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The Hofoper, designed by August Sicard von Sicardsburg and Eduard van der Nüll, can stand for all the Ringstrasse’s bold, monumental, ultimately barren plundering of the past. The outside of the Opera is a riot of Renaissance elements, from where one entered a many-arched grandstaircased gloom like a Turkish harem, and finally arrived in an auditorium of similarly eclectic style.6 In Vienna where everything artistic was a matter of ongoing dispute in every coffeehouse, the Opera’s potpourri of historical expropriations was captured in a little rhyme: Der Sicardsburg und der van der Nüll haben beide keinen Stül—Sicardburg and van der Nüll have neither any style. In good Viennese style, architect Sicardsburg responded to the slander by killing himself. Vienna had one of the highest suicide rates in Europe, especially among the upper bourgeoisie. In the talented, prosperous, highly musical Wittgenstein family, made famous by philosopher Ludwig, three of the four brothers took their own lives.

So oddly isolated, Brobdingnagian new buildings sprang up around the Ringstrasse, design and symbolism regularly foiling practicality. In the Hoftheater one could hardly hear the actors, in the Hofoper half the boxholders could barely see the stage. The Opera’s capricious relation of outside and inside was echoed again and again in the avenue’s other buildings, among them the Musikverein, completed in 1869 as home of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (Society of the Friends of Music). The serenely classical exterior of the Musikverein is outshouted by the candy-box extravagance of the “Golden Hall” inside, the audience flanked by rows of gold-plated caryatids. The dominant painter of the era was Hans Makart, brought to Vienna by the emperor in 1869. Makart fashioned a style at once riotously Baroque and turgid, with the same horror vacui that characterized the architectural decoration of the day. The Ringstrasse Era is also the Age of Makart.

The period began with supreme extravagance in the 1860s and stumbled in the stock market crash of 1873 and ensuing depression. Those years exactly matched the decline of Austrian power that was to begin with the German victory in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, which made Austria irrelevant to the further history of German peoples, and the sapping of power after 1867 that came from the Austrian crown’s Dual Monarchy with Hungary. Thus the supreme irony of Ringstrasse Vienna: the more impotent the Austrian empire, the more inflated its monuments. Yet as the empire declined the bourgeoisie prospered, immoderately until the crash, more temperately afterward.

So what was Johannes Brahms doing there, this austere North German living in a city halfway across Europe from the homeland he loved, and which considered Vienna second only to Paris in decadence? At least some of the reasons are easily found. Brahms shunned Hamburg after the Philharmonic snubbed him, and by lingering on in Vienna took a path of less resistance. After all, whatever its contradictions the place remained incomparable in the Western world when it came to music. In Brahms’s day as in Mozart’s, the finest artists gravitated there. One found contacts to be made, powers to court, and both critically and financially the rewards of success were unbeatable. (Now the movers and shakers came more from the Grossbürgertum than the court circles Mozart and Beethoven depended on, though there were still aristocratic patrons.) Brahms was to conquer the powers in Vienna with historic success. After fumbling his campaign to get the job he wanted in Hamburg, he made himself quite a canny careerist, wooing the influential while not appearing to care in the least.

All the same, though his old friends concertized regularly in Vienna, none of them felt obliged to live there. Clara Schumann and Joachim thrived in Berlin, Julius Grimm made do with Göttingen and Münster, Albert Dietrich with Oldenburg. Brahms could have made a living in any number of German cities, even Hamburg. Why