The Vienna Secession

In 1897, Gustav Klimt led a group of radical artists to break free from the cultural establishment of Vienna and found a movement that became known as the Vienna Secession. In the vibrant atmosphere of coffee houses, Freudian psychoanalysis and the music of Wagner and Mahler, the Secession sought to bring together fine art and music with applied arts such as architecture and design. The movement was characterized by Klimt’s stylised paintings, richly decorated with gold leaf, and the art nouveau buildings that began to appear in the city, most notably the Secession Building, which housed influential exhibitions of avant-garde art and was a prototype of the modern art gallery. The Secessionists themselves were pioneers in their philosophy and way of life, aiming to immerse audiences in unified artistic experiences that brought together visual arts, design, and architecture.  With: Mark Berry, Professor of Music and Intellectual History at Royal Holloway, University of London Leslie Topp, Professor Emerita in History of Architecture at Birkbeck, University of London And Diane Silverthorne, art historian and 'Vienna 1900' scholar Producer: Eliane Glaser Reading list: Mark Berry, Arnold Schoenberg: Critical Lives (Reaktion Books, 2018) Gemma Blackshaw, Facing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna 1900 (National Gallery Company, 2013) Elizabeth Clegg, Art, Design and Architecture in Central Europe, 1890-1920 (Yale University Press, 2006) Richard Cockett, Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World (Yale University Press, 2023) Stephen Downes, Gustav Mahler (Reaktion Books, 2025) Peter Gay, Freud, Jews, and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture (Oxford University Press, 1979) Tag Gronberg, Vienna: City of Modernity, 1890-1914 (Peter Lang, 2007) Allan S. Janik and Hans Veigl, Wittgenstein in Vienna: A Biographical Excursion Through the City and its History (Springer/Wien, 1998) Jill Lloyd and Christian Witt-Dörring (eds.), Vienna 1900: Style and Identity (Hirmer Verlag, 2011) William J. McGrath, Dionysian Art and Populist Politics in Austria (Yale University Press, 1974) Tobias Natter and Christoph Grunenberg (eds.), Gustav Klimt: Painting, Design and Modern Life (Tate, 2008) Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (Vintage, 1979) Elana Shapira, Style and Seduction: Jewish Patrons, Architecture and Design in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (Brandeis University Press, 2016) Diane V Silverthorne, Dan Reynolds and Megan Brandow-Faller, Die Fläche: Design and Lettering of the Vienna Secession, 1902-1911 (Letterform Archive, 2023) Edward Timms, Karl Kraus: Apocalyptic Satirist: Culture & Catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna (Yale University Press, 1989) Leslie Topp, Architecture and Truth in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (Cambridge University Press, 2004) Peter Vergo, Art in Vienna, 1898-1918: Klimt, Kokoschka, Schiele and Their Contemporaries (4th ed., Phaidon, 2015) Hans-Peter Wipplinger (ed.), Vienna 1900: Birth of Modernism (Walther & Franz König, 2019) Hans-Peter Wipplinger (ed.), Masterpieces from the Leopold Museum (Walther & Franz König) Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography (University of Nebraska Press, 1964) In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Melvyn Bragg and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

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  This is In Our Time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you'll find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hallo. In 1897 Gustav Klimt leit ein Gruppe von radikalen Arztes, um von der Kulturanordnung in Wien zu brechen, und entdeckte einen Bewegung, die als "Vienna Secession" bekannt wurde. In der lebhaften Atmosphäre von Kaffeehäusern, Freudian Psychoanalysis und der Musik Wagner und Mahler versuchte die Secession, tolle Kunst und Musik zusammenzubringen, mit beispielsweise Architektur und Design. Die Art Nouveau-Exhibitionsszene

• 2:25Speaker 05

  wurde ein Zeugnis für den internationalen Avant-Garde und ein Ort, um neue Ideen über Freiheit in Kunst und Leben zu zeigen. Mit mir zu diskutieren ist die Vienna Secession Mark Berry, Professorin für Musik und intellektuelle Historie an Royal Holloway, Universität von London, Leslie Topp, Professorin für Architektur in History of Architecture an Birkbeck, Universität von London, und der Art-Historiker Diane Silverthorne. Diane, wie und wann erschien die Vienna Secession als Bewegung?

• 2:53Speaker 06

  Um zurück zu Ihrer Einführung zu kommen, war der kritische Jahr 1897, 1898. Das war ein Jahr, als Gustav Klimt, der bereits eine Reputierung für sich gegründet hatte, als ein Arzt, der von der Regierung in Wien akzeptiert wurde, und bereits in ein paar neuen Gebäuden Panne zu befestigen hatte, als Teil eines großen Entwicklungsbaus, der vom herrschenden Habsburg-Emperor gestimmt wurde. Er war Mitglied, er musste Mitglied sein, um zu zeigen, des einzigen Exhibitionsgebäudes in Wien, das einfach "Kunsthaus" oder "Exhibitionsgebäude" genannt wurde, das in Wirklichkeit eine privater Exhibitionsgalerie war, ein neues Gebäude, das auch auf dem

• 3:36Speaker 06

  was "Ringstrasse" oder "Ringstraße Entwicklung" genannt wurde. Das war in Kehuz, wenn Sie möchten, mit der Akademie für tolle Kunst. Beide, die Akademie für tolle Kunst in Wien und das Kunsthaus, waren außergewöhnlich konservativ über den Art, den sie promoviert und exibiert. Dies führte über die Jahre, in Wirklichkeit bis 1987, von den frühen 1900er bis 1890, zu einem großen Strang von Frustration zwischen einigen der jüngeren Arztes, die auch Karriere wie Gustav Klimt wünschen wollten. Gustav Klimt. So Klimt firstly tried to create a kind of breakaway group within the Künstlerhaus to gain more freedoms, to exhibit the kind of art they wanted.

