Vienna New Year's Postcard

An Ode To The Joy Of Beauty In A World Of Pain And Violence

Conductor Marie Jacquot and members of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, taking bows after their stunning performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony

Vienna at New Year’s was magical, if by “magical” one means “as cold as hell.” No, seriously, it was a gorgeous sight — I think Vienna never looks better than in winter — but boy, was it cold. My camera-shy American friend — a Southerner — toodled around with me struggling hard not to shiver. The main reason for us to come was to see the Vienna Symphony Orchestra and chorus perform Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on New Year’s Eve. And so we did!

It was unforgettable. Really and truly. One of the highlights of my life, in fact.

Without knowing what I was doing when I booked tickets online a month or so ago, I accidentally landed us seats on the second row! This was especially fortunate, because we were on the side, at an angle where we could see the conductor, a young French woman named Marie Jacquot, lead the orchestra. I knew nothing about Jacquot, 34, when I took my seat, but she proved utterly captivating. She was full of passionate expressions, like Leonard Bernstein, and seemed completely in command of the music. I found this earlier performance under Jacquot’s baton online; if you scroll through it, you can get an idea of how passionate she is:

Here, in German, is an interview with her, with some rehearsal footage, at the very Vienna concert hall where we saw her on New Year’s Eve:

I did not realize that Beethoven was living in Vienna when he finished the Ninth, his final symphonic work, until this trip; nor did I realize that it premiered in Vienna. Beethoven was present for it, but was by then deaf, and could not hear his most famous, greatest work when it was performed!

I first heard it in college; the Herbert von Karajan version, with the Berlin Philharmonic, was my entrée, and remains, probably for sentimental reasons, my favorite (though if you watch the video, you’ll see in the maestro the purest expression of passion under control). I beg you to go here, to the 46:00 mark, where von Karajan’s chorus begins to sing, and watch till the end. This was my second time to hear the Ninth performed live, and perhaps because it was in Europe (in Vienna!), and it was New Year’s Eve — well, this was one of the high points of my life. I rarely lack for words for anything, but experiencing the final, choral movement was like being present in Paradise for a liturgy. Wave after wave of exultation passed over me and through me, and by the time the sopranos break through near the end after a moment of almost unbearable tension — I’ve cued it here — well, I dare you not to weep tears of pure joy.

As the audience delivered a nearly nine-minute ovation for Jacquot and the performers, I felt overwhelmingly that this, this is the only justification that Western civilization could ever need. A civilization that can produce a work of art so transcendent is worth loving and defending till the very end. For that matter, it is a justification for our entire human existence. It was, and is, just that powerful.

My friend and I exited the Concert Hall into the frigid night air, and wandered over to the Stephansdom, where a large crowd had gathered for a pop concert in advance of the annual ringing of the cathedral bell to welcome in the new year. But it was too cold, and too crowded, to linger long. We strolled through the Innere Stadt, and made our way to the legendary Hotel Sacher, built on the site where the theater where the Ninth was first performed, and talked our way into the bar (no reservations, alas) where an elegant party was underway. (I took no photos for some reason, but here is a recent YouTube tour of the hotel’s sumptuous interior during the Christmas season.) The maitre’d allowed us to stay to drink half a bottle of Veuve Clicquot, and to listen to a jazz band in a wood-paneled room decorated elaborately with Christmas trees, lights, and bunting. As we sipped our bubbly, an elderly hippie couple, easily in their eighties, but turned out in their best, danced alone on the floor, ecstatic in each other’s arms. We didn’t want to leave, but leave we had to, as we were interlopers there in this party.

What grace, all of it! What a gift! Life remains a blessing. Beethoven in Vienna, and Champagne at the Sacher on New Year’s Eve. It truly doesn’t get any better than this.

On the train back to Budapest the next day, we shared a compartment with a young German man, very tall, a mathematician who told us about his life. I won’t give any details, because the unusual circumstances of his life and work might make him identifiable. He was on a long journey that will end next week in China, where he will spend six months establishing a Chinese outpost of the business he started. He was very down on prospects for his homeland.

“It’s over,” he said glumly. “At Christmas dinner, all anybody could talk about was the decline of the economy.” He went on to talk about how the ruling class has mismanaged everything. Of course migration came up. He talked about how “our history classes were really more about psychology, about teaching us to make sure it” — Nazism — “never happened again.” He told us what we already knew: that nobody in Germany is permitted to take pride in anything German, and what a beatdown that was. Mind you, my American friend and I had less than twenty-four hours earlier experienced one of the great monuments of human civilization, a musical work penned by a German, in the German language: an artifact of a particular people, and a particular civilization. It seemed to me a crime that this young man, like tens of millions of Germans in the postwar period, had been taught, in effect, that all of German history is determined and defined by the twelve evil years of National Socialist rule. I could see in his confused, slightly tormented face, that he could scarcely bring himself to resist his programming. He seemed … resigned. Utterly resigned. It was one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen.

