Vienna: Habsburgs, Coffee Houses & the Ring

Step back and think about what has happened here. In seventeen ninety-one, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's funeral was held inside those doors. It was, by most accounts, a modest and poorly attended affair. The great composer died in poverty, deeply in debt, and was buried in a common grave at the cemetery of St. Marx on the outskirts of town. Vienna has spent two centuries compensating for that embarrassment by putting his face on everything it can find.

Beneath your feet, in the catacombs that stretch under the cathedral, lie the bones of roughly eleven thousand people — most of them victims of the great bubonic plague that swept through Vienna in the seventeenth century. The catacombs also hold urns containing the organs of Habsburg emperors. The Habsburgs were buried in pieces: their hearts went to the Herzgruft in the Augustinerkirche, their embalmed bodies to the Imperial Crypt at the Kapuzinerkirche, and their entrails here. Death, for the Habsburgs, was a logistical operation.

Listen for the bells. The great bell of Stephansdom is called the Pummerin — the Boomer. Cast in sixteen eighty-three from the bronze of Ottoman cannons captured when Vienna defeated the Turkish siege, it was a victory bell from the start. The city had been surrounded, starved, and bombarded for two months before a relief army arrived on the twelfth of September and sent the Ottomans into retreat. The Pummerin rings today on New Year's Eve, its deep voice broadcasting across Austria on the radio, and every Viennese stops what they are doing to listen.

Outside the cathedral, the Fiaker horse carriages are waiting on the Stephansplatz, their drivers in top hats calling out to tourists. The Fiaker has been a part of Vienna since the seventeenth century. These open carriages once carried emperors and composers and probably a fair few spies. Now they carry mostly tourists, and they are not cheap. But on a cold autumn afternoon, wrapped in a blanket with the cathedral receding behind you, it is one of the more theatrical ways to see a city.

Now turn and face southwest. We are walking toward the Hofburg, the imperial palace. It is about six hundred metres. This is the walk generations of Habsburgs made from their winter residence to their church. Follow them.

The man who defined the modern Hofburg was Franz Joseph the First. He ruled for sixty-eight years, from eighteen forty-eight until his death in nineteen sixteen — longer than Queen Victoria, longer than almost any monarch in European history. He rose at four in the morning every day, worked at his desk until late, ate simply, and dressed in his uniform until the end. He was not a romantic figure. He was a bureaucrat of empire, and he held it together through sheer stubbornness long after it should have fallen apart.

But it is Franz Joseph's wife, Empress Elisabeth, who haunts this palace most powerfully. She was called Sisi, and she was one of the most beautiful and most miserable women in nineteenth-century Europe. She loathed court protocol. She travelled constantly to escape the Hofburg. She was obsessed with her figure — her waist measured fifty centimetres at its smallest — and spent hours each day exercising and having her hair dressed. She was assassinated in Geneva in eighteen ninety-eight by an Italian anarchist who stabbed her with a sharpened file. She was sixty years old, still beautiful, still running. The Viennese have turned her into a myth. The Sisi Museum here will show you the other side: the loneliness, the eating disorders, the decades of flight.

Before you move on, consider visiting the Imperial Treasury — the Schatzkammer — which lies just through the Swiss Gate. Inside is the Habsburg crown jewels, including a narwhal tusk over two and a half metres long that was once believed to be the horn of a unicorn and valued accordingly. The Habsburgs paid more for it than they paid for an entire castle. That is not metaphor. That is the invoice.

Also in this complex, the Spanish Riding School trains its Lipizzaner horses in the baroque winter riding hall, a space of such extraordinary beauty that the horses seem less like athletes than baroque sculptures in motion. Performances have been held here since sixteen eighty. The horses are white — though they are born dark and lighten with age — and the schooling they undergo takes years before they can perform the dramatic elevated movements that made them famous across Europe.

Walk now toward the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Cross the Ring and you will see it facing you, its dome green against the sky. We are heading into the world's greatest collection of what power looks like when it decides to sponsor genius.