• 4:17Speaker 06

  And when that was unsuccessful, he resigned from the Künstlerhaus after he'd already sort of gleaned support from a number of notable young architects, designers and other fine artists. And within two years, had established a secession as the leading avant-garde art group of Vienna. He had these wonderful portraits, society portraits, which were also rather mysterious and puzzling. Why were they mysterious? They were mysterious because they were not like portraits that were painted in order to illustrate the sort of personality of the sitter. They were much more about a telling story about what was happening underneath the surface of Vienna through

• 5:00Speaker 06

  the decorative elements of the portraits. The faces and hands of the women, for example, were the only bits, if you like, of the portrait that looked real. And often the hands looked terribly tense, which again was a feature of Gustav Klimt's art.

• 5:12Speaker 05

  Mark Berry, can I tell to you, first of all, what do we mean in this context by the word secession?

• 5:17Speaker 07

  I suppose we mean really seceding from official bodies in some sense and actually creating your own. And as Diane said, the Parisian love of controversy, back to the Ancien Régime, this had been something very much from the sub-creation of what we used to call at least a bourgeois public sphere in the 18th century and perhaps still do. But in terms of Viennese institutions, this is probably rather less so, but had been preempted in a way by a similar secession in Munich before. A Munich secession, the Berlin secession would happen shortly afterwards. So this was-

• 5:56Speaker 05

  Secession basically means breaking away from the status quo.

• 5:58Speaker 07

  Yes, exactly. And from those organisational structures in terms of visual art.

• 6:05Speaker 05

  Was there a guiding vision, we talk about coffee houses meeting together and so on, but was there a guiding vision about this? I mean, it seems more than when two or three were gathered together, doesn't it?

• 6:15Speaker 07

  Yes, I think so, and as Diane said, in these coffee houses, and there's a wonderful book by Edward Tins on Vienna at this time, which has a diagram actually of circles and people who are members of those circles and how they interact, almost mirroring the tables of the coffee houses in a way. And one of the great things about coffee houses at the time was they were clubs to which anyone could enter and read the newspaper, take the coffee, discuss at a much lesser price than gentlemen's clubs, which would have been, you know, the way one might do it in Palma or something like that. And that tension, I think, between the individual and not so much the collective,

• 6:59Speaker 07

  because that's a perennial tension, you can hardly have society without that. But between those and those organisational structures, musicians were doing very much the same at the time. Arnold Schoenberg's early music rejected by the Viennese musical institutions. And he and his colleagues going on to found new musical institutions of themselves. They didn't actually call it a secession, but I think it's part very much of this secession movement.

• 7:29Speaker 05

  How did, how did they all come together as effective groups? Just to overthrow an established gallery and an established way of making your way as an artist in those days, quite a big thing to do. It wasn't just two or three people, but the strategies, what was happening?

• 7:43Speaker 07

  Yes, and in many ways quite a modern publicity movement. You know, they have a journal, Ver Sakrem, who's, who's Holy Spring.

• 7:52Speaker 05

  Holy Spring, yes.

• 7:53Speaker 07

  And, you know, it's designed by one of their members, Josef Hoffmann, and the celebrated slogan that meets you when you enter the secession house. "De Saiti, era kunst, der kunst, era freiheit." "To this time, it's art, to art, it's freedom." So, and I think that issue of timeliness is very important there and, you know, is something of a modernistic emblem in that sense. The idea that art is appropriate to a time, rather than necessarily observing classical verities that continue from time to time, I think is part of what is going on here.

• 8:32Speaker 05

  It's still quite amazing watching it happen, these different architects, artists, all coming together with one idea and forcing it through. How did they do that?

• 8:43Speaker 07

  I'm not so sure. It is simply one idea. I mean, there's the idea of seceding, I suppose, if that's what we're talking about.

• 8:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, that's the one idea I'm talking about.

• 8:50Speaker 07

  Yes, but there are many artistic ideas that are part of that, and it's more, as it were, an opposition, well, almost having been forced out because they need to be able to show their art.

• 9:03Speaker 06

  One of their great motives was to create an art which was specifically for Austria. And some of the commentators at the time, Hermann Baar, who was a great supporter of the secession, theatrical director and impresario, was writing great tracts and criticisms of the cultural environment of Vienna at the time in terms of the visual arts, that Austria didn't have its own art. And the other guiding principle essentially was to create new art which would rejuvenate life. So the importance really coming out of that whole Jürgenstil, Art Nouveau period, was to bring together the fine arts, the applied arts and architecture to create some greater art form which would not only be beautiful but would beautify

• 9:45Speaker 06

  life. And those were two of the driving missions, if you like, of the Vienna secession.

• 9:51Speaker 05

  Lesley, can you tell us more about what they were breaking away from?

• 9:55Speaker 04

  Yes, so the group that they were all members of initially, it was called the Society of Visual Artists of Vienna. And as Diane mentioned, it went by a kind of nickname, as it were, the Künstlerhaus, which is the name of the building where they exhibited. The Artist's House, that translates as. It ran all the juries that would select artists for international exhibitions, and it put on its own exhibitions in its premises. So what started happening, especially in the 1890s, is that there were a series of scandals where young artists submitted works to be exhibited as part of the Künstlerhaus exhibitions, and these were rejected by the jury. There's one instance of a young artist called Josef

• 10:40Speaker 04

  Engelhardt, who'd been in Paris for a couple of years. He came back, he had a watercolor of a young female nude figure, done in a naturalistic mode, so it looked like it could be a real woman rather than some kind of allegory. And she's picking cherries in an orchard. This was, as I say, rejected by the jury on both aesthetic grounds and moral grounds. It was seen as as not suitable viewing material for the respectable audiences, especially female audiences, of Vienna. And so people rallied around Engelhardt and protested, and camps developed within the institution. The young ones and the old ones, the jungen, came to be this camp around which people

• 11:24Speaker 04

  rallied, looking for change within that institution initially, and then eventually they turned their backs on it.

