Vienna

Abstract When Mahler left Vienna in 1907 he described his decade at the Opera as ‘ten war-years’. Arnold Schoenberg, in a letter to him in 1910, referred to ‘our hated and beloved Vienna’. From his days at the Conservatory Mahler knew only too well how Vienna treated its great men, canonizing them when they were dead, often reviling them during their lifetime. The city repelled him yet fatally attracted him. It was, after all, the city of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Bruckner, the city of the Strauss waltz, of the coffee-houses, of the Prater and the Opernring. The city of light-hearted, easy-going, gracious living, of intrigue, callousness and spite where revolutionary ideas in art struggled for expression in a climate of conservative, sometimes reactionary, opinion. The years from 1897 to 1914 were Vienna’s ‘Edwardian’ age, an almost exact parallel to the London of the same period. With hindsight, it seems that the life of Europe then was illuminated by a garish light shed by the sun as it gradually became obscured by the storm clouds. In Vienna the opera had a golden age under Mahler; the operettas of Lehar and Oscar Straus were on everyone’s lips; science and medicine thrived; writers and painters abounded. But the Emperor was growing old; the political scene was seething; anti-Semitism grew fiercer and more open.