A view of Vienna from a native.

books:

	• The Spell of the Vienna Woods: Inspiration and Influence from Beethoven to Kafka Paul Hofmann Henry Holt & Co, 1994 - 260 pages average customer review:based on 1 review
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A view of Vienna from a native.

I happened to pick up this book in an ebay auction after two visits there. Paul Hoffman is a Vienna native and has written
extensively about the city and his native land elsewhere. The book is unique in describing points of interest in the woods which surround Vienna on the south and west. Points of interest such as churches, monuments, restaurants, homes and palaces are described in the detail which only a native can. A good example
are facts about the suicide of Crown Prince Rudolph in the woods in 1889 which I have not found published elsewhere.
If you love Vienna, you'll love this little book.

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Paul Hofmann, a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, offers a fine meditation on the Vienna Woods, a tract of gladed forest five times bigger than the combined boroughs of New York, geographically the last gasp of the Alps before Austria opens onto the great central European plain. In those forests, Hofmann tells us, lie the origins of many great works of the imagination: the later symphonies of Beethoven, several Schubert sonatas, Mozart's The Magic Flute, and, most famously, Richard Strauss's 1868 opera Tales from the Vienna Woods, which instilled in the Viennese a sense that the woods had to be protected from the growing city on their fringe. Thanks to the play of art and memory, the woods thrive today; as Hofmann remarks, "No other major European capital can boast such a large and safe recreational area."

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