Vienna: Turn of the Centuries

Notes on the Program

by Steven Blier

For over 200 years, Vienna has been a “City of Dreams” for musicians, composers, artists, architects, and intellectuals. As the seat of government of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and today of Austria, and as a capital of western culture, Vienna has always been a city steeped in clashing opinions, politics, competitions, and intrigue. This was especially true in the years surrounding 1900. The world was on the threshold of a new scientific and industrial age. Electricity, Darwin, and Freud provided enough upheaval in the status quo for creative artists to begin to argue their philosophical implications.

In music, opinions were polarized into two camps. The progressives chose Wagner as their champion. His grandiose music-dramas, his expansion of form and harmonic language pointed toward what seemed the logical fulfillment of Western music. Conservatives chose Brahms. His old-fashioned use of sonata form, counterpoint, and traditional harmony provided continuity, stability, and purity to their views of history and the direction of new work. In both camps (and both are well-represented on tonight’s program), the poetry they chose to set to music is laden with repeated images: midnight, surreal dreamlike settings, actual dreams, gardens, nightingales, darkness, personal struggle, and tormented love. Violence also finds its way into the Lied, reflecting an ever more violent society. Yet perhaps the most important characteristic of Vienna around 1900 was that of decay. While the K. und K. (Koeniglich und Kaiserlich) Society of Vienna was unable to confront the problems of a failing empire, it fell to the artists to transcribe the “writing on the wall” into their work.

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