Lady luck thrusts James Lane into the world of Vienna's Mozart glitterati.
It's meant to be an early night back to a hostel near Vienna's central station before a long drive to Prague the next day.
But a post-dinner ride on the Metro derails our plans in the best way. I'm with a friend and we're just about to get off at our stop when a distressed Japanese woman approaches us.
A statue of Pallas Athene. Photo / Getty Images
"My friend is sick and we can't attend a Mozart concert at the Musikverein tonight. Please take our tickets — it's only just started," she says.
The tickets are each worth more than $250 and Musikverein's Golden Hall is the most monumental concert hall in the Austrian capital. Each New Year it's showcased when the Vienna Philharmonic performs the traditional January 1 concert.
This year's concert was watched by an estimated TV audience of 50 million people in 93 countries.
With this in mind we console the Japanese duo and smile gratefully (read: gleefully) before catching the next train back into the city on a balmy summer evening.
The Viennese are renowned as the most elegant and best-dressed in Europe. They also take social etiquette seriously.
The Musikverein within its Golden Hall. Photo / Getty Images
Willy Elmayer-Schaefer, Austria's arbiter of etiquette, lists the cardinal errors of attending live classical music to include eating, chewing gum, blocking the view of others, letting in gatecrashers, stealing floral decorations, sitting on fire extinguishers, taking off one's jacket and arriving improperly dressed.
On that score we easily commit four errors as we take up our excellent balcony seats.
I'm unshaven, dressed in a grotty Nick Cave T-shirt and shorts. My friend looks only slightly better in a faded polo shirt and jeans. We are dishevelled and so out of place it's hideous, but with a traveller's mix of chutzpah and cheekiness we take in the Golden Hall's excess of gilt and architectural detail. The performance of the Vienna Philharmonic is almost an afterthought.
Just about every part of the Golden Hall's surface is crammed with ornamentation: from the crenellated, gilt-edged balconies to the over-the-top allegorical paintings on the ceiling, not to mention 50 golden, topless female sculptures stationed around the perimeter of the hall. Is Neoclassical nudity racy? The whole shebang is a riot of detail.
A concert in the Musikverein concert hall in Vienna. Photo / Cha Gia Jose
When it comes to sound, the Musikverein seems to set its own rules. It's as though there's something in the air that is coaxing and cosseting the process of music-making. As a blow-in scruff, I try to go unnoticed but the Golden Hall does me no favours by keeping the lights up throughout the whole concert. I guess like Milan's equally opulent La Scala opera house, a big part of the show at the Musikverein is its interior and aesthetics.
Knocked out by the experience, we linger long enough after the final bows to savour what seems like a giddy dream. We take our cue as we feel the glare of the Viennese glitterati. Our time is up.
We seek refuge by finishing the night at one Vienna's oldest coffee houses, Cafe Central — a pseudo-Gothic haunt of intellectuals, politicians and the literary set. Regulars included Freud, Hitler, Trotsky, Lenin and Tito.
We spend our last euros ordering an "obermayer" — a big cup of mocca with a thin layer of cold cream on top. It's named after a musician with the Vienna Philharmonic. As we enjoy our coffees, we shake our heads in disbelief at our luck.
Inside the hall of the Musikverein. Photo / Harry Weber
Checklist
GETTING THERE See Vienna as part of a 14-night APT luxury River Cruise, from $8295pp twin share, and fly free to Europe. Departures from March to November, 2019.
