May 20 was a Monday, but it was also the Whit Monday holiday so many things were closed. I had known that while planning, so the day focused on museums and another opera in the evening. I had hoped that we might be able to get some laundry done at a laundry service near the hotel, and I really wanted to visit the famous open-air Naschmarkt, but the holiday made both of those impossible. That meant that we got an early start on exploring the vast gardens and grounds of the Schoenbrunn Palace, the elegant summer home of the Hapsburgs. It was a good thing, because the place is enormous and it took most of the day!
We started by exploring the grounds before it got too warm, and then we took one of the many tours of the palace.
The palace itself is huge. It was the ruling family's summer residence (when it was built, it was outside of Vienna in the countryside, so it was about a 30 minute taxi ride to get the the far, uphill end of the grounds). It was the center of much royal entertaining and some government activities, although most of those stayed at the Hofburg in the city. Like Versailles, it opens upon acres of gardens and parks, with fountains and the first zoo in Europe.
The gardens include a labyrinth that the rest of our merry crew enjoyed while I caught up on my notes, and it also has acres of formal gardens and neatly-maintained woodland with trails. At the far end, where we entered, is the Little Gloriette, a sort of playhouse size marble structure that you might play in if your parents are emperors and empresses. From there we could look down across the grounds and gardens and reflecting pools to the grand palace and it was clear why the taxi driver had insisted upon delivering us to this entrance of the park; it was a long downhill walk to the palace, past many marvels and wonders.
Schönbrunn means "beautiful spring", and it was a glorious day in mid-May. Brigitte especially enjoyed getting out into the fresh air! Vienna is a big modern city and the previous day had been spent among all the traffic and noise of a big busy city. It's a beautiful city, but even beautiful cities have traffic and noise.
My favorite part of the grounds was the Palmenhaus, a big greenhouse filled with palm trees and ferns. The ceilings are high enough to permit the palm trees to grow to impressive heights. There's running water everywhere, and between the sound of the waters, the colors and textures and smells, the color of the light filtered through great palm fronds in many layers overhead, and the tropical greenhouse heat, I had a deep sense of being in someplace very different from my daily experience. I overheard more than one person mention Jurassic Park in an Austrian accent, but this is no jungle, it still has the controlled elegance of the many formal gardens and rose gardens, but you see it most in the soaring steel-and-glass architecture, as if you are a colorful pet turtle in a terrarium in a fine home. Right around you everything looks wild and natural, but you don't have to look real hard to see the carefully-hidden incredible structural components and irrigation that make make this tropical oasis look so natural.
Inside the palace was even grander than the grounds. The place was built not only as a beautiful place to escape the city's summer heat and noise, but also to impress visiting royalty, ministers of state, and captains of finance and industry. Many of these people would have seen Versailles and its counterparts in England, Italy, and Russia, and the Hapsburgs needed to show that they had the wealth and power to be seen as equals and even superiors in those glittering halls. Our tour was one of many, each with a different focus. We selected the Empress Maria Theresa tour because it fit our schedule, and we were very happy with the tour guide and the tour.
I bought a cookbook of Imperial Austrian cuisine in the gift shop while the others found some souvenirs of their own and got some much needed water, and then we went back outside where we explored some more gardens. I wondered how many people must be employed to maintain this sprawling monument to opulence, an army to be sure, but then I saw the number of tourists, the busy gift shop and snack stands, the lines of tour buses parked in the distance, and the prices of everything and it was easy to see how they manage to balance the books of this beautiful enterprise. We had certainly spent enough time and money there to feel that we had made our contribution!
We took a taxi back to our hotel in the city center (the five of us had two rooms at the same hotel, the Hotel Terminus, and we had no complaints). At the top of our street is this magnificent staircase, designed by one of the Secessionist artists and paid for by one of their patrons to ease the difficulty faced by workers from the poorer district behind me as I took the photo to the grand city up the hill.
It was good to freshen up and to get off our feet for a little while before continuing our adventure. Owen and Brigitte set off for some exploring of their own and we planned to meet again for a 17:30 dinner at You.
Dinner was excellent. We shared a Gruener Veltliner Austrian white wine, and a good hummus platter. I had parsley soup (shown here) and Owen and I had Wiener schnitzel again. I never did get the traditional Viennese tafelspitz. Lorna had halibut, Melissa had a vegetarian Thai curry, and Brigitte had the "Little Italy" seafood pasta. It was a good dinner but service was somewhat slow so we skipped dessert so we could walk the two blocks to the Staatsoper for our second opera of the trip and our third musical entertainment in three days in this city made legendary for music by Mozart, Haydn, Brahms, Strauss, and so many more!
The show was Verdi's penultimate work, Otello, based on Shakespeare's play. This time I had gotten seats for three and two, with Owen and Brigitte in a beautiful box and the rest of us on the floor near the front. This was because heights make Lorna anxious and we wanted to find out if the second tier of boxes was high enough to be scary; it wasn't, at least at that opera house, so that opens up more seating options for us. However I was surprised to see that their seats were excellent with a great view and fine acoustics, but if I remember correctly the seats behind them in the same box were the same price and not as nice. I must remember to check that if I ever order seats in a box again.
As for the show, the orchestra was great and the acoustics were great. Naturally the finest opera house in Austria can afford the finest musicians, and the Wiener Staatsoper has a long history of great conductors, so I expected nothing less.
But for this show, unlike Figaro two nights earlier, the sets were boring and costumes were unexciting. The voices were good and Iago and Desdemona were brilliant, but I felt that the tenor who played Othello lacked the charisma that you would expect for a mighty admiral, warrior, and governor of Cyprus. It shows that even in the best opera houses in the world, opera is a vastly challenging production and it's really difficult and expensive to get everything to a level that will satisfy most ticket buyers. I don't feel bad being critical here; the tickets were about $275US each and I had to buy them months in advance without being able to select specific seats like you can at most opera houses and other venues.
We were pretty tired after that, and not hungry enough for dessert. Knowing that the morning would see us on the train to Salzburg, we retired early, exhausted and happy.