Gallows Music

TWO WELL-KNOWN BOOKS on early twentieth-century Vienna, Stefan Zweig's memoir Die Welt von Gestern (The World of Yesterday) and Frederic Morton's novelistic Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/14, use the same sonic phenomenon to mark the onset of the First World War: a moment when “the music stopped.” Zweig describes a leisurely day in Baden, where Viennese vacationers are enjoying bandstand music in the park, when the little orchestra suddenly breaks off. The musicians join the crowd around a placard that announces, via telegram text, the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo. Morton's book draws on Zweig's to evoke a similar, if a bit more melodramatic, scene in Vienna: “All enjoyed the jasmine-scented air, the violins undulating in pergolas. Sometime before 3 p.m., policemen seemed to shoot out of the ground to whisper into the ears of orchestra conductors everywhere. Everywhere bows dropped away from strings. Flutes fell silent. The music stopped” (266). In a city known for Ländler, waltzes, and the late Mahler's klezmer snatches, not to mention Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, and Brahms, such a break in music marked, if only symbolically and in hindsight, the end not just of an era but of a long cultural epoch. The city's more recent period of Richard Strauss's heated operas and Schoenberg's richly atonal Erwartung marked a threshold between old and new, comfortable and scandalous. World events were coming to a head, largely undetected in the Vienna carnival season of 1913, when Stalin and Trotsky clashed and conversed in the city, as Lenin tracked events from Krakow amid Stalin's efforts to develop a firm ideological ground for his Bolshevist plans. The young Hitler bought standing-room tickets to the Court Opera's Wagner productions whenever he could. Meanwhile, Freud's Vienna with its seething dreams, Wittgenstein's Vienna with its language games exposed, Klimt's Vienna with its gilded women—all this “nervous splendor,” as Morton titles his book on the city's late nineteenth-century incarnation, 4 coincided with the Hapsburg empire's teetering demise.