by Ian Fleming
The Vienna Boys’ Choir – there are, in fact, three of them, but one is generally travelling abroad – sings every Sunday in the Hofkapelle. Here, after battling up the narrow stairs, clutching your tickets, and being shown to a seat from which you can see neither any part of the choir nor the Mass that is being held far down in the body of the small church, you must just sit and forget the tourists around you, close your eyes and listen to the piercingly beautiful voices against the full orchestra and organ. You must close your eyes to appreciate the mysterious poignancy of these boys’ voices, because the mixture of church service and tourist attraction, though it has to be, is an unfortunate one. When people have paid for a ticket for any kind of performance, they seem to think they have also bought the right to behave as they please. Even during a church service, the loud whispering, particularly in a language I will not designate, the standing up to see better, and even, in the case of a man in front of me, the chewing of gum, is part of the tourist smear that is rapidly desecrating the remaining beautiful places and occasions in the world. And there is absolutely nothing to be done about it. If you want to hear the Vienna Boys’ Choir, you have to hear it with around two hundred other people who have also paid to get in. Since quite a few of these people are only collecting the occasion, like a postage stamp, to stick in their albums when they get home, you cannot expect them to pay more than cursory attention to what is going on. At the end of, for them, an exhausting hour during which they are longing for a cigarette, you must patiently submit to being swept up with them and pushed off back down the narrow stone stairs so that they may be just in time to ‘do’ the Spanish Riding School next door – the second ‘must’ for a well packaged Sunday in Vienna.
As for my own visit to the Spanish Riding School, I was more fortunate. There was to be a special night performance on Monday evening for which I was lucky enough to get a ticket.
I am not greatly interested in horses. Our brief friendship terminated when, at the age of about twelve, I was allotted a hireling with a large, red, chocolate-box ribbon on its tail to denote a kicker, and was sent off complaining, with my elder brother, Peter, to a near-by meet in Oxfordshire. I stood well away from the meet and was given a wide berth by the rest of the hunt. Unfortunately, when the Master and the hounds set off, they passed close to my beast, who immediately waded in backwards with hooves flying. My diminutive heels and light switch had no effect, and the furious bellows of the Master and whippers-in – ‘Get control of your animal, damn it!’ – only made me rein the monster in and accelerate its backward progress. We scythed our way through the hunt, kicking the Master’s mount and one or two hounds on the way, and were only brought up by a clump of gorse. We waited, I pale and trembling, and my monster sated – a dreadful Bateman cartoon – until ordered home, ‘until you can learn to ride’. Since that day, and after equally horrible experiences in the Cavalry School at Sandhurst, I have profoundly agreed with whoever said that horses are dangerous at both ends and uncomfortable in the middle.
But the Spanish Riding School is something different. It is the most graceful exhibition of sheer style in beautiful surroundings to be seen anywhere in the world. And on this occasion I took trouble, in the stables and from the writings of the present commandant, Colonel Podharsky, to find out more about it.
The Lipizzans date from ‘Caesar’s snow-white steed which Hispania did him send’. Further developed from the original Arab strains during the occupation of Spain by the Moors, the breed was introduced into Austria in the sixteenth century by Maximilian II. The basis of the present stud was established about that time in the village of Lipizza, near Trieste, whence the stud influenced horse-breeding throughout the Danubian monarchy. At the peace treaty after the First World War, this Lipizza stud was divided up between Austria and Italy as part of reparations, the one hundred and nine horses allotted to Italy returning to Lipizza, and the eighty-nine horses for Austria going to Piber in Styria. Today, the Lipizza breed has six dynasties of stallions dating back to the following sires: Pluto, Conversano, Neapolitano, Favoury, Maestoso and Siglavy; and, though extensive breeding of Lipizzans still goes on in Hungary, Rumania, Yugoslavia and Poland, the paramount Austrian stud remains at Piber.