Now, the collection. The Bruegel room alone justifies the existence of this building. The museum holds the world's largest collection of works by Pieter Bruegel the Elder — twelve paintings out of only forty-five that survive. The Tower of Babel. Hunters in the Snow. Children's Games. The Peasant Wedding. Bruegel painted the sixteenth century from the inside, with extraordinary sympathy for ordinary people doing ordinary things in a world that was very beautiful and very brutal. These paintings have survived five centuries, two world wars, and the entire Habsburg empire. They are still here.

There is also Vermeer's Art of Painting — the large canvas in which the master depicts himself, back turned to us, painting the model posing as the Muse of History. Scholars have argued for three hundred years about its meaning. It may be Vermeer's declaration of the dignity of the artist. It is certainly one of the most luminous canvases in existence. Also here: Raphael, Titian, Caravaggio, Velázquez. And Benvenuto Cellini's gold salt cellar, commissioned by Francis the First of France in fifteen forty and stolen from this museum in two thousand three — it was hidden in a metal box under a bed in a Vienna apartment for three years before being recovered. Art theft in Vienna. Of course.

Interestingly, it was Maria Theresa who pushed for these collections to be accessible to the public. Previous Habsburgs had accumulated art for themselves. She opened the doors. That is worth remembering as you walk through a museum that a dynasty once hoarded.

When you're ready, walk east along the Ringstrasse toward the State Opera. The great boulevard unfolds before you — two kilometres of monument, ambition, and extraordinarily good tailoring.

Look around you. The neo-Gothic Rathaus, the town hall, all spires and lace-like stonework, completed in eighteen eighty-three. The neo-baroque State Opera, which you are standing in front of, opened in eighteen sixty-nine. The neo-Renaissance Parliament, completed in eighteen eighty-three, with Athena standing guard over democracy from her fountain. The neo-classical University, opened in eighteen eighty-four. All of it built within thirty years, all of it within a few hundred metres. A dozen nations' worth of architectural styles, summoned to one street to demonstrate that Vienna was the centre of civilisation.

The two architects who designed the Opera House, August Sicard von Sicardsburg and Eduard van der Nüll, did not live to enjoy their success. When Franz Joseph made a mildly critical remark about the facade, the comment was reported widely and van der Nüll hanged himself. Sicard von Sicardsburg died of a broken heart two months later. After that, Franz Joseph made it his policy never to comment on anything in public except to say that it was "sehr schön" — very nice. The phrase became famous.

The Vienna State Opera performs roughly three hundred nights per year, with a different opera almost every night — a repertoire that no other opera house in the world maintains. It opens fifty new productions per season. Tickets for the best seats sell for hundreds of euros. But here is the wonderful Viennese secret: standing room tickets in the pit and the gallery cost a few euros, and many of the greatest operagoers in Vienna have been standing for decades. You book your spot with a scarf tied to the rail. Then you go get a beer and come back before the curtain.

Beethoven's Ninth premiered in Vienna in eighteen twenty-four. Mozart's Don Giovanni was performed here. Mahler conducted here for ten years. And in nineteen forty-five, Allied bombs destroyed the building's stage house and auditorium. It was rebuilt and reopened in nineteen fifty-five — the same year Austria regained its independence.

Continue northeast along the Ring toward Café Central. We are going inside the coffee house, which is the actual parliament of Vienna.

Now consider who has sat at these marble tables. Leon Trotsky played chess here in the years before the Russian Revolution, coming to Vienna to escape the Tsarist secret police. He was a regular. When a colleague warned the Austro-Hungarian foreign minister in nineteen fourteen that a certain Herr Bronstein was likely to lead the Russian revolution, the minister reportedly replied that he couldn't possibly — he played chess at Café Central. Also regular visitors: Sigmund Freud, who lived five minutes away on Berggasse. Stefan Zweig, the great Austrian writer, who chronicled the collapse of this world in his memoir The World of Yesterday. The architect Adolf Loos. The writer Karl Kraus. And, according to records, a young Adolf Hitler, who lived in poverty in Vienna from nineteen oh seven to nineteen thirteen, and a young Josef Stalin, who attended a Bolshevik conference in Vienna in January nineteen thirteen. The two men may have been in this city at the same time, possibly in this room. History is sometimes more terrifying than any thriller.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination in Sarajevo in nineteen fourteen lit the fuse of the First World War, was also connected to these circles. The entire collapse of the Habsburg world began gathering here, in these polished rooms, over years of coffee and argument.

