Ringing in the New Year

[N.B.: The acidic commentary in the following may be taken with a pinch of salt. I'm only in a satirical, hopefully not a mean-spirited, mood.]

Yesterday we celebrated the end of 2008 predominantly by partaking of a feast: wieners (Knackwurst), potato salad, and pickles. The potato salad is a compound of diced boiled potatoes, pickles and apples, and a mixture of fried onion and bacon that is deglazed with balsamic vinegar and bouillon. I infinitely prefer it to the species of potato salad in which gloopy white mayonnaise covers everything. Mama also prepared a punch of white wine, champagne, and peach slices. Normally I dislike drinking much alcohol, preferring to be in perfect command of my wits; but yesterday I made an exception and downed at least five glasses of the punch, though over a period of as many hours, and did not feel woozy or dizzy at all. Sadly Gi. was missing again, but his absence felt more dreadful over Christmas, as that is a less profane occasion.

Out in the streets the firecrackers were not as prolific as in the previous year, and they have tended to sound anticlimactically like a car door being slammed shut, but in the afternoon a battery of very loud ones, reminiscent of cannonshot, verged on a public nuisance. I also dislike the ones that sound like automatic gunfire. As the evening progressed there were more fireworks, and I like hearing the ones that go wheeeeee before they disintegrate into crackling sparks.

As for television, the programming was spectacularly lousy in my point of view. There was classical music, but it was Beethoven's Ninth and modern stuff, and I was in a snobby mood. Likewise I choose to be a wet blanket about Dinner for One, a short black-and-white film about a lady's dinner where her butler must play the roles of four guests and becomes increasingly intoxicated in the process. Though it is English, it appears to be a staple of German New Year's culture. On the other channels there were also pop and rock offerings, including a concert with Coldplay, whose music I find a trifle monotonous though intriguingly hypnotic. There was also comedy: the channel ZDF put together an annual retrospective on German politics that was quite amusing, and it aired at least twice on the documentary channel Phoenix. Aside from that I mostly groaned about the absence of westerns or agreeably stupid action films, with which we have been blessed in great number around Christmas. There was at least The Thomas Crown Affair (the one with Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo), of which I watched excerpts largely for the sake of the footage of New York in general and of the Metropolitan Museum in particular.

When the clock ticked down, we all gathered in the corner room. Papa held the champagne bottle and let the cork work itself loose, the glasses glimmered on the table, and we all looked expectantly at the television screen as the seconds were counted down at the Brandenburger Tor. Then the cork popped, injuring nobody and destroying nothing, and we took our glasses (beaded bubbles winking at the brim, to quote very pretentiously from Keats) and raised them in the obligatory toasts. The curtains were open and we saw the fireworks blobbing upward into the air, streaming away, and erupting into scintillating fragments, as the smoke fogged the light under the streetlamps. Mama, after playing "Auld Lang Syne" on the French horn as we sang along as our memory of the lyrics permitted, handed out long sparklers, which we lit at a candle and then held up into the air, at careful arm's length, as Papa looked on in slight anxiety. No fire resulted, and the pyrotechnics in our household were as modest as intended.

This morning I woke up after eleven. A hoarfrost, perchance mingled with the snow that fell as a tiny dust, had descended on the deserted streets, and it was and remains cloudy. From the direction of the corner room I heard the strains of the Vienna New Year's Concert. So I arose and watched the spectacle with the parents. Normally the concert teeters on the brink of the unendurable for me, as there comes a point where the polkas are indistinguishable and they are churned out like tunes from a music box, and the lush scenes of Austrian mountains, fields, gardens, and architecture become cloying, and the saccharine offerings in the way of everything inspire a more than faint nausea. Even the flower arrangements are bombastic. It is comical, but unintentionally as well as intentionally, and always a little painfully. So I can rarely tell whether it is more pleasant or unpleasant.

But this year the music was more than endurable. Daniel Barenboim was conducting, and under him the music of the Strausses had a Beethovenian substance that may not be so authentic but that was a great relief for me. The endless lilting levity that is more authentic gets on my nerves; one can only hear so many songs in a 3/4 tempo without losing one's marbles. If someone had asked me yesterday, I would have declared that I am sick of the Blue Danube waltz and even more so of the Radetzky March; today I even hummed them happily after the concert. I remarked here and there that the music reminded me of the "Lonely Goatherd" from The Sound of Music, but mostly (and unsuccessfully) did so to tease Mama. It was nice, too, that the Philharmonic performed the fourth movement of a Haydn symphony, in honour of the composer's approaching bicentenary; it was a change of pace, especially as the tone of the musicians grew gentler and quieter, but a welcome one.

As for the spectacle, it was groan-worthy as usual. The camera work inside the Wiener Musikverein was not too bad, though there was one angle up the cellos that was odd, and I mischievously enjoyed seeing the crack in the gold on a pilaster, right above its cherub-infested capital. The flowers (zinnias, roses, etc.) were blindingly orange; red and pink were also in evidence, not improving the matter. When the Musikverein was not shown, we were treated to vistas of the Alps, and of a cave (at first a confused bluish mass whose identity was indistinguishable), melting and dripping away like an endangered glacier; vineyards in green and gold; sunsets; etc. As a matter of course, the colours were so hyperinfused that they would overpower the most chromophilic toddler.

Nor were we spared the horribly perky ballet-waltzing. It began during the "Schatz" waltz, as a lady ballerina sat in a black carriage that drove up to the steps of a palace, where a gentleman who was quite evidently gay pretended to wait for her anxiously. This lady ballerina then descended and danced, with a grace which was nice to watch. She wore a red-ribboned white gown that was all right. Her blonde successor to the affections of the pink-shirted gentleman who had awaited her (apparently the colours of one's clothing make one compatible with certain people), however, had to put up with a pink-swirled white maternity gown. The simplified costumes are probably supposed to look moderned up, but they merely look dumbed down.

The inevitable pièce de résistance arrived as the strains of the Blue Danube waltz rose from the stage. A trio of boys dressed up as cherubs with awkward golden breastplates, possibly stolen from a low-budget production of a historical film or play set in Rome, and white wings, had to dance with a trio of girls, who were dressed in blue costumes with scaly golden diamonds at their tummies and blue furbelows in the back that may have been intended for fishtails but that looked like a cross between an eighteenth-century bustle and a bird's tail. Said tails can be attractive only to the avian mind. Then there was the choreography. The dancers had to mime flirtations, like their elders, and it was even more annoying here, since children should be permitted to be children and not forced to be little editions of grown-ups.

In his closing words, Barenboim wished for peace in the world and "human justice in the Middle East," and then in German the musicians all said, as custom dictates, "Prosit Neujahr!"