Week 1 of the “Toast to Vienna” Festival

This week the Festival opened, featuring 2 lectures and a dance lesson. The lecture on Tuesday, Feb 17th, was by U of U history professor Emily Michelson. She used a PowerPoint presentation to show us how the Hapsburg Empire grew and shrank by turns over 6 centuries of family ownership and inheritance. The Habsburgs were famous for expanding empire through strategic marriages more than by warfare. There was even a poem written about this.

Let the strong fight wars
Thou happy Austria marry
What Mars bestows on others
Venus gives to thee!

There was also a lot of inbreeding among the royal family, and perhaps the ‘Habsburg jaw’ was the result of that—an extremely jutting lower jaw.  Emily said there was reportedly one Habsburg whose lower jaw jutted far so forward he couldn’t close his mouth even to prevent the rain from falling in.

One final memorable tidbit concerns a rather unbelievable Latin family motto from the early days of the Empire: “Austria est Imperare Orbi Universo,” or Austria is the ruler of the universe,” which can conveniently be represented by AEIOU. Apparently there are still buildings and places around Vienna where this abbreviation appears.

During the Feb 18th lecture on the Art and Architecture of Vienna, our art history professor, Alexandra Karl, told us that in 1857 the walls around the old city of Vienna were taken down (the city had expanded beyond them, and the terror of the Ottoman Turks was passed), and around the circle were build resplendent buildings in many historical styles.

She focused especially on a modern visual art movement that came out of Vienna in the late 1800s, eventually called Jugenstil. Gustav Klimt (‘The Kiss’) was its famous leader. The Secession Museum that was eventually built to house the artwork of these rebel artists, whose style can be compared to better-known (to us) Art Nouveau, has a big golden open sphere on top that led people to call the place ‘the big cabbage.’ We saw part of Klimt’s “Beethoven Friez” and learned about an exhibition about The Nude with an amazing promotion: for a time period when it opened, people got in free if they stripped down themselves to see the exhibit, and lots of people did.

One February 19th, 24 people learned a Viennese waltz routine. We were rather amazing, I thought. And we were a diverse group:  several couples who had danced together for years, some members of the opera chorus and some of our opera young artists, 2 recent high school grads from Murray (girls who enjoy doing random fun things, they said), a young man who is going to the opera and wanted to check out the class, and a mother with her 11-year-old daughter who are taking our virtual Vienna trip for a family vacation this year. Andrea Hale, who has a ballroom dance studio in Draper, was our guide and teacher. She taught us the basic footwork and got us moving to the quick tempo. We bowed, did quarter turns, different kinds of balancés, underarm turns and spins, that thrilled us all.  We were amazed at what we all could learn in an hour, and are all yearning to go to a ball now and show off our steps.