• 11:30Speaker 05

  Was Vienna singular in having this secession going on, or was it happening in other cities and other places in a not dissimilar way?

• 11:38Speaker 04

  It was happening in other places. So the Munich secession was a couple of years before, as Mark mentioned. The Viennese secession, in their journal, they published a short blurb about why they had called it the secession. And they referred to the Roman republican phenomenon of secessio plebis, when the plebian population withdrew from the city in about 495 B.C. onto the sacred mountain and left all the patricians to try to get by without them as a kind of ethical protest against the conditions in which they were being made to live. And so the Munich secession initially, and then the Vienna secession, pick up on this

• 12:21Speaker 04

  idea of a group that is named after the split and named after this kind of ethical stance that they're taking against the elites that they were subject to.

• 12:33Speaker 05

  Thank you very much. Can we go back to you for a moment, Mark? What was it about Vienna that made this such a potent movement?

• 12:40Speaker 07

  I think part of it is that there is a very engaged public there as well, that, you know, artists are really doing battle, not only with institutions, but also with sections of a hostile public, and that, you know, that publicity makes good stories. Vienna at the time was a very febrile place politically, socially, I mean, it was an extremely multicultural city, for one thing.

• 13:09Speaker 05

  Why is that, do you think?

• 13:10Speaker 07

  It's the seat of a multicultural empire, Austria-Hungary, which has a huge influx of migration, for example, you know, Jewish people coming from Eastern Europe, but also from all parts of the empire, from Bohemia, from Hungary, from other parts of Europe as well, and they are partly coming because it is a city of art, of the arts in general. I mean, it has a very lengthy musical history in that sense, and there's this intermingling, and that's attractive to young people, to young artists, but there are also very conservative institutions, as both Lesley and Diane were telling us, and they are sort of upholding

• 13:54Speaker 07

  those sort of classical verities. We talked about, you know, for example, there's the Vienna School of Art History, very influential at the time, debating ideas of what is beautiful, what is ugly, whether these are actually terms that in contemporary Vienna, that is the Vienna around about 1900, even have any meaning anymore. This blurring of the ethical and the aesthetic is called into question, particularly as newer drives are being taken more into account, whether it be by writers, painters, musicians, particularly, you know, ideas of the unconscious, the truths that lie beneath the surface of the city and of the person.

• 14:36Speaker 05

  So you think that psychology is an important part to play in all this?

• 14:39Speaker 07

  Very much so. I mean, there's the preoccupation with dreams, for example. I mean, everybody in a sense has been preoccupied with dreams at some time or another, but it's very important. And the idea that they are getting to a truth that is being concealed by reality, I think, is an extremely potent one at this time. And of course, it's the Vienna out of which Freud emerges as well.

• 15:04Speaker 04

  One of the really practical reasons why there was such a draw Vienna for people in all these areas, in the visual arts and beyond, was the education that was offered there. So the Academy of Fine Arts was the Imperial and Royal Academy of Fine Arts, and that was where, if you wanted to make it as an artist at the highest level, you sought to come and study, whether that was as a painter, sculptor, or architect. So, for instance, there was an architecture kind of masterclass being run there by Otto Wagner, who's seen as the real progenitor of modern architecture in this period. And he has students from all over the empire, the Czech lands, Poland, et cetera, studying with him, Italy as well. And there's also another art school, equally important, the School of Applied

• 15:49Speaker 04

  Arts and Industry, which was a great crucible for design innovation, and had two of the key secession members, Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser, were very important professors there.

• 16:00Speaker 05

  Diane, can I come to you, and then I'll come back to you, Leslie. Let's talk about the Secession Building, what it was and why it was so important and why it worked.

• 16:09Speaker 06

  Yes, so if we can imagine the Secessionists gathering round, as Mark has said, not just mythical coffee tables and planning to create this exhibition building, which was going to be radical in the way it was designed, and the place where they could not only exhibit Austrian art, their own new art, but also bring artists from across Europe to exhibit. And there hadn't been much interest previously in bringing artists together. So amongst their membership, they kind of recruited two architects, one in particular, Joseph Maria Olbrich, who was a Prix de Rome awarded. Architect and had also come up through Otto Wagner's school.

• 16:50Speaker 06

  And this incredibly talented architect started to create a one-storey, white and gold pavilion, which the front of the building was strikingly different in its simplicity and whiteness, if you like, looked rather like and was often compared to a Greek temple. And the top of the back end, if you like, where the exhibition hall was created, essentially used new materials like glass and steel to create this extraordinary greenhouse effect on the back of the building, so that the main hall, the main exhibition hall, was flooded with light. Not only that, it was also, as I say, utterly simplified.

• 17:29Speaker 06

  There were large areas of just empty white wall at the front of the building, inlaid with golden flattened decoration. It had a golden dome of laurel leaves, which again had symbolic and allegorical meaning. Inside the hall, although it was a very specific format, the shape of the building was in a Greek cross design, there were no barriers, apart from very slim pillars, around which to create exhibition design. So one of the great talents, if you like, that several of the leading secessionists brought to bear on this amazingly versatile space was the development of exhibition design, which essentially meant that they could create a new way of looking at exhibitions that

• 18:13Speaker 06

  had really never been seen in that way before in Europe.

• 18:16Speaker 05

  Can I come back to you for a moment, Liz? Did it have a distinctive drive, this place that they'd built, this white palace?

• 18:23Speaker 04

  It was highly distinctive and highly controversial at the time. It might be worth saying that there was an initial site for the building right on the Ringstrasse. Diane's mentioned this Ringstrasse Boulevard built on the old city walls, which was the big project of monumental historicist revivalist architecture from the 1860s onwards. They initially wanted to build their building right there, which is interesting, and that would have really made quite a splash. But the land that they were hoping to be granted was controlled by the Defence Ministry, which- Complained that it would bring the land values down in the surrounding area. And as a result, they had to find another spot. So they end up in a kind of outer zone of the Ringstrasse.

