Paul Hofmann, a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, offers a fine meditation on the Vienna Woods, a tract of gladed forest five times bigger than the combined boroughs of New York, geographically the last gasp of the Alps before Austria opens onto the great central European plain. In those forests, Hofmann tells us, lie the origins of many great works of the imagination: the later symphonies of Beethoven, several Schubert sonatas, Mozart's The Magic Flute, and, most famously, Richard Strauss's 1868 opera Tales from the Vienna Woods, which instilled in the Viennese a sense that the woods had to be protected from the growing city on their fringe. Thanks to the play of art and memory, the woods thrive today; as Hofmann remarks, "No other major European capital can boast such a large and safe recreational area."