Oh, Vienna!

I promised you Lipizzaners this time and here they are, but I must confess: they, and Iberian breeds in general, were not really an interest of mine until relatively recently. Then about four years ago, a couple of things happened to change that.

The first was that I read an absolutely wonderful children’s book called The Star of Kazan by Eva Ibbotson. It’s the story of an orphan girl called Annika, growing up in Vienna in about the year 1900, and I would recommend it to anyone. To me, it has everything that the best childrens’ stories should have. Animals, including the stallions of the Spanish Riding School, play an important role in the book, and this was what first began to fire my romantic imagination. I began thinking that it would be nice to have some model Lipizzaners, possibly named after some of the book’s characters.

The second thing was that in 2007, my husband and I were lucky enough to be able to leave our children with friends and spend the long Easter weekend together in Vienna. We had a fantastic time, seeing many of the major sights, and of course I was determined not to go to Vienna without visiting the Spanish Riding School. Fortunately they have a very good website, available in English as well as German, on which I was able to find plenty of information to plan our visit in advance.

I quickly decided that it was too expensive to see a full performance, and in any case I don’t think there was one scheduled for the days of our visit. However, I found that on most days it’s possible to see the young stallions doing their morning exercise and training. This takes place to music, inside the same famous riding-hall where the performances are held, and it seemed to be the perfect way to get a flavour of the school.

It was indeed a fascinating experience, and a privilege to be able to spend two hours watching the young horses (not the ones who currently take part in the performances) being put through their paces. Most of the training was flat work and fairly basic, just walk, trot and canter in different degrees of collection, on different leads, and so on, with some practice of passage and piaffe. The riders were very quiet and sympathetic, and whenever a horse had successfully worked in collection for a while, he would then be allowed to walk on a loose rein and stretch his neck out again. Towards the end, one horse did a little practice of levade and courbette. When the exercise was over, each horse received lots of pats and a little edible treat from his rider’s back pocket!

One is not supposed to take photographs inside the riding-hall, but my husband managed to sneak a few, so here’s one just to give you a flavour:

In the afternoon we were able to go on a tour of the Spanish Riding School’s museum and stables. The museum contained interesting items on the history of the School and the Lipizzaner breed, including beautiful paintings, and information on the horses’ brands which I assiduously copied down! There were also historic costumes and saddlery worn in earlier times. Unfortunately we were not able to tour the main stables as they were being refurbished at the time, but we did see the stable yard, with a few white heads poking out over the doors:

And also the tack room, where I was pleased to note several fresh white hairs adhering to the saddle cloths!:

As you can imagine, this also boosted my enthusiasm for the Lipizzaner breed, and so when a little later I bought a Stone Chips white ‘Andalusian’ on eBay, he became my first Lipizzaner. Fortunately, there is quite a lot of variation of type within the breed, so that quite a variety of models are (I think!) suitable. All Lippizaner stallions are named with their founding sire line (Siglavy, Favory, Pluto, Neapolitano, Maestoso, Conversano, and the two later additions Tulipan and Incitato) first, followed by the name of their dam. Thus finding a name and a pedigree for this chap were one and the same exercise!

Again, the Spanish Riding School Website came to the rescue. Among the pages giving information of their stud at Piber is one which links to lists of horses for sale, and from each horse one can link to a document showing a 5-generation pedigree. A little browsing around the various horses on the site (which will, of course, vary over time!) can thus give a picture of which horses were producing offspring at Piber at a certain date, and from that, one can select parents.

I chose my horse’s parents on two criteria. One was how much I liked the look of the horse on the sales page which came from that line. However, as most of these are young horses and the Lipizzaner is a slow-maturing breed, it was often difficult to base much of an opinion on the photo. The other was simply how the name sounded in combination! After a little playing about I came up with a name and pedigree for my chap: Siglavy Biondella, by Siglavy Galanta out of Biondella.

As this model is sold as an Andalusian, I felt that when I took a photo of him for showing purposes, I wanted to emphasise his Lipizzaner-ness as much as possible. Happily I was able to print off one of our photos of the stable yard in Vienna and position him ‘in’ it. It’s a shame I couldn’t really replicate the paved floor, but nevertheless I was pretty pleased with the result:

As I mentioned last time, I was responsible for helping Helen Cooke’s mum to sell off Helen’s models after her death. A few of them have ‘called to me’ so strongly that I have ended up buying them for myself! One of these was an Animal Artistry ‘Tagus’ in fleabitten grey, which I think she had actually won as a MECS Championships prize.

Helen had named this model ‘Casablanca’ and had been showing him as a part-Andalusian, but being already quite ill when she got him, had not managed to assign a pedigree to him. I wasn’t particularly happy with the ‘part-Andalusian’ designation and decided I would prefer to have him as another Lipizzaner. As Helen had never found him parents and not shown him a great deal, I felt that this change was acceptable. I did however want to keep the name Casablanca, partly as a tribute to Helen and partly just because I liked it!

Luckily, the name has quite a Lippizaner-sounding ‘feel’ to it, even though of course it is not, but I thought with the addition of one of the stallion line names, it would sound OK. I went back to the pedigrees on the Piber Stud website and chose Favory Graina as the sire. For the dam, I knew I would be unable to find a real mare named Casablanca, and in fact there does not even seem to be a mare line with names beginning with ‘C’ so in the end I just chose the mare Allora, as a fairly ‘bland’-sounding name, available in the right year. So, I have not followed the breed naming rules with this horse, but even so I think Favory Casablanca sounds quite nice.

So now I have two Lipizzaner stallions and still no mares – watch this space, and I might eventually get some!