HISTORY OF THE COFFEEHOUSE, PART II: Music, Politics, and Pastries Come to Vienna

Published on: January 24, 2007

One can hardly describe the cosmopolitan city of Vienna without mentioning the abundance of cafés, elegant or sleek, charming or merely functional, that have graced this grand city for generations. In each, you will always find rich, aromatic coffee and pastries often described with words like divine, decadent, and most assuredly, delicious. Perhaps you will be entertained with a trio of musicians, see today's writers scribbling away or, more likely, typing wirelessly, and see artists and intellectuals debating the events of the day. How did coffee, and the coffeehouse, come to this Austrian city and when?

It all started more than four hundred years ago, in 1683, when Muhammad IV sent his men from Constantinople to Vienna quickly surrounding the European capital and literally shutting it off to the rest of the world. His 300,000 Turkish soldiers did their best to fend of the encroaching armies of the Duke of Lorraine of France and King John of Poland who aimed to defend their allies in Austria.

As the plot unfolded, the star character taking center stage was one Franz Georg Kolschitzky who, wearing an ornate Turkish uniform, wended his way into the confidence of the Turks and managed to relay enough information to the Duke and the King, so that they were able to turn Muhammad IV's troops back on the road to Constantinople. So quickly did the hordes leave, that the inordinate amount of supplies remaining were an astonishing tally: 10,000 oxen, 5,000 camels, 25,000 tents, and a rather large bounty of gold. While no record seems to have accounted for what happened to the valuable if exotic beasts, nor those handy canvas tents, one can assume that the victors grabbed onto the precious metal with no small greed.

Kolschitzky, we are delighted to report, took another route to claim his role in Viennese history: he recognized that among the supplies the Turks left behind was a considerable amount of coffee beans. He wangled them for himself (after all, he did help send the enemy troops a-running), and with this chest of beans, opened Vienna's first coffeehouse, the Blue Bottle (aka Blue Flask). So popular was his new business, it soon spawned an official guild of coffeemakers (kaffe-sieder) and cafes bursted onto the scene in old-world Vienna, welcoming artists and anarchists, poets, and radicals.

Precious Pastries for the Palate

Viennese pastries are legendary not only for their light, delicate taste but for their jewel-like beauty perfected over the centuries by pastry artisans of cakes and tortes. Kipfel and krapfen are two pastries that date from Kolschitzky's era. The kipfel actually began as a politically incorrect piece of pastry. Shaped like the crescent in the Turkish flag, it gave many a Viennese great satisfaction to bite into it with gusto. The krapfen is a jelly doughnut that Kolschitzky commissioned to be designed. Each was eaten with the three types of Viennese coffees of that era: mélange, coffee with milk; braun, a darker brew with less milk; or schwarzer, a strong, very black cup of coffee.

Kipfel pastries are also popular in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and the following is a typical recipe of this classic. It is not for the diet conscious but one cookie is deluxe satisfaction.

Kipfel Pastries

Music Becomes Classic at the Coffeehouse

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) was so taken with the growing enthusiasm for coffee, despite the attempt by Frederick the Great to ban coffee in all of Germany, that he wrote an amusing little piece called the Kafenkantate or Coffee Cantata (1734.) In it, librettist Christian Friedrich Henrici demonstrated sympathy for women neglected by their husbands who squandered time and money in the coffeehouse and featured a young woman sneaking a cup or three on the sly.

Most precious of blisses,
Choicer than ten thousand kisses,
Sweeter than muscatel wine!
Coffee, if my Pa would please me,
Only coffee will appease me,
I hail thee coffee, mine!

The above is written for the voice of Lizzie who expresses her love of the new beverage known as coffee to her distraught father who knows not what to make of his daughter's insolence. Lest you wonder, all's well that end's well, Pa relents, Lizzie can sip all she wants, and coffee comes to the German household not just the coffeehouse.

Ludwig van Beethoven was another German composer to embrace the allure of coffee, allegedly being so particular that he would count some 60 (no less, no more) beans to be grounds for his daily brew. He was a patron of a coffeehouse in the vast Prater area that was home to innkeepers, gingerbread bakers, and coffee brewers and is today an enormous entertainment park of 250 attractions. In Prater, Beethoven premiered his Opus 97 in B-flat, one of the "Archduke" Trios, for the public; the occasion also marked his final public performance as a pianist as his hearing was deteriorating, and he devoted the rest of his musical career to composing only. In subsequent centuries such diverse composers as waltz king Johann Strauss Sr. and 20th century concert composer Arnold Schoenberg followed Beethoven's musical direction and were frequent patrons at the Prater as performers or members of the audience.

19th and 20th Century Viennese Avant-Garde at the Coffeehouse

When you are worried, have trouble of one sort
Or another----to the coffeehouse!...
When she did not keep her appointment,
for one reason or other---to the coffeehouse!...
You are a chair warmer in some office while your ambition
led you to seek professional honors—coffee!…

-Peter Altenberg (1859-1919), Viennese poet from his poem, To The Coffeehouse.

Born Richard Engländer in Vienna, he barely traveled 10 miles out of the city his entire life, lived with great economy, and wrote miniature musings like very short sketches, aphorisms, and prose poems reflecting his association with the cultural icons of Viennese coffeehouses where he was known more as a friend of the artist than for his own works. He was part of the Viennese avant-garde of the late 19th and early 20th century that included intellectuals like Sigmund Freud, the composers Felix and his sister Fanny Mendelsohn, Richard Strauss, Hugo Wolf, and Gustav Mahler, the painting triumvirate of Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, and Oskar Kokoschka, a Czech who had emigrated to Vienna, architects, and legions of other artists and writers like Altenberg and writer-painter Adalbert Stifter.

A whiff of these legendary patrons still seems to hang over today's Café Schwarzenberg and Central Café or the Silbernes Kaffeehaus (aka Silberkammer), one of the more famous cafes, which opened in resplendent luxury in 1824. So exquisite, it featured every possible accessory that could be made of silver from coat hooks to door handles and, of course, pots, cups, and spoons. Wainscoting and billiard tables were rich polished woods and of course plush fabrics and wall hangings abounded. There patrons played chess, cards, dice and, of course, billiards, and entertaining cabaret shows entertained from the early 1900s to the 1930s when Germany and Austria first came under the canopy of fear perpetuated by a failed Austrian painter named Adolf Hitler.

Today, art and music, and some measure of peace, can be found in Viennese coffeehouses along with legions of lovely pastries that seem exactly right for a deep dark rich cup of coffee.

To bring the taste of Vienna home, you can always whip up a classic "Viennese Coffee". Like so many coffee drinks, it has many variations, but this fabulously fattening, devilishly rich seems just the thing when the mood says, "indulge."

Viennese Coffee

FEATURED RECIPES:
Viennese Coffee
Kipfel Pastries

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