A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888-1889

by Frederic Morton

Book Overview

A National Book Award Finalist A "riveting" (New York Times) look at one year of Viennese life during the twilight of an empire On January 30, 1889, at the champagne-splashed hight of the Viennese... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 014005667X
• Release Date: October 1980
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 0.57 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.8" x 0.8" x 5.1"

Customer Reviews

Time travel does exist...

...and it takes the form of Frederic Morton's "A Nervous Splendor." Morton takes the reader on a trip through a long-vanished Vienna -- the Carnival season and the drudgery of day-to-day life in the city's slums; the glory of sun-splashed and colorful parades and the spiritual desperation manifested in a municipal epidemic of suicides; the stullifying atmosphere of the Habsburg court and the creativity of the intellectual/artistic community.The book is a snapshot of a year in the life of an imperial city as lived by disparate Viennese (including Freud, Klimt, Bruckner, Brahms, as well as Mary Vestera, "The Bird King," and the disturbed Crown Prince Rudolph). Morton focuses heavily on Rudolph's frustrated life and its bizarre end in the murder/suicide pact with the beautiful socialite, Mary Vestera. Rudolph is a frustrated liberal confined to carrying out increasingly meaningless imperial functions -- making the rounds at receptions, smiling for official portraits, and otherwise participating in the empty pageantry that is life in the Habsburg Court and aristocratic Vienna. His democratic leanings are thwarted by his father, the omnipresent Emperor Franz Joseph, and his father's retinue. To make matters worse, Rudolph is trapped in a loveless marriage. Enter Mary Vestera, the beautiful Baronness who has set her sights on Rudolph. Her slavish devotion to the Crown Prince, and his desperate frustration with life, culminated in a gruesome(and scandalous) end at Rudolph's hunting lodge, Mayerling. The author portrays this sad story as a reflection of the malaise that infected the imperial city as the Austro-Hungarian Empire moved unknowingly toward its own demise."A Nervous Splendor" is one of those histories that reads like a novel. Frederic Morton utilizes firsthand accounts, anecdotal stories and wonderfully descriptive writing to bring to life a society long gone.

The birth of "angst"

Morton finds the earliest cultural roots of twentieth century "angst" in early Fin-de-Siecle Vienna. He transects a single 9 month period which offers a cross sectional view of the nascent stems of an organism which will grow into liberalism & communism and which will leaf out as the artistic "revolutions" of german expressionim, atonal music (the "second" Vienesse school), the architectural theories of Loos and the Bauhaus, the theater of Beckett & Brecht, and the philosophy of Wittgenstein and Mach.Morton focuses his analysis around the death by suicide pact of Kronprinz Rudolph, heir to the Hapsburg empire. The event is intrinsically intriging; Rudolph's suicide and it's aftermath cover an emotional landscape that ranges from the tragic to the bizarre and goulish. Vignettes in the life of important cultural figures, including Freud, Herzl, Klimt, Brahms, Bruckner, Schnitzler and Mahler, dramatize the trend toward the dissolution of conservatism and the collapse of upper classs domination.A NERVOUS SPLENDOR is entertaining, informative and well written. Morton's style of writting is sophisticated, elegant and, yet, in a sense that is hard to define, unusual and piquant.

Morton captures essence of fin de siecle Vienna

Part narrative, part drama/adventure, and part history lesson, Morton keeps the reader interested with vivid accounts of everyday life at the end of the Hapsburg reign. One receives a glimpse into the lives of the working class and elite, as they struggle with everything from the rising price of sugar to keeping up with the latest fashions. Most interesting was the exploration into the lives of famous Vienese such as Franz Joseph, Prince Rudolph, Klimt, Freud, Bruckner, and Wolf.s