One of Opera Chic's favorite pastimes in Vienna is to visit the Arnold Schönberg Center (they're so 1337 that they have a YouTube page full of videos and a fantastic MySpace page as well): Arnie, the greatest Austrian ever to move to California, gets lots of l0ve there from scholars, tourists tired of the usual visits to Schonbrunn and the Belvedere, and simple hangers-on (check out the library to see the cute very serious looking young aspiring composers who hang out there spying all those scores and wondering how they can make their stuff sound NOT like a wheezing washing machine).
There was a lovely exhibit re: young Arnie, with lots of memorabilia and manuscripts.
So here's Opera Chic's field trip report.
Arnie & BFF Alex Zemlinsky: beer and the destruction of tonality.
A humongous map of Arnie's Vienna.
L'homme du train.
The dorkiest revolutionary in history.
The New York Times, confused as always when confronted by new things, greets the exile with the not so flattering headline, "The Enigma Of Modern Music Arrives" -- like, beware of Jews carrying atonality.
The maestro's study on North Rockingham, a few houses down the street from the place where OJ Simpson's wife and a friend committed suicide in that most unusual of fashions in 1994, has been shipped off to Vienna after his passing and recreated in the center. We loved the fat pencils and the customized pencil cases.
This is the life I chose or rather the life that chose me
If you can't respect that your whole perspective is wack
Maybe you'll love me when I fade to black
