The capital of cake

I have just come from an absolutely lovely weekend in Vienna, following three days of (pretty hard) work there.

The last time I was in Austria (the only time) was nearly 30 years ago and on that occasion I just got to Salzburg and Innsbruck. I didn’t really know what to expect with Vienna – based on what I’d seen in movies I’d expected somewhere a bit like Prague but it wasn’t like that at all.

For one thing, it’s not as quaint. Much of the centre is alomost grid-like and many of the streets are wide and grand – like the paris boulevards. Other points in common with Paris are the proliferation of green spaces and the grand inperial architecture. However, it is much more compact and, as with Rome or Prague, a moderately energetic person could easily walk from one side of the historic centre to the other. The Schönbrunn palace – home of the Habsburgs in the last centuries of their reign – is a little further out but not nearly so far as Versailles.

There is so much to see that we could only hit it in spots. We went tot he Kunsthistorisches Museum, which houses the prime classical paintings. For me the main highlights there were the Vermeer and the impressive collection of works by Breughel the Elder (I reckon that if you google B the E on Google images you’ve about a 50% chance of turning up a piece from the collection but I haven’t tried for myself). The Belvedere has the modern artists – most notably, a number of works by Klimt (including The Kiss) as well as some oft he best bonsai pieces I’ve ever seen. It’s also an impressive building in its own right, with a beautiful view of the city.

The Schönbrunn proved to be more interesting than I had expected, with intimate insights into the lives of some of the later Habsburgs. These confirmed my impression that Maria Theresa was basically a bitch and Franz Josef a stick in the mud. Next to the gardens is a superb zoo. We saw pandas and greater one-horned rhinos, among other things (though the polar bear enclosure was a disgrace).

For me, though, Vienna’s maverick is the ingenious architect Hundertwasser, a man who could out-gaudi Gaudi himself. His buildings are delightful flights of fancy, with wavy, crooket lines and bright colours. I saw his waste disposal building and the social housing project he designed but did not have time to see the museum in another building of his design that is dedicated to his work. Like many other things, that will be for a return visit.

You might be waiting form e to talk about music (and I will in a minute, I promise) but there is one other art that is treated with as much reverence in Vienna and that is confectionery. Vienna, as I said on Facebook, is the capital of cake. There are other cities where the cakes are as good (though not better) but there are no others where confectionery and pastry are treated with such reverence. In the famous Demel coffee shop, on the Sunday morning, we were able to sit sipping coffee while watching apple strudels being made. A Viennese applre strudel is pure delight – apples soft enough to melt in the mouth but firm enough to retain their texture, seasoned with brown suggar and cinnamon and wrapped in the finest of pastry. We saw the pastry chef take a piece of pastry of about A3 size and stretch it to cover an entire worktom (which had first been covered with a cloth sheet). He then sprinkled the pastry with the sugar and spice mixture, added the apples (which, I trust, must have been slightly pre-cooked), then more sugar and spice, before rolling the pastry up and separating it into three tubes of about two feet each, to be baked.

As for the music, we attended a Mozart mass on Sunday morning sung by the Vienna Boy’s choir (who else ?) and then, that evening, saw an absolutely sizzling production of Janacek’s Jenufa at the Wiener Staatsoper. What an opera (searing, moving, but above all – like all the Janacek operas I know – one where you are dying to know what’s going to happen next). The production matched the quality of the piece – no sign of any pretentious priam donna of a director who wanted to ram his interpretation of the opera down the audience’s throat.

The toughest part of the weekend was the heat – the upper twenties all the time and no rain. Which is kind of ironic because now I’m in Bergen and, although the rain has stopped now, it was lashing earlier. Now, at 11pm, as I look out, it’s still light…