The Empress and Old Vienna

She was a shy and lovely teenager unhappily married to a powerful European royal. Criticized by the aristocracy for her common touch and alienated from a husband who shared few of her interests, she grew into a depressed, anorexic, rebellious woman--a great beauty of her day--and died violently.

This haunting plot line belongs not only to a beloved 20th century British princess but also to a mercurial 19th century monarch: Elisabeth, Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary (1837-1898). Even before Vienna mounted its current exhibition celebrating her life, the most casual visitor could pick up on the city’s infatuation with the stunning “Sisi.” Reproductions of her many portraits have long graced everything from tea towels to hotel lobbies. But this year, it’s impossible to escape her gaze as my husband, G.J., and I stroll through the old city. Displays of Sisi chocolates, jams and coffee stare out the window of the Julius Meinl grocery store. In pastry shops, we find her image stamped on the white chocolate medallions crowning the delectable walnut Elisabethtortes. A Vienna Tourist Board brochure lists the exclusive shops from which the empress once ordered her silks, jewelry and bed linens. And it seems that even the locals have been seduced by the 10-month-long exhibit “Elisabeth:

Eternal Beauty.” Gabrielle Buchas, a guide of Elisabeth-themed walking tours for seven years, says, “Yes, foreigners are taking these tours. But many Viennese, too, especially school groups.”

If any city rivals London in its attachment to its regal past, it is surely Vienna. The Viennese cling sincerely, even passionately, to traditions rooted in the distant centuries of the Hapsburg dynasty, to its glittering winter balls and horse-drawn carriages, to a fondness for titles and coffeehouse rituals. On our most recent visit, G.J. and I observe our own Vienna ritual. Though we come here every year or two, we never quite feel we have arrived until we turn the corner of one immaculate pedestrian street, Graben, and look down another, Kohlmarkt. Rising up out of the long, narrow corridor is the stately baroque faade and green dome of the Michaelertor, the St. Michael’s gate entrance to the Hofburg, former royal seat of the Holy Roman and then Austro-Hungarian empires. It is a magnificent sight.

As we walk into the heart of the Altstadt, as the old city is called, I marvel at how little this neighborhood has changed in the 15 years we have known it, though at times it seems perilously close to becoming a Hapsburg theme park, with its palaces draped in patriotic red and white banners, its silly souvenir figurines of Lipizzaners and its legions of frock-coated touts hawking concert tickets, selling the music for which the city is renowned. (The programs rarely stray from the Vienna blend: a smidgen of Haydn, a little Beethoven, but mostly Mozart, and perhaps a dollop of Strauss.)

G.J. pauses in front of a stationery store and reminds me that, before the war, his father and grandfather had their calling cards made up there. We stop at Demel’s, the oldest of Vienna’s pastry shops, land a coveted street-side table and order our favorites: the lavishly chocolate Annatorte for me and the walnut coffeecake, called Potize, for G.J. We have arrived.

For G.J., though, spending time here is bittersweet. Seated in view of the Hofburg, he contemplates the empire that attracted his grandparents, assimilated their offspring, made them wealthy and then brutally turned them out in 1938, murdering those who did not flee. Yet Vienna still holds power over him, rooted in family--some of whom returned after the war--language and even profession. His academic career led him to a focus on Austrian literature. He feels at home here yet never entirely comfortable.

That paradox reverberates over the next few days as we devote ourselves to the exhibition marking the 100th anniversary of Sisi’s death. Running through Feb. 16, 1999, it is housed in three grand Hapsburg residences: the Hofburg, Schonbrunn palace and the Hermes Villa, all homes of Sisi. Although G.J. and I have visited these major tourist attractions many times, the exhibition promises to flesh out the life story of the enigmatic empress.

During her marriage to the next-to-last Hapsburg ruler, the long-reigning (1848-1916) Franz Joseph, the Viennese venerated Elisabeth’s beauty even as they censured her nonconformity. Many people here still condemn her as an outsider--a first cousin from a lesser branch of Bavarian royalty--who failed as a wife, mother and queen. Others, says G.J.’s Viennese cousin Gretl, view her as the victim of a malicious mother-in-law and an oppressive Viennese court.

