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By Root 1452 0

adornment of life and a sign of status. For the liberals’ children, art was a way of life, in part because they had no effectual political power left, no other comparable field for their imaginations.5 “The life of art,” writes Carl Schorske, “became a substitute for the life of action. Indeed as civic action proved increasingly futile, art became almost a religion, the source of meaning and the food of the soul.”6 The innovations of Schoenberg and his followers, which were to set them unprecedentedly in opposition to the concert-going bourgeoisie—to the degree that they founded the “Society for Private Musical Performances” for invitees only—nonetheless presupposed the attitudes of that same class as to the significance of art. The bourgeois audience might not have liked what it heard from the radicals, but it still understood what was being done in music to be vitally important. Schoenberg and his followers were reviled, not ignored. (Was it only when Schoenberg came to the U.S. that he realized it was possible for important artists to be ignored?)

Almost from the moment Brahms died in April 1897, Vienna began to change, and with vertiginous speed. It is as if, with his accustomed skill in managing his career, Brahms had known precisely when to exit the scene. The very day he died, one-time fashionable historical painter Gustav Klimt led a group of students from the Künstlerhaus in the founding meeting of “The Secession,” the spearhead of Modernism in Vienna. Exactly one year after Brahms died, ground was broken for the revolutionary little exhibition hall named The House of the Secession. Its geometric shapes, severe white stucco walls, and bizarrely beautiful dome of gilded laurel leaves stand just off the Ringstrasse that the building rebukes, and across the way from the Karlskirche.

The architect of The House of the Secession, Joseph Maria Olbrich, conceived the building and its contents as a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, and wrote of it in visionary terms: “Subjectivity, my beauty, my building, as I had dreamed.… It was my noble right to show my own idea of beauty, to say that it has to be done with the heart, and that everything measured with the proportions of traditions and the traditional aesthetic teachers appears foolish and awkward.”7 Above the door of the museum is written the motto of the Secession movement: “To the Age Its Art, to Art Its Freedom.” The freedom the building and its architect are talking about gave rise to the cryptic and elegant Viennese Jugendstil, the Freudian spectres of artistic Expressionism, and the tortured atonality of early Schoenberg and Webern. That freedom, in other words, was what Brahms called the end of art: when the laws of counterpoint, harmony, melody, and form that he called eternal no longer applied, and the insurrectionists took over the shop.

A few years after he died, Gustav Klimt, for an exhibition featuring Max Klinger’s statue of a seated Beethoven, painted his Beethoven-frieze on the walls of the Secession. His spectral, shockingly carnal nudes float in a marvelous and macabre atmosphere of jewel-like textures. The panels illustrate Wagner’s narrative interpretation of the Ninth Symphony, including “Weak Humanity” pleading with “The Well-Armed Strong Man” for salvation. (The Strong Man, here a knight in golden armor, Wagner surely intended as Germany in general, himself in particular. Klimt, however, gave the knight Mahler’s features.) If Brahms’s Fourth Symphony had been a “taking back” of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” Klimt expressed that joy for a new and troubled time.

By the first decade of the new century in Vienna, Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka were painting Expressionist canvases that wrenched forms and colors away from nature and the traditions of drawing. In architecture the post-Jugendstil elegance of Otto Wagner competed with the stripped-down, functionalist style of Adolf Loos. All these artists had in their own style fled from the crowded kitsch of the Ringstrasse and the Age of Makart, which was Brahms’s age (even as his style remained his own).