Budapest Streets

The streets of Budapest are filled with fascinating and sometimes very idiosyncratic architecture.   Budapest's glory days were in the last few decades before WW1, and the Art Nouveau (Secession) movement was very big here.   And, although there was a lot of destruction in WW2, most of the city was reconstructed to look the same way.

One of the most striking buildings is the conservatory of music.  The interiors are amazing, not quite like any conservatory of music I have ever seen:

Inside:

We also saw the apartment where Liszt lived for a period of time.   I liked his desk:

Budapest was the second city in the world to have a subway.  The original subway line still works, and the stations might have looked like this a hundred years ago:

This is the museum for applied arts, closed for renovation:

Apartment building:

One of Budapest's markets, beautifully restored:

A bridge and street:

More apartments:

A statue on the Neo-Gothic House of Parliament:

One of the train stations:

Some buildings are still in a state of decay, but not as extreme as in Bucharest:

This is the photography museum;

Detail:

This is the opera house, which was staging an outdoor preview of its upcoming season:

This is an amazing theater:

Detail of the top:

Fisherman's Bastion, an architectural folly with a viewpoint of the river:

View:

One more building:

And an idea for my garden:

To Budapest!

We took the overnight train from Bucharest to Budapest, bypassing both Buchapest and Budarest.   I have fond memories of overnight train rides, of looking out the window at 3 AM and seeing a deserted train station in the middle of nowhere.  I love the sensation of lying in my couchette as the train speeds through the night, with all the sounds and motions buffeting you.   Unfortunately, I usually can't sleep because of that.   The trip took 16 hours, and at the beginning we had a wonderful view of the Carpathian Mountains, and at the end a view of the extensive Hungarian plains.

I took this picture through the train window at the train station at Ploiesti, an oil town.

My first impressions of the streets of Budapest were that the city seemed much more in the in the European-Americam mainstream than Bucharest.   You see the same shops you see everywhere.   I also didn't realize how much Budapest is a tourist attraction.   There are many souvenir shops and signs in English everywhere.   Because virtually no one besides Hungarians speaks Hungarian, English is the defacto language for signs and retail transactions wherever foreigners might be.

As always, we walked the streets to get a feel for the city.

I realized I haven't mentioned the food in this trip.   We ate extremely well in Romania, focusing on the traditional dishes such as stuffed cabbage, sour soups, and grilled spiced meats.  There are interesting things happening in Romanian cooking now, as people are reinventing the more obscure peasant dishes and others from the past.   I had a dish of minced goose meat stuffed in vine leaves that was extraordinary, and we ate other things that our daughter doesn't want to know about.   In Budapest, we were taken to lunch at a superb Hungarian restaurant by our friends Louise and Attila.   Hungarian cuisine is excellent, beyond the usual goulashes, etc.  We had several extraordinary meals in French influenced Hungarian restaurants.   And dining out is very cheap, because of the low exchange rate.   Foodies should go to Hungary!   (And, of course, there are Hungarian pastries!)

By the end of our stay I was absolutely won over by the city of Budapest.   There are many fascinating neighborhoods to explore, and the overall streetscape looks something like a cross between Vienna as it was, Paris, and something which is uniquely Budapest.   In 1867, the Emperor declared Budapest the equal of Vienna, and he might still be right.

Posts to follow with pictures.

Georges Enescu Festival

One of our main reasons for going to Bucharest at this time was to go to the Georges Enescu Festival, which is a three week classical music festival featuring an astonishing number of high quality concerts.   The festival brings in orchestras from all over the world, including the London Philharmonic, Concertgebouw Orchestra, Russian National Orchestra, etc.    As well as the predictable line-up of classical music star soloists.   There are usually four concerts a day.   The programming, for the most part, is the same old repertoire, with the notable exception of a focus on the work of Enescu.   The major event for us was to hear Enescu's opera "Oedipe" in a concert performance.   It is a truly extraordinary work, and is rarely done.   It should be recognized as one of the major works of 20th century opera; but it has never been done by the Metropolitan Opera as far as I know.  The performance was spellbinding.   Enescu's musical language is something quite original; it is relatively consonant and tonal, and yet the music moves in ways that always seem original and unexpected.  He uses folk music elements along with some traditional avant-garde devices, but it all sounds coherent.  It is however, quite dense, which perhaps explains the fact that the music is not more popular.   We also heard some other Enescu works in the festival that were excellent; but I'm afraid that Enescu has fallen into that black hole of classical music categories, the composer known for one particular work (Romanian Rhapsody) which ends up being the only work that is ever played.