In a sense, this young man, and the crumbling nation of whom he is a son, is another victim of Adolf Hitler. It is not easy to pity someone like this, given the enormity of Nazi Germany’s crimes. I think back to the time a few years ago when I visited Auschwitz, and how I thought on that bleak day that Germany doesn’t deserve to exist. But I was wrong then, because there does not exist a civilization anywhere on earth that has not done similar things to others over the long course of their existence, and that would not do similar things given the right circumstances. That, I think, is one of the most important lessons of the twentieth century — of Hitler, of Stalin, of Mao: that if it could happen then and there, it could happen anywhere, to anybody. Yes, Germany’s story is Hitler, Himmler, and Hess. But it is also Bach, Beethoven, and Goethe. When Angela Merkel said, infamously, “Wir schaffen dass!” (“We can do it!”), and opened the floodgates in 2015 to a million Arab Muslims from the Middle East, she might well have consigned the German nation to oblivion, out of sentimentality and guilt. In the hearts and minds of so many Germans from the ruling class, there is no redemption for Germany other than oblivion.

Sitting before us in a train car was an intellectually brilliant son of Germany, who was going abroad to try to build a future for himself (“It is impossible for anyone of my generation whose parents aren’t rich to hope to buy a house,” he said), because of the abject failure of his country’s leaders, of every generation after Hitler. The only surefire way to make sure that It Never Happens Again is for Germany to commit suicide, they must have reckoned. To pass, as my fellow American and I did, from the unsurpassable glories of German civilization, in Beethoven and Vienna on a cold winter’s night to the desultory resignation of his 23-year-old German man in a stuffy train car barreling eastward through the snow-frosted landscape of Hungary, is to have lived, in a sense, through the tragedy of the West. He spoke briefly about how some of his friends talk about going to America, where at least, unlike in today’s Europe, a talented person might build a life free of the strangling regulations and mindset of Europe. I told him that I have children his age, and they too face a struggle to buy a house one day, and to establish a stable life. It’s certainly not entirely the fault of mass migration, but the blindness of our own ruling class — the Republicans, with their desire for cheap labor to help Big Business, and the Democrats, with their woke sentimentality — has done to his generation in my country, in a smaller way, what the Right and the Left has done to his country. The young German man expressed hope that Donald Trump can turn things around for America, and he delicately — so delicately — indicated that the so-called “far right” AdF party in Germany might do something good for his country, if they are allowed to take power. But mostly, I saw no hope in him, only a dim instinct for survival, elsewhere.

On the train I read news on my phone from New Orleans, about the New Year’s Eve terror attack there by an ISIS militant. We now know who the killer was:

The driver, who was killed in a shootout with police, was identified by the F.B.I. as Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar, 42, a U.S. citizen and U.S. Army veteran from Texas. He had loaded his rented truck with weapons and at least one “potential” improvised explosive, authorities said, and an Islamic State flag was found on the trailer hitch of his rented white Ford pickup.

He was a US citizen, an Army veteran, a successful corporate professional, and a Muslim who had recently become very serious about his religion:

Chris Pousson, 42, a retired Air Force veteran who also lives in Beaumont, said he attended middle school and high school with “Sham,” as he was known then, and described him as “quiet, reserved, and really, really smart.”

“He wasn’t a troublemaker at all,” Mr. Pousson said. “He made good grades and was always well-dressed in button-ups and polo shirts.”

They reconnected on Facebook after Mr. Jabbar got out of active-duty military service in 2015, at which point Mr. Pousson noticed that Mr. Jabbar had become deeply involved in his Muslim faith.

“Before, if he was into it, he wasn’t open or verbal about it,” Mr. Pousson said. But at that point, he said, Mr. Jabbar was making lots of posts about religion on Facebook. “It was never Muslim extremist stuff, and he was never threatening any violence, but you could see that he had gotten really passionate.”

Still, the attack came as a shock to him. “This is a complete 180 from the quiet, reserved person I knew,” he said.

We know now that he was twice-divorced, and may have had serious financial problems. Lots of people — even Muslims — struggle in this way, but they don’t become mass-murdering terrorists. I suppose we will learn more about what triggered him in the days to come. I wonder how the vibe shift that has happened in the US since Trump’s re-election will affect the way most Americans think about this attack. No doubt in newsrooms across America, stories have already been assigned to reporters, ordering them to focus on the real victims here: innocent Muslims who might suffer from bad thoughts from non-Muslims about their religion. It’s a ritual we have all become accustomed to after 9/11. The young German in the train had mentioned the recent Magdeburg terrorism, and how German authorities seem more concerned with policing the Bad Thoughts of the German people than protecting them from Islamic terrorism. At some point, most people will have had quite enough of this kind of thing.