• 19:06Speaker 04

  Really interesting site facing the St. Charles Church, which is a very important Baroque church, also very white with a very prominent dome. And some of the the visual language of the building is a much modernized kind of nod to the St. Charles Church. It also has all around it the the big vegetable market of Vienna, which is still a very famous place.

• 19:29Speaker 05

  Can I get your people now, which artists were prominent and why were they prominent there?

• 19:34Speaker 04

  So I think the first one really to start with is Klimt. And he, of course, is the the leader of the group. But he's also extremely important as an artist, not just as a as someone that people rally around. One way into this is to think about two particular works that he creates right in this first couple of years of the succession. One of them was called Nuda Veritas, The Naked Truth. And like a lot of his works, it experimented with format. So it was two meters high, this work, and only fifty centimeters wide. So a very tall, narrow format, very unconventional. It depicted a naked woman who was supposed to be a kind of allegory of truth.

• 20:17Speaker 04

  But what was so unusual and really very jarring to people about this painting is that she seemed to be a real woman. She was depicted in this naturalistic mode. Even her pubic hair was shown, which would have been completely unheard of in allegorical female nudes, which were, of course, very common before that. And she had coal-rimmed eyes, a red mouth, luxuriant red hair in a kind of pre-Raphaelite mode. And she's depicted right up against the picture plane with a abstracted background. Zones of abstract color with some quite abstracted ornamentation, not any kind of recognizable space she's in. It's almost like a kind of graphic art rendition, the background.

• 21:02Speaker 04

  And she's holding up a mirror to the viewer, not for herself to look in, but for the viewer to look in. To, and Mark mentioned this, search for the truth in Vienna, this idea that you're constantly trying to get away from surfaces and into something behind. And this was the challenge of this painting, The Naked Truth, to try to get to what's behind surface.

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• 23:37Speaker 05

  Mark, that's certainly music now. There were a great number of important composers associated with the movement. What were their most influential works? Maybe you just want to concentrate on one or two of them.

• 23:47Speaker 07

  Well, I think I would start with Schoenberg, whom I mentioned before, who, unlike many so-called Viennese composers, was actually Viennese, was born in Vienna. Vienna has a great history of importing composers whom it reveres and actually ignoring those who come from Vienna itself, Schubert being another example. But Schoenberg was also unusual in that, not that he was a Jewish composer, but that his background was not a wealthy Jewish background at all. He was from rather, as it were, lower-middle-class stock and didn't have the education that many of his Jewish and other peers was. I mean, he essentially taught himself.

• 24:31Speaker 07

  But a work more or less consistent with the Secession in many ways would be his string sextet, Transfigured Night, or Fikletenart in the German. And it's very interesting in many ways, partly because it is more or less, I think, the first, and may even be the first, piece of chamber music that uses what we call a programme, that is, a text from outside music, a poem, which it sets more or less verse to verse, but only in music. And the text is not unclimpt-like in that sense. It's a text by the poet Richard Daimler and is the story of a woman going into a forest.

• 25:16Speaker 07

  She's married someone she was not in love with. She meets a man and bears his child. And this isn't a tragedy. This isn't some horrible situation where everything is screwed up. It's presented as natural, as a transfiguring moment.

• 25:33Speaker 05

  You mentioned the word Jewish there. A lot of this was subsidised by Jewish patrons, am I right?

• 25:39Speaker 07

  Yes, I mean, by patrons of all sorts. But certainly there were a lot of wealthy patrons who were Jewish and in many ways tended actually to be rather more artistically adventurous than the sort of institutions the Secession was rebelling against.

• 25:56Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 25:56Speaker 06

  Yes, just to go back to that earlier question about the secession building and how it was established. Lesley very well described that it had this extraordinary position on land which was given to them by the state in the end, by the government. But it wouldn't have come into being unless the Wittgenstein family hadn't funded it almost entirely. So Karl Wittgenstein did fund the secession building. Again, rather like one of these very wealthy industrialists assimilated Jewish families, second generation, who were passionately interested in driving forward and supporting art and architecture into the modern period.

• 26:38Speaker 05

  Was there any sense that there was friction between that and an antisemitic feeling in the city?

• 26:43Speaker 06

  Antisemitism in Vienna was a way of life by eighteen, in a sense.

• 26:47Speaker 05

  What does that mean?

• 26:47Speaker 06

  Well, I will explain what I mean. If we just go back to eighteen ninety-seven, eighteen ninety-eight, a number of things happened that year, which is a way of getting into this whole subject of the sort of swirling institutionalized, one might say, antisemitism. Gustav Mahler was appointed as director of the Vienna Court Opera, but before he was allowed to take his position up, he had to convert from his Jewish-born origins to Catholicism. Nevertheless, he was still, as he went through the years, he was both applauded but also criticised and vilified by the institutionalized antisemitic press. In the same year, the mayor of Vienna, a figure called Karl Lueger,

• 27:30Speaker 06

  who was the Christian Socialist Party, was elected as mayor of Vienna on what might describe as an antisemitic ticket, borrowing from German nationalism, which was also a prevailing politics, if you like, of the time, led by a politician called George Scherner. So we have this very strange mix around the time that the secession was established of this sense of liberal enlightenment, which was portrayed by the emperor and the way that he'd created these amazing buildings of the Reinstrasser to represent the arts.

• 28:06Speaker 06

  Culture and universities in all sorts of different historical styles. And we have this sort of driving antisemitism, also partly caused by what Mark referred to earlier, which was the hundreds and hundreds of people who were bound, if you like, for Vienna, which became very, very crowded in fact, and very polyglot by the end of the century, from across the whole of the empire. And going back to Leslie's example of Gustav Klimt being our sort of leading exemplar of what was going on in the art world. The secessionists themselves, the art, the artists of the secession, unlike most of the musicians who were successful at the time, were themselves not Jewish.