The festival is a very popular event, and many concerts sell out.  Unfortunately, the only venue for large scale orchestral concerts is a very large hall seating 4,000 people, built during the Communist era as a place for party meetings. etc.   While the sound is full and present, many other details get lost, particularly with soloists.  When you hear the Prokofiev 3rd Piano Concerto and you can't hear the soloist very well, that's not good.   The same was true for the Berg Violin Concerto, where the soloist was frequently inaudible.

Bucharest does have a wonderful smaller concert hall, the Romanian Atheneum, which seats 900 and is a visual wonder.  Elaborately decorated, the auditorium is in a circular shape.   We heard string octets there, but the sound was too reverberant for my taste.

Because the festival is a popular event, you see behavior that you might not see, say, in Vienna.   Cell phones are frequently in use, and people come and go.   But I'm happy they are there, and I just close my eyes.....

Bucharest 5 - A Visit with Vera's First Piano Teacher

On a previous trip to Bucharest, Vera ran into the woman who had been her first piano teacher and a friend of her family.   This time, we went to visit her in her house in the middle of Bucharest, where she has lived for more than 50 years.   It was an fascinating visit.  Vera spent a lot of time hearing about her family and the past.   As she didn't really speak English, I spent a shorter time there.   Her house was was extraordinary, filled with works of art and antiques, almost like a museum or time capsule.   I took pictures.  

This telephone was actually connected.

Bucharest 4

After 6 days of walking the streets of Bucharest, I am more and more fascinated by what I see.  Despite all the degradations I have described in an earlier post, there is a tremendous richness and variety of architecture.  There are so many beautiful old buildings, some decrepit, some restored.  There are dilapidated ruins next to glossy new buildings, concrete Communist era monstrosities next to 18th century Orthodox churches, and an amazing number of ornate late 19th century French style villas and very large commercial and governmental buildings. Apparently a newly prosperous and independent Romania in the 19th century sent all its would-be architects to France to be trained, and it shows.   And like many Communist countries, the state never got around to tearing down old buildings in the same way that more prosperous democracies did.  I think that if Romania becomes more and more prosperous in the next 20 years, Bucharest will become one of the more beautiful cities in Europe.  Though the ugly parts will still exist.

Here are some more photographs from the streets;

This is the National Theater, an enormous edifice that was the pet project of Mrs. Ceaucescu:

A bank building from the late 19th century:

Most of the wiring seems to be outside on the walls:

I like these windows:

Examples of decay:

Paris, anyone?

This is the house that Vera grew up in:

Typical decaying concrete apartment blocks and wires:

Communist heros:

More overgrown:

Ceaucescu's "grand boulevard", with the palace in the distance.  The sidewalks on the boulevard are quite empty, and there are few stores.  People go elsewhere.

Bucharest also has many small Orthodox churches that have survived, along with several synagogues that have been restored.  The interiors are striking; the Orthodox churches are all painted with frescoes inside, while the synagogues are decorated with non-representational patterns.

 Churches:

After looking at this for a while, it started to turn into an Agnes Martin painting:

These are modern stain glass windows.  Art Nouveau?

 Synagogues:

This is the Great Synagogue of Bucharest.  Ceaucescu tore down all the old buildings around it, and it is now nestled among parking lots and apartment blocks.   At least it is still there!

The pictures below are from the interiors of two synagogues, the Great Synagogue and the Templu Corol:

 I visited the George Enescu house, which was the composer's home.   He had married the daughter of one of Romania's wealthiest men.   This was his house:

Inside were a number of interesting mementos of his career.   But the Enescus actually lived in a smaller house in the back.   His room:

Their bathroom: