Danube Cruise bonus: Ceilings

We are home, staring at our own plain white ceilings. I thought it would be fun to collect some of the more interesting ceilings we have seen in one place. The lighting made this one in Smetana Hall of the Municipal House in Prague one of my favorites. 

All of Municipal House was in the Art Nouveau style. This is the ceiling of the confectionary. I longed for a pastry and a cup of tea there.

The Egyptian room nearby was completely different.

Alphonse Mucha painted this dome in the Mayor's Hall above the main entrance of Municipal House ans designed all the rest of the decoration of the room.

The Spanish synagogue in Prague imitates a Moorish style popular at the beginning of the 20th century. In light of modern Moorish/Jewish relations, I found it rather ironic.

The Estates Opera House, Prague, where we saw Mozart's Cote Fan Tutti. (Hmm. Circles and ovals make great ceilings!) Here I was as entranced by the layers of balconies as I was the ceiling.

The vaulting of St. Vita Cathedral, Prague Castle.

Chapel of Mirrors in the National Library, Prague, with an organ Mozart played and an incredible young soprano.

Golden Hall in the Musikverein, Vienna. This one was a bit much for me.

Sala Terrena in the Mozart House, Vienna, where we heard the string quartet in early 18th-c dress.

St. Peter's, Vienna, where we heard the wonderful organ concert. I loved the soft colors.

These last three are in the very Hapsburg Museum of Fine Art in Vienna.

I think my favorite would be either the first in Smetana Hall (Prague) or St. Peter's, Vienna. How about you? (I am not considering replacing any of my plain white ceilings at home. Just sayin'.

Danube Cruise bonus: the boat

My daughter remonstrated with me for not showing more of the boat itself. Of course, we are already home and I can't go back and take pictures.

The Amadeus Queen was a lovely small boat, holding a little over 100. (At least, we 100 were the only passengers this voyage.) The rooms were a lot smaller than on our Iceland cruise, but perfectly adequate. (Our Iceland suite was over-the-top luxurious.)

A couple times, housekeeping left us little gifts.

Dining was four-course meals twice a day. You chose from a couple appetizer options and several main course options, including vegetarian. You could always pass, but portions were tiny and I loved trying things. The scale at home shows only a couple pounds gain, which hopefully will soon be gone.

What silverware to use? Oh, yeah, take from the outside and work your way in.

We spent a lot of time in the forward lounge.

That's where our 6 PM on-board concerts were just before dinner.

There was a smaller lounge in the back with a tiny pool, but from there you couldn't see where you were going, so I never sat there.

We met on the upper deck the night we left Budapest with the lights. I did a lot of walking there (between rain showers) on the last day. We went through several locks which sometimes included low bridges. I was instructed to sit down when we went under this one. The man at the front rail opted to duck.

The captain drives from this little building. When we passed under one of those bridges, it could be lowered so the roof was on level with the bar chairs.

I'm a geek who gets a kick out of long hallways.

Sorry I didn't take more pictures to specifically show the boat. Here is the website where you can find more. We would highly recommend this line as well as Earthbound Expeditions.

Danube Cruise Day 10: Cruising

The schedule for today (our last day) had a walking tour in Salzburg, birthplace of Mozart. The problem is that Salzburg is not on the Danube. It's a one-and-a-half hour (plus rest stop) bus ride from Linz. The boat would continue upstream to Passau, Germany, also a couple hours from Salzburg. 

And it was a dark drizzly day.

We've been to Salzburg before (albeit decades ago), so we and about 20 others opted to stay on the boat for a relaxing day. Very good decision. Although the rain held off for their walking tour, it rained during their free time in Salzburg and poured on the way to Passau, making a two-hour bus trip into a four-hour trip.

Meanwhile on the boat, we sat in the lounge, or walked on the upper deck between showers, and enjoyed mysterious views of the hills through the fog. I loved walking on the top with 360-degree views. The first time I went up (when no one else was there) it was all I could do not to twirl around and sing, "The hills are alive!" 

I got in my desired 10,000 steps just doing laps around the deck. We have done a lot of walking tours, but mostly rambling or gentle walking. It felt good to stretch my legs--almost like hiking on the bike path along the shore.

