In Vienna we will continue to visit both architectural monuments and museums. We will visit the Abbey of Melk, and 18th century structure that epitomizes the Baroque style. This abbey has recently been resotred so that it displays Baroque ideas of a materialized heaven as a stimulus to faith and spirituality. It combines this architectural ideal of sublime lightness with more traditionally medieval displays of relics as tokens of belief. We will also tour the late 19th century buildings in the Art Nouveau structure. Art Nouveau, a style that seeks to incorporate natural processes of growth with human imagination, is a particularly Viennese style. In Vienna, Art Nouveau structures continue to preserve mosaics, murals, stained glass windows and other decorative art forms in the same style as the architectural buildings themselves.
We will visit two extraordinary museums, the Kunsthistorisches and the Belvedere. The Kunsthistorischs contains a strong collection of Western painting, particularly by artists including Cranach, Curer, Brueghel, Rembrandt, Rubens and Velasquez. The Belvedere is particularly strong in the arts of 19th century Viennese painters including Klimt and Schiele. This visit will be expecially relevant in light of the public controversy about the return of art works to Holocaust survivors and their families. It is so because one disputed work is Schiele painting owned by the Belvedere. This painting was lent to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where the family of its pre-World War II owners laid claim to it. It has been returned to Austria, where laws of reclamation have been notoriously weak and unsympathetic to Jewish claims. Thus, ethical issues on a broad scale will be addressed in the context of art ownership.
Vienna is a "must" for any excursion ot Europe devoted to the study of music. There are two Viennese schools: the first includes Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert; the second includes the early 20th-century composers Schonberg, Berg, and Webern. The late Romantic Brahms also claimed Vienna as his home for most of his life. There are many museums devoted to these composers, especially to those of the first Viennese school, which give students a first-hand feelinf of the composers' works and day-to-day living experiences. There are also two wonderful opera house (the State Opera and the Peoples' Opera) and two concert halls (the Musikvereins and the Konzerthaus), the former of which is a marvel of 19th-century architecture, where we hope to be able to attend performances of symphonic music. The Musikvereins also houses a beautiful smaller hall, called the "Brahms Saal", where piano recitals, song recitals and conerts of chamber music are held. Vienna also has an important cemetary, the Zentralfriedhof, where many of the Viennese composers are buried. A trip to this cemetary provides the students not only with opportunities for photographs, but also allows us to talk about the music, lives and times of the composers in a truly meaningful way.