Vienna: Legend and Reality

"A writer who captures the moods, the atmosphere of Vienna at different periods brilliantly is Ilsa Barea who wrote a book called Vienna: Legend and Reality published in 1921. It is a kind of love-hatred letter to the city that she had had to flee and captures the feelings of nostalgia tinged with melancholy. She evokes the Baroque city and even more the Biedermeier age (after the Napoleonic war, 1815-1848) very vividly. The earlier Baroque architecture was largely Italian in its source—because the first great musicians at court were from Italy and the first great architects in Austria, like Fischer von Erlach or Hildebrandt, were trained in Rome. But the Baroque was a world also all of its own. The Austrians have a wonderful phrase, Sein und Schein , which denotes the worlds of ‘illusion and reality,’ which the Baroque combined in a single mindset. In my book, I quote the cultural historian Egon Friedell (1878-1938): “Then came the Baroque with its double reversal of the idea of worldliness. It first rejected the world as a mere dream. But since at the same time it affirmed the dream as the only reality, it again returned to the world in a roundabout way. Thus, it became the philosophy of the most worldly worldliness, since it rejected every accountability on the grounds that the world is just a dream. So arose that odd mixture of withdrawal from life and love of life, of submissiveness and pride, of incense and musk.” So that’s a good bit of Baroque prose—or we might call it neo-Baroque prose—and it describes the atmosphere of Baroque Austrian cities very well. Leopold was incredibly extravagant. A famous opera, Il Pomo d’Oro (The Golden Apple) , was played in the open air over two days. This was to celebrate the wedding of Leopold and his young Spanish bride. She was 15 and called him uncle throughout their marriage (which, in fact, he was. She was also his first cousin). So this is the period when a great cultural and architectural awakening occurs. Then it goes further when, for example, Baroque music develops into the Viennese Classic period of Haydn and Mozart, and later early Romanticism with Beethoven ."