The Habsburg Cafe by Andrew Riemer Page A

frozen in her posture—a wax dummy, a mannequin, a plaything.
    This pantomime continues throughout the performance. They are still at it when I return to the box after the interval; they do not cease for the melancholy parting of the lovers in a bitter, snowy dawn, or for their reunion in the artists’ garret where they first met, or for Mimi’s pathetic death in the arms of her lover. As before, nothing distracts them from their absorbed ecstasy. And then, at the end of the performance, as the applause begins, and as the singers, including the resurrected Mimi, come to take their bows in front of the plush curtain,the couple rises briskly from their chairs and squeeze their way out as efficiently as they had when coming in.
    Throughout the years I have lived in Australia, a land where musical culture, especially opera, is not very firmly entrenched, where audiences often seem unaware of the conventions of good manners and respect to which art claims to be entitled, I have often thought about these older societies where the arts are valued, where audiences are well-informed and well-mannered, where they will not start chatting about their problems with dishwashers or differentials at a moment of sublime beauty. Yet here, in the world that had become an object of veneration and longing throughout an antipodean exile, a quite different possibility now presents itself. Central Europe’s much publicised respect for culture, its putting the things of the spirit and the mind well above the claims of Mammon may be one of the lies, one of the instances of dishonesty that have marred the political and social life of this part of the world. Opera as the communal symbol of a coherent society, where all respected their proper places in that order—whether in the stalls, the boxes or the balcony—yet came together under the one roof in celebration of the finer things of life, may have been no more than a ruse, a pretence to mask instincts which, in the final count, had little to do with those reaches of the mind. It is for that reason that the boxes in these theatres used to be furnished with a curtain that could be pulled down, obscuring the occupants in their cosy cubicle, and why in some of these theatres—as in the opera house in Budapest during my childhood—a couch was placed at the back of the box, well out of sight.
    It is just after ten o’clock as I leave the theatre. Perhaps, it occurs to me, that imperial edict about the time by which performances must end had little to do with public convenience, with ensuring that patrons may catch the last horse-tram or whatever conveyance was in use at the end of the nineteenth century. It may well have been designed in order to allow ample time for silent lovers to reach the climax of their performance in some overfurnished apartment in the heart of the imperial city.
R ELIQUARIES
    Vienna’s churches echo with memories of the opera. Even the interiors of venerable gothic piles underwent thorough modernisation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to transform them into God’s theatres. The churches constructed in that epoch are often indistinguishable from the court theatres of the age. The Karlskirche, a basilica dedicated to St Charles Borromeo, ‘Reliever of the Plague,’ the masterpiece of Fischer von Erlach, the virtuoso of the Austrian baroque, reveals its essentially theatrical design from the moment you set foot inside the porch. It is a miniature foyer—your eyes scan its wall and corners in search of the cloakroom and buffet. The church itself is embellished with every variety of coloured, veined and patterned marble. The high altar is displayed behind an ample proscenium arch, its curtain raised to reveal a stunning spectacle of marble, gold and bronze. The organ gallery, protected by an elaborately carved balustrade, occupies the position of a royal box. The architect’s flamboyant manipulation of space, light,