Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [157]
Across Vienna from the Prater, south of the palaces and churches of the Old City and across the River Wien, sits the Karlskirche, most remarkable of the city’s Baroque churches. For the last twenty-four years of his life Brahms would look out his front windows across Karlsgasse to its portico and triumphal columns. Between his first arrival in 1862 and his taking an apartment there in 1874, Brahms saw Vienna’s last boom and the beginning of its decline toward what Karl Kraus, the fin-desiècle social critic, called the “Proving-Ground for World Destruction.” Yet the place that called itself the City of Dreams never lost its vivacity, its love of life that included love of music and the arts. The splendor of the city lingered on as incomprehensibly as Austria’s ancient, incomprehensible empire.
At the time of Brahms’s arrival in Vienna the city was approaching its greatest boom. Perhaps no one could have suspected how soon on the heels of that boom the decline would begin. In 1857, the young Haps-burg emperor Franz Josef had decreed that the Renaissance walls of the city, built to hold off the Turks, would be razed and replaced by a broad circling avenue, to be lined with what aspired to be the grandest monuments of art and architecture in the world. So began the Ringstrasse and, in the later 1860s, the period of middle-class boom and speculation called in Austria the Ringstrasse Era—the equivalent of the Gründerjahre in Germany, the Victorian period in England, the Second Empire in France, the Gilded Age in the United States.
The first Ringstrasse building finished—before Parliament or Town Hall or the University—was the giant Hofoper, Court Opera, begun in 1861 and opened in 1869. As part of his official duties Franz Josef regularly attended the productions, dozing week after week in the Imperial Box. If the Ringstrasse project originated by royal decree, however, it was carried out by other forces, with their own agenda. Vienna historian Carl E. Schorske calls the Ringstrasse “a visual expression of the values of a social class”2—that class being the prosperous bourgeois builders and speculators and art lovers, the Grossbürgertum, who shaped modern Vienna in its splendor, its fragility, and its madness. As in Germany, that class was the main audience for classical music.
An essential conviction of the bourgeoisie was that truth in the modern world comes from science and law; only the past contained beauty. So, writes Schorske, “whenever [the Grossbürgertum] strove to express its values in architecture, it retreated into history.”3 Translated into architecture, that conviction meant that the structural elements of modern building and technology had to be concealed behind a screen of borrowed tradition.4 For the Ringstrasse project Franz Josef assembled celebrated architects from around Austria and all over Europe, and formed them into committees to plan a unified development. It amounted to an urban building project unprecedented in history. The committees decreed that each building was to have a style appropriate to its function: the Hofoper in early French Renaissance style, the Town Hall neo-Gothic, the University Italian Renaissance, the Law Courts German Renaissance, the Parliament neo-Hellenistic, the Hoftheater a wedding-cake improvisation on the Baroque, and so on in a ramble through nearly everybody’s history except Austria’s. The buildings were intended to look like ancient stone, but it was fake: they were made of poured and molded concrete.5
Thus the Historical Style. Its admirers included aspiring young artist Adolf Hitler, who in Mein Kampf recalled of his first encounter: “For hours I could stand in front of the Opera, for hours I could gaze at the Parliament; the whole Ring Boulevard seemed to me like an enchantment out of ‘The Thousand and One Nights.’ ” Hitler would plan the Berlin