The fate of the stud during the last war was fraught with drama. In 1942 the stud was ordered from Piber to Hostau in Czecho-Slovakia, and there they were joined by the stud from Lipizza to form, for the first time since 1919, a united Lipizzan stud with about three hundred and fifty horses. But, as the war went worse for Hitler and the Russian front approached Czecho-Slovakia, it looked as if the end had come. At the last moment, in March 1945, occurred what must have been a romantic and moving sight. The whole stud, together with its baggage train of original uniforms and equipment, trekked hundreds of miles between the armies to St Martin in Upper Austria. The sight of these beautiful white stallions wending their way towards the west must have lifted the hearts of many. In the midst of shot and shell, the Riding School at St Martin awaited the arrival of the American forces, fortunately in this sector commanded by General Patton, who was himself a great horseman and had been a member of the United States riding team at the Olympic Games in 1912. He took the stud under his protection and, in due course, its homeward trek continued back to Piber.
The height of a Lipizzan is between 14 and 15.2 hands. At birth the horses are black, but their colour changes through grey until they are white at the age of about four years, by which time they have completed their basic training in the three essential paces, walk, trot and canter. Only the stallions are used for performances in the Riding School, and then only for about a quarter of an hour’s performance by each horse, with a maximum of forty-five minutes’ daily training, to avoid taxing their powers of concentration and restraint.
The Riding Hall itself, seen at its most wonderful at night when the two vast chandeliers each blaze with a hundred lights, was built in 1735 by the younger of the Fischer von Erlachs, masters of the baroque period. The only touch of colour in the hundred-yard-long white hall is the wine-red plush on the balustrades, and I am not being irreverent when I say that the classical virginity of the interior reminds me of my favourite church in the world, the white baroque interior of the Frauenkirche in Munich.
This beautiful Riding Hall, fortunately undamaged in the last war, was also used, under Maria Theresa, for tournaments, carousels, great balls and fancy-dress carnivals of fantastic splendour. In 1814, Beethoven conducted here his monster concert of over a thousand musicians, and this was the scene of the first assembly of the Austrian parliament in 1848. (History does not relate that, with the advent of the Nazis, this graceful virginal hall was used as a temporary prison for many thousands of Jews, men, women and children, who were crammed in here for days without food or sanitation during the ‘cleaning-up’ of Vienna.)
But now these beautiful and hideous memories are gone, it is eight o’clock in the evening and the lights along the walls and in the giant chandeliers are blazing. The far double-doors under the portrait of Charles VI on a Lipizzan stallion are thrown open and eight of the beautiful horses, their riders ramrod-straight (their motto is ‘Ride your horse forward and keep it straight’), pace majestically in and line up facing the royal box. The brown tricorns are raised and replaced over the serious, dedicated faces with one straight-arm sweep, and then, as the hidden orchestra strikes up Reidinger’s ‘Festive Entrance’, horses and riders proceed to the first number – ‘All the Paces and Movements of the High School’. The riders in their chocolate-brown redingotes, white breeches and tall black boots to the knees, double rows of brass buttons flashing, and themselves wooden and expressionless, are toy soldiers, and the horses have all the soft, silken, plump appearance of other nursery toys. You notice that, for the first easy exercises, the control on a snaffle is light as the limping trots and sideways chassées gradually smudge the neatly raked field of sawdust and tan bark. Then come the more difficult ‘Levades’ and the ‘Piaffe at the Wall’, and, while y
ou are still watching these, in a far corner, one stallion does a sensational ‘Capriole’. Now you notice that the curb is being used. The horses are reined in tautly so that the proud curve of the neck is still further arched, there is a fleck of foam on the jaws, and here and there a brown eye shows white with concentration and nerves. But immediately after something difficult, the rider relaxes his horse and allows him to float gracefully the full length of the hall in the beautiful prancing trot that I find the most effective pace of all.
And so act follows act, with ‘Work in Hand’, ‘Pas de Trois’, and ‘Work on the Rein’, until the grand finale of the ‘School Quadrille’, when the eight horses perform solemn and rather slow arabesques to Chopin and Bizet.
