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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The Iron Curtain

Let's start this post with a question. What do you call a Škoda on top of hill? 

No, I'm not going to give you the response to that right now. We'll come back to the answer in a bit.

In my senior year of college at the University of Michigan, my daily journey to the Art and Architecture Building involved me walking several blocks from my apartment on Hill Street and boarding a bus to take me to the University's North Campus for the hours and hours I spent at my desk in the architecture studio every day. One day in the fall of that year (this would be 1989), I vividly remember sitting on that bus and looking out at the newspaper machines at the bus stop and reading something about the wall coming down. The headline was huge. This seemed like big news.

My first thought here, by the way, was why was the Detroit Free Press putting something about Pink Floyd on page one? Don't mock. At this point in my life, I was a little fixated on Pink Floyd. Of course, the headline wasn't about Pink Floyd's 1979 album. It was about the Berlin Wall. 

The removal of the wall between the west and east sides of Berlin was a seminal moment in the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of their almost complete control over most countries in eastern Europe. This sphere of control, which consisted of puppet governments in a series of nations to the west of the U.S.S.R., was referred to as the Iron Curtain, a term coined by Winston Churchill in a speech delivered in 1946 (in Missouri, of all places). The Iron Curtain in mainland Europe was the western border of East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria.

I often equate the fall of the Berlin Wall as the first step in the collapse of the Soviet Union. It wasn't. While I probably didn't realize it at the time, Hungary and Poland had already taken official steps to move towards democracy earlier that same year with the blessing of the Soviets. Two years and a couple of months later, the Soviet Union would officially disband as a nation, leaving Ukraine, Georgia, several Stans and a bunch of other countries to various forms of self-government and freeing the citizens of countries locked behind the Iron Curtain to figure things out for themselves.

Bratislava here we come!!! Train waiting in Vienna.

I've traveled a lot since my four years at Michigan. I've been all around the United States and the world and have hit six of the seven continents. Among other things, I've been on safaris; roamed all over western Europe; walked to Machu Picchu; looked for kiwis at night in New Zealand; and belted out karaoke at the top of my lungs in Tokyo's Shinjuku neighborhood. But until December of last year, I'd never set foot behind the Iron Curtain. That would change when we took a train north from Vienna to Bratislava, Slovakia. Our passage over the Slovakian border technically took us through the old boundary which was very, very real.

Our plan for our visit to Bratislava was pretty simple: (1) get a taste of what life under Soviet rule or influence or whatever you want to call it was like and (2) hit up the city's Christmas market. The second part of that agenda was simple and straightforward. Plus, why would we NOT visit a Christmas market? I mean, 11 in Vienna just wasn't enough, after all. 

To do the first part, though, we'd need a little help. So we called in a professional. When we got off the train in Bratislava, we were met by Peter Chrenka in his 1993 Škoda car. Peter and his brother operate a company called Authentic Slovakia and one of the tours they run is specifically geared around what remains of the Soviet occupation (I don't know what else to call it, really) in Bratislava. Let the fun begin!

As a point of establishing perspective here, Bratislava was as close as you could get to the edge of Soviet control in eastern Europe in a major city during the cold war. It is right on the border between Slovakia and Austria (meaning it was right on the border between Czechoslovakia and Austria between the mid 1940s and the late 1980s). It's so close that you can actually look across to Austria from many, many points within Bratislava. I don't like necessarily equating some societies as totally free and others as totally not free but literally, more freedom could be seen less than a mile away from Bratislava. It must have been an interesting and desperate time.

Our chariot for the day. How awesome is this vintage Škoda????

Our agenda for the day was set by Peter and that was fine with us. There are times on our trips where we like to have a lot of control over where we go and what we do based on a ton of advance research. And there are other times where we can't possibly come up with an agenda for an obscure quest like a visit to Soviet-era sites in city in eastern Europe. Plus on a day trip like this, we really wanted to talk with someone who had actually been there. OK so maybe Peter at 40 years old had limited experience with living behind the Iron Curtain, but he clearly remembered enough based on our few hours in his company that added a ton of value to our day.

First stop? A 1956 concrete panel housing block. I'm not kidding. The first place we stopped and got out of the car was an historic (also not kidding; check it out below) apartment building constructed by the Soviets out of prefabricated concrete panels. Now sure, we drove by a couple of other sights along the way. We also talked some history, including covering the 1968 invasion by the USSR to squash developing connections between what was then Czechoslovakia and the West and Peter being taken by his parents to a celebration of Slovak independence in November of 1989. He had no idea what was going on at seven years old but it's a cool memory to have been a part of that. But, yes, our first stop was at a vintage apartment building.

