apartment was the dining room vs. the kitchen vs. a bedroom. It's just a series of empty rooms filled with exhibit after exhibit of non-original objects. There's no reflection of how they lived in the residences because nobody recorded it.

I think the only original items that were (or may have been) in the possession of either composer were the sugar canister and salt and pepper shakers and the music stand (but that's really sort of doubtful based on the display description) in the Beethoven Pasqualithaus. I'm not knocking the alleged authenticity of these items (OK maybe I am just a bit...) but I'm not sure a salt shaker owned by Beethoven adds to the museum that much.

End of that rant, I promise.

Beethoven's sugar canister, salt and pepper shakers and music stand (maybe), Beethoven Pasqualithaus.

We did find a surprise in the Beethoven Pasqualithaus that absolutely crushed us. I think it's worth spending a few minutes on that issue, if only to write down two names.  

When you travel through Europe, eventually somehow when it is least expected, the Holocaust will pop up and jar you back to reality that the wonderful place you are visiting has a much darker piece in its history. And sure enough it did just that at the Pasqualithaus. This particular museum was established in 1941 and in 1941 the Nazi German army had taken control of the city of Vienna. In fact, it was the Nazis that founded the museum in the first place.

To make room for the museum, the Nazis had to expel the family living in the apartment which was thought to have been one of Beethoven's favorite places to live. Of course, the family was Jewish. In June of 1943, Josef and Josefine Eckstein were removed from the apartment and deported to Theresienstadt, a ghetto established by the Nazis in the town of Terezin, in what was then Czechoslovakia. Theresienstadt served as a way station to the various concentration camps the Nazis has set up across Europe. 

On October 23, 1944, the Ecksteins were moved to Auschwitz. They never left. They were murdered along with about 1.1 million other innocent people in that death camp. It makes you really wonder whether that museum should really be in that building at all. Or if more than just a tiny bit of wall space should be dedicated to how the museum was first created.

The Mozart Ensemble Vienna String Quartet at the Mozarthaus.

If there was a part of our Vienna music quest that was more successful (and there was), it was definitely the three performances we attended, primarily because (1) there was live music involved and (2) they didn't require extensive reading. After searching through various websites and our Lonely Planet Vienna guidebook, we eventually settled on something grand (Mozart's The Magic Flute at the Staatsoper), something seasonal (Christmas concert at the Stephensdom) and something intimate (the Mozart Ensemble Vienna String Quartet at the Mozarthaus).

I will say here that the Staatsoper is absolutely an amazing venue. It has to be one of the top few opera houses in the world. The hall is magnificent, the lobbies are breathtaking and the rooms where you can get a snack or a glass of grüner veltliner during the intermission are just gorgeous. You feel like you should be dressed in a suit or a tux for these performances just based on the place itself. I wore jeans, a sweater and boots. Hey, it was the winter. Or December, at least.

This was probably my second Mozart opera ever. I think I saw Don Giovanni years ago although I can remember very little about that experience. I don't know what Mozart was smoking or taking when he wrote The Magic Flute but it seemed shall we say not absolutely rooted in reality. Awesome music, the singing was terrific and the venue was perfect but I'd say I'm passing on future opportunities to see The Magic Flute.

Intermission time at The Magic Flute. Grüner veltliner, anyone?

I'll also say that the Christmas concert in the Stephensdom (or St. Stephen's Cathedral) right in the city center was a great complement to the Christmas markets we went to Vienna to see. However, the Stephensdom is huge (I mean it is a Gothic cathedral after all...) and a small ensemble of musicians along with a couple of vocalists struggled to fill the space with music in a meaningful way. It's also really cold inside an uninsulated stone building when it's snowing outside.

So that leaves the Mozart Ensemble Vienna as the clear winners of our live music experience in Vienna. This night out was super intimate. It's you and four musicians in a tiny room inside an historic building just steps from the Stephensplatz. There is not a bad seat in the house, particularly considering there are only six rows of chairs in the place. 

There were a couple of things that I really loved about this performance. First, there was a little historical context provided before each number which I appreciated. The comment that Schubert is probably the most important composer for string quartets is something that sticks with me above all others. It makes me want to explore that comment someday.

