THE KITE FLIER FROM BALI. Ann had dropped us at the airport and now we are lurching around in dismal swirling vapors accompanied, appropriately, by Gorecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful songs. But soon we are above an immense taut skin of cloud, ruffled only by the subcutaneous shapes of the Blue Mountains. Now following the tentacles of Hong Kong’s sprawling new airport, we turn East (my trollybag has a useful compass let into the handle) towards a gate with a very large number claiming to lead to Paris. On my right now is the kite flier and we talk about the international kite festival for the first hour. Behind us a small boy kicks the back of our seats for the next 11 hours.
LINGO. Now May 17 and having struggled with French yesterday, the school children on our train to Munich are showing off, speaking alternative English, French, German and Italian sentences. In the taxi in Salzburg my attempt at “Wir kommen aus Australia” only adds to the confusion so I shut up.
THE PRINCE ARCHBISHOPS (Salzburg). We are now climbing up through the castle, past this window, to the RESIDENZ, a palace of some 180 rooms, containing treasures, paintings and exquisite baroque ceilings that would rival any national gallery. In Europe, perhaps anywhere in the world, the priesthood and the nobility here were often interchangeable. For example, this morning the Prince Archbishops were called the Knights Archbishops. Whoever they were, they had become immensely wealthy from the salt mines on their land (Salz means Salt). Apart from salt, Salzburg is famous for Mozart and the Trapp family, so we visit two of Mozart’s houses and, in a beautifully ornate marionette theatre, watch incredible puppets apparently singing the Marriage of Figaro.
COSI FAN TUTTE (Women are like that). I am aware that this title carries risks so I will be circumspect. We are now in Vienna where all the emperors are called Franz or Joseph or Maximillian. One of the latter, a shy retiring sort of fellow, was persuaded by his ambitious Belgian wife to accept the post of Kaiser of Mexico. But as soon as he got there the French, who were running the place, shot through, leaving Max facing a firing squad of revolutionaries. The Elizabeth (Sisi) who married the emperor Franz Joseph was a fitness freak who scandalized the royal household by installing a gym in her boudoir. She was articulate and bitter, claiming that “marriage is a barbaric institution into which I was sold at 15”. But the empress Maria Teresa did all right, palaces all over the place, the Schoenbrunn here containing 2700 rooms”. Less fortunate was her daughter Marie Antoinette, cut off in her prime.
Now reading Saturday by Ian McEwan, and his character Henry says of his mother “She was a woman who gave her life to housework, to the kind of daily routines of polishing, dusting, vacuuming and tidying that were once common, and these days are only undertaken by patients with obsessive compulsive disorders”.
Last night, when Joan and I were introduced to a swarthy gentleman with a European accent, he complimented me on my good taste. Perhaps this might be a prudent time to end this excursion into the dangerous territory that Mozart explored in that opera about women and Albanian princes.
KORUS (Budapest and Prague). “Our job is to take B9 to the world” says our conductor Steve. But somehow there are no Beethoven works in our repertoire. Wendy says he is a man of many talents but management and conducting are not amongst them. Kevin calls him Stevie Wonder. A more important visitor here is Meek Chekker Rollink Shtone. Our doctor, one of the sopranos, coughs frequently with remarkable force sending a swirling cloud of germs down the coach (must gargle tonight).
IN BUDAPEST we listen to a talk, it was but Greek to me, on Hungarian folk songs and soon half the choir is asleep. Some were still drowsy for the performance in Matthias church, but the next performance at Estergon is spectacular, with great applause for the Vivaldi Gloria. The castles of Buda are spectacular, the streets, squares and coffee houses of Pest are elegant but, wedged in between these, the buildings are grey slabs of communist cancerous concrete with basement cafes full of a rotund proletariat feeding greedily from huge trough-like wooden platters.
IN PRAGUE the food is even worse but John Banville’s Prague Pictures has forewarned us: “dumplings like soggy worn out tennis balls and steaming middens of white cabbage”. The astronomer Tycho Brahe is buried here. He travelled extensively with his large entourage which included his pet elk. One night the elk got at a tray of beer, drank deep and fell down stairs and broke its neck (imagine the maid coming in to make the bed). Tycho had two cousins Rosencrantz and Gyldenstierne who actually traveled to London on a diplomatic mission. Must have met Shakespeare. Banville himself did meet someone who had been interrogated. “Why have I been arrested?” “That is not for us to tell you, that is for you to tell us.” But, for Banville, the beer in Prague is good, tasting like “hayfields baking in summer heat”.
SOMER IS ICUMEN IN (Bonn, Cologne and Luxembourg). Now June 1st the first day of summer and it is 7 degrees and raining in Prague, and snowing in Germany. Our German tourist guide sheet insists there is good swimming in lakes and coast. As one wag put it “German humour is no laughing matter”. However, moving from the Czech Republic into Germany is like moving into another world: the sheer industrial efficiency, purposeful infrastructure development, friendly and helpful people everywhere, attention to detail and presentation, excellent hotel breakfasts and good restaurants.
IN BONN we visit Beethoven’s birth house, where he was geboren, and a castle clinging to a precipice above the Rhine. In Cologne: a cathedral to rival any other, and in Luxembourg a free performance of Mozart flute and harp in the beautiful old town. The rest of Luxembourg seems entirely devoted to the production and distribution of bureaucracy, called the European Parliament.
