
Vienna, City of Paradox - tintinnabula
https://aeon.co/essays/vienna-schoenberg-and-the-advent-of-musical-modernism
======
fit2rule
Vienna, ah what a place. It is the one city on Earth where you can find
someone who thinks its the best place to live on Earth, while ignoring the
fact that the city was built up to house hundreds of thousands of poor, giving
them naught but a thin strip of blue sky, if any at all.

It is, literally, a concrete jungle - but prefers to describe itself as a city
of gardens and parks.

It doesn't matter which side of the political spectrum you profess to hold,
whether you are leftist or right-wing, you will ALWAYS receive the ire of its
citizens if you criticise Vienna for being an inhuman, desperate city. And
yet, in many ways, it really is a desperate place, full of yearning and
misery. You only have to take a walk down one of the many, many gasse (roads)
where only a bare ribbon of sky is exposed, and hear for yourself the
lamentations of its citizens. The Viennese are not friendly, and never will
be, as theirs is the culture of duplicity refined. But of course, tourists
looking for Beethoven and Mozart won't notice, because Vienna is very good at
distracting the visitor from its ugly core.

It is not a friendly place, either - well except maybe for a few weeks in
early Spring, as things thaw out and the winters piles of dogshit melt.. I've
lived here for 12 years, and type this from a villa looking out over
Turkenschanzpark, which is one of the places considered so valuable to the
citizens who believe it is the greenest city in the world. Its true, once
you're in the park, its easy to forget the hell that surrounds it.

Of course, if I'd been born here, I wouldn't see all of this in such a dark
light. But as I was born in a state where the wide open sky is not a privilege
but rather a right, I find the Viennese love of their prison quaint and
irregular.

~~~
no1name
Can you name a city you are fond of? Just so that we can contrast it with
Vienna.

~~~
rurban
Graz is far more beautiful than Vienna. Also, most Austrians despise Vienna's
arrogance, intrigance and dirtyness. But foreigners do love Vienna.

------
acqq
As a good point (maybe even intentional) the article is contradictory itself,
using sentences like "This" "analogy, while tempting, fails to take into
account" ... and then continuing with other shallow explanations. And all this
leads to the coda:

"In examining Vienna’s cultural legacy, and especially its zenith during the
fin-de-siècle period, my intention is not to debunk or demythologise. Vienna’s
mythos is part of its beauty. What is necessary, though, is to understand the
complexity of this legacy, and that there is no satisfactory single answer to
the question of the cultural vibrancy of Vienna 1900."

And like when one composes a piece of music and even when one plans to break
some expectation and one has to still remain consistent to itself, the text
remains true to its style of writing about the "failures" of other
presentations while just repeating them. Seeing that the author both writes
music and is a music critic, but that he also avoided to concentrate too much
directly on Schoenberg, I can still say I've (by induction) learned something
new: it motivated me to read a bit more about "Pierrot lunaire":

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierrot_lunaire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierrot_lunaire)

to discover that it got a new interpretation relatively recently:

"In March 2011, Bruce LaBruce directed a performance at the Hebbel am Ufer
Theatre in Berlin. This interpretation of the work included gender diversity,
castration scenes and dildos, as well as a female to male transgender Pierrot.
LaBruce subsequently filmed this adaptation as the 2014 theatrical film
Pierrot lunaire."

~~~
seanhunter
If you're interested in Schoenberg, it's definitely worth checking out the
other members of the second Viennese school: Alban Berg and Anton von Webern.
A really good starting point would be Berg's violin concerto or (if you like
opera) Wozzeck (which has themes that seem astonishingly relevant today (ptsd,
difficulty for returning military in adjusting to civilian society etc).
Berg's violin concerto is famous for having an amazing moment of transcendent
beauty built around a reference to another great work (which I don't want to
spoiler but you can search and find out about it if you want or just listen to
it!).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wozzeck](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wozzeck)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violin_Concerto_(Berg)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violin_Concerto_\(Berg\))

------
an_opabinia
There's this unforgettable plaque in those Vienna "kaffeehauses" I saw in the
museum quarter. Something along the lines of "The 400-year old Grand Vienna
Teahouse was founded on March 13th, 1938, by Hans Gruberhuber, a humble
chimneysweep." Every teahouse had a plaque like this.

C'mon. It was the expulsion of Jews that ended Vienna's influence on global
culture. It was their struggle that motivated new music. Listen to
Schoenberg's music and hear the pain of a man facing seemingly insurmountable
discrimination. He anticipated and put into sound a great deal of violence
that was and continues to be fought over identity.

~~~
ImaCake
Stefan Zweig in his "World of Yesterday" captures the essence of your argument
well. Although I think we says more that WW1 combined with the Nazi takeover
later was responsible, rather than specifically the racist attacks on Jews. He
has a haunting few lines where he talks about those Jews in Vienna ("they") in
the days preceding the Nazi anschluss:

>They invited each other to full-dress parties (little thinking that they
would soon be wearing prisoner’s clothes in a concentration camp), they were
lavish customers at Christmas for their beautiful homes (little thinking that
in a few months they would be confiscated and plundered). And this eternal gay
unconcern of old Vienna which I had formerly so much loved and which, as a
matter of fact, I am always redreaming, this gay unconcern which Vienna’s poet
laureate Anzengruber once caught concisely in Es kann Dir nix g’schehn–for the
first time it gave me pain.

~~~
svara
I just want to say that's one of the greatest books I've read in recent years.
Highly recommended!

