Scholars began taking a serious interest in Vienna 1900 only in the 1960s. ‘Gay Vienna’ might provide a comforting suturing-up of historical complexities, but, as the musicologist Seth Brodsky at the University of Chicago might argue, such fantasies themselves must be un-sutured in order to restore a portrait of a time and place that is much messier, but also closer to the truth.įin-de-siècle Vienna, or ‘Vienna 1900’ – the period spanning roughly 1890-1913, including the emergence of the Wiener Moderne – has become a kind of fantasy space, problematic but also fascinating.
It is an enduring and popular characterisation of the city’s cultural history. The history of Viennese music and culture is knotty because it has been interwoven with clichés about a singular ‘Viennese way,’ namely ‘Gay Vienna’: a city of charm, sentimentality and light-hearted nihilism. But how did this happen? How did Europe’s ‘city of music’ – the home of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms – become the birthplace of an explosive musical modernism that threatened to destroy the very tradition to which it belonged? Portrait of Arnold Schönberg (1917) by Egon Schiele. In this narrative, Vienna’s musical revolution was especially radical: Schoenberg’s Pierrot was later characterised by Igor Stravinsky as ‘the solar-plexus of modern music’ – the culmination of a shift away from tonality and hundreds of years of classical music, in favour of a new music for a new century. A much-romanticised era for the city, these years are commonly celebrated as a period of explosive artistic, literary, intellectual and especially musical modernisation in which resolutely iconoclastic geniuses such as Schoenberg, Sigmund Freud, Gustav Klimt and Alfred Schnitzler broke with the past in order to lay the groundwork for the future. In this incarnation, Schoenberg’s Pierrot – as the artist desperately seeking new means of expression in the modern world, while at the same time vilified by that world – neatly encapsulates the feverish and often contradictory spirit of Vienna in the early decades of the 20th century. It is also allegorical and autobiographical: Pierrot, moon-drunk and doomed from the start to be misunderstood and unappreciated, is the epitome of the modern artist at the turn of the century. Featuring a small chamber ensemble and a spoken-sung part for a reciter, Pierrot Lunaire is a grotesque parody of the cabaret style. The moon-drunk aesthete soon becomes disillusioned: stigmatised and abused by an intolerant society (a part played unwittingly by the audience at the Musikverien), Pierrot retreats from the world, floating home in a boat, following the trail of an ancient scent back to his dreamy, distant home in Bergamo.
On the stage of the city’s pre-eminent concert house, the Musikverein, the mute and melancholy clown Pierrot, the star of Arnold Schoenberg’s atonal melodrama Pierrot Lunaire, is drinking moonlight – the stuff of intoxicating artistic inspiration – with his eyes. It is autumn, and the city’s fin-de-siècle extravagance is approaching its peak.
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