Let's talk about the coffee. You do not simply order a coffee in Vienna. You order a Melange — half coffee, half steamed milk, a dream in a glass. Or an Einspänner — black coffee in a glass with a mountain of whipped cream on top. Or a Verlängerter — a long black. Each variety has its protocol, its serving vessel, its social meaning. Your coffee arrives on a small silver tray with a glass of water and possibly a small biscuit. The water is not optional. It is part of the ritual.

Order something. Stay awhile. The Viennese invented the concept of sitting here for two hours over one coffee and the waiter never hurrying you. It is not laziness. It is philosophy.

Vienna's history is layered through this market. The original market sold milk from wooden buckets — Aschmarkt, the bucket market, which became Naschmarkt over the centuries. When the Jewish community was strong in Vienna before nineteen thirty-eight, the eastern end of the market had a distinctly different character. After the Anschluss, Jewish-owned stalls were seized overnight. It is one of the places in Vienna where the memory of what was destroyed sits very close to the surface.

Today the market reflects Vienna's present tense: Turkish and Balkan vendors who arrived in the great migration waves of the nineteen sixties and seventies, selling spices and feta and baklava alongside Austrian farmers with their mountain cheeses and cured meats. On Saturday mornings the market extends further south into a flea market where you can buy everything from baroque oil paintings of uncertain provenance to someone's grandmother's china. The combination of fresh produce, second-hand treasure, and an enormous brunch crowd makes Saturday at the Naschmarkt one of the great urban experiences in Europe.

Find something to eat. The apricot is the fruit of Austria, and in summer the Marillenknoedel — apricot dumplings, the apricot whole inside a jacket of potato dough, rolled in buttered breadcrumbs — are one of the great pleasures of Viennese cuisine. In winter, try a Käsekrainer — a sausage stuffed with cheese — from a stand at the market entrance. The Viennese eat it standing at a high table, with mustard, and they regard it as a perfectly reasonable breakfast.

We are heading now to the Secession Building, just south of the market. Look for the gold dome rising above the trees.

Read the inscription above the entrance. It says: "Der Zeit ihre Kunst. Der Kunst ihre Freiheit." To every age its art. To art its freedom. Fourteen words that became the motto of the entire Viennese modernist movement. They are still there, cut into the stone above the door, more than a century later.

The building hosted the Secession's exhibitions from the beginning. The fourteenth exhibition, in nineteen oh two, was the occasion for which Klimt painted his Beethoven Frieze — thirty-four metres of painted wall in the basement of this building. It is still there. You can go down and stand in front of it now. The frieze was painted for a single exhibition, never meant to be permanent, and Klimt worked in gold leaf and casein paint and semi-precious stones and real hair pressed into the surface. It depicts humanity's search for happiness through the Nine Symphonic movements of Beethoven's Ninth, culminating in a golden embrace that reads simultaneously as erotic and transcendent. The Viennese called Klimt a pornographer when it was first shown. They later decided he was a genius.

The Vienna Secession included not just Klimt but the architect and designer Koloman Moser, the young Egon Schiele who would push Klimt's symbolism into something rawer and more disturbing, and the architect Otto Wagner who rebuilt Vienna's infrastructure — its metro stations, its postal savings bank, its apartment buildings — in the new style. Together they produced what historians call the Viennese Jugendstil, the art nouveau movement, and it transformed the visual language of modern Europe.

The Secession still operates as an exhibition space today. Whatever is showing when you visit, the basement is permanent. Go see the Beethoven Frieze.

The Upper Belvedere is now a museum, and it holds the painting that every visitor to Vienna comes to see. It hangs in the middle gallery on the first floor, surrounded by tourists holding phones: Gustav Klimt's The Kiss. Painted between nineteen oh seven and nineteen oh eight, it shows a couple embracing on a flowery cliff edge, their robes merging into a single glittering mass of gold squares and rectangles and circles that covers them like Byzantine mosaic. Their faces are private. What we see is the intensity of the gesture, the completeness of the absorption in each other. Klimt used gold leaf — real gold — pressed directly onto the canvas. The painting is roughly one hundred and eighty centimetres square. It fills a wall. When you stand in front of it, the gold catches the light and the thing practically breathes.

