Where do I begin?

This was such an engrossing read and I believe Alex Ross must have been inspired by Schorske's groundbreaking collection of essays (both its cohesive structure and magnificent breadth) when writing Wagnerism. Both are stellar works of cultural and intellectual history and I think they have such magic in marrying the academic rigour of history-writing and the compelling vigour of the eclectic subject matter that straddles literature, architecture, music, etc. Schorske takes the writings of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the sketches of Otto Wagner, and the songs of Schoenberg and so marvelously weaves a seamless narrative stretching from 1848 (the beginning of the crisis of liberalism) until the 1st World War; while the reader is faced with the challenging task of stringing together the ideas and works of all these different cultural giants, Schorske makes it much easier by presenting a consistent idea of Fin-de-Siècle Vienna in its cultural glory.

What image of Vienna does Schorske create? What kind of world does he immerse us in?

One of political and social disintegration. One of contradictions, most evident in the modern yet historical Ringstrasse. One of sui generis aestheticism, particularly in the decade before the 1st World War.

Vienna in the late-19th century was a hotbed of intellectual, cultural and political activity and Schorske deftly depicts this with 7 standalone but mutually-enhancing essays:
1) Politics and the Psyche (Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal)
- Their differing responses to the dissolution of liberalism (both affirmed the emergence of the psychological man; Schnitzler approached the problem from the moral and scientific side of the Viennese liberal tradition, Hofmannsthal the aesthetic-aristocratic.
2) The Ringstrasse and Urban Modernism (Camillo Sitte and Otto Wagner)
- The Ringstrasse being the liberals' political bastion, economic capital and centre of intellectual life; the differing approaches to architecture (whether historical, as with Sitte, or contemporary and functional, as with Wagner).
3) Mass Politics (Schonerer, Lueger, Herzl)
- Their leading their followers out of the collapsing liberal world (which failed to represent those beyond the middle class) by composing ideological collages of fragments of modernity, glimpses of futurity, and resurrected remnants of a half-forgotten past.
4) Freud's Psychoanalysis
- By reducing his own political past and present to an epiphenomenal status in relation to the primal conflict between father and son, Freud gave his fellow liberals an ahistorical theory of man and society that could make bearable a political world spun out of orbit and beyond control.
- Patricide replaces regicide; psychoanalysis overcomes history.
5) Painting and the Crisis of the Liberal Ego (Klimt)
- That Klimt shared with other intellectuals of his class and generation a crisis of culture characterised by an ambiguous combination of oedipal revolt and narcissistic search for a new self.
6) The Transformation of the Garden
- The garden as a literary idea that captures and reflects the changing outlook of Austria's cultivated middle class.
- Stifter (expurgated reality): an ideal of life that implied social withdrawal and cultural elitism (rural-aristocratic past); that art could join with science and ethics in a progressive and redemptive function
- Saar (abstract social ideal): that the world of art had lost touch with social reality
- Andrian Werburg: self-preoccupation, incapacity to love another, inability to distinguish inner self from outer world
- Hofmannsthal: rescued function of art from hedonistic isolation into which his class had carried it and had tried to redeem society through art's reconciling power
7) Explosion in the Garden: Kokoschka and Schoenberg (Expressionism)
- First appropriation then the disintegration of the garden as the image of order served as the liberating vehicle.
- Kokoschka: unified psyche and corporal reality in portraiture
- Schoenberg: presented wilderness as the proper metaphysical analogue and metaphoric ideal of psychological man

Kokoschka: "Isolation compels every man, all alone like a savage, to invent his idea of society. And the knowledge that every doctrine of society must remain a utopia will also drive him into solitude. This solitude swallows us in its emptiness."

Schoenberg: "Redeem us from our isolation!"

Sartre: "Man is condemned to be free."

"Indeed, Mahler's magnificent setting of the song [in the centre of his Third Symphony] can afford the viewer of Klimt's "Philosophy" another kind of access to that intellectual generation's painful, psychologised world-view -- a view that at once affirms desire and suffers the deathly dissolution of the boundaries of ego and world which desire decrees."

So thankful for this book.