WFMT is the name of a religious cult in Chicago that disguises itself as a radio station. The religion is that of musical culture, classical music and opera chiefly. I happen to belong to this cult. Its announcers are careful never to mispronounce foreign names or words; the station eschews all canned commercials; a tone of seriousness pervades the proceedings, every day all day (and night) long. The station is a good reason to live in Chicago.
One morning this past summer, a WFMT announcer said that a ten-day musical tour of three great cities of Mitteleuropa–Budapest, Vienna, and Prague–was being organized over the Christmas holidays. On the tour one would hear three operas, see a ballet, and go to two concerts, the most notable of them a rehearsal performance of the famous New Year’s Day concert of the Vienna Philharmonic. The cost was roughly $5,000 per person. I signed up.
I have been on only one other travel tour in my life, a 17-day Swann’s cruise of the Greek Islands, Turkey, and the Dalmatian coast. Swann’s was then an English-run company, which specialized in sending Oxford dons along to lecture its clients. Maurice Bowra used to do Swann’s cruises; on the one I attended, John Chadwick, who was in on the discovery of the Linear B script, was a lecturer. Our fellow travelers–“detested fellow pilgrims,” as Henry James once described travelers with cultural intent–were mainly English and Australian, and, in the main, very winning. On this cruise, the left-wing journalist I.F. Stone was on board–the first time, you might say, that I had an actual fellow-traveler for a fellow-traveler–and each night, wearing his Magooish spectacles and a dinner jacket, he boogalooed (Magooalooed?) with his wife to the music of a small Greek band. Charming.
The trade-off (to use the cant word) between traveling on a tour and traveling independently is that on a tour one sheds all worries: about luggage, reservations, meals, tickets, and the rest. For this relief from anxiety, one loses a certain sense of serendipitous adventure. On a tour, too, one abandons the luxury of waking, eating, and going about just as one damn well pleases. Alone, of course, one doesn’t have to contend with one’s detested fellow pilgrims, or, as I came to think of them, one’s DFPs.
As for those DFPs–and there were thirty-five of us in all on this tour–my social antennae alerted me to steer clear of a number of them. Steering clear chiefly meant avoiding them at meals, and this I was for the most part able to do. Only now do I wonder if perhaps the social antennae of others advised them to steer clear of me.
We were blessed in being led by a sweet character in his late sixties, a Viennese of wide culture and great kindness and good humor, named Paul Koutny. Herr Koutny arranged superior tickets, ordered splendid meals, made things as little regimented as possible. Still, the Ken Keseyian question, “Are you on the bus?” had to be asked, often and insistently.
This tour also taught me about the very real limits of my cultural stamina. I had long before known that my museum stamina was fairly low–that is, two hours in a museum, any museum, and you can, as they say about major-league pitchers who are done for, put a fork in me. This tour, with six musical performances in eight days, showed me that my performing arts stamina is also fairly low.
The musical highlight of the tour was a New Year’s Eve performance of Beethoven’s “Ninth Symphony” played by the Vienna Symphony in the acoustically fine Wiener Konzerthaus. There we heard the greatest symphony of the greatest symphonist played under perfect conditions–musically, a 720 slam dunk. But I knew I was beginning to tire when, the following night, sitting in a plush loge seat watching “Die Fledermaus,” I thought to myself that there is perhaps nothing heavier than German light opera. And I knew I was in serious trouble in Prague when, in the same opera house in which it was first performed and the orchestra conducted by Mozart, late in the second act of “Don Giovanni,” I invoked Mozart please to hurry and kill off his miserable eponymous libertine so that I could return to my hotel to get some sleep.
Tourism of course remains tourism. No greater deception is possible than that of believing three days in Budapest, three in Vienna, and two in Prague (perhaps the most interesting city of the trio) will give one any more than a glancing sense of these cities and what is distinctive about their cultures. Tourism is, I fear, to deep knowledge what channel surfing is to Greek tragedy. In each of these three historically great cities, I felt the desire to live there for a year or more, had I the time and money to do so. I didn’t, don’t, and, regret to report, probably never will. So, with a smile at my DFPs, instead I got back on the bus.
–Joseph Epstein
