It was our last night in Vienna and our last concert, this time at the Schönborn Palace (built 1699). Don’t confuse this with Schönbrunn Palace on the other side of town.
This evening we eventually found the venue in the at the Hofkapelle and we were ushered in to the Barock Hall. It was much smaller than the photo they showed us led us to believe. I think there were about 130 people seated and a very small area for the 5 musicians and the piano.
There are lots of men in front of tourist attraction places here who are dressed in old red or black cloaks and robes and hats. They are there to sell tourists tickets to the many concerts going on all over town. They carry a big binder full of sheet-protected pages of concert venues and available seating. They have a credit card machine in their pocket and a big billfold for cash. And they are persistent, to the edge of annoying. They are also pretty sure that there are ONLY TWO seats left in any given concert, and if you don’t buy those two seats, the opportunity is lost forever.
We purchased our other 5 concert tickets weeks ago, online, but this time we were sucked in by a rather convincing ticket salesman in a cloak as he told us tonight’s venue is where Beethoven first played his 9th Symphony and he had to be turned around to see (he was deaf) the people cheering and applauding afterwards. (Not sure that happened here.) He also told us they’d play a selection from La Traviata (one of my favorites). (That didn’t happen.) Oh well.
Our Frankfurt Germany Mission 