• 28:46Speaker 06

  So there wasn't a sense that the secession was established and also joined in, if you like, the sort of antisemitic movements and tendencies. But of course, as with the secession house, we also have Klimt's art and also the art of other protagonists of the secession, the applied arts, as the most important patrons who helped to create an environment in which modern art, Klimt's very important portraits of the wealthy wives of some of the industrialists, were created essentially using and being supported by Jewish circles, if you like, middle-class circles.

• 29:26Speaker 05

  Thank you very much. Can I switch to music now with Beethoven and the influence he had? He was massively important in the city. Why? What was the consequence of that?

• 29:35Speaker 07

  Beethoven, I mean, it's impossible to imagine the history we have of 19th century music without him. I mean, he stands in music almost like Shakespeare does for English literature in that sort of sense. And certainly Richard Wagner saw them as similar progenitors of his art, his music drama, which sought to combine the two. But Beethoven's... Art was mostly not musicodramatic, it was instrumental, it was orchestral. So it had something, in a sense, for everyone. Wagner and his Viennese disciples claimed the Beethoven of the Ninth Symphony, who was honoured as a secession. Mahler arranged music from the Ninth Symphony when the word enters the symphonic realm.

• 30:19Speaker 07

  And that was part of it, but also most of Beethoven's music fit in very well at the official institutions. The Musikverein fit very well with the Brahms strand of 19th century music. And Viennese musical culture at the time had these two factions. Broadly, one might say, progressive Wagnerian, at least in aesthetic terms, not necessarily, I mean, often highly questionable in political terms, and more conservative Brahmsian in the sense. And Brahms was another of those adopted sons of Vienna. So everyone could claim something from Beethoven.

• 30:59Speaker 07

  And Schoenberg was one of those composers, who were really the first composer, to try to reconcile those two Beethovenian strands, those of Wagner and of Brahms. And that was, in a sense, what his early music was all about.

• 31:17Speaker 06

  As Mark said, and as you've spotted, Beethoven cast a hugely long shadow across the whole of the century in Vienna in various ways. The myth of Beethoven wandering the streets of Vienna in the early part of the 19th century.

• 31:32Speaker 07

  Looking very ragged.

• 31:33Speaker 06

  Looking, yeah, looking deep in thought. He was by then, you know, he's often pictured, actually, in graphic designs, in graphic illustrations, as the man with the hands behind his back, looking very stern, walking through the streets of Vienna. And people felt that in this sort of magical moment, he was listening. Because of his deafness, he was able to hear the sort of spheres of music coming from space almost. And he was also quite a champion ultimately of Napoleon, until Napoleon turned rotten. And even after he died, and his funeral was attended by thousands and thousands of people, his music... Was still being puzzled by, even though people knew it was extraordinarily innovative,

• 32:14Speaker 06

  and particularly the Ninth Symphony, when the voice and the poetry of Schiller was used for this great chorus. And if I just might add, in nineteen oh two, thanks to a promise by then a very well-known Leipzig artist called Max Klinger, who is not very well-known now, but was an extremely important artist at the time, also adored and loved music and was very knowledgeable, the secessionists were promised his monument to Beethoven, which he sculpted out of marbles, this figure of Beethoven, sitting on an articulated bronze throne. And he had promised the secession that when this extraordinary monument was completed, they would have first dibs, if you like, at exhibiting it.

• 32:58Speaker 06

  So bringing together the kind of mythological status of Beethoven and the extraordinary flexibility of the secession house, they created one of their most, if not their most famous exhibitions, the nineteen oh two Beethoven exhibition, which was entirely devoted to the spirit and ideas of Beethoven.

• 33:15Speaker 05

  Do you want to come in here?

• 33:17Speaker 07

  And I think something that was attractive about Beethoven, as well as, you know, the glowering images of the romantic artist we see in the paintings and so on, I mean, he looks just like he ought to, was the idea that he had composed for posterity, which is a semi-fiction in some ways, but his late music and late Beethoven, I think, became an idea in itself, particularly the Beethoven of the late string quartets, which was seen as not understood by the publics of their time, perhaps not even understood by the public seventy, eighty years later. But the Be- they were considered to be very difficult, introverted music, written by

• 34:01Speaker 07

  a deaf person, and that trope in Beethoven discussion keeps coming up again. I mean, it's a very questionable one in many ways, but he certainly wasn't. Writing for the instruments of the time in the sense that he could hear them, he was having to resort to his imagination to what he thought things sounded like. And when you have his late piano sonata, the so-called hammerclavier sonata, it's more or less unplayable on any piano, but it's pretty much impossible to play on a piano at the time. Some of the tempo markings are simply impossible really to observe in performance, or it becomes a mess when they did. So there's something cultish about this.

• 34:43Speaker 07

  The idea of someone who was hurling his lance into the future, as another of his disciples with very strong Vienna aspect to his history, Franz Liszt, described his music. So that avant-gardism, I think, is very important in the idea of Beethoven.

• 34:59Speaker 06

  Which is why he was such an attractive figure, in a sense, for the succession, because they were aligning themselves with this extraordinary avant-garde characteristic of Beethoven.

• 35:09Speaker 04

  An important manifestation of that in the Beethoven exhibition is this very famous frieze by Gustav Klimt that he paints around four walls of the main exhibition room that tells a story of this piece of music and combines figures of great kind of idealism and beauty with very grotesque and quite irrational figures in this medley that was really fascinating to people at the time and is still really fascinating. People can still see this frieze in the succession house where it's been moved down into a basement room. And it's an amazing work of art that, as I say, is unique in Klimt's work in being a story told over space.

• 35:53Speaker 05

  I'm with you. Could you talk about architecture at the time?

• 35:57Speaker 04

  Yes, so, architecture was really central to what the succession was doing, which is important because that's unusual. You don't get that, for instance, in French avant-garde movements, where you have painters joining together with architects and designers. It was something that was characteristic of this Central European milieu, where there was seen to be a lot of shared ideals among...

