The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places From Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley (38 page)

Alas, the transmission didn’t go quite that smoothly. The two men couldn’t be more different. Haydn, formal and impeccably dressed; Beethoven, rough and unkempt. Beethoven was also impatient; he wanted a crash course in the musical technique known as counterpoint and soon realized he was not going to get that from Papa Haydn. Haydn’s teaching
style was too methodical, too rigid, for Beethoven. Haydn, for his part, found the young composer headstrong and arrogant. “The Great Mogul,” he teasingly called him.

As the lessons continued, Beethoven grew increasingly exasperated. He couldn’t simply quit though. That would amount to career suicide. So Beethoven, in essence, two-timed. He continued to show up for lessons with the master Haydn, but his real teacher was a lesser-known composer named Johann Schenk. They kept that arrangement a secret. At Schenk’s urging, Beethoven copied the exercises in his own handwriting so that Haydn wouldn’t suspect anything was amiss.

Beethoven eventually made his peace with Haydn and even learned a thing or two from him. One cold March day, in 1808, Haydn made what would be his last public appearance. He had just turned seventy-six, and was in failing health; everyone knew the end was near. The piece was Haydn’s
The Creation.
Beethoven was in the audience, sitting in the front row. After the performance, the Great Mogul knelt down and, tears welling in his eyes, kissed the hand of his mentor and friend.

Finally, the day arrives when I can stop contemplating the role of audience and join one. I had purchased my ticket a few days earlier from a ponytailed, tattooed, young man who, from behind the counter, nodded his approval when I told him I wanted to hear Schubert. This would not happen back home. Young, ponytailed, tattooed men do not, as a rule, get excited about Schubert. But this is Vienna, where culture is utterly devoid of elitism. The ticket cost only seven euros. It was so cheap for a reason, and that reason, I’d learn, says much about the musical genius that was, and is, Vienna.

On the day of the performance, I walk across town to the Musikverein, perhaps the finest concert hall in Vienna. When I arrive, I find Mozart waiting for me outside. He is wearing his trademark frilly shirt and powdered-white wig and talking on a cell phone. Everywhere I look I see Mozarts, each dressed identically and each hawking tickets. The city’s Mozarts, I’d later learn, are actually resourceful Albanians, hoping to make a quick euro off Wolfgang. I can hear old Leopold Mozart protesting the
misappropriation of his son’s persona, but secretly smiling at his international acclaim and enduring brand recognition.

I arrive early, as the ponytailed ticket guy had suggested. I show the usher my ticket, for the
Stehplatz
section, and he directs me upstairs. So far, so good. I walk up an ornate, marble staircase. A young woman in jeans whizzes by me, practically knocking me over. Clearly, she, too, holds a
Stehplatz
ticket.

Stehplatz,
you see, means “standing room,” as in no seat, and competition for space is fierce. I’m lucky. I snatch one of the last prime seats—er, spots. Located up front, near the railing, it affords a clear, if distant, view of the stage. I marvel at the chandeliers, the gold-leaf inlay, the frescoes of angels dancing on the ceiling. Staring in awe, I realize what I am looking at: a secular cathedral.

I had requested a
Stehplatz
seat for a reason, and not because I am cheap, not that only. I wanted to experience culture at its least highfalutin, and you don’t get any less falutin than standing perfectly still for two solid hours.

My fellow
Stehplatz-
ers are diverse. Young and old. Well dressed and shabby (Euro-shabby, that is, which isn’t really shabby at all). Standing next to me is a young Japanese guy. He explains that he’s studying violin in Vienna. The city may have lost much of its past glory, but in certain districts of Tokyo and Hong Kong it still looms large as a musical promised land.

A buzzer sounds, and the chattering instantly evaporates, as if someone had pushed a giant mute button. The anticipation is thick. I’m on the edge of my space. Finally, the orchestra walks onto the stage and everyone applauds wildly, as if greeting a rock star.

