Ferris Wheel Interlude

Pictured: ferris wheel, view from ferris wheel.

Happy almost-Thanksgiving to everyone, and happy almost-birthday to Maeve. Full-length Vienna take 2 blog post coming soon (homework permitting), followed by Milan sometime after Thanksgiving break!

Vienna: Hofburg Palace ~ Sophia

Last of the Vienna series. At least until I go back this weekend. (Yes, there's a bit of a time lag on the posts. Shh.)

I spent a whole day on the immense grounds of the Hofburg Palace. The Habsburgs were all about the absurd opulence -- recall their treasury from the last post. Accordingly, the palace grounds are pretty spectacular.

Some sort of ornamental sculptural building thing. Who knows. This is what happens when you have emperors with more money than they know what to do with.

Enormous fountain sculpture, with ducks.

The palace itself, with ornamental rose garden. (I should emphasize that this shows maybe 5% of the castle grounds. Really, they were immense. Multiple orchards, huge green areas, jogging trails.)

For a small admission, you could wander through a selection of labyrinths (some featuring mathematical puzzles, no less). Children's admissions in Vienna go up through age 19, so I got to have some fun dialogues when I bought my tickets.

[In German:]

Clerk: What can I do for you?

Me [offering credit card]: One children's ticket, please.

Clerk [bewildered]: Sorry, what?

Me: One children's ticket.

Clerk [incredulous]: How old are you?

Me: Eighteen.

Clerk [skeptical]: ID, please?

Me [handing him my passport]: Here you are.

Clerk [reluctantly]: Huh. One children's ticket. Here you are.

[Repeat every time I bought a ticket to anything.]

If you made it to the center of the hedge maze, there was a treehouse from which you could see the whole labyrinth. And take pictures, of course.

Another hedge maze had various traps (e.g., weight-sensitive stepping stones that squirted water at you when you stood on them), and a set of mirrors in the middle.

Which, of course, made for something of a maze of their own.

There was also a playground, with various cool equipment. My favorite was an enormous Habsburg eagle: you could climb a rope ladder to get inside, and it would move its wings if you bounced it. (I managed to refrain from trying this myself. Barely.)

I'm sure Maeve and Bibi will be delighted to hear that there was in fact a doocot. Although I don't think they call them that in Austria.

I stopped by the grocery store for lunch. They were selling Christmas chocolates, for both good and bad children. I approve of this custom.

Lunch in the rose gardens.

The last stop for the day was the marionette museum. They display the marionettes that they use to perform operas, and show videos of how they're made. I really wanted to stay to see the marionette production of the Magic Flute, but unfortunately that would have kept me after the last train left to Budapest. Which would have been bad.

A marionette together with its concept sketch and partially-sewn outfits, showing the design process.

I managed to catch the last train home, with help reading the timetable from a young man who turned out to be a railroad engineer. He spent most of the three-hour trip home explaining errors he'd found in the timetable, problems with the ticket machines, and how the couplings between the train cars work. Apparently his version of a fall vacation is to take trains across Europe, not to see cities like Vienna and Budapest, but to see the trains and train stations. I've never seen someone quite so enthusiastic about trains; it was great. The people you meet, I guess.

Vienna: House of Music ~ Sophia

Next in the Vienna series is the House of Music. I don't think I can actually adequately convey the sheer weirdness of this place, but my best try follows. For the full effect, you should probably turn on some really hair-raisingly strange ambient sound, and lower the lights to about 25%.

Really, my first warning should have come before I even walked in the door. Every other museum in the aptly named Museum District was an incredibly elaborate feat of architecture, with pillars and domes, fountains and statues. This one was a rickety, shabby little building tucked away in a corner. The clerk at the front desk seemed vaguely surprised to see someone come in.

The hallway up to the first floor was lined with odd, brightly-colored paintings of composers and musicians ranging to world-famous to completely obscure. It also featured the first of many plaques, which, instead of following the standard title-artist-date-description format, contained strange philosophical statements about the intent of the exhibition in English and German.

The main exhibit on the first floor was a random waltz generator. Following the instructions projected on the screen, I rolled the red and blue dice on the lightboxes, which automatically read off the numbers and chose corresponding musical phrases for flute and cello. At the end, it did indeed play a randomly generated Vienna Waltz.

There were also various glass display cases with an eclectic assortment of music-related artifacts. You see here Brahms' glasses. I spotted at least three pairs of glasses from different famous composers throughout the museum. They seem to have a theme going.

And here are the batons of various famous conductors. If you ever wanted to know what Strauss' or Toscanini's batons looked like, now you do. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, they look exactly like everyone else's small pointy sticks.)

Well, that was all fairly normal museum stuff, right? Time to move on to...

... the Sonosphere. (Also known as The Next Floor, but apparently they thought it needed a name.)

No, that's not a camera malfunction, that's the first room of the Sonosphere: dark, with a faintly glowing plastic bubble thing in the middle. You can't tell from the picture, but there's an ultrasound picture projected onto the bubble, and loud, hair-raising whooshing noises playing. Text from the placard:

"ringing of the senses

on the borderline between chaos and order

vibrating air, flows from the silence, creates space"

The hallway is also completely dark, with only this lit case set into the wall. It contains sand shaped into wave patterns. Placard text for this one:

"auditory pathway

the journey of sound into the human ear:

reducing noise to the smallest sonic impulse.

the sonic atom."

I'm skipping the room full of screens with corresponding headphones that invite you to play various disturbing tricks to your sense of hearing. You'll just have to take my word for it that they were equally weird. Instead, we're moving on to: the room full of giant musical instruments. This one was as tall as I am. The drum was even taller. Placard:

"laboratory of perception

sound processing and phenomena of hearing.

the borderline between reality and imagination

in the light of measurable dreams and the laws of emotion"

Hallway into the next room. Everything's still dim, with ambient noises playing that change from room to room.

And here is the last room of the Sonosphere. Each of the metal studs and faucets is in fact a speaker. If you put your ear to one, you can hear the sound noted on the small card next to it. These ranged from "sneeze" to "new york city street" to "interstellar space."

And at last we emerge from the Sonosphere and move on to the next floor.

This time the stairs feature the organ pipes of St. Stephen's Cathedral. Behind them on the wall you can see the standard stream-of-consciousness descriptions of what you're going to experience on the coming floor.

As it turns out, each room of the third floor is some kind of shrine dedicated to a famous composer. These are roughly eight times as creepy as you would expect, as seen here with the dead-eyed mannequins of some composer or other and his mistress.

Sometimes there are actual museum-type objects in the rooms. For instance: the door to Beethoven's house.

And sometimes there are just stoves. (No, it's not Beethoven's stove, despite being right next to his door. It's just a stove.)

This series of speakers plays the music that Beethoven composed at various periods in his life, growing gradually softer and softer to the point of inaudibility, so that you can experience what it would have sounded like to him as he went deaf.

The last hallway was covered with playbills for operas, balls, and concerts.

The final exhibit was a game for the various small-children who'd been trooping through, looking cheerfully bewildered by the whole experience. In the game, you can choose a piece of famous music and direct the Vienna Symphonic by waving a toy baton. The screen shows the orchestra, and the speed changes based on how fast you wave the baton, the aim being of course to match the sample clip played at the beginning. If the child makes it all the way through successfully, the conductor appears on the screen to congratulate them. If, on the other hand, they do badly, the on-screen orchestra stops playing to riot and shout insults at them: "You're completely useless!" "To think that I should have lived to see this day!"

I have no idea who thought this was a good idea for a game for small children. Actually, I have no idea who thought any of this museum was a good idea. But it was, in fact, extremely cool.