For most of us, Vienna is less of a place and more of a state of mind. It doesn’t offer up its secrets on a first or second date. Denied intimacy, we outsiders can only imagine. And our three writers in Goodnight, Vienna have fertile imaginations.
Leah, the little girl at the heart of Jo Baker‘s story, The Last Train, must say goodnight to Vienna literally, as her mother drags her through the streets to make the last Kindertransport out of the city. Some of you may have read Jo’s most recent novel, Longbourn, but if you haven’t, I recommend that you do. (I tend to steer clear of Jane Austen ‘reworkings’ – but this is a fine, honest and subversive novel in its own right.)
James Hopkin has spent so much time in Mitteleuropa over the years that he is – at the very least – on footsie-under-the-table terms with Vienna. In Jonke’s Schnitzel, the Narrenturm or ‘Tower Of Fools’, once a mental institution, has been reopened, its new inmates charged with learning grace. This is very much a radio piece: give yourself up to the rhythms of the piece, and the strange chanting of the names of Vienna’s 23 districts. As luck would have it, James’s earlier A Georgian Trilogy is being repeated on Radio 4 Extra from Christmas Eve onwards.
Last year, Louise Stern transported us to contemporary Mexico in Latido, and her forthcoming novel Ismael And His Sisters will return there. But here, in A Bird In Vienna, she takes us back to the 1930s – tapping into the spirit if not the detail of her own grandmother’s past. This is a pared-down tale of wonder and self-discovery, in which a young deaf girl goes awol in the city instead of going to school.
So, we have three fine writers with three fine readers to match. Bryony Hannah inhabits the emotions of both children and adults superbly and with so much invention in The Last Train. While having lost none of his comic timing over years, Tim McInnerny also brings an edge, bordering on menace, to Jonke’s Schnitzel. Eleanor Bron gives us an austere and beautiful reading of A Bird In Vienna.
We were spoiled for choice for possible music for the series. While we nicked the title, I didn’t buy into the version of Vienna in the Maschwitz and Posford song (performed here by Jack Buchanan.) Ultravox was off-limits, too, not least because the temptation to pace the house during post-production yelling ‘This means nothing to me!’ would have been too strong and would have prompted my family to take drastic action. Strauss? The Second Viennese School? In the end – at the risk of sounding like Maureen Lipman in Educating Rita – it had to be Mahler. We’ve used snatches from the first two symphonies, arranged for piano four hands by his associate, Bruno Walter.
Special thanks to Sylvia Petter for helping me with pronunciations, and to Bianca Jasmina Rauch and her team of chanters (Lukas von Abegdeuden, Daria Lukić and Fran J. Nikolić) for Jonke’s Schnitzel.
That’s all for now. Until 2015, maybe …
Goodnight, Vienna will be broadcast on Sundays 21, 28 December 2014 and 4 January 2015 on BBC Radio 4.
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