Here are some of my favorite pictures. They made me want to come home and watch the beginning of Sound of Music with all those shots of Austria.

This one was taken during lunch through the window with great drops of rain clinging to it, hence the blurs.

Our last on-board concert Michael and Natsuki played Mozart's Mirror Duet. That is the music on the horizontal music stand between them. They both start from the upper left hand corner from their perspective and play at the same time.

Here's what the music looks like.

It was delightful as was every one of our on-board concerts. The whole experience was beyond our expectations. We would definitely do a classical music oriented tour like this again.

Now we are home. We had to have our luggage outside the door by 4:30 AM Tuesday in order to make the 5 AM bus to Munich for our flight. A whole group of us said our good-byes at the airport, wondering if we will meet again on another music adventure.

Concert content:

October 24/Salzburg Day - Amadeus Queen

• Mozart: Mirror Duet for Two Violins
• JS Bach: Concerto in D minor for Two Violins

Danube Cruise Day 9: Melk Abbey

Melk Abbey was the inspiration for Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, which I have read a couple times and enjoyed very much. I was disappointed to find that the medieval buildings were pulled down in the Hapsburg days and the whole place done in Baroque style with lavish rooms for visiting royal guests. 

I guess that is sort of like Rome being rebuilt in the Renaissance and if you want to see older church art, you have to go to Ravenna, where the pope was in exile following the Visigoth invasion in the 5th-c. 

The morning was foggy when about half of us arrived at the abbey for Sunday Mass. 

I'm not Catholic, but I am perfectly capable of sitting in the church, enjoying the organ and praying for those around me. I snapped this picture before we were told no pictures were allowed inside the buildings.

I was sorry that we had to leave early for our tour. We tried to be subtle, but the floors of the pews creaked, and I'm afraid we were a distraction.

The abbey sits high on the cliffs overlooking the medieval town and the river.

We could even see our boat not far away.

In the above picture we are headed into the famous library (central to Eco's medieval mystery.) We only saw two rooms (and were not allowed to take pictures.) The other ten are up or down a winding stairway. But the rooms we saw were awesome, two story affairs. I have already told the Lord that that's what I want for my room in heaven--two-story, floor-to-ceiling, dark-wood bookcases with all the best books I didn't get to during my lifetime on earth plus the ones worth re-reading in eternity. I don't need the ostentatious decoration of the Hapsburgs, however. (Here are some photos from the Internet.)

On our way back to the boat, we stopped for a wine tasting, accompanied by local entertainment.

The climate of the region is good for a particular kind of white wine, unique to the thousand acres of the Wachau Valley.

From there we walked back to the boat past this lovely view of the abbey where I took the earlier picture of the boat.

After another gourmet lunch, we spent the after cruising the Danube past villages and a couple more locks.

Salzburg is on the schedule for tomorrow, but it is a two-hour bus ride from the river, returning to Passau, Germany. I'm thinking I may stay on the boat and enjoy a leisurely cruise instead.

Concert Content:

October 23/Melk Day - Amadeus Queen

• Mozart: Sonata for Violin and Piano in C Major (1778)
• Maria Theresia von Paradis (?): Sicilienne
• Brahms: Violin Sonata No 1 in G Major

Danube Cruise Day 8: Vienna

 I caught this lovely view of Vienna from our stateroom when I got up this morning.

The morning tour was to the late 19th c Museum of Fine Arts, the first building in Europe to be built as a museum (as opposed to a former palace turned into a museum.) It houses the Hapsburg family's personal collection. 

They were some family, ruling much of Europe from the 15th c until the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918. This statue of Empress Maria Theresa (18th c) stands between the fine arts museum and its twin, the natural history museum.

Among the things the Hapsburgs collected were gadgets, popular among the very rich during the Renaissance. This golden galleon could roll around on the table top and fire its tiny cannons.

The Hapsburgs had a large collection of Flemish artists. Bruegel trained as a miniaturist and he tells lots of stories in the details of his Tower of Babel.

Another gorgeous ceiling, this one over the grand stairway of the museum.