Eager to judge for ourselves, G.J. and I explore anew Elisabeth’s haunts, marveling at the remnants of a culture that not even a world war could obliterate. During the 68-year reign of Franz Joseph, Vienna shed much of its medieval character. In the late 1850s, wide tree-lined boulevards replaced walls encircling the Altstadt. A trolley ride around this Ringstrasse is an inexpensive way to scan the city’s 19th century architecture. We often board one of the red cars and glide by the Opera, the Kunst-historisches Museum, the Burgtheater, the Volksgarten, the Parliament, and so on, catching glimpses of the lounging patrons at the Cafe Landtmann or the Imperial.

But while we find the surface civility of Vienna appealing, the emperor’s wife loathed the city, felt trapped by it and escaped at every opportunity. By all accounts, the 16-year-old who came in 1854 to the Hofburg--an imposing 50-acre labyrinth of state buildings, chapels, museums, libraries and gardens--was ill-prepared. A liberal upbringing by her father left her unschooled in the strict etiquette of the Viennese court. She refused to observe rank and protocol, chafed at her obligations and grew to hate her mother-in-law. In arranging the royal living quarters, the formidable Archduchess Sophie isolated Sisi’s rooms from her husband’s--and eventually her three children’s. Yet the young empress enjoyed no privacy or peace under Sophie’s critical eye. Only a few weeks after her wedding, she wrote in a letter, “I have awakened in a dungeon with chains on my hands.” Photos, artworks and mementos displayed in Elisabeth’s apartments attest to her restlessness. Inventing any excuse, including illnesses, she took refuge in temporary households--in Madeira, Hungary, England, Ireland and Corfu, where she built a villa called the Achilleion.

Of all the exhibition spaces, the 20 or so rooms in the Hofburg offer the fewest clues about the personalities of their occupants, with notable exceptions. To the horror of the court staff, Elisabeth turned a neo-Rococo dressing room into a fitness room, a modification she would make in each of her homes. Intent on maintaining her 20-inch waistline, she worked out on parallel bars, a set of rings installed in a door frame and with weights. In her 1986 biography of Elisabeth, “The Reluctant Empress” (Alfred A. Knopf), Brigitte Hamann cites an account of her routine: “When I saw her, she was just raising herself on the handrings. She wore a black silk dress with a long train, hemmed with magnificent black ostrich feathers. . . . Hanging on the ropes, she made a fantastic impression, like a creature somewhere between snake and bird.”

Franz Joseph’s study and bedroom, with its modest iron bedstead, reflect his simple tastes and devotion to his wife, with whom he fell in love at first sight. Two paintings by Franz Xaver Winterhalter, each showing her in a simple dressing gown with a loose mass of curly brown hair, are among the many Sisi images adorning his somber quarters.

To escape the city in summer, the royals moved the court from the Hofburg to Schonbrunn, a Versailles-scale palace that largely bears the stamp of the 18th century monarch Maria Theresa; she ordered smaller rooms to create a cozier atmosphere for her large family. Because this mustardy “Hapsburg yellow” mansion draws fleets of tour buses, G.J. doesn’t like to go near it except to stroll its old-fashioned zoo (Elisabeth kept a monkey as a pet) and 500-acre park.

As at the Hofburg, this slice of the exhibition centers on the apartments most closely associated with Elisabeth. G.J. and I opt for the self-guided tour with audio headset, retracing Elisabeth’s steps through the contiguous chambers. Among her many personal belongings are the fans she hid behind as her beauty faded.

Elisabeth obsessed over her appearance, biographer Hamann theorizes, because she understood it was her sole source of power, her leverage to gain autonomy. Through rigorous exercise and fad diets she stayed extremely thin (reportedly about 110 pounds on a 5-foot-7 1/2 frame). And, the empress wrote in a letter, “I am a slave to my hair.” The styling of her knee-length tresses took three hours each day, and washing it--in cognac and eggs--consumed one full day every three weeks, time which Elisabeth used to learn five languages.

