Posted: Jan 16, 08
2:49pm
Two years ago my wife and I finally scratched an increasingly nagging itch. We flew to Austria to spend the week before Christmas in Salzburg and the following week in Vienna. It was a magical experience. The picturebook city of Salzburg presented its annual Christmas Market whose stalls and booths filled the entire Cathedral square and spilled into several surrounding streets. Choirs sang each evening on the Cathedral steps and brass choirs played from a bell tower. The Mirabell Palace featured one of the finest string quartets I've ever heard - four very young Russian women. We celebrated the birthday of "Silent Night" in Oberndorf and attended a beautiful Christmas mass in the magnificent Cathedral. Most memorable? Watching from a viewing point across the river from the "old city" at noon on Dec. 24th as the liturgical season of Advent ended and Christmas officially began. At that moment all the cannon in the imposing 11th century fortress that looms over the city began to fire, accompanied by the ringing of every church bell in the city. What a way to welcome Christmas!
In Vienna we saw the Philharmonic's Johann Strauss program, Die Fledermaus in the Opera House, saw the sights, shopped ourselves to exhaustion, ate and drank excessively but enthusiastically (including a dinner in one of Beethoven's lodging houses), and ended our stay with a marvelous Beethoven Ninth Symphony the night before our departure.
For a musician and an Austriophile this was the trip of a lifetime. Would I do it again? Ina blink! In fact just writing about it has made me think about a follow-up in '08.-----AEA
