A Golden Age without artists - generations of artists in hothouse Vienna

When we talk an artistic Golden Age, we are typically identifying an unusual cluster of great artists.   Periclean Athens, Elizabethan London, Goethe’s Weimar – look at all of these geniuses living and working together, look at this burst of creativity.

The period I am looking at in Vienna was different.  In a culture newly obsessed with creativity and genius, the geniuses themselves were absent.  Herman Broch identifies the period as 1870 to 1890 in part, I think, to make sure the great writers are gone:  Adalbert Stifter died in 1868, and the playwrights Johann Nestroy in 1862 and Franz Grillparzer in 1872.  The latter two are especially important as they had become the core of the Burgtheater repertory, along with Goethe, Schiller, and Shakespeare, and this was a theater-centered culture.

Johann Strauss and Die Fledermaus (1874) have come to define the period  - “the totally idiotic counterfeit of comic opera,” grumps Hermann Broch (Hugo von Hofmannsthal and His Time, 64).  Anton Bruckner is the other lasting composer of the time.  The novelist Ferdinand von Saar sounds interesting (he was an early critic of Vienna’s turn to aestheticism), but I am obviously reaching a bit.

The period was actually full of geniuses, but they were children.  Here are the years of birth of every major Austrian writer, artist, or composer I could think of (up to a point):

1856	Sigmund Freud	1880	Robert Musil
1859	Peter Altenberg	1881	Stefan Zweig
1860	Gustav Mahler	1883	Anton Webern
1860	Hugo Wolf	1885	Alban Berg
1862	Arthur Schnitzler	1886	Oskar Kokoschka
1862	Gustav Klimt	1886	Hermann Broch
1864	Richard Strauss	1887	Georg Trakl
1874	Arnold Schoenberg	1889	Ludwig Wittgenstein
1874	Hugo von Hofmannsthal	1890	Egon Schiele
1874	Karl Kraus	1894	Joseph Roth
1875	Rainer Maria Rilke

These men (the ones born into the 1870s, at least) were all raised in the hothouse, breathing the air of aestheticism, their traditional education blended with continual encounters with theater, art, and music of the highest quality, approached with an attitude not just of respect but reverence, interspersed with a series of erudite artistic dinners – “Increasingly, from the age of Grillparzer to the age of Hofmannsthal, poets, professors, and performing artists were valued guests, in fact, prize catches of hosts and hostesses (Schorske, 297)” – all concentrated on

the development of those abilities through which the leisure hours of the burgher class were being transformed to “noble enjoyment,” to the enjoyment of art in winter, nature in summer – or, more precisely, in the “resort months” [Sommerfrischenzeit].  Clearly the burghers of the epoch, with their solid industriousness, were in no way a “leisure class” as the feudal nobility unequivocally was; nevertheless they behaved as if they imagined they were… (Broch, 88)

And as if their children would be.  Although “leisure class” is not the right term, given the artistic productivity of so many of these artists.  The story would be the same if I added scientists, musicians, and actors.

I had always understood the story of Austrian decay as being a political decline, the gradual hollowing out of the Habsburg Empire.  But I now see that the artists beginning their careers in the 1890s or 1900s were reacting to a more recent phenomenon.  A writer like Musil, born in 1880, grew up during but also after the Golden Age.  The decline began not at the Battle of Austerlitz but in his parents’ generation.  Musil is a witness of the collapse.  To a writer like Joseph Roth, ten years old* when a world war erupts, it is all just history and the memories of others.

To me, perversely, there is no collapse, since the really interesting art and music and writing turns out to be a response to the period that cultivated it.  But I did not live in it; I can just enjoy it.  Herman Broch grew up in it, and his ideas are a little different than mine.  Tomorrow for that.

* Ahem. See comments below.

The Viennese middle class chooses art and fun - not as an ornament of life or as a badge of status, but as the air they breathed

The little Austrian aesthetic Golden Age that was magically called into being by Adalbert Stifter’s Indian Summer is described in some detail by Carl E. Schorske in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (1980), particularly in Chapter VI “The Transformation of the Garden” (originally published in 1967), where Schorske actually begins with fifteen pages on Stifter’s novel.  The actual causes of Golden Age are political, social, and economic, the usual stuff – the 1848 revolution and counter-revolution, the perpetual rise of the middle class, changes in the nature and influence of the Austrian imperial court.

But it must have been strange, or satisfying, for a Viennese burgher, circa 1875 or 1885, to re-read Stifter’s idealistic account of moral and aesthetic development.  My son will be Heinrich, he could think to himself.  The parallels between Stifter’s character and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, an aesthetic Tiger Woods, trained from childhood to be a great artist, are especially striking.  As Schorske describes the time:

Beginning roughly in the 1860’s, two generations of well-to-do children were reared in the museums, theaters, and concert halls of the new Ringstrasse.  They acquired aesthetic culture not, as their fathers did, as an ornament of life or as a badge of status, but as the air they breathed. (298)

The Vienna State Opera (opening 1869), the Burgtheater (an 18th century institution, but in a new building in 1888), and the Kunsthistorisches Museum (1891) are still central to Viennese culture.

I have been going back and forth about the uniqueness of the period compared to earlier Golden Ages, or to contemporary cities all Europe and America that were also building museums and opera houses.  Heian Japan, for example, or Medici Florence, or the Ferrara of the Estes, depicted in Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier (1528) – these were all court-centered, aristocratic.  So perhaps what Schorske calls “the aristocratization of the middle classes” (296) is a real difference, with what were once court institutions like the Burgtheater not exactly democratizing but at least opening up to the bourgeois or burgher or managerial class, which really was expanding at a new pace.

That expansion was happening everywhere, though, and only in Vienna did aestheticism swallow the middle class.   As Schorske describes it:  “Aestheticism, which elsewhere in Europe took the form of a protest against bourgeois civilization, became in Austria an expression of that civilization, an affirmation of an attitude toward life in which neither ethical nor social ideals played a predominant part” (299).  In France, Flaubert and Baudelaire and their descendants set themselves against the smug, philistine bourgeois.  In England, aestheticism was intimately tangled with social reform.  I am thinking of Ruskin and Morris and the pre-Raphaelites, all of whom were direct influences on Viennese art nouveau, but with all of the politics stripped out.

The anti-bourgeois protests come later in Austria, and take on a different character. It was a challenge to make an oppositional case for advanced art against an opponent who devoutly believed in advanced art.  Flaubert and Baudelaire would have found this frustrating.

I wonder how the spread of Arthur Schopenhauer’s ideas contributed to the Viennese ethos.  Ignored for decades, Schopenhauer began to attract followers in the 1850s and his writings rapidly diffused across Europe.  The important concept here is that he argued that aesthetic appreciation, however brief, was one of the few ways people can mitigate their ordinary state of suffering and misery.  Schopenhauer argued that the more effective, more lasting path is one of asceticism and renunciation.  But that is difficult and no fun, while dancing to Johann Strauss is easy and fun.

Good choice, Viennese middle class!

But tomorrow, I begin the case against.