• 36:19Speaker 05

  Why do you think it took place so strongly in that area?

• 36:22Speaker 04

  I think this has a lot to do with the legacy of the Ringstrasse we've talked about a few times. Suddenly, over a couple of decades, they needed to build these monumental buildings for the opera, the Art History Museum, the parliament, the city hall, the university, the Imperial Theatre. And all of those were total works of art. They were a combination of architecture, sculpture, and they were heavily decorated inside with painting as well. And so that idea that the three arts work very much together had an older legacy in Vienna that is really baked into institutions like the Kunsthhouse. And so it's not surprising that it is then these three aspects, plus the very, very important role of modern design coming into it as well.

• 37:06Speaker 06

  Mark has mentioned "To every age its art, to art its freedom", which was written in relief in gold lettering, very modernistic gold lettering. Something else that these Secession were very able to do, drive lettering as a decorative art form into the future. But underneath that sort of motif, which is as close as we can get to some kind of manifesto, also there are the three gold heads in relief of three gorgons. And their snake-like hair is essentially guarding three words: architecture, painting, and the plastic arts. So it was always the intention of the Secession to bring together the three arts into this new age.

• 37:47Speaker 05

  Did women have any place in this movement?

• 37:49Speaker 06

  The Secession was a sort of club. There were Secession members who were Austrian, and there were also what were called foreign members, who were artists from around Europe, prominent artists who also supported the Secession movement, as they had done when the Munich Secession got going in 1892. And when the Secession was formed, there were no female artists members. So what's come down through the last hundred years, really, is not a story of women artists who participated in the Secession exhibitions, or who gained a reputation, anything like even some of the applied artists in the Secession. On the other hand, there were female artists who did exhibit.

• 38:32Speaker 06

  Not only within the Secession building, but also in two major exhibitions that were called the Kunsthaus exhibitions, which simply again means just art show, which were created in nineteen oh eight and nineteen oh nine, when Klimt and what were pejoratively called the decorator artists, the painters and decorators, actually left the Secession house and created two magnificent self-standing pavilion-like art exhibitions in the centre of Vienna, where the same figures who were dominating the Secession were also leading a whole new way of teaching at the Applied Art School, the Kunstgebirge Schule, where they were appointed to rejuvenate teaching. And a lot more women were then being trained at the Applied Art School

• 39:17Speaker 06

  and exhibited in these two great exhibitions in nineteen oh eight and nineteen oh nine.

• 39:21Speaker 05

  Mark, can we now turn to yet something else that was going on there, which is psychoanalysis? What part did that play in the general melee or organised, well organised, wasn't it chaos? Organisation of artists pushing forward on an apparently united front in some ways?

• 39:38Speaker 07

  Yes, I mean, I think it's certainly part of what is going on here, although I think in some senses we perhaps exaggerate the importance, because Freud has been so foundational to twentieth century thought and culture thereafter, that we see him perhaps as more central to the life of Vienna at the time than perhaps he was. But nonetheless, the great interest in the unconscious and perhaps in the idea also that even if one buries down to what is at the bedrock of human existence, one might still find a lie, one might never actually get to truth at all, and that that might be the sort of riddle we have to deal with, is of course a very rich idea

• 40:21Speaker 07

  and one I think that is perhaps particularly amenable to artistic expression in all sorts of spheres.

• 40:27Speaker 05

  Lovely.

• 40:28Speaker 04

  I agree with Mark that it's hard to draw a direct line between what's happening in the Secession and psychoanalysis particularly, but there was a lot of interest in other approaches to what were called nervous ailments at the time. There was a huge amount of writing and indeed of lived experience of what we would now refer to as depression, anxiety, disorders of the nerves of various kinds. And we can see a direct connection when we look at a building that Josef Hoffmann, one of the key architect members of the Secession, builds in 1904, which is called the Perkstorff Sanatorium. It was built in a very beautiful area in the Vienna woods, on the outskirts of Vienna.

• 41:09Speaker 04

  It's a white, cubic, highly advanced, innovative building, in which one was supposed to live a very regimented, simple life, surrounded by beautiful objects of, again, highly simplified, technologically advanced design. And there you would experience a cure for the nervous ailment that was bothering you. Of course, this was a bit like Freud's psychoanalysis, this was really only for people that could afford that kind of treatment. There was also a large state psychiatric hospital designed by Otto Wagner.

• 41:41Speaker 06

  If we go back a few years again to the early 1890s, Arthur Schnitzler, one of the most important members of the, what were called Jungveen, which were the literary figures, who in a sense predate the beginning of the Secession, had already started writing the most extraordinary stream of consciousness novellas, if you like, one called Lieutenant Gustl, which is about a sort of senior soldier who spends the whole of the night wandering around the Ringstrasse, trying to argue in his own mind about whether or not he's been insulted and whether or not he should commit suicide. And Arthur Schnitzler was latterly seen, again, we look at the forthcoming sort of shadow

• 42:23Speaker 06

  of Freud, as a kind of precursor, Freud recognized him in fact, in his writings as a precursor of having an understanding and exposing sexual and other social tensions through his stories, very much as Freud would later do through The Talking Cure. So in a sense, there was already this fascination, there was also hugely sort of repressed idea about sexuality, particularly amongst younger generation, and that was also part of the context in which the Secession came into being, if you like.

• 42:52Speaker 05

  Can you talk a bit about the legacy of the Secession, starting with you, Dan?

• 42:58Speaker 06

  One of the important legacies of the Secession goes back to this whole idea of the applied arts coming together to create some greater whole. And I suppose you could also trace that into the 20th century by looking at the Bauhaus, for example, which was not directly inspired by the Secession, but some of those principles of the applied arts were certainly brought forward into modernity. And I think the second thing is also the way they designed their exhibitions to, in a sense, take ideas, strangely enough, which in fact were written about by Max Klinger, the artist of the central feature of the Beethoven exhibition. This idea of a unified design inside the Secession house to create an atmosphere, a

• 43:42Speaker 06

  themed exhibition, was completely new and completely different. And we might look at that, they actually called it a particular name, Raumkunst, or spatial art, which then became known as the new art of exhibition design. And we might look back to some of those Secession exhibitions, particularly the 1902 Klinger Beethoven exhibition, where a prevailing environment was created. And the audience, in a sense, were manipulated through a series of passages and spaces in order to be immersed in the art itself. And one could say that's a precursor of immersive art, which is one of the buzzwords of the 21st century.