A few miles from Schonbrunn, on the fringe of the city, lies the Hermes Villa, which Elisabeth called her “palace of dreams.” Built in 1886 to reflect her tastes, the residence did not anchor Sisi to Vienna, as her husband hoped it would. The empress’ bedroom decor here reveals perhaps her most striking quirk--a strong identification with Titania, queen of the fairies. Scenes from Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” play out on the walls and ceiling; prominent Viennese artist Hans Makart did the designs and a young Gustav Klimt painted them. In two volumes of poetry she wrote in middle age, Elisabeth often refers to herself as Titania and to Franz Joseph as Oberon, king of the fairies. The poems provide unguarded views into her egocentric and lonely world, as in this excerpt from “Abandoned”:

*

Once I was so young sad rich

In love of life and hope;

I thought nothing could match my strength,

The whole world was open to me.

I loved, I lived,

I wandered through the world;

But never reached what I strove for.--

I deceived and was deceived.

*

After leaving the Hermes Villa and taking a long hike through its large enclosed park, G.J. and I have one last stop. We return to the Altstadt, where just a few blocks from the Hofburg stands the Hapsburgs’ burial crypt in the Kapuzinerkirche (Church of the Capuchin Friars) on Neuer Markt. Empress Elisabeth was entombed on Sept. 17, 1898, one week after an Italian anarchist stabbed her in the heart with a sharpened file. The attack occurred on a visit to Geneva, as she was about to board a lake steamer. The public wept, according to biographer Hamann, more for the widower Franz Joseph than for the slain Sisi.

The unadorned facade of the church and adjoining entrance to the crypt--containing 133 monarchs, consorts and offspring--seems at odds with the Hapsburg excess. A brown-robed friar accepts our admission fee and points the way to the staircase leading down to musty rooms.

In the marble-lined room containing Empress Elisabeth’s sarcophagus, floral wreaths, dried and plastic, and flickering votive candles testify to Elisabeth’s posthumous popularity among the Austrians and among Hungarians, who during her life feted her as a great queen. On this day, a tiny, faded Hungarian flag rests next to fake flowers draped with a ribbon imprinted “Queen of Hungary.”

How sad, we think, that Elisabeth, unlike Princess Diana, drew no comfort from her subjects. “Though I may walk among other people,” she wrote, “I am not of their kind.”

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Guidebook: Royal Vienna

Telephone numbers and prices: The country code for Austria is 43. City code for Vienna is 1. Prices are approximate and computed at a rate of 12.5 Austrian shillings to the U.S. dollar. Hotel rates are for a double room for one night. Unless otherwise noted, meal prices are for dinner for two, food only.

Getting there: Air France, British Airways, Delta, KLM, Lufthansa, Northwest and Swissair have connecting flights between Los Angeles and Vienna.

Where to stay: Hotel Kaiserin Elisabeth, Weihburggasse 3; telephone 515-260, fax 515-267. Rates: $168 to $220. Hotel Konig von Ungarn, Schulerstrasse 10; tel. 515-84, fax 515-848. Rate: $183. Both are small, elegant hotels in Vienna’s old city.

Where to eat: For traditional Viennese cuisine: Restaurant Stadtbeisl, Naglergasse 21; tel. 533-3507; $40. Also, Esterhazykeller, Haarhof 1, tel. 533-3482; $20. Near the Hofburg: Cafe Griensteidl, Michaelplatz 2; tel. 535-2692; $30. For pastries: Ch. Demel’s Sohne, Kohlmarkt 14; tel. 535-1717; $4 to $10.

What to do: A ticket for all three sites in the Empress Elisabeth exhibition is available for about $14, though separate admission to each exhibition site can be purchased. The Hofburg Elisabeth Exhibition, 1010 Vienna; tel. 533-7570. Admission about $6. The Schonbrunn Palace Elisabeth Exhibition, Schloff Strasse, 1130 Vienna; tel. 811-130. Admission about $7. The Hermes Villa Elisabeth Exhibition, Lainzer Tiergarten, 1130 Vienna; tel. 505-8747. Admission about $5. The Kapuzinergruft (Imperial Burial Vaults): Neuer Markt 1; tel. 512-6853. Admission about $3. For English-language walking tours, call Gabriele Buchas for information, tel. 489-4263.

For more information: Austrian National Tourist Office, (310) 478-8306, fax (310) 477-5141. The Schonbrunn Palace Web site, https:www.schoenbrunn.at/, has information about the Elisabeth exhibition and related events.