Klimt painted it the year after his first version of the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer — the painting that was looted by the Nazis, spent decades in this museum, and was eventually restituted to Maria Altmann, the subject's niece, in two thousand six, then sold to the Neue Galerie in New York for a hundred and thirty-five million dollars. Vienna lost that one. The Kiss it kept.

One more reason to stand in this place: this is where Austria came back to life. On the fifteenth of May, nineteen fifty-five, the Austrian State Treaty was signed in the ceremonial Marble Hall of this building. After ten years of occupation by the Allied powers following the Second World War, Austria regained its full independence. The foreign ministers of the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and France signed the treaty alongside the Austrian government. Leopold Figl, the Austrian Foreign Minister, held the document up to the crowd gathered outside and shouted: Austria is free. People wept.

From here we walk north toward the Prater. A city's soul isn't only in its palaces.

The Hauptallee — the great central avenue of the Prater — runs four and a half kilometres through the park, lined on both sides with chestnut trees that bloom spectacularly in spring. For most of its history this was where Vienna's society came to see and be seen: carriages rolling slowly, horses showing their best gaits, hats at precise angles. Today it is cyclists and joggers and people walking large dogs.

Now, the wheel. Step into one of the gondolas if you can — they hold up to twelve people and the ride takes about twenty minutes. At the top you look out over the entire city: the Stephansdom spike, the Ringstrasse domes, the green hills on the horizon. This is Vienna from above.

But the Riesenrad is famous for something beyond its view. In nineteen forty-nine, the British director Carol Reed and the writer Graham Greene made The Third Man here in postwar Vienna — a film about black market penicillin and moral collapse in the Allied-occupied city. The climactic meeting scene was filmed in one of these gondolas, the two men circling slowly above the ruined city while Orson Welles delivered his great speech: "In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

The speech is not in Graham Greene's original novella. Welles improvised it, or invented it, or borrowed it from somewhere. No one is entirely sure. But it became the most famous lines ever spoken in a Viennese setting, delivered in a gondola of a wheel built for an emperor's anniversary, during a film shot in a city still clearing rubble from the war. Vienna contains multitudes.

Head back now toward the city centre. Our last stop is the Graben — the elegant heart of the First District, and a column that tells you everything about how this city has survived.

Look at the details. Leopold himself is shown prostrating himself in prayer at the base. Above him rise the three persons of the Trinity, surrounded by angels and clouds. Around the column, allegories of Faith, Pestilence, and the Power of God are arranged in theatrical poses. The whole thing is simultaneously deeply serious and completely over the top, which is a Viennese characteristic, and one of the most endearing.

At the north end of the Graben, look down for a moment at the public toilets. They were designed by Adolf Loos in nineteen oh four — the same Loos who designed the Looshaus on the Michaelerplatz that so offended Franz Joseph that the Emperor reportedly refused to use the wing of the Hofburg facing it. Loos was the great opponent of ornament. He wrote an essay called Ornament and Crime. His public toilet is a masterpiece of restrained elegance: marble floors, brass fittings, immaculate geometry. People come specifically to use it.

The Michaelerkirche — the church of St. Michael — is at the far end of the Graben where it meets the Kohlmarkt. Beneath it are catacombs that were in active use until seventeen eighty-four, when Emperor Joseph the Second closed them on sanitary grounds. Some four thousand people are buried there, many of them in open coffins, their remains preserved by the dry air of the vaults. You can visit. It is not for everyone.

From here, Stephansdom is less than five minutes on foot. You have walked the Ringstrasse and the backstreets, stood in the imperial residence, seen the art that power commissioned and the art that power tried to suppress, drunk coffee where Trotsky played chess and Freud argued with himself, smelled the Naschmarkt, and ridden the wheel that Orson Welles made famous.

Vienna is not a light city. It is beautiful, but its beauty knows exactly what it cost. This is a place that produced Beethoven and Brahms and Schubert and Mahler, Freud and Klimt and Wittgenstein, and also produced the soil from which the worst of the twentieth century grew. Those things are not separate. They come from the same overheated, overcrowded, imperial, anxious, glorious capital.

You've earned a Melange. The café is just around the corner.