PARIS and a riotous end of tour party took place on the hotel rooftop soaring above which was the dazzling white Sacre Coeur. Rue Rollin is too narrow to be shown on the map, but we found it. Descarte lived at number 14 and Hemingway opposite us. Below us the pizza café buzzes until midnight, then the water cannons open fire at 6 a.m. followed by a re-enactment of the storming of the Bastille by the garbage men. We are on the corner of tiny picturesque Place de Contrescarpe out of which flows Rue de Mouuffetard, a narrow cobbled medieval lane where we get our baguettes and croissants each morning. The apartment comprises two shoeboxes in which we eat and sleep, and three matchboxes: a kitchenette, a shower-ette, and a triangular loo designed for one legged people. Tim flew in from Bristol for 3 days (up and down on the Batobus, across the “vasty fields of France” to Chartres), Ann and Margaret from Russia for the other 3 days (water lilies at Giverny, monuments and museums).
UZES. Now 7 am Thursday, Ann and Marg already on metro to airport, but rain so no taxis available for us. Fortunately Marg had left 8 euros for a broken knife which impresses our landlord and so he squashes us into his trop petit auto (thanks Marg). Clutching baggage and landlord’s giant open package of soap powder we arrive at Gare de Lyon just in time for the high speed TGV to Avignon. Now rattling along in a country bus to Uzes. The compass in the handle of my trolley-bag is always a good ice-breaker and the driver laughs as he pulls my bag up into the bus.
The downside of not booking ahead is trundling baggage around town looking for accommodation already absorbed by a trade fair or an international conference on subatomic particles, and both have actually happened to us. The upside is you see what you get and you get last minute bargains. And so, for far less than the rent of the shoe boxes, we get 8 days in a beautiful four storey 700 year old Maison next to the Duke’s Castle. The Duke, whose family had ripped off the peasantry for 1000 years, now charges12 euros to see over the dungeons used for defaulting rent-payers. As someone once said “The poor have always kept the poor. That is not the problem. The problem is that they also have to keep the rich”. Here is a picture of the poor doing my ironing in a dungeon.
Thirteen years ago we visited the exquisite, arcaded Place aux Herbes, the market square in Uzes, the temperature hovering at zero, and Joan said “wouldn’t this market place be lovely in summer”. It is.
PERUGIA. The Roman aqueduct, le Pont du Gard, still has huge arches at three levels, the top one carried water from Uzes to the Roman baths at Nimes. We knew something was happening to European temperatures when we waited on the road side for the bus back to Uzes. In a Jaques Tati film an incoherent loudspeaker sends a sweltering crowd of holiday makers dragging their baggage from platform 3 down, under and up to platform 5, while the train then comes in at platform 3. This now happens to us at Pisa on our way, via Florence, to Perugia. Later, we are passing the huge Lago di Trasimeno where Hannibal washed the dust off the elephants he had brought all the way from North Africa to terrify the Romans. Before the Romans came the Etruscans, and their civilization reached its zenith around 700 BC. The Romans wiped out their culture but couldn’t shift the massive Perugian arches under which we are now walking. “The little city of the infinite views” is still my favourite town. Piazza Menicucci 7 is a miniature medieval palace with painted, arched ceilings just below the Corso Vannucci. A lot cheaper than the shoebox, it becomes even better value when we tell Fabio we are moving into a hotel for 2 nights before going to Rome. “You are welcome to stay on here, we have no tenants till next week.” On our last night we book a table with a million dollar view, at the edge of a high terrace looking across the wide valley of the upper Tiber to Assissi, and watch the sun set on the Apennine mountains.
POSTSCRIPT. High temperatures (38-40), baggage of increasing obesity, an autumnal disinclination to heavy exertion, and the discovery of a coach from Perugia direct to Rome airport have all combined to bring us home early. And so, somewhere over Queensland the sun has set leaving a fantastic rim of orange fire along the horizon. And today a dazzling blue winter sky outshines any in Europe’s summer.
ON INDECISION – HAMLET
Unlike Mozart, Beethoven had many of Hamlet’s characteristics. Both were idealists, Beethoven in his Eroica symphony, and both had to resolve uncertainty, Beethoven in the last movement of the B9. In moments of introspection and self-doubt I can relate to Hamlet, though his predicament is expressed in some of the finest passages in all literature, soaring way above mine. For example : Hamlet starts off depressed : « How weary, stale, flat , and unprofitable , seem to me the uses of this world », and very critical of his Mum «Frailty, thy name is woman ». But his father’s ghost then shakes him to the core « There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy » and he concludes that « Something is rotten in the state of Denmark » and that « The time is out of joint ». Basically, he must kill the king.
But he is distracted, first by the arrival of the players, and then by indecision, immortalised in perhaps Shakespeare’s most famous speech. « To be or not to be – that is the question; whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take up arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them? » But then he sees the catch : «, To die, to sleep ; to sleep, perchance to dream. Aye, there’s the rub ; for in that sleep of death what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil. » His distraction does not go un-noticed by Ophelia « Now see that noble and most sovereign reason, like sweet bells jangled, out of time and harsh ; That unmatched form and feature of blown youth blasted with ecstacy. O, woe is me ».
But now Hamlet recovers, seeing a way to use the players : « to hold, as t’were, the mirror up to nature », to trap the king in a play which he calls The Mousetrap. And then everything starts unravelling fast. Hamlet tries some behaviour modification on his mother « I must be cruel only to be kind », is interrupted by Polonius hiding behind a curtain, whom he kills. Then he himself is being sent to England to be killed, by his old friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern « my two school-fellows whom I will trust as I will adders fang’d ». But he is one jump ahead and is already undermining his traitors « For t’is sport to have the engineer hoist with his own petar…I will delve one yard below their mines and blow them to the moon ».
Ophelia now goes mad, sings « Tomorrow is Saint Valentine’s Day » and drowns herself in the creek. For the king and queen it is now downhill all the way «When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions ». Hamlet, at long last the man of action, kills Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and returns triumphant for the obligatory sword fight. But too late and all die by the sword or by poison, leaving Horatio to say « Good night sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. »