Then the pianist, a large man dressed in coat and tails walks onto the stage and the applause crescendos. The Viennese care deeply about their music; you mess with it at your peril. A century ago, in this very concert hall, Arnold Schoenberg’s unorthodox piece Chamber Symphony No. 1 was performed for the first time. The audience didn’t care for it and showed its displeasure by rioting and practically torching the concert hall. A riot over classical music? Really? But standing here now, feeling the
passions, my disbelief fades. We are more “civilized” today—the worst sanction a composer risks is a bad review in the
New York Times
—but I wonder if, in our attempt to tame culture, we have lost some of its essence.

The virtuoso pianist Yefim Bronfman begins to play. It does nothing for me. I was afraid of this. I’m also starting to regret those two whiskey sours I had before the concert. My legs are tired. My head is spinning. I begin to sway, and not to the music. I hope nobody notices. I’m tempted to cut my losses and relinquish my primo space, but I hear Friederike’s words:
Wait five minutes. Then another five.

The music stops. I do nothing, recalling an unfortunate incident when I thought the performance had ended and broke into applause. It had not. It was merely a break in the score—an adagio section, perhaps—and everyone looked at me as if I were a cretin. So now I wait. As if on cue, the audience erupts into wild applause. Then, suddenly, all jump to their feet. All, that is, except for us in the
Stehplatz
section. We are already on our feet. Chalk up another one for the cheap “seats.”

I find myself wondering whether their applause is sincere or reflexive, a reaction more to Bronfman’s reputation, his Mozartian marketing, than to his music. Is that unfair? I don’t think so. Rarely do we experience anything today—a piece of writing or music or the latest blockbuster movie—unmediated. Curation is necessary, given the deluge of cultural choices available, but it also means we always have someone else in our head telling us what we like and don’t like. Something about this audience’s reaction, though, strikes me as immediate and raw. It’s not their knowledge of music that explains this, I think, but their receptivity, their openness.

Bronfman plays again. My swaying has subsided, and so, too, does my restlessness. No new cosmos reveals itself, but I do experience
something.
A pleasant sensation, not unlike the one elicited by the whiskey sours but with a sharpness and clarity that the sours lack. Goethe’s observation that music is “liquid architecture” comes to mind, and, yes, I know what he means. I can hear the archways and the porticoes, sloshing and swirling inside my head. This musical epiphany doesn’t last long, perhaps ten or
fifteen minutes, but that is okay. What distinguishes an epiphany is not its duration but its intensity.

When I eventually turn to leave, it is not so much because I have tired of the sonatas but because my legs and back have begun to ache. The downside of
Stehplatz.
I relinquish my space and a crowd instantly fills it, like compressed air rushing into a vacuum.

Walking back to my hotel, past the Albanian Mozarts and the organ players and the edgy graffiti, a deep appreciation washes over me. Yes, an appreciation for the music, a two-hundred-year-old piece that sounded as fresh as yesterday, but also an appreciation for the city that nurtured it. No wonder Mozart and Beethoven and the rest thrived here. They had an entire city cheering for them. More than cheering. The audiences of that time, like the one I was part of this evening, were not mere spectators. They egged on their musicians, prodding them, pushing them to ever greater heights. An audience, a
good
audience, is a sort of co-genius. They disapprove and the genius improves. When the musician gets it “right,” nothing is sweeter than the heartfelt applause of a discerning audience.

Mozart’s Vienna had one other kind of audience, perhaps the most important of all. Here, I’m reminded of what W. H. Auden said about poets: “The ideal audience the poet imagines consists of the beautiful who go to bed with him, the powerful who invite him to dinner and tell him secrets of state, and his fellow poets. The actual audience he gets consists of myopic school teachers, pimply young men who eat in cafeterias, and his fellow-poets. This means, in fact, that he writes for his fellow poets.”

So the musical greats of Vienna wrote for one another. Mozart wrote for Haydn, his mentor and surrogate father. Haydn taught Beethoven and was in turn influenced by him. Beethoven wrote for a dead Mozart, going to such pains not to imitate him that this avoidance constituted a kind of imitation.