By this time, impressed and delighted though one may be by the discipline and authority of the whole performance, one does rather long for a vulgar touch of the Aldershot Tattoo when perhaps the horses might be allowed one single splendid gallop. But that only shows what a Philistine one is in these matters. Exuberance is not permitted in this dedicated world, and in due course, to the rousing strains of the ‘Austrian Grenadiers’, the team once again line up, the tricorns are gracefully held out and replaced, and silently, almost funereally, the beautiful horses file out again under the clock until the last clink of spur and bit has disappeared.
After these various elegant pleasures I had one last rendezvous in Vienna – an incongruous one – with the International Atomic Energy Agency installed here in 1956 by the United Nations.
I am allergic to almost every form of international agency, conference or committee. Having worked briefly in the League of Nations around 1932, I believe that all international bodies waste a great deal of money, turn out far too much expensively printed paper, and achieve very little indeed. So it was with a jaundiced mind that I made an appointment to visit the Atom Kommission, as the Viennese call it, with the secret intention of making sharp fun of it. Unfortunately I fell into the hands of Dr Seligman, formerly head of the Isotope Division at Harwell, and U.K. representative at the I.A.E.A. since its foundation, who completely took the wind out of my sails. Dr Seligman is one of those intelligent, humorous, liberal-minded scientists (he reminded me of Sir Solly Zuckerman) who makes science understandable to the layman, and, with a nice mixture of irony and enthusiasm, he completely convinced me that the Agency, which has a modest budget and staff, was doing something really important very well.
I personally leave it to others to worry about the Atomic Age. It seems to me too late in life for this layman to concern himself with such a vast and inchoate subject, but I accept the fact that atoms are here to stay and I now realize that, while a few years ago every small country simply had to have its own national airline, now every small country has to have its nuclear reactor, allegedly at any rate for peaceful purposes.
It is to control the demand and safe supply of these reactors and to teach the operators to work them without blowing up the world that the Atomic Energy Agency has been set up, and I can now appreciate that the existence of such international security measures is absolutely vital to all of us.
What happens is that an underdeveloped country wishing to develop the peaceful uses of atomic energy (and they all do) needs outside help. This is provided by the Agency in the form of a mission which examines the requirements of each country in respect of nuclear physics, raw materials, reactors, the medical uses of isotopes, and the briefing of nuclear personnel. Such missions, for instance, visited India, Indonesia, Thailand and Ceylon in 1959, and there are other similar missions in various parts of the world at this time. Purchases of nuclear equipment, the training of staff, etc., are then carried out through the Agency, and member governments supply the goods and any necessary personnel, presumably in accordance with their individual economic strategies.
Thus the Agency – in which, by the way, the Soviet Union participates with, to me, a rather suspect enthusiasm – can keep track of all power reactors and nuclear material throughout a large part of the world.
In addition to this police activity, the Agency makes independent studies of health and safety techniques including waste-disposal – thankless tasks, but surely vital ones.
To give one rather dramatic example, there is a matter on hand at the moment (1959) in the Agency described as the ‘Vinca Dosimetry Project’. On October 15th, 1958, there was a brief uncontrolled run of the Vinca Zero power reactor in Yugoslavia which exposed a number of operators to considerable radiation. The exposed men were flown immediately to the Curie hospital in Paris and there treated by new methods of counteracting radiation injury which apparently aroused keen attention in the scientific and medical worlds. Meanwhile, in the following April, the Yugoslav reactor ‘went critical’, as they say, again, and unknown elements in the control of such emergencies were revealed. As a result, the Agency in Vienna decided that a full-scale reconstruction of these dangerous circumstances should be undertaken whereby the precise doses and distribution of neutron and gamma rays to the originally injured men could be established in the interests of radiation safety.
Yugoslavia has agreed to this project and many nations are participating, including the United Kingdom, who loaned the heavy water needed to restart the reactor, and the United States, who provided, from Oak Ridge, four plastic phantoms filled with a salt solution which, in the experiment, will suffer various dosages of radiation.