Even the cafe over the entry hall is opulent, befitting the Hapsburgs.

Some of our group chose to stay in town after our tour for lunch and further exploration. About half of us decided to take the afternoon off and returned to the ship. A bike path follows the canal, and I chose to do my exploring there despite the sprinkles of rain. As I neared town, I saw more and more summer cottages and finally, new condominiums under construction--a good place to turn back.

This view welcomed me when I returned to the ship in time for afternoon tea in the forward lounge.

Tonight's on-board concert featured Beethoven from various periods, followed by another gourmet dinner. I find myself thinking of the eighteenth century practice of noblemen employing musicians and composers like Mozart. Our on-board recitals feel like intimate gatherings of friends and family in a private salon.

Concert Content:

October 22/Vienna - Amadeus Queen 

All- Beethoven Program

• Piano Sonata No. 2: 1st movement
• Violin Sonata No. 7: 1st movement
• Piano Sonata No. 22: 1st movement
• Violin Romance in G Major
• Piano Sonata No. 30: 1st and 2nd movements

Danube Cruise Day 7: Vienna

 The Amadeus Queen is parked on a canal near Vienna Woods.

We bussed into Vienna to the old Imperial part of town. The weather was cloudy and low 50s, not the sort that makes you want to linger outdoors even with all Vienna's inviting cafes.

This was the Hapsburg capital for generations. A hundred fifty of them are buried in this Capuchin monastery. Most of the architecture of the city is not so simple. It's designed more to communicate power and wealth.

We paused at this poignant Holocaust memorial of an old Jewish man scrubbing the street with barbed wire on his back. It was built on the site of a bombed building where 200 people died, sheltering in the basement. It is intended to remind Austrians that they were not all innocents in the war.

Our first indoor stop was the Musikverein with its 6 venues, 2 of them dating from the 18th c. 

The modern Hall of Glass has amazing acoustics due to the glass tablets on the walls being curved and angled so as not to face one another. We were not allowed to take pictures anywhere but the historic Great Hall, also called the Golden Hall for obvious reasons.

These statues are under the balconies.

We visited the Mozarthaus Museum, but no pictures were allowed. It is more displays of information with an audio guide than a place to feel the reality of his having lived there. I wish I had left more time for the first floor where their actual apartment was.

The twelfth-century St. Stephen's Cathedral is the main square of the city and our meeting place as we scattered to do our own exploring.

We poked our noses inside for a short visit. Awe-inspiring.

Coming from Wisconsin, we couldn't resist sampling the local version of bratwurst for lunch. It was huge and slathered with brown mustard, but didn't have sauerkraut the way Wisconsinites eat it.

After lunch we met the group in front of St. Stephen's to weave through the old buildings to this courtyard of the monastery of the Teutonic Knights, a military order of monks who now work in hospitals instead of fighting crusades. Mozart stayed here briefly when he first came to Vienna. (He moved twelve times during his handful of years in the city mostly due to running out of money. Placards saying he lived there reminded me of "George Washington slept here" in New England.)

This window is the room where we attended a concert by the Mozart Ensemble.

The room was exquisite, but tiny. Our group of 100 needed two separate seatings.

The members of the string quartet were in period costume. Their leader (the second violin, mostly hidden behind the first violin) is Brazilian!

The program was a variety of composers with Viennese connections (except for Bach) and contrasted their styles nicely.

Remember that window in the courtyard? Here it is from the inside.

After our string quartet concert, we wandered over to St. Peter's Church for a free (for donation) organ concert.

The church is very Baroque, cluttered and overdone in Steve's opinion.

With another glorious ceiling.

No on-board concert this evening, but then we have had two enjoyable concerts in town. Tomorrow...

Concert Content:

October 21/Vienna: The Sala Terrena in Mozarthaus

The Mozart Ensemble

• Mozart: Divertimento in F Major, K. 138
• Schubert: “Rosamunde” Quartet - Andante: Theme & Variations
• JS Bach: Air from Orchestral Suite No. 3
• Beethoven: String Quartet No. 4, Op. 18 (1:30 pm program)
  Haydn: String Quartet in C Major “Emperor” (3:00 pm program)