Speaking of Peter's parents, they were travel agents, which in Czechoslovakia in the 1980s meant that they booked holidays for people in eastern Europe or Yugoslavia (you weren't really allowed to travel anywhere else). Peter knew that sometimes his father would send 40 people on vacation to Yugoslavia only to have 30 come back, with the rest fleeing to the west. But his dad never really talked to him about it, thinking that if Peter said the wrong thing to the wrong kid at school with the wrong dad, it could mean some serious trouble. My parents never thought about stuff like this while I was growing up. Peter's parents had to.

But enough of that family stuff. Let's get back to that housing project!!!

Sexy stuff, right? This apartment building was actually one of the two main sites Peter took us to and talked to us about. Sure, we went to a local Soviet-era food market and drove past a couple of very totalitarian-looking pieces of architecture in the form of an inverted pyramid and a bridge that looked like it has a UFO on one side of it (the informal name of the bridge is actually the UFO bridge) but yes, really, we spent more time at the concrete panel apartment building than any of those three other buildings.

So by now, I'm sure you are snickering at us paying some dude in an antique Czech car to drive us around looking at some of the worst manifestations of 20th century building design in the world, right? I mean this tour must have been a total waste of time and money, right?

Wrong! In addition to being able to talk to Peter about what it was like to live in the former Czechoslovakia, there was a ton of value not only in the tour as a whole but also in stopping by some dull, light grey, concrete building in the middle of town. 

I know I mentioned earlier in this post that the apartment building is historic. I was doing that a bit tongue-in-cheek but its historic status is exactly part of the narrative that we experienced this day. Sure, it wasn't the reason that we visited that spot in Bratislava (it was clear we were visiting because it was erected under the auspices of the U.S.S.R.), but its historic status is what's keeping it around and is going to keep it around for a while. Maybe forever.

So look, the building sucks, OK? Yeah, I know there's some vaguely cool bas reliefs (read: propaganda) of dancing Russians above the entrances to the building (both men and women, shown above) but it's just not attractive in any way. But it's here to stay because somehow, somebody thought this was something that needed to be saved and it's old enough to be protected by whatever preservation laws exist in Slovakia. It also, by the way, was not insulated properly when it was built and the building can't be insulated from the outside in because such an intervention would compromise the historic "character" of the thing.

This debate about "is everything old worth saving?" occurs all over the world, including in the United States. Just because something has survived long enough to make it quality for historic preservation doesn't mean it should have such protection. But there's another wrinkle to the debate in Bratislava. This was not built by Slovakians for Slovakians. It was effectively built by an occupying force and it's here to stay. Maybe forever. 

How would you feel about having to keep in place reminders of decades of being controlled by a foreign totalitarian regime when all you wanted to do was move on with your lives and make your society your own? It must be tough, even if, as Peter suggested, about one quarter of Slovaks today would welcome, or at least not object to, a return to a more Soviet way of life. Apparently, some are having a difficult time adjusting to a more capitalist society.

What a creative bunch those Soviets were. Bratislava Castle (dating from the 1400s) is on the lower left.

But if you are going to get upset about an uninsulated apartment building, you really have to wrestle with this issue when you venture to what is probably the highest point in the city of Bratislava and visit the monument to the Soviet soldiers who freed the city from the Nazis in World War II.

This monument is not a statue or a plaque or a reflecting pool or anything small or reasonably scaled like that. No, no. It's the entire top of the hill. There's a giant paved plaza with a mausoleum topped by an enormous spire crowned by a Soviet soldier holding an unfurling flag and crushing a swastika with his boot as its centerpiece. To get to the building itself you have to walk up various flights of steps past bas reliefs of Russian forces and graves of 6,485 fallen Soviets with some of the names of those who died liberating Bratislava from the Germans. 

It's actually pretty impressive. It's well designed and beautifully sited. But the message is confusing as hell. There's one inscription in the monument that proclaims (in Russian of course, so I'm paraphrasing a bit) eternal glory for those who fought for the independence and glory of their homeland. But it's not for those who fought for the homeland where this monument is erected. It's for those who fought for Mother Russia, only it's a building in Slovakia.

So sure, the Soviets did actually liberate Bratislava from the Germans. Peter pointed out that it's probably one of the only places on Earth that had squares named after both Hitler and Stalin at one point. But they liberated the city from the Nazis and then kept it for themselves. And they stuck the residents of Bratislava with a giant piece of propaganda on top of a hill to remind them of it. Heck, they even demolished a steeple on a nearby church so there would be nothing to compete visually with the monument they erected.

