1966-68  Post-Academy days (3) – Vienna highlights

Harvey was becoming increasingly frustrated, working in the Bank.  He found the world of finance lacking a great deal in ‘musicality’.  Can music mix with money?

In September 1968, with adolescent impetuosity, he wrote directly to the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, ‘out of the blue’, and secured a ticket for the world-famous New Year’s Day Concert in the Vienna Musikverein on 1 January 1969!

Following Angela Lawrence’s suggestion to ask Doris Meissner if she knew where we could stay in my favourite European city, the Meissner family immediately responded ‘Come and stay with us, and have a couple of weeks’ holiday in Vienna!’

On 22 December 1968 we set off by train and ferry, eventually arriving at Vienna’s Westbahnhof station 24 hours later.  We were met by Doris and her father Eduard who treated Harvey to a coffee at the Schonbrunn Palace, before settling in at the Meissner residence in the old Habsburg Arsenal by the Sudbahnhof and the Belvedere Palace.  I was so thrilled to be there – as was Harvey, of course.  All my memories of the Vienna Congress, my visit to Beethoven, etc, in the early 1800s, came flooding back to me. Also, I remember recounting Harvey’s earlier visit to the Vienna Musikverein on his Austrian school trip back in 1963.

Vienna’s Arsenal now Apartment buildings

There were countless musical Highlights during our stay with the Meissners:

Apart from meeting the famous Willi Boskovsky (Konzertmeister, Wienerphilharmoniker) at the Musikverein prior to the wonderful anticipated Neujahrskonzert, we played with other musicians (‘Schammel’ Musikeren, folk musicians) during a visit to a Heuriger in Grinzig.  Harvey was given a complimentary box ticket at the Volksoper, to hear and see ‘Tiefland’ by Eugen d’Albert. We accompanied a young Austrian cellist in a Chamber concert, and, on Christmas Eve, Doris’s parents, Helene & Eduard asked Harvey to play ‘Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht’ through the telephone to a friend in Salzburg.

That call to Salzburg stirred up powerful emotions and feelings for me and my resonating body.  At the time, I couldn’t understand what was happening, but now, as I write these memories, I think I do have an ‘inkling’, a kind of echo from the far reaches of my body.

Frydlant Castle today

I learned many years later that the Salzburg ‘friend’ was likely to have been a Countess who had grown up in the Sudetenland, in a castle in Friedland (Czech: Frydlant).  Late in 1945, Eduard & Helene Meissner, who were also from the Sudetenland, had been expelled from their home in Haindorf (Czech: Hejnice), near Friedland.  At one time, Helene had worked for the countess’s family at the castle, and there were large paintings of Schloss Friedland proudly displayed in the Meissner’s Vienna apartment.

(Doris in Sudetenland dress – Schloss Friedland in the background)

Friedland, in the Liberec (Reichenberg) region of Czechoslovakia, is very close to places I have known about in the past, and which I have mentioned in earlier postings of this diary – Theresienstadt, Gorlitz, Herrnhut (the Moravian settlement).  Friederich Schleiermacher and Caspar Hobf, John Wesley, had strong connections with Herrnhut, you may remember.

Even later, just over a year ago, I learned that a Richardson ‘heirloom’ – a commemorative gas lamp with a glass dome and an engraved base, on display in the Richardson home in Rottingdean – was made at the famous Glass-making town of Steinschonau (Czech: Kamenicky Senov) in 1888. Steinschonau is located in the Liberec region of today’s Czechia.

(The globe from the Richardson heirloom lamp, showing Steinschonau)

It’s little wonder that my body was reverberating and resonating in an unexplained emotional manner during that phone call on Christmas Eve 1968 in the Meissner Viennese home.

This is more evidence that our bodies are hard-wired to memories of past events.  I strongly believe that powerful memories have the potential to resonate between my frame and Harvey’s sounding body when we express music together with deep feeling and emotion. 

The theologian might ask: is this an example of the way God’s voice is heard?