Book blurb:

Vienna, at the turn of the century, was a center for extravagant cultural achievement. Some of the most intellectually significant ideas and works of the twentieth century can be traced to Vienna in the decades preceding World War I. The disintegrating Austro-Hungarian Empire provided a peculiarly propitious environment for the emergence of men of genius. In the visual arts there were Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka; in architecture, Joseph Olbrich, Otto Wagner, Josef Hoffmann and Adolf Loos; in literature and theater, Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Robert Musil and the brilliant satirist Karl Kraus; in philosophy, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Otto Weininger. The Vienna Opera House achieved exceptional distinction under the direction of Gustav Mahler, although his merits as a composer, now universally acclaimed, were then recognized only by a few. A similar fate was reserved for other, even more startling, musical innovators, notably Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern and Alban Berg. In the field of politics, Theodor Herzl evolved a new and vigorous brand of Zionism in response to the same anti-Semitism that was hampering the advancement, in the human sciences, of a man whose rameas now become a household word - Sigmund Freud. Thus the multi-national metropolis on banks he Danube, with its two
was one of the chief cultural springs of central Europe. The inscription above the entrance to Olbrich's Secession building, 'To the age its art - to art its freedom,' expressed the views not only of that association's members, the painters, sculptors and architects who had broken away from the general academic stagnancy, but also those of almost all their fellow artists. The capital's strong traditionalism, however, drove some of its more rebellious and talented sons to seek their fortunes abroad, greatly to the benefit of their host countries, in particular Germany and the United States.