Cynthia Peck

Schloss Hof, with its dramatic stage of Baroque grandeur, is the largest palace complex in the Austrian countryside. A mere forty-minute drive east of the capital through the flat farmland of the Marchfeld – Vienna’s vegetable garden – it lies just across the March River from the back suburbs of Bratislava. A setting of extraordinary grace and understated elegance unique in Austria and rare in Europe, its gardens can perhaps best be described as a small version of Versailles or Sanssouci in Potsdam.

Apr. 17, 2010, ICE 26 north to Dortmund, Germany from Vienna, departure time 10:40 a.m. At Vienna Westbahnhof the lines in front of the ticket counters are easily 50 meters long. The platforms are teeming with people. The numbers pulling little black carry-on bags and shouldering laptop briefcases are a clue to who these travellers are: the airline passengers stranded when the Vienna International Airport at Schwechat was closed on Apr. 16.

The “volcano-marooned,” they described themselves.

In Herbert Rosendorfer’s curious but gentle novel Letters Back to Ancient China, a tale of the adventures of a Mandarin Chinese aristocrat transported to present-day Munich, one thousand years into his future, the protagonist describes his first hearing of the music of “Master Vay-to-feng” (Beethoven): “It goes without saying that I could not appreciate this music, which was in every way different from what I was used to… Although these soft opening notes of the great Master Vay-to-feng made it impossible for me to cling on to my prejudice, at first the music still seemed to me incomplete, as if full of arbitrary holes, in some way imprecise and, of course, confusing.

The Theater an der Wien has opened its 2009/10 season with something old and something new – Handel’s oratorio Susanna, composed in 1748, and Benjamin Britten’s opera Death in Venice, composed just a generation ago, in 1973. Although hardly a traditional bride, the youngest opera house in Vienna, has no need for lucky tokens – also not something borrowed, something blue or even a sixpence in the shoe.

If there are still some sunny days in September or October, if Summer manages to stretch itself into Fall and Autumn doesn’t pretend to be Winter, there may still be a chance to enjoy a bicycle ride down the length of the Neusiedler See in Burgenland, across the Hungarian border and to one of the best restaurants I have enjoyed in years: Ráspi Restaurant and Vinarium in Fertőrákos.

“I need the gaiety of Mozart, his beauty, his objectivity and his melancholy,” wrote choreographer Uwe Scholz of Mozart’s Piano Concerto E-flat major, KV 271, “…not steered by any sort of narcissism, but by a tragic power.”

The Salvatorsaal, a late-baroque room with frescoed ceiling and windows to a tiny garden, is tucked into a corner of one the buildings attached to the Barnabiten Church on the Mariahilferstraße and its cacophony of shopping, cars and fast food. Amazingly, this small room is a miracle of silence – the perfect site for a “concert in historical places:” the twenty-third of the series “Unknown Masterpieces of the Renaissance,” May 6 and 8, with René Clemencic on the clavichord.

Slowly, revivals of lesser-known works by George Frideric Handel are beginning to reappear on concert schedules, helped by 2009 being a “Handel year” (250 years after his death). Still, these are rare enough, so we must applaud the Theater an der Wien for offering us two obscure baroque riches in one season (in addition to the Messiah, which needs no introduction). After Ariodante last fall, a glorious four-and-a-half hours with not a note cut, now comes Partenope, with six performances between Feb. 22 and Mar. 6.