Dead Day

First of all I would like to give a big thanks to the Catholic Church for having All Saints Day.  I think it is pretty cool, and not just because it made my weekend a little longer.  Today I went to the Zentralfriedhof (the GIANT cemetery in Vienna) with Daniel and Austin, and we walked around and watched the thousands of people who came to visit the graves of family and friends.  People brought candles and flowers and decorated all of the graves.  We didn't have any relatives in the cemetery to visit, so we went to our next closest relations and visited Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Mozart (a memorial.  We don't exactly know where Mozart is in Vienna...oops), and Wolf.  They are doing well and have lots of visitors.  I really wanted to find Schoenberg, but the place is absolutely huge.  You have to know where you're going before you get there if you want to find someone in particular unless it is one of the aforementioned famous guys.

I also went to see the Verdi Requiem at the Musikverein just to keep up with the death theme today.  It was really lovely, if you can describe a Requiem as "lovely".  The Orchestre National de France was really good (I saw them do Rite of Spring on Friday), and I loved the soloists for the most part.  The soprano was wonderful, and aside from a few strained tenor moments, all four were outstanding together.  It put me in a Requiem mood, and now I have the Faure Requiem in my head...