Over the top

VIENNA, MAY 2016

If anywhere could be described as over-palaced, it is Vienna. It has loads of them, parked besides parks, surrounded by fountains and gravelled courtyards, glittering majestically in the sunshine. But that was not the Vienna we wanted to see; I had two specific goals in mind. The S-bahn wafted us into town from the airport and we made our way to the Motel One hotel next to the Messe Prater. The first thing to say is that the Motel One was an accidental but perfect choice. A really nice modern hotel, with friendly staff, minimalist rooms, and an outstanding buffet breakfast – all you need really.

Heading out from the hotel, the first stop was in the Messe Prater – Vienna’s pleasure park. It was slightly pre-season so many of the rides were still closed, but one stood out from (or rather stood above) the rest. The Reisenrad. The location of one of the most famous and powerful scenes in all cinema. The one where Harry Lime (played by Orson Welles) entices guileless Holly Martin (played by Joseph Cotton) on to this Ferris wheel. Standing in one of the cabins, Welles idly wonders whether it would really matter if any of those tiny people below ceased to exist. So it was ‘The Third Man’ that brought me here. The wheel was being renovated, with bright new cars replacing the older dilapidated ones, but luckily we were shepherded into one of these veterans. The ride over the top was a delicious mixture of ambition fulfilled, being where this scene was made, and not being entirely certain that the rickety wooden floor wouldn’t give way before we reached the ground.

A walk into town brought us to the museum quarter. Vienna has plenty of interesting art to display, and given its status as the birthplace of psychoanalysis, a good deal of it is intriguing and pretty unrestrained. Somehow there seemed to be a mentally deep connotation to everything you looked at. Or maybe I thought that because I was in Vienna – surfing the zeitgeist.

The next day we got across to the Naschmarkt, where you can – if you like – start a tour of the sewers to see other locations of The Third Man. Rather than do that we went into the Secession house. This remarkable gallery was put up by artists who wanted to secede from the stuffy strictures of Vienna’s art establishment, and is an early example of art nouveau architecture, dating from 1898. There are few outside windows, instead the interior is bathed in light from above. Atop the building is a large punctuated metal globe, known locally as the golden cabbage.

The home of much of that establishment art is the Albertina museum, and that was the place to find the subject of my second goal. Albrecht Durer was an astonishingly talented artist and engraver from Nuremburg. My favourite work of his is a watercolour of a hare, painted in 1502 and now in the Albertina. It is small, less than a foot square, and the hare is full of suppressed energy, ready to leap forward. How Durer managed to compose his image (because hares don’t sit still while you draw them) is a fascinating mystery – a stuffed hare just wouldn’t do. So popular is this little creature that is has become the unofficial mascot of Vienna.

The centre of the city was devastated in the second world war, but – like so many central and eastern European cities – much of it was rebuilt as it once stood, rather than being clumsily modernised as so often happened in Britain. Thus the climb to the roof of St Stephen’s cathedral means surmounting a relatively new building, even though the atmosphere inside is distinctly medieval.

High culture is not just for the elite here. For four euros we were able to get standing places to see Don Carlos at the Opera House. The standing section has rails like a traditional football ground, and the form is that you bagsy your place by knotting a scarf round the rail where you want to stand, knowing it will be respected while you go off and get a drink before the performance. Minutes before the curtain went up, the section filled up with dozens of people. Next to us was a well-dressed older man, obviously very keen on this experience. It turned out he was a retired Irish diplomat, living in Vienna, and he had been to see all the great operas this way. His stamina outpaced ours; after an hour and a half of high drama and fraught emotion we dipped out for dinner. I know many people who find opera captivating, but somehow the spell doesn’t work on me. Maybe one day it will.

Next morning the S-bahn wafted us back to the airport and it was not so much goodnight Vienna, as good morning. A short but very enjoyable trip with so much else still to see – a Vienna slice if you like.