This is a bit crazy, right? One of the most impressive monuments in the city of Bratislava has nothing to do with Slovakians. Not really, anyway.

I don't know how many people day trip to Bratislava when on vacation in Vienna. I'm guessing we are not the only ones who have taken the just a bit more than an hour train ride east and north over the Slovakian border. I'm also guessing there are not many who go to see what we go to see and then go straight back to Vienna. We didn't want to follow a standard tourist agenda on our first trip behind the old Iron Curtain. So we didn't.

But this day in Bratislava wouldn't have worked without a guide. I mean, sure, we could have done the research or bought a guidebook and made our way to pretty much everything we saw that day. But without the commentary from our guide Peter, it would have been nowhere near as valuable.

So sure (and I know I already said this), Peter was seven years old when Slovakia freed itself from the yoke of the Soviets, but it's not like things changed immediately or anything in 1989. Change took time. It's also not like he can't remember things from his childhood and he doesn't have the benefit of hearing stories from his family who were far more aware of what life was like under Soviet control. His perspective was so valuable, right down to the Slovakian soft drinks he brought along for us and which we sipped on while we gazed at the concrete panel apartment building. 

Kofola, a type of spiced or herbed (I got cinnamon out of drinking it) cola made in Czechia and Vinea, a grape based soda invented in Bratislava in 1973, if you must know, by the way. We got the red version of the Vinea. I'd drink that again. I'd pass on the Kofola.

The last stop we made with Peter was at an overlook of sorts with a view to the south and west of Bratislava across the Danube River and into Austria. The bridge that crosses the Danube today providing easy access between the two countries wasn't there when the Iron Curtain was up. It was consequently deliberately difficult to get from Slovakia over the Danube to a society that was fundamentally different than life experienced by the citizens of Bratislava. 

One of the perks of being so close to Austria in the 1980s was that you could receive television signal from across the border, and while it was forbidden to watch Austrian TV, Peter did anyway (I mean, of course he would; why wouldn't he). It made quite an impression on the young kid, one which manifests itself today in Peter owning a Trans Am (he was a huge Knight Rider fan). Back then he used to watch whatever he could get over the illicit signal received from over the river and based on his time in front of the TV, he longed for some Milka, a Swiss chocolate, which was advertised all the time but was completely unavailable in Bratislava in the 1980s.

The first place Peter and his family visited after the fall of communism in Slovakia was Austria. And of course, he got some Milka. That was all he wanted.

Looking south and west into Austria.

Finally, a word or two about our transport.

We went everywhere that day with Peter in Bratislava in his 1993 Škoda. He and his brother (through his grandfather) actually own one made in the 1970s but it doesn't really run too well in the winter and Peter hinted that he may have actually done a little (or maybe a lot of) damage to that car recently so we got the later model. If you've traveled much in Europe you may have seen Škodas around. Heck, you might have even rented and driven one yourself. If you have, odds are that they are pretty modern and reliable vehicles. They are, after all, made by Volkwagen these days.

Peter's version is pre-VW. At one time, 50% of the cars on the roads in Czechoslovakia were Škodas and they were maybe not quite as reliable as today's versions before Volkwagen got involved. But the 1993 version of the car got us around the city just fine, including to the top of the tallest hill in the city. Which brings me back to my opening question: what do you call a Škoda on top of a hill? 

A miracle.

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How We Did It

Getting a train from Vienna to Bratislava is pretty easy. Trains from Vienna's Hauptbahnhof run frequently and cheaply. We booked our tickets at the ÖBB site, although there may be other options. 

We arranged to have Peter pick us up at the train station after we booked our tour through the Authentic Slovakia website. Their website is simple and payment was safe and secure. The day before our tour we were emailed details of the meet along with a picture of the car we'd be touring around in. It all worked. We found the car easily and got right to the tour. I thought these guys were great. I'd totally recommend them for anyone wanting someone to show them around Slovakia for a day. Nothing but good things to say here.

I'm sure Peter is not the only one at Authentic Slovakia who runs this tour (there are a lot more people than just Peter pictured on their website) but if you do get Peter driving you around, hope that he brings some of his homemade plum brandy. You might need something to warm you up a little before stepping out into the cold in a Slovakian December.

If you decide to go it alone and want to do all or part of this itinerary, I'm not sure I could tell you where the apartment building we visited is, but the Soviet memorial on top of the hill is called Slavin. Good luck, comrade!

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