Back home in Budapest, I checked my e-mail and social media — I had left my laptop back home for the Vienna trip; aren’t you proud of me? — and saw that the transcript of the 2013 trial of Pakistani Muslim gang rapists in the English city of Rotherham had either just been released, or had somehow been rediscovered, and were making their way across social media. You will know that British authorities have gone for many years out of their way to compel the British people to deny the hideous realities of what mass migration from the Islamic world has done and is doing to their society. These transcripts are many things, perhaps nothing more powerful than a scathing indictment of the UK’s ruling class. For example, here is the trial judge:

More:

You, Mohammed Karrar, were introduced to GH when she was only 11. It is a [sic] clear from the video clip we have seen, she was a small girl at the age of 12. You were in your thirties. [You knew that both her parents had profound disabilities, and at a very early age she shouldered a huge responsibility towards her parents. You would go to her home and smoke joints with her father who no doubt would have had no idea what you were doing to his daughter, including having sex with her at his home.] You anally raped her when she was 11. After a period of months when you groomed her, you were having regular oral, vaginal and anal sex with her. You duped her by telling her that you'd take her to Saudi Arabia and marry her when she was 15. She became pregnant. Your reaction was to become angry with her and slap her. You took her to Reading so that an illegal abortion could be performed upon her at an underground so-called clinic. Clearly this was highly dangerous to her health. As always you had no regard to her welfare and the damage you were causing her. She became obsessed with you, and you exploited her.

Read the whole transcript of the sentencing hearing here. And here is a flashback to how Yorkshire police reacted to discovering two underage girls in a house with seven Pakistani men: they arrested the girls for being “drunk and disorderly.” Germany and the UK are both beyond screwed. But be of good cheer, Britons! As King Charles reminded his nation in his Christmas address, Diversity Is Our Strength.

On our recent visit to the South Pacific to attend the Commonwealth Summit, I was reminded constantly of the strength which institutions, as well as individuals, can draw from one another. And of how diversity of culture, ethnicity and Faith provides strength, not weakness. Across the Commonwealth, we are held together by a willingness to listen to each other, to learn from one another and to find just how much we have in common. Because, through listening, we learn to respect our differences, to defeat prejudice, and to open up new possibilities.

Who can believe anything these guilt-ridden ruling class poltroons say? God forbid that bigotry against decent, hard-working Muslims should become an issue. But if it does, then above all, I blame fools like the British sovereign, politicians of Left and Right, journalists, academics and others who chose to live in lies, and to shame people, and train them to shame themselves, for believing the evidence of their own eyes.

I have a feeling that 2025 will be a very difficult year for us all. I am off later today to spend a few days on Mount Athos, with the monks. It will be my first pilgrimage there. God knows I need to pray, to repent of my sins, and to think about this poor old world of ours. I hope I can carry with me the memory of that luminous moment with Beethoven, to remember the lesson that Tarkovsky’s Theophanes tried to pass on to medieval iconographer Andrei Rublev in the ruins of the cathedral sacked by Islamic raiders and their Russian confederates: that artists have a duty to bring beauty to the people, to proclaim it in defiance of the world’s sin and suffering, to speak the truth to us that God is with us, no matter what, and that evil does not have the final word, unless we allow it to.

A hard truth to perceive in light of the ISIS attack on innocent street revelers in New Orleans, but the truth all the same. I think of Flannery O’Connor, who counseled that “you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.” I also remember her immortal advice: “To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.” We are now living in the West through the bitterness that comes through having been led for a long time by people who have a sentimental view of life. To recover what we have lost — what we have had taken from us, and what we have given away by our own consent to lies — and to recover it without losing our charity, is the challenge before us all now.

You will next hear from me when I’m back from Athos in about a week. I will remember you all in my prayers there. Please pray for me too. I am a sinner with a heart broken from all I’ve lived through, but also a heart that somehow cherishes hope. Hope, because I really and truly believe that evil will not have the last word, that resurrection and redemption is possible. Hope because above all, I believe our God is a God of mercy, and that He is with us always, no matter how hard we work to hide from Him.

I will leave you today with some beauty I saw on exhibit at the Albertina Museum in Vienna. Here is Albrecht Dürer’s famous drawing of a hare:

Here is Dürer’s self-portrait when he was all of 13:

And here is a canvas by Marc Chagall, in which he memorialized both the beauty of Vitebsk, his Russian (Belarussian, actually) village, and Paris, where he found his home in exile. It was a reminder to me, like the final image of Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia, that the tension within an expatriate can only be resolved when and if he finds a way to join in his imagination the homes he has known:

Finally, more humbly, the joy of Kaiserschmarrn in the museum cafe; Kaiserschmarrn, a favorite of the emperor Franz Joseph, are lightly sweetened torn crepes, pregnant with rum-soaked raisins, and served with a dusting of powdered sugar and, if you’re lucky, whipped cream:

Dürer, Chagall, and Beethoven aside, it is possible to eat Kaiserschmarrn and think, if only for a moment, that we live in a world of sweetness, light, and enchantment. I know this, because three days ago, I lived it. This Christmas season has been one of intense abundance for me — experiencing beauty, love, friendship, and the vivid presence of Christ in Rome, Vienna, and now, Athos. For that, I give thanks to God for all His graces, most of all for His love for me, a sinner. The world is a dark place in this bleak winter, but as Russell Kirk said, remains sunlit despite its vices. Remember, you won’t be hearing for me for the next six or seven days, but I’ll be back with you all soon, with lots of stories to tell.