~~~
082349872349872
Wow, we complain about the immediacy of Twitter and FB, yet Zweig was already
feeling too plugged-in in the mid-twentieth:

"In times of catastrophe former generations could revert to isolation and
remoteness; it was reserved for us to have to know and to co-sense whatever
evil happened on our globe at the moment of its occurrence. No matter how far
I withdrew from Europe, its fate accompanied me. Landing one night in
Pernambuco, under the Southern Cross, dark-skinned people in the streets, I
read on a news placard of the bombing of Barcelona and of the execution of a
Spanish friend with whom, a few months before, I had spent some pleasant
hours. Once in a Pullman car between Houston and another Texas city I suddenly
became aware of loud, mad shouting in German: a fellow-passenger had
innocently tuned the train radio to Germany’s wave length and in consequence I
had to listen to one of Hitler’s inflammatory speeches while the train rolled
along the Texas plains. There was no escape, not by day, not by night; always
I was in a torment of anxiety about Europe and about Austria within Europe."

I would be happy if one could once again board planes without doffing shoes,
but Zweig remembers even more frictionless travel:

"Before 1914 the earth had belonged to all. People went where they wished and
stayed as long as they pleased. There were no permits, no visas, and it always
gives me pleasure to astonish the young by telling them that before 1914 I
travelled from Europe to India and to America without passport and without
ever having seen one."

"When those of us who had once conversed about Baudelaire’s poetry and
spiritedly discussed intellectual problems met together, we would catch
ourselves talking about affidavits and permits and whether one should apply
for an immigration visa or a tourist visa; a stenographer in a consulate who
could cut down one’s waiting-time was more significant to one’s existence than
friendship with a Toscanini or a Rolland."

~~~
ImaCake
On the passport thing, I was curious about how true it was. Turns out there
has been fluctuating amounts of freedom of movement over the course of human
history. Equivalents to passports have existed for a long time, so Zweigs
nostalgic comments here only really generalise to a short period of European
history. In fact, there are plenty of stories about the exploits of Scientific
adventurers trying to get visas for international travel during the French
revolution and Napoleonic wars period. English naturalist Joseph Banks was
well known for his granting of passports to scientists in continental europe
so they could travel through international waters and advance science.

r/Askhistorians is a great place to look for more information. Here is a
pretty good threat related to the topic:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dq9940/why_d...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dq9940/why_do_passports_come_with_a_message_asking_the/)

------
mprovost
While wandering around Vienna a few years ago looking at all the buildings
from the height of the empire and realising that it's quite a liveable city,
for some reason it made me think about San Francisco. If the tech industry
disappeared from the city tomorrow, what would be left in 100 years to show
that it was there? It doesn't seem like there have been any meaningful
improvements made to the actual city or its infrastructure. Just go on BART
and listen to the 1970s robot voice announcements that could easily be done
much better by an iPhone and Siri now. Certainly it's easier for tech
companies to build parallel private transport networks than it is to invest in
better public transportation for everyone.

It doesn't feel like SF has been able to capture any of the wealth being
generated in a way that other cities like Vienna have, and now even when it's
a century past its peak, people there still benefit. Certainly the homeless in
SF don't seem to benefit even now, but maybe there are so many because SF
truly is the best place to be homeless.

~~~
OriginalNebula
The reason why Vienna is so liveable is because it's the heartland of the
Social Democrats. They governed the city from 1919-1934 and ever since 1945.
As much as I don't like the current Social Democratic Party, their
predecessors transformed Vienna into what it is today. A good place to live
for everyone.

~~~
ginko
In fact at it's imperial height, Vienna had a higher population than
today(2.1M then 1.9M now), living in significantly less space. The living
conditions of the poorer part of the city were pretty grim. This is what got
the Social Democrats to gain power in the first place.

~~~
iguy
This history also means there's a lot of pre-1914 city per capita today. The
urban planning of that era has tended to result in more liveable neighborhoods
today, compared to districts & cities built from scratch more recently.

------
PunchTornado
what other periods and cities there have been like 1900 Vienna. I guess the
70s Palo Alto. What others?

~~~
cguess
Athens Georgia or Muscle Shoals Alabama for music.

The amount of insane bands through those include REM, B52's, of Montreal among
others for Georgia.

Muscle Shoals had such bands record in North Alabama as The Staple Sisters,
The Rolling Stones, Paul Simon, The Band... honestly the list there is far too
long.

Both places are still going strong too.

------
eru
To add to the parodoxes, meanwhile around the same time also in Vienna:

> On 21 December 1907, [Adolf Hitler's] mother died of breast cancer at the
> age of 47, when he himself was 18. In 1909 Hitler ran out of money and was
> forced to live a bohemian life in homeless shelters and a men's
> dormitory.[43][44] He earned money as a casual labourer and by painting and
> selling watercolours of Vienna's sights.[40] During his time in Vienna, he
> pursued a growing passion for architecture and music, attending ten
> performances of Lohengrin, his favourite Wagner opera.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler#Early_adulthood_i...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler#Early_adulthood_in_Vienna_and_Munich)

~~~
arethuza
Hitler, Trotsky, Tito, Freud and Stalin all lived in Vienna in 1913:

[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21859771](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21859771)

~~~
cguess
Having spent a bit of time in Vienna... I imagine it was a lot more vibrant
100 years ago.

