The great double doors at the end of the riding hall swing slowly open by invisible hands. Violins sound Bizet's "Arlesienne Suite" and breathe a gentle invitation. From the shadows of the passageway, the first horse and rider, an apparition in brown and white, move gracefully forward into the hushed arena. A tall, steel-gray man with lean, ascetic cheeks and serious mouth, sits on top of a snowy stallion in complete composure. His hands are still as marble, his back firm, his boots straight and his eyes stern and fixed ahead. Under him, the horse moves with quiet pride. His neck is arched and its hoofs spurn the smoothly raked sand. Seven other riders follow the leader, all soberly uniformed in the cinnamon livery of a bygone era; they exhibit the same impassive, taut control over themselves and their mounts. Beneath the many faceted chandeliers, they parade the length of the gold and ivory hall until, approaching the lofty portrait of Charles VI, they doff their two-cornered hats in wide-sweeping salute. The deliberate, majestic gesture produces a spurt of applause from the audience packing the double balconies. They sense a willing acknowledgment by the riders that they are the trustees of a fragile and precious tradition of horsemanship that has been passed along - by word and by example - from one generation to another throughout four centuries.

The high and exacting technique of Dressage originated centuries ago in Greece and sank out of sight in Roman and medieval times; it re-emerged in the Renaissance, and came to full flower in the imperial courts of the 18th century. Today, it survives in the purest form in Vienna, home of the Lipizzaner Stallions. Should anything happen to the School, this thin line of continuity with the past would be snapped and more would be lost than the livelihood of a few score horses and riders. An art form of great subtlety and power, as abstract and moving as the ballet, would vanish from the world's cultural heritage.

"Horses walking" is what the stallions of the School troops were doing when Colonel Alois Podhajsky, the late Director of the Spanish Riding School, led them into the hall to begin the Quadrille. Is there anything exciting about a walk? One might not think so. Yet the spectators hunched over the red - velvet balustrades seem almost hypnotized, drawn into this tense spell in which horse and rider appear to move as in a dream. Some of them may know, others merely surmise, that it takes two years just to teach a Lipizzan to walk.

All Lipizzans respond to achievement: the high knee action, the stately vertical carriage of the head, the slight downward thrust of the haunches, the precise and delicate placing of the feet . . . in summation, the indefinable impression of great vitality under the most sensitive and unobtrusive control. In this example, we come near to the heart of "haute e'cole." The objective of this demanding discipline is not the hackneyed goal of "making the man and his mount seem like one," rather that it is to appear as if the man were not even there. So serene must be the rider in his seat, so disguised and invisible his guidance by pressure of thigh or heel, rein or body weight, that the audience's attention slips away from the man and focuses wholly on the fluid movements of the horse.

Those movements range from the exact performance of walk and canter to the piaffe, the passage, and the Spanish step. The feats also include pirouettes and half pirouettes, the mincing cross-steps of the "plies," the intricate weaving and shuttling of the "quadrille" and the "pas de trois," etcetera. Most dramatic, of course, is the "Airs Above the Ground"^®: the Courbette, the Levade and the Capriole.

The various exercises are certainly stylized, yet they are all based upon the spontaneous action of the horse in nature, a performance on command of the leaps and kicks, curvetting and prancing that can be observed in any pasture. Nothing artificial or grotesque enters the curriculum of the School . . . none of the three-legged gallops, the backward cantors, the waltz steps of the circus and the trick-riding ring. Each movement simply develops to its ultimate refinement and natural pace or position. An antique art, it is still one with a curiously timeless and universal appeal. Emperors, archdukes, kings and queens once graced the galleries of the Riding School. So concerned with the art was Emperor Joseph II, that he requested weekly reports on the progress of each pupil. Today in republican Austria, royal visitors are rare, and the School falls officially under the aegis of the minister of Agriculture. However, each performance sees the hall crowded with commoners, no less entranced than the aritocratic spectators of days past; and the commoners cherish a similar possessiveness of this unique national legacy.

The beginnings of the School go back to 1565 when a state document noted that money was allocated for a riding ground in the Hofburg gardens. In 1573, the first reference was made to the Spanish Riding Hall, then a wooden building on what is now the Josefsplats. Why Spanish? The term had nothing to do with a Spanish mode of riding or with any court school established in Spain. It referred simply to the Spanish ancestry of the Lipizzans. The Lipizzan derives its heritage from the blend of three blood-lines: Andalusian, Arab, and to a lesser extent, Vilanos.

Lipizzans are born dark, reminiscent of their heritage from six great Andalusian sires: "Pluto," a dappled gray from the Denmark, stud, born in 1765; "Conversano," a Neapolitan black, 1767; "Neapolitano," a brown from Naples, 1790; "Favory," a dun-hued stallion, 1779; "Maestosa," a gray, 1773; and "Siglavy," an Arabian gray, 1810. The Lipizzan doesn't acquire its handsome milk-white coat until it is from three to ten years old. High spirited, often fiery in its bearing.

The Lipizzan is yet fantastically gentle - largely because from birth it meets nothing but kindness. Its mildness comes not from being cowered, but from being free of fear.