- Paperback: 352 pages
- Publisher: Viking; New edition edition (24 Sep 1981)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 014005667X
- ISBN-13: 978-0140056679
- Product Dimensions: 19.7 x 13 x 1.7 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
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Amazon Bestsellers Rank:
149,372 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #25 in Books > Travel & Holiday > Countries & Regions > Europe > Hungary
- #43 in Books > Travel & Holiday > Countries & Regions > Europe > Austria
- #62 in Books > History > Europe > Enlightenment, Revolution & Empire 1751-1900
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Product Description
Review
"A remarkable and unusual slice of history."
--Robert Kirsch, Los Angeles Times
"As lush, beguiling, and charming as an emperor's waltz"
--Publisher's Weekly
"1888/1889 is my favorite year in the life of 'the imperial City, ' and Frederic Morton's A Nervous Splendor is my favorite book about Vienna."
--John Irving, author of The World According to Garp
--Robert Kirsch, Los Angeles Times
"As lush, beguiling, and charming as an emperor's waltz"
--Publisher's Weekly
"1888/1889 is my favorite year in the life of 'the imperial City, ' and Frederic Morton's A Nervous Splendor is my favorite book about Vienna."
--John Irving, author of The World According to Garp
Product Description
On January 30, 1889, at the champagne-splashed hight of the Viennese Carnival, the handsome and charming Crown Prince Rudolf fired a revolver at his teenaged mistress and then himself. The two shots that rang out at Mayerling in the Vienna Woods echo still.
Frederic Morton, author of the bestselling Rothschilds, deftly tells the haunting story of the Prince and his city, where, in the span of only ten months, "the Western dream started to go wrong." In Rudolf's Vienna moved other young men with striking intellectual and artistic talents--and all as frustrated as the Prince. Among them were: young Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Theodor Herzl, Gustav Klimt, and the playwright Arthur Schnitzler, whose La Ronde was the great erotic drama of the fin de siecle. Morton studies these and other gifted young men, interweaving their fates with that of the doomed Prince and the entire city through to the eve of Easter, just after Rudolf's body is lowered into its permanent sarcophagus and a son named Adolf Hitler is born to Frau Klara Hitler.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Concentrating on just ten months of Viennese history between July, 1888, and May, 1889, Morton dissects the life of Vienna vertically, revealing its brilliance and its contrasts--its magnificence but ineffable sadness, its political gamesmanship but resistance to social change, its "correctness" of behavior but its anti-Semitism, and its patronage of the arts and sciences but its refusal to acknowledge true originality. He carefully selects details with which the modern reader can identify to create a full picture, both of the historical characters and the constricted settings in which they try to live and breathe.
Focusing on Crown Prince Rudolf as romantic hero, liberal thinker, and sensitive social reformer, Morton selects details which show Rudolf's resentment of his figurehead position, his lack of power to effect change, and his fears for the future of the monarchy. He is presented as a modern man trying to live within a fusty and stultifying environment. Also chafing against limitations on their creativity are artist Gustave Klimt, writers Arthur Schnitzler and Theodor Herzl, musicians Arnold Schonberg, Gustav Mahler, and Anton Bruckner, and psychiatrist Dr. Sigmund Freud, whose detailed stories of frustration run parallel with that of the Crown Prince and enhance it. Only Baroness Mary Vetsera, age 17 and full of life, is able to escape the bonds of Viennese "correctness," attracting Rudolf, having a brief affair with him, and eventually succumbing with him in a suicide pact at Mayerling.
Morton's scholarship and care for detail are obvious throughout, but he goes far beyond most other historians in his ability to involve the reader and make him empathize with the long-dead people in his book. In his hands the events at Mayerling become understandable--though no less sad. One can only wonder how history might have changed if Rudolf had been a partner with his father, Emperor Franz Joseph, rather than a powerless figurehead. Mary Whipple
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Vienna poised at the end of the 19th century. A striking mix of political ferment, intellectual creativity, gaiety and despair. Resident are an astonishing collection of