This comes to us courtesy of Land of the Leopard National Park. It's in Primorsky Krai in Russia's Far East, not far from Vladivostok.

While these are tigers, the park is so named because it was created in 2012 as a merger of three refuges in order to save the Amur leopard, whose population had dwindled to 30. Its numbers are now back up to over 100.

Much of the territory is common habitat for the tigers and leopards.

​He was born on “27. Jänner 1756,” as the plaque outside his birthplace on Salzburg’s Getreidegasse says, using an Austrian form of January.
 
I had the fortune to be there between just after Christmas in 1990. As I’d just spent my first two months in Czechoslovakia, my parents had come to meet me in Munich. From there I showed them around Central Europe, including my lodgings in Martin, Slovakia, finishing off with Bratislava and New Year’s Eve in Vienna.
 
The one-night stay in Salzburg included a concert of “Eine kleine Nachtmusik,” probably the composer’s most popular piece. Though I knew his work fairly well, this was the beginning of a relation with his music that was to go deeper during my years in Europe.
 
I sang his sumptuous “Ave Verum Corpus” with several choruses in the region – and have sung it with groups in the U.S. as well. The pinnacle of my Mozartiana was learning the bass part to his Requiem, which I was blessed to perform with the St. Cecilia Choir of St. Elizabeth’s Cathedral in East Slovakia’s Košice.
 
Please see the video of a rehearsal with that chorus below, as well as memorabilia including the 250th anniversary of his birth in Columbus, Ohio, part of the slideshow above.

This is a sad but worthwhile follow-up to my August posts on the 1968 Invasion of Czechoslovakia. Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the self-immolation of Jan Palach, whose memorial on Prague’s Wenceslas Square attracts political/historical pilgrims to this day.

I’ll leave the description of the scene to William Shawcross’s well-informed biography of Alexander Dubček (titled simply Dubček) whose reforms were quashed by the Soviet intervention:

 At 3:30 on the drizzling afternoon of 16 January 1969 a battered Škoda drove up Wenceslas Square, past the [equestrian] statue [of St. Wenceslas, saint of Bohemia] and the trams and stopped for a moment below the [National M]useum. A boy of about twenty climbed out of the car and said something to the driver. A young man in the back seat passed him a small can. The boy took it from him and gazed, rather vacantly, at the car as it drove away….

The area where the boy stood had been destroyed by tanks; no effort had been made to repair it because it was to be the site of the main station in an underground railway that was slowly being built in Prague. Blocks of stone lay untidily in the mud, and flimsy metal barriers surrounded the debris in order to stop people tripping over.

The boy stepped past the barriers and over to a fallen block of stone. He set down the can and took off his coat which he laid carefully on the stone. He picked up the can and poured most of its contents over his head and shoulders. The rest he splashed against his chest and trousers. He then flicked a lighter and set his clothes on fire.

Palach left a letter claiming that "further torches will burst into flames" if certain demands for political freedom were not met. There were supposedly thirteen other young people ready to burn themselves for their cause; however, none of them every materialized. It appears, however, that there were a considerable number of other independent self-immolations in protest of the Soviet occupation and the politics of "normalization," and similar acts were carried out in other Soviet Bloc countries in the next few years, apparently in imitation of Palach.

 The young protestor died three days later of his wounds. Afterwards, his body lay in state at the Carolinum of Charles University while some 350,000 mourners filed by to view the coffin; all the policing was performed by students while official security forces remained in the back ground. The funeral – apparently allowed by the state as another pressure release valve – was attended by about 800,000.

It is difficult to estimate how much difference Palach’s act of desperation made. One former dissident, Tomáš Halík, has said, “when, during interrogations in the eighties, they made promises here and threatened me there, I always remembered Palach and gained the strength to say no.”

The twentieth anniversary of Palach’s act in January 1989 helped set in motion the Velvet Revolution of that November. Dissident playwright Václav Havel turned up at a protest held on Wenceslas Square, apparently only to watch, and was uninvolved in organizing the event, but was nonetheless arrested. This was his last detention under the regime, and calls for his release, helped build the movement that eventually forced the communist government to resign in December 1989.
 
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IF YOU GO TO PRAGUE
Palach was initially buried in Prague’s Olšany Cemetery, but in 1973 his remains were skirted away by authorities and cremated, with the ashes given to his mother for burial in a discrete location that would not attract a cult following. They were finally returned to his original grave in 1990. There is a memorial to Palach and another student who burned himself in February 1969 on Wenceslas Square. Jan Palach Square was established in December 1989, right after the Velvet Revolution. It lies at the foot of the Manes Bridge on the Old Town side of the Vltava River.
 

“Prosit Neujahr” is an expression combining “Cheers” and “New Year” used in various regions of the German-speaking world. The instrumentalists in Vienna’s Musikverein shout this toast at their famous New Year’s concerts.
 
2019’s event, broadcast by PBS, celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of the network’s coverage from the Austrian capital. Host Hugh Bonneville commended the State Opera for currently holding its 150th season. The program also explained the relationship between the Opera and the Vienna Philharmonic. You’ll have to watch it here, as I can’t embed it.
  
The concert opened with the overture to Johann Strauss, Jr.’s operetta The Gypsy Baron, which Bonneville aptly called a piece full of “Hungarian spice, dripping with Viennese schmaltz.” The tempo moves from fiery to languid to flowing. Much the same could be said of the czardas from Strauss’s opera Knight Pasman, which came half-way through the program. Some passages evoke an air of mystery found only in Hungarian (or Magyar-inspired) music, rather like the lingering phrases of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody number 2. In any event, Knight Pasman is representative of the multi-ethnic influences in the old Austro-Hungary. It’s based on a narrative poem by Janos Arany, a leader of his nation’s Romantic movement, and the libretto was written by Jewish-Hungarian Ludwig/Lajos Doczi.
 
That’s the sort of thing I widely remark on in this blog – for examples, see posts on The Czardas Princess and the breakup of Austria-Hungary.
 
The hour-and-a-half show also introduced a Turkish march by showing the “Turkish Room” in the Hofburg imperial palace complex. It was decorated in this style by Crown Prince Rudolf following a visit to Upper Egypt shortly after the Suez Canal was opened in 1869. Although I’ve been inside the Hofburg three times (and passed by scores of times), I’ve not actually managed to see that room, so I’ll be looking for tours that include it in future visits to Vienna. But back in 2014, I did see a good selection of artifacts Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand brought home after his round-the-world tour.
 
One other travel tip from this PBS production is Castle Grafenegg in Lower Austria, which holds the Grafenegg Music Festival every summer and hosts a composer in residence each year.