• 44:20Speaker 04

  The notion of the white cube, which you hear about as the kind of dominant form of art viewing, especially of modern art in museums today, where you have completely white walls, white ceiling, white floor, and artworks isolated in a large white plane, and so that you're supposed to be able to commune with those artworks and really get absorbed in them. That has its roots in the Vienna Secession, especially in some of the slightly later exhibitions, 1904, 1905. Koloman Moser designed the exhibition of Klimt's work that they showed around that time. Amazingly forward-looking, if you see the images of it.

• 44:59Speaker 07

  One thing that interests me about the secession now, as it were, I mean, quite apart from the fact that it it still exists, there are still secession exhibitions and so on now, we shouldn't think it's entirely historical, but leaving that slightly aside, the idea of the Vienna secession as a moment and as a visual moment seems now to be almost the primary visual idea of what Vienna as a city is. This idea of Vienna, city of dreams, you think immediately of a clamped picture. And this art that in many ways was trying to dig beneath the surface has almost paradoxically, or dialectically, I suppose one might say,

• 45:41Speaker 07

  has become, the surface of it has actually become the most alluring thing, and that has endured as an idea of what Vienna is.

• 45:50Speaker 05

  Well, thank you all very much. Thanks to Mark Berry, Lesley Top and Diane Silverthorne. Next week, the evolution of lungs. Thank you for listening.

• 46:00Speaker 04

  And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

• 46:07Speaker 05

  Lesley, did you not get time to say something you'd like to say?

• 46:10Speaker 04

  I think it's important to think about what comes directly after this kind of heroic moment of the secession, because that's part of its legacy as well. There was a really interesting backlash, really, against the secession that pointed to the way that the secession was quite implicated in elite power structures at the time, in kind of providing decorative objects for the interiors of wealthy people and so on. And so you get artists like Oscar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele, also two very well-known Viennese artists of this very slightly later period, who can be seen as developing an artistic language

• 46:52Speaker 04

  that's much harsher, that's expressionist in in in a much more rough-edged way, both aesthetically and in terms of the the the vision that underlies it. And there's the same thing happens in architecture, in fact. So you Adolf Loos is a great friend. of those two artists. He's an architect who, from the very beginning, is highly critical of the secession as kind of spending too much time on surface. And his friend Carl Kraus, the cultural critic, has the fantastic saying, the more exquisite the packaging, the more dubious the content. And so that kind of gets across that razor-sharp, critical idea

• 47:36Speaker 04

  that comes to the fore in Vienna that Ludwig Wittgenstein, the philosopher, is also associated with. And that can be seen as a legacy of the secession in that they were kind of bracing themselves against the secession and developing the modern in a different direction.

• 47:50Speaker 05

  Can I come back to you, Ma?

• 47:52Speaker 07

  Yes, and I was going to say, the names Leslie mentions there, for example, Kokoschka, Sheila, and Carl Kraus, these were all people Schoenberg knew very well as well. And Schoenberg's very interesting in that he was a painter as well. He was an exhibited painter. And Kandinsky thought very highly of him, asked him to contribute to the Blauer Writer, the Blue Rider, Almanack, and so on. And the idea of the arts coming together, which many of these people talk about, they speak about music as if it were visual art and the other way around. Schoenberg, in his opera of this time, Die Glückliche Hand, The Hand of Fate,

• 48:33Speaker 07

  actually devised something that he called a color crescendo, which was to be part of the staging. I mean, it's very much a multimedia idea in which the orchestra and the staging work together visually and musically. And you really can't dissolve them. And one certainly sees that that sort of influence in Kandinsky's art as well.

• 48:54Speaker 06

  To pick up on that very important point of Schoenberg's circle, which was very much a Kraus circle, Adolf Loos, Schoenberg's Die Glückliche Hand was in part inspired also by a legacy, a little, little written about, little known legacy of the secession. One of their rather behind-the-scenes figures, a designer called Alfred Röller, was Essentially airlifted in a way out of the secession in nineteen oh two nineteen oh three after the Beethoven exhibition where Mahler had actually played a small part and was appointed as Mahler's stage design director for a very groundbreaking production of Tristan and Isolde which took place in Vienna in nineteen oh three and that was the first

• 49:39Speaker 06

  time when it's very well accounted for that Wagner's ideas about light and lighting effects that were part of the atmosphere of this perhaps one of his greatest works Tristan and Isolde were actually put into action by Röller and the music also had a sort of transformative element to it in the hands of Mahler which was then in a sense certainly influenced Schoenberg who saw that production of Tristan and Isolde and Alfred Röller unlike a lot of other of the figures we've been talking about didn't die in nineteen eighteen and went on in fact to become part of the theater reform movement which completely transformed

• 50:20Speaker 06

  the way drama and opera were presented also on behalf of other figures like Richard Strauss.

• 50:26Speaker 05

  Was there a sense which other cities, artists in other cities were saying we've got to get to Vienna to join in this great thing, we're being left behind?

• 50:33Speaker 06

  I think I'd like to think there were and certainly the secessionists were seen by British artists in the arts and crafts movement and by critics across Europe as being at last having kind of woken up from a deep slumber as taking part in modern art. And what fascinated some of the critics and writers of their work and also who actually were invited to the exhibitions to write about them, the reviewers, was the strange term, a German term, Stimmung, which in fact Wagner uses a lot in his written works, artwork of the future and music and drama to convey the

• 51:13Speaker 06

  Affect of not only the musical, music drama, but the affect of what he wanted to create on the stage, which he did eventually in Bayreuth. This idea that the artwork and the Klimt portraits and these exhibitions created something called stimmung, a highly prized aesthetic element of effect, was the prize that they'd been reaching for across all of these arts in music, drama and the theatre.