Dr Seligman confirmed what the Foreign Minister adumbrated – that the Atomic Energy Control Commission, for so long a subject of debate at Geneva, would, if and when East and West can agree to its creation, also have its headquarters in Vienna. It is odd to think that such a pretty, frivolous city is becoming the headquarters for such solemn and ultra-modern undertakings.
Musing on these incongruities, I left the city of romantic dreams and took off for the Semmering Pass and the beautiful road through the Alps, for Salzburg, Innsbruck and points west:
INCIDENTAL INTELLIGENCE
Hotels
Five-star: Still the best is Sachers, just the same as ever, wonderful service and food, hard to get into unless you have influence or can book well in advance. Even if you cannot manage to get a room there, Sacher’s Blue Bar and Red Bar are Vienna’s meeting-places for a pre-dinner or pre-opera drink. The original chocolate Sachertorte cakes are to be had on the premises, the same recipe as Emperor Franz Joseph liked, although discerning Viennese prefer the Sachertorten you get at the old-fashioned coffee-shop of Demel, a few streets away in the Kohlmarkt. Alternative five-star hotel: the Ambassador (but known to the Viennese as the ‘Kranz’) on the Neuer Markt, back of the Kärntnerstrasse. Ask for one of the rooms where the walls are lined with thick red silk. Excellent restaurant.
One-star: Hotel Allstria, in the Wolfengasse, off the Fleischmarkt, near the Danube Canal. Comfortable, cosy and old-fashioned but quite efficient in a restrained, never-get-flustered Viennese sort of way. It lies in a narrow alley and is nearly opposite one of Vienna’s oldest restaurants, the Griechenbeisl.
Restaurants
Five-star: Again, Sachers is hard to beat, and its superb cuisine has quite recovered from the days fifteen years ago when it was a British officers’ and Control Commission canteen, and the best it could turn out was baked beans and dried-up rashers on toast, with NAAFI tea.
Am Franziskaner Platz and the Drei Husaren in the Weihburggasse. But the Viennese leave the five-star restaurants to the foreigners and prefer picturesque one-star places like the Weisser Rauchfangkehrer (the White Chimney-sweep) in the Rauhensteingassc, where one sits in niches and drinks the eternal white wine from the vineyard slopes of Gumpoldskirchen, just outside Vienna, and listens to sentimental piano music. Its good family cooking is much more like real Vienna than any of the five-star places. Viennese gravitate between this and places like the romantic candle-lit Kerzenstüberl in the Habsburger Gasse and the Lindenkeller in the Rotenturmstrasse.
Night-clubs
Five-star: Maxim, which has a floor show and girls w
hich remind one of Berlin in the good old naughty days before World War II. It is far and away more sophisticated than anything one can see in the spiessbiirgerlich Berlin night life of today. Likewise Eva, an even more intimate night-club of the same somewhat exotic type.
One-star: A spot of history is attached to the Fatty George in the Peters Platz. It was called the Oriental during the war and was much used by the Gestapo to trap unwary German soldiers on leave and recovering from the rigours of the Eastern front into ‘careless talk’. Microphones were fitted behind all the seats. In those days the owner was a character named Achmed Bey whose name still brings tiny frissons to the Viennese. Today the Fatty George, run by a coloured band-leader, is rather more harmless and is dedicated to the blaringest rock and roll. For those who prefer songs sung in Viennese dialect as well as to dance, there is Marietta’s. One of the present-day cabaret stars in Marietta’s fled to Britain and served in the Pioneer Corps during World War II to avoid being sent to a Nazi concentration camp. Though the foreigners like the night-spots, Viennese prefer to sit in Heurigens and drink wine and sing nostalgically their traditional songs. These places are all pretty cheap. The claim to fame of the Esterhazy Keller, apart from the fact that all its wines come from the Esterhazy estates, is that it is in a thirteenth-century cellar so deep in the bowels of the earth that not even the invading Turks nearly four hundred years ago dared to descend into its murky and sinister depths. Another city-centre wine cellar of equal antiquity is the Urbani Keller in Am Hof, which has wonderful wine but where the musty smell reminds one nostalgically of the tunnels of the Metropolitan Railway between Baker Street and Finchley Road.