Second, they played the hell out of the music, particularly Schubert's Quartet in D Minor, Op. 76, No. 2. I mean really nailed it. It was aggressive and passionate and dynamic. I loved it. It's incredible to hear musicians play this way, especially when it comes to classical music. We saw a Vivaldi concert in Venice years ago where the same thing happened. Just awesome stuff. We think of classical music sometimes as calm background music. It's not at all sometimes.

Christmas concert in the Stephensdom.

But this post isn't really about any of that stuff I've just written. It's supposed to be about one piece of music. And that piece of music is Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 17.

In the first room of the Beethoven Museum, there is a story about Ludwig van Beethoven seeing a rider on a horse canter by his window while in his apartment at what is now the Museum. The Beethoven Museum today is surrounded by other buildings in a neighborhood but at the time he occupied it in 1802, it was in the middle of the country. That bucolic view and the horse's pace supposedly created a piece of music in his head that date which eventually became his 17th piano sonata. 

The story of this inspiration is written on the wall next to a wheel with a handle. Turn the handle and the Sonata plays. We turned the handle as directed.

I have never listened to a piano sonata in my life. I have tried once or twice but it has historically been difficult for me to get into a solo piano track lacking any sort of external motivation or interest. But that piece of music in that museum was just incredible. It has pace, it has melody, it has passion, it has depth and tenderness and forcefulness. It's dynamic. I've never really heard a piece of music quite like it and I have listened to a lot of music. I mean I guess it should be all that because Beethoven wrote it but I'm sure he has some clunkers out there. All artists do, don't they? Even Beethoven?

I know if I had really wanted to I could have started going through Beethoven's piano sonatas systematically on my own. I know I didn't have to travel to Vienna and discover this piece of music. But in a way, there's no way I would have found this without traveling. Maybe that's stupid. Maybe it's inconsequential that I've discovered this one piece of music that I now love. I don't think that it is any of those things. I love this sonata. And I know I wouldn't have found it without traveling.

Don't get me wrong, here. I'm not saying that the rest of our music experience in Vienna outside of one room in a museum was a waste or wasn't an essential part of our trip to Austria. It was. I loved all the music we saw live (even shivering in the Stephensdom) and I got a ton out of the Beethoven and Mozart museums we visited. But without Vienna there would have been no discovery of that piano sonata. And I'm happier today for it. 

As soon as we got back and home and I had the chance, I bought the complete set of Beethoven's sonatas (there are 32) on a nine CD set (yes, I still buy CDs...). I've listened to No. 17 I don't know how many times. I've dabbled in the others and have not played a single one twice. Travel...I'm telling you...it changes us.

That's the story. Apologies on the length.

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How We Did It

We visited the Beethoven Museum, Mozart's Apartment at the Mozarthaus and the Beethoven Pasqualithaus. We also attended a recital by the Mozart Ensemble Vienna at the Mozarthaus; saw an opera at the Staatsoper; and shivered through a concert at the Stephensdom. With the exception of the Beethoven Museum, all of these attractions are inside the Ringstrasse and easily accessible if you are staying in or near the city center of Vienna. To get to the Beethoven Museum, we took the number 37 tram from the Schottentor U stop. Get off at the Hohe Varta stop and walk about a block or so north from there. The trams in Vienna are awesome. They run frequently and on time.

The two Beethoven museums are both owned by the City of Vienna, as are the four museums about Haydn, Strauss and Schubert that I mentioned in this post. If you have the time and inclination to be a completist on the history of music in Vienna, there is a combination ticket for all six properties. 

We found all the concerts (an opera is a concert for the purposes of this section of this post) we attended to be reasonably priced and the quality of the sound and the performers at both the Staatsoper and the Mozarthaus to be excellent. You can spend a lot of money on a ticket at the Staatsoper. We sat in the upper deck and thought the view and the sound was just great from up there. Of course, we are not fanatical about opera. 

Concerts at the Stephensdom are not restricted to the Christmas season. We got our tickets from the Kunst & Kultur website, which seems to have programs throughout the year, although certainly not as many as there were before Christmas.

We spent a lot of time looking at various venues before picking our three concerts. There's a lot to look at honestly but we found a good starting place was the Vienna tourism website's page about music in the city. 

Also, there are plenty of statues of composers around the city if you are into that sort of thing. I am, although the only one we sought out was the status of Beethoven on the Beethovenplatz.

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