Vienna: Sammlung Alter MusikInstrumente

Another rainy, windy day. Great day to vist the last of the museums that were on my "want to for sure visit." This was the Sammlung Alter MusikInstrumente or the Museum of Ancient Musical Instruments. Housed in part of the Neue Berg (New Palace), it is just another of the collections of the Kunsthistorisches Museum.

What I did not realize until after I bought my ticket was the the admission price included the other collections housed in the Neue Berg, which was the Ephesus Museum and the Hofjagd und Rustkammer (Arms and Armor) Museum.
The palace itself was beautiful, although the side rooms that housed the collections were not as ornate as the portions in the front part of the palace. I found the musical instrument collection to be quite interesting. As part of your ticket price you receive a free audio guide, from which you can both gain information on various instruments, but also can hear a recording of them being played. There were some very unusual instruments, including a piano that you could "carry around!" It never caught on because in order to carry it, you had to limit both its sound quality as well as its musical range. Also part of the collection are instruments played by famous musicians and composers.

I also visited the Ephesus Museum. I had not realized the the city of Ephesus has been under excavation by Austrian archeologist since the late 1800's and the government of Turkey has allowed them to bring back some of the ruins of that city, including statues, reliefs and bronzes. I guess this is not on the "visitation list" of most visitors to Vienna, but because of Ephesus importance in scripture (see Acts 19), I found it quite interesting! On display is a 40 meter long frieze with life-size figures from the Parthian Memorial, commemorating Lucius Verus victory over the Parthians. The museum also includes a model of the city of Ephesus as well as fragments from an altar of a Shrine to Artemis.

I did wander through the Arms and Armour collection; it appears to be much larger than the collection we viewed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC. However, by this point, I was a bit "museum weary," and decided to call it a day!

Of historical importance, it was from the balcony of the Neue Berg that Adolf Hilter, on March 15, 1938, proclaimed that the "Anschluss"of annexation of Austria into the Third Reich.

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