Saturday, 7 April 2012

Things to do in Vienna when you're dead

I couldn't visit Vienna without making the pilgrimage to see Beethoven, Brahms and Schubert in their final resting places. Luckily, the Zentralfriedhof is on the line out to the airport, making a visit to Vienna's central cemetery very easy. You've got to have the legs for it, though: the cemetery covers a slightly larger area than the city centre and, if you walk from one side to the other, like I did with my suitcase, you'll get a good workout to boot. Luckily for you, I took some snaps of the composers I found.


Mozart's memorial. Mozart is actually buried up the road, near a big motorway junction. Yes, we do know where he is buried, though the precise plot isn't known.


Beethoven, sitting just behind the Mozart memorial and next to Schubert. The two were exhumed from their original graves and reburied here in the late nineteenth century. Apparently, Bruckner had to be dragged away from their corpses. Nice.


 

Schubert, to the right of Beethoven's grave.



Brahms, looking a bit worried, as you'd expect.




Hugo Wolf, looking a little like he'd expected there to be the body of a muscle man painted below the hole for his head.



An appropriately modernist grave for Arnold Schoenberg.




Zemlinsky, with the shiniest grave in the cemetery.




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