Bonding with Beethoven and Italian Eis

March 16, 2010

                  Everything will pass, and the world will perish but the Ninth Symphony will remain.  Michael Bakunin, quoted in Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station (1940)

     Beethoven lived in the building before I did.  For three years, he walked down the same street, went through the same doorway, walked up the same stairs.  It was before he wrote the Ninth Symphony, but not many years after he wrote the Fifth.  It was my first and favorite missionary apartment during my stay in Austria.  The studio apartment itself was a dump –hideously decorated and sparsely furnished.  But I loved it.  It was in the center of Vienna’s magical kingdom… mere steps away from “beautiful” and “amazing” and “unbelievable.”  I couldn’t leave my apartment each day without feeling a whoosh of joy as I absorbed my surroundings.  It never faded with time or became monotonous to me, and I was sad to move on to a new area after only two months. 

Today we went back.  Walking down Graben … passing the shoe repair shop and the Tabak… seeing the old street sign for Tiefer Graben…  it was as if I had been transported back in time just for a moment, and the old familiar whoosh of joy settled in like a long-lost friend. 

                   

                       There is an amazing energy and elegance to Vienna, which in its glory days was the capital of the Habsburg empire for more than 600 years.  It was a place of royalty and power, presiding over a kingdom of more than 60 million people and encompassing a huge geographic region.  When the empire collapsed in 1918 after WWI and the monarchy fell, the nobility was officially abolished… and gorgeous palaces and residences became the property of the Austrian Republic and were turned into office space, museums, etc.   And a country that was once arguably the largest and richest country in Europe became a country of 8 million residents that many people only associate with “The Sound of Music” movie…   And it is so often confused with Australia that tourists show up expecting to find koala bears and kangaroos (which explains the “No kangaroos in Austria” PR campaign -- see previous blog entry.)    Ahh, but I digress….

                        I introduced Cade, Regan and Reyna to Italian Eis today; they became fast friends.  There is a shop at Schwedenplatz that was there when I lived in the Tiefergraben apartment.  It is bigger now.  Much fancier.  Oddly enough, the prices seem cheaper… or perhaps that is only because my food budget now is much more comfortable than it was back then.  :-)   At any rate, four Euros (about $6) bought us each a cone and our flavor of choice… and in spite of the cold and the occasional swirl of snow, we enjoyed every lick.