Wiener S

Wiener Saengerknaben

Tourists who go to Vienna nowadays may pay a few schillings and wander fairly freely through the gloomy Imperial Palace. They may gaze to their heart's content at the iron cot on which old Franz Josef slept, at the basin in which ample Maria Theresa bathed. But one wing in the Hofburg is barred to them. Tourists are not allowed to prowl through the rooms which belonged to Archduke Rudolf, Franz Josef's son who died mysteriously at his hunting lodge at Mayerling. Rudolf's rooms have not been preserved as a museum for tragic memories. They are occupied by 40 lively boys, the Wiener Saengerknaben (Singing Boys of Vienna), a choir which Maximilian I founded in 1498 to supply music for his chapel.

Without the Habsburgs to subsidize them, the Wiener Saengerknaben have had to do what they could toward supporting themselves and last week 22 of the boys ranging from 9 to 12 arrived in the U. S. for a transcontinental tour. On the pier at Hoboken, N. J. they stood solemnly to be photographed in their sailor pants and reefers. They romped and spun tops while customs officials skimmed through their 22 valises in each of which bathrobe, towel, comb and handkerchiefs were packed exactly alike. Then, after sight-seeing Manhattan, the boys set out for Washington where Mrs. Hoover and many another notable heard them sing with expert unity and phrasing, saw them enact neatly and unaffectedly Bastien & Bastienne, a fragile little opera which another Austrian boy, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, wrote when he was 12.

Mozart was never one of the Wiener Saengerknaben but Haydn and Schubert had their first musical training in the choir school as did Clemens Krauss, natural son of an Archduke and a ballet dancer, who now directs the Vienna Opera. Haydn and Schubert had to leave the choir when their voices broke. The Habsburgs would not have their boy sopranos castrated although that was common practice elsewhere in 17th and 18th Century Europe. With the fall of the Habsburgs the choir disbanded, but six years later Father Josef Schnitt, a priest at the Former Imperial Chapel, reorganized it, for two years fed, clothed and educated the boys out of his savings.

Most boy choirs existed because the Catholic Church would not permit women to sing in the sanctuary. The Wiener Saengerknaben sang nothing but ecclesiastical music until 1926 when Father Schnitt's savings were gone and they went out giving concerts with an eye to the boxoffice. The blue-&-white sailor costumes which the boys are wearing for the U. S. concerts are symbolic of the secular turn their programs have taken. (In Washington last week they sang "The Star-Spangled Banner" and "Dixie.") Proceeds from their U. S. tour, to be taken in a bus labeled "Wiener Saengerknaben Special," will go to the school, not to the boys. Yehudi Menuhin still asks for a strawberry ice-cream soda when he has finished a violin recital. When the Viennese boys sing well they get candy.

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