Musical chairs

13-08-07

I had lunch at the recommendation of my parents at the Rosenberger Markt which is an underground cafeteria in the opera district. The Markt is one of the few inexpensive eateries in Vienna and offers everything from Sushi to fruit salad. Also, thankfully, there is a non-smoking section as most Viennese cafes are too pompous to ban smoking.

The apartment of Mozart (Mozarthaus) is disappointing as there isn’t much in the four-bedroom apartment as the original items have long been lost. Clips from the Milos Forman‘s Academy Award winning film “Amadeus” were shown to give tourists an idea of how life was like in Mozart’s apartment 200 years ago. The museum put in furniture from the era such as a small pool table, but it felt like a money making exhibition rather than a tribute to Mozart which is too bad because it could have been interesting. As Peter Gay noted in his biography of Mozart, Leopold was astonished with the luxurious state of his son’s estate which was one of the reasons he had financial trouble because he frittered away his money. The Mozart House in Salzburg is the superior museum by far because it has authentic artifacts and allows you to envision how Mozart lived more accurately.

The Haus der Musik is one of the newer museums in Vienna and its interactive exhibits are geared toward children in an attempt of getting them interested in music. However, the bottom floor is dedicated to the world-renowned Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, displaying its history and important feats. An interesting tidbit was that in the 1930’s, the orchestra started going to a guest conductor yearly instead of having a big name like a George Szell as their head for years, although they certainly had celebrities like Leonard Bernstein leading their symphony. The bottom floor also had a broken interactive exhibit that allowed you to roll the dice and it would somehow compose notes to a song- the gamble didn’t pay off here.

The second floor tests the range of your hearing by giving different frequencies while the third floor has interactive multimedia displays of the prominent composers in Vienna, such as Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, Mahler, Schubert, and Schoenberg. A computer screen gives a biography and allows a user to listen to some works written by each composer. Although it was short and lacking in detail, it is a good tool for those unfamiliar with the works of these famous composers. The third floor concluded with a virtual reality program that allows you to lead the Vienna Philharmonic as a conductor. Although, I didn’t try as I let the little kids have the fun, I could tell it wasn’t a piece of cake as precise hand movements were required or the symphony would go too fast or slow.

The top floor of the museum was apparently supposed to be music of the future. I was supposed to hum or sing a song and the electronics would translate it into a song, but it didn’t work for me as I failed to get any feedback.

The Music Haus had some interesting exhibits and interactive features, but it wouldn’t be a place I would recommend for people to go when they visit Vienna unless they have children.