I’m trying to stay up until 10pm so that my sleep schedule will be somewhat back to normal. We got back (to home — the plane landed 2 hours before that) around 6 tonight.

I have notes on the last few days, so I’ll put that up soon. One tidbit to tide you over until then: The airport in Vienna has a cafe called Ikarus, complete with a mural of him falling from the sky. Yikes.

Last night we went to see Britten’s “Billy Budd” at the Vienna Staatsoper. The cast and music were great, but the design and production were lousy. Simon Keenlyside was a very attractive (and beautiful-sounding) Billy Budd, James Morris (Wotan in the Met’s Ring) was Claggart, and Michael Roider was an excellent Captain Vere. I think the Captain is the most interesting (and sympathetic) character in a pretty depressing opera. I had heard it on the radio before, but I had never seen it live. I hadn’t realized how blatant the homoerotic aspects of the opera are, and I’m amazed by what Britten got away with. At one point Claggart sings about his “depravity” while musing on the beauty of Billy Budd. The audience was much better-dressed than a Met audience, even the teenagers.

Afterward we went to the Palmenhaus, which is a restaurant in a Jugendstil greenhouse with at least 50′ ceilings. The food was excellent, but it was SO LOUD.

Oops, I forgot to mention that when we were at the Staatsoper to buy our Billy Budd tickets, we went to Arcadia, the opera CD store on the ground floor. I bought Malcom McLaren’s “Fans” album. It seemed appopriate.

We went to see the Vienna Secession building this morning and saw a beautiful work by Gustav Klimt called the Beethoven Frieze. It’s a visual interpretation of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Klimt has never been one of my favorite artists of that era — I’m more partial to Egon Schiele — but this was fabulous. In the shop you could buy a snowglobe with the building in it.

Next we visited the Academy of Fine Arts to see the Bosch Last Judgement Tryptich, and then went on to the Imperial Apartments at the Hofburg. I don’t normally do so much museum stuff on vacation, but there are so many important works here that I would never see in NYC. After lunch we saw the Imperial Apartments in the Hofburg. We had drinks afterward at Halle, a beautiful cafe/restaurant at the Kunsthalle filled with attractive people (including the waiters). We also walked around the new MQ (Museum Quartier), a collection of buildings near the Hofburg being changed into spaces to be used for temporary contemporary art projects.

We had dinner again tonight at Neu Wien — this time for me to have my first Wiener Schitzel in Vienna. It’s a really great restaurant, with slightly nouvelle cuisine, good wines and service, and a really attractive space.

All of the public squares and parks in Vienna have statues of famous artists who spent time in Vienna — composers, writers, poets, etc. New York should really do the same.

We went to Judenplatz (Jew Square) to see the Rachel Whiteread-created Holocaust Memorial. Then we went to the Judenplatz Museum, which has the excavated remains of this first synagogue in Vienna. Parts of it date from around 1240, and it was destroyed in 1421as part of a wave of anti-Semitic persecution. Parts of the synagogue were then used to build part of the University of Vienna.

We visited the Shakespeare & Co. bookstore before that. One of the things I spotted was a textbook called “American Civilization: An Introduction”. It had photographs of an American flag, fireworks over the U.S. Capitol, and Ricky Martin on the cover. They also had a series of books called the Xenophobe’s guide to… They were sold out of the American one — apparently it’s quite popular.

We then had lunch at Restaurant Gustl Bauer on Drahtgasse after the Judenplatz Museum. The good was great, with a good atmosphere. The table next to us was a group on a culinary tour. You can basically get any kind of tour in Vienna it seems. The one American turned out to be a chef at the Ritz Carlton in Maui.

In the morning we went to a big (and very good) exhibit, sponsored by the town, on Melk and Nazism, 1938-1945. There were specific names and addresses of Jews who had lived in the town, and their experiences — ranging from survival to death in a concentration camp. There were a lot of photos of the town in that period, including one of our hotel decorated with Nazi banners on May 1, 1938 — the Anschluss was in March of that year. The exhibit included posters made my children in the local school with photos and text. There were pieces of bomb shrapnel on display from when the town was bombed, front pages from local newspapers, official city notices, and photographs from the concentration camp at the edge of town plus nearby Mauthausen. They did an interesting job of also showing what happened at the end of the war — expulsion of Germans from points east such as Czechoslovakia, and the prosecutions and executions of pro-Nazi officials of the town at the end of the war.

Afterward we went to one of the great Baroque buildings of Europe, the Melk Abbey (Stift Melk). It is still a functioning Dominican, abbey, and I was really struck, particularly after the Nazi exhibit, by the element of battle present everywhere — angels battling, the battle of good vs. evil in the world, etc. It was recently restored, and many of the exhibits (including some religious propoganda) are pretty high-tech. The restoration was paid for from the proceeds of the sale of the abbey’s Gutenberg Bible to Harvard.

We then drove along the Wachau wine area toward Vienna, stopping at the Kirchenwirt Restaurant in Weissenkirchen for lunch. It was a great meal with good local wine in a very tasteful room — which isn’t always an easy thing to find in this part of the world.

Our arrival in Wien was a NIGHTMARE. It’s very hard to navigate (in a car) the streets of Vienna to a hotel on a small street without really knowing the proper route in advance.

I LOVE VIENNA. It’s a fabulous city, and feels much more like a real city than Munich. It also feels very un-American in a way. The people are pretty sophisticated, and make even New Yorkers look like we don’t care about our weight. As a city, it’s so “out of the way” in terms of its importance today, but it doesn’t seem to matter at all. It’s a very cosmopolitan and attractive city. We looked at restaurants on along a street near us called Baeckerstrasse, which has several interesting choices. We chose a very attractive restaurant called Neu Wien (New Vienna) that turned out to be excellent. We had a classic of Vienna — tafelspitz (boiled beef) with a great Vienna wine called Wiener Trilogie. On the walk back to the hotel we walked by a plaque on a building near our hotel stating that Robert Schumann had lived there for a bit.