This realization hits me over the head like one of those rare, and expensive, therapeutic breakthroughs. Which is fitting, because nowhere else was the web of creative genius woven more tightly, and productively, than in the Vienna of Sigmund Freud.

SEVEN

GENIUS IS CONTAGIOUS: VIENNA ON THE COUCH

MOZART WOULD HARDLY RECOGNIZE THIS Vienna. The year was now 1900. A century had passed, and the city had grown tenfold. It had experienced a short-lived revolution, a cholera outbreak, a financial collapse, but not a lot of genius. Yes, there was Brahms, but one genius does not a golden age make, and the half century following Beethoven’s death in 1827 had produced few bright lights. It seemed as if Vienna were heading down the same one-way street that Athens and Florence and most other places of genius had, but then it suddenly reversed course and accelerated again. Appropriately, this U-turn was prompted by the construction of a shiny new boulevard.

The Ringstrasse was the most ambitious urban project since the reconstruction of Paris, a physical manifestation of the sense of inexorable progress that was in the air. The new emperor, Franz Joseph, ordered the old, medieval walls razed to make way for this “nineteenth-century version of Disney World,” as one historian calls it. The new road projected all the syrupy optimism of Tomorrowland. “When one walks out into
the new Ringstrasse,” said a streetcar operator at the time, “one thinks of the future.”

And what a future it was! Freud is the best-known name to emerge from this intellectual stew, but he had plenty of company: the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, the artist Gustav Klimt, the writers Arthur Schnitzler and Stefan Zweig, physicist Ernst Mach, composer Gustav Mahler, to name just a few. If any place can lay claim to the title of Birthplace of the Modern World, it is Vienna.

The genius of fin de siècle Vienna resided not in any one discipline but in an intellectual and artistic energy that infused every nook and cranny of the city. This energy spread with the speed and ferocity of a California wildfire. Vienna offers proof positive that creativity is contagious, that genius begets more genius. Everything that we consider good and modern, from architecture to fashion, technology to economics, can trace its roots to the elegant, twisted, teeming streets of turn-of-the-century Vienna.

Driving this unexpected Renaissance was an equally unlikely, marginalized group of immigrants. They came from the far corners of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, bringing with them raw ambition and fresh insights; Vienna’s story, and the story of its Jews, are as inseparable as a composer and her piano. How, I wonder, did these outsiders, these Others, come to play such a crucial role in shaping the second act of Vienna’s golden age?

That is the question on my mind as I enter the Café Sperl, a short walk from the Ringstrasse. To step into the Sperl is to step back in time. The owners, bless them, have studiously resisted the temptation to gentrify. No track lighting, no Wi-Fi, no baristas. Only simple wooden booths and grumpy waiters. A billiards table sits in one corner, newspapers, mounted on long wooden poles, resting atop it like the fresh catch of the day.

Yes, I am here for the caffeine, I confess, but not just that. The story of Viennese genius is incomplete without the story of the coffeehouse. The city’s history is written on its cigarette-stained tables, and on the faces of its surly but endearing waiters. Within its walls, and on its terraces, much of Vienna’s genius unfolded. At the Café Sperl, Gustav Klimt and his merry band of artists declared the Viennese Secession, thus launching
Vienna’s own modern-art movement, a break from the past encapsulated by Klimt’s famous words: “To each age its art, to art its freedom.”

Like the concert hall, the Viennese coffeehouse was (and is) a secular cathedral, an idea incubator, an intellectual crossroads—in short, an institution as much a part of the city’s fiber as the Opera House or apple strudel. It also provides an important piece of the genius puzzle, for some of the city’s best ideas (and a few of its worst) first took flight in the smoke-filled air of the coffeehouse. What exactly made the Viennese coffeehouse so special? How, I wonder, can an establishment that serves caffeinated beverages ignite a golden age that changed not only the world but the way we think about the world?