The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
A Danube delight that hits all the right notes
Fearing she would be out of her depth on a themed cruise, Jane Archer ends up remarkably in tune with the maestros
When I was at school I signed up for evening classes to learn about the theory of music. I managed two lessons before giving up – which may explain why I felt a little anxious about my first ever musical river cruise along the
Danube and in particular the lecture I was about to attend on classical music styles in Vienna.
I assumed other passengers had been weaned on Wagner and brought up on Beethoven. While I can tell you the name of the 1969 record by one-hit wonders Zager and Evans and recite the words of David Bowie’s album Aladdin Sane, my classical music knowledge starts and ends with Strauss and The Blue Danube.
So why was I there? Well, I would not only be sailing from Budapest to Regensburg on one of my favourite rivers but we would have two musical “maestros” on board to offer insight into the lives of the great composers. The cruise did seem an appealing way to gen up on Mozart, Strauss and Bartók, and if nothing else would add a new dimension to places I had visited many times before.
Shore excursions, one or two a day, would be geared to the lives and works of the great composers. In Budapest, for instance, a morning coach tour ticked off the opera house, the parliament building and Heroes’ Square, leaving the afternoon free to visit the Franz Liszt Academy of Music – a beautiful art nouveau building full of marble columns and grand chandeliers – for a private cello recital.
It would be the first of many musical interludes during the cruise. That evening, at the city’s Museum of Music History, music by Haydn, Bartók and Dvořák along with the first movement of a Beethoven’s piano sonata in D Major were performed by a string quartet. I wrote notes on my programme to try to pick favourites. It was a start.
We returned to the museum next morning and watched as our guide coaxed a few grunts from an 18thcentury organ with wooden air pipes, and then visited the house, now a museum, where Bartók lived. A pianist played Bach and Bartók but the exhibits, culled from the composer’s life, were a bit of a disappointment – not least the half-smoked cigarette found in 2006 inside one of his pianos.
Several river cruise lines offer themed cruises but few are as in-depth as this one was turning out to be – great for me on my learning curve. Even better, I soon discovered I was not the only passenger with a rudimentary grasp of classical music. The lounge was packed for the aforementioned music talk, which was presented by composer, conductor and musician Raphael Fusco, one of the on-board maestros. Using diagrams and playing excerpts of music on the piano, he explained how sounds work together and styles changed and evolved. While I can’t claim I understood it all, things made a lot more sense than they ever had when I was at school.
It was the first of three excellent talks during the cruise. Raphael also spoke about Mozart on the day before we visited Salzburg, where the boy genius was born, while soprano Brittany Palmer – the other maestro travelling with us – gave us a potted history of opera and explained the storyline in Puccini’s Tosca, which we were going to see in Vienna.
Cruise operator Tauck went to