• 51:44Speaker 04

  There's an interesting legacy of the secession, which is a kind of worry about commercialising art. And that goes right back to the time of the secession itself, where there were phenomena that people referred to as the false secession. The leaking of secessionist ornament and style into mass-produced objects of everyday use, of fabrics and furniture and dishes and things like that, posters, advertising. That was very, very common right from the very beginning. And you still see it as a way of kind of undermining what the secession was doing or seeing it as somehow superficial, the fact that it had that reach.

• 52:24Speaker 05

  I know this is repeating to a certain extent what we did earlier, but I think it deserves maybe a bit more attention. You tell me, the relationship between the secession and antisemitism.

• 52:33Speaker 06

  Right. As I said earlier, the secession themselves, unlike the musicians that Mark has mentioned, Schoenberg and Mahler and Zemlinsky, of course, who was Schoenberg's brother-in-law and who was partly helpful in helping Schoenberg come to his kind of musical compositions, were Jewish-born, even if assimilated. And the main Jungveen, who were already sort of pushing the boundaries of what was possible in a highly controlled society, where polythes and sexuality and gender were highly topical issues, were also mainly Jewish-born.

• 53:14Speaker 06

  Schnitzler particularly, Hugo von Hoffmannsthal, who was a child prodigy poet, who was also Jewish-born, who ended up again writing.

• 53:24Speaker 06

  Working with Richard Strauss and writing libretti for some of his important operas. I think one way of looking at all of this, this sort of swirling atmosphere of antisemitism and indeed misogyny, is to look at the writings of not perhaps Freud at this time, but of a young man called Otto Weininga, who in 1902 published a thesis called Geschlecht und Charakter, which is Sex and Character, which was highly controversial but also taken quite seriously and widely circulated in cultural circles in Vienna, which essentially elided the demise of masculinity and the sort of state of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was

• 54:07Speaker 06

  blamed on the way in which irrational women undermined the rationality of men. And then he managed to elide the feminization of culture, also blamed it on not only women but the Jewish population, who were also feminizing the culture and society. And even Freud gave some credence to these ideas. So around the secession, we have this kind of extraordinary, these contested ideas about both the woman question and the Jewish question.

• 54:35Speaker 04

  I could just come in briefly on that. There's this phrase that circulates too, isn't there? La gueule juive. It's a French phrase that gets, for some reason, used in the French Jewish taste to label what the secession was doing. So that was a way of, in a way, identifying these non-Jewish artists with their Jewish patrons because they were serving a so-called Jewish taste, which was obviously a kind of antisemitic idea. The other way in which you see antisemitic tropes come in, in a rather indirect way, is by the identification of the building as having eastern roots.

• 55:16Speaker 05

  Which building?

• 55:17Speaker 04

  The secession building itself, yeah.

• 55:20Speaker 05

  By eastern, what do they mean?

• 55:21Speaker 04

  Well, it was called things like a Mahdi's tomb or an Assyrian convenience, for instance. It was, the eastern idea, I think, comes from the way that the building couldn't be pinned down to any particular historical root, and that was very deliberate on Albrecht's part, that he did not want the building to look like a copy of something from the past, the way that so many other buildings in the city did.

• 55:46Speaker 05

  We're coming to the end now. Would you like to go for the final word, Mark?

• 55:50Speaker 07

  I was just going to say, paradoxically, of course, I mean, you could hardly have a more Catholic name than Joseph Maria Albrecht. But, so I think it's actually quite a good indication of how even people who are clearly not Jewish in any sense can, that can be elided. Karl Lager, one of his most celebrated utterances was, "I decide who a Jew is", and that antisemitism that is not even necessarily always focused on Jewish people, but some, a amorphous idea of Jewish culture as a threat, I think, is perhaps the most insidious thing about Vienna at the time.

• 56:27Speaker 05

  Final word?

• 56:28Speaker 06

  Yes, I mean, I would agree with that. That extraordinary mix of paradoxes and opposing views on these issues. You asked a question, why Vienna? Vienna was unique over a period of that 10 to 15 years of having this kind of melting pot, this heated melting pot of ideas, underlined by all these other difficult political, antisemitic, misogynistic, sexual ideas, which caused this extraordinary outflowing of art and culture in so many different ways, music, literature, the arts.

• 57:03Speaker 05

  Well, thank you all very much.

• 57:05Speaker 04

  Diane, would you like some coffee?

• 57:08Speaker 06

  Are we still being recorded?

• 57:09Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 57:10Speaker 06

  Thank you, Eliane. I would love some coffee.

• 57:12Speaker 04

  Lesley? Could I have just a cup of hot water? Hot water? Yeah. Tea, please.

• 57:17Speaker 05

  Melvin? Tea, please.

• 57:19Speaker 00

  In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg was produced by Eliane Glaser, and it is a BBC Studios audio production for Radio 4. Hi, guys. This is Ryland, and I'm here to tell you about How to Be in Love from BBC Sounds. Now, as a single divorcee, I feel ready to find love again, but I want to see if there's a better way of going about it. In this series, I'm going to sit down with 12 incredible guests who are really going to help me rediscover.

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  What love truly means and how I can find it again. People like Stephen Fry, Louis Theroux, Matt and Emma Willis and many more. So join me on this journey as I explore how to be in love. Listen on BBC Sounds.

• 58:03Speaker 03

  Hello, Misha Glenny here. Before you listen to this episode, I wanted to share some exciting news. You can now watch this episode and all future episodes of In Our Time in full video. Just search for In Our Time on YouTube or watch episodes 28 days early by subscribing to the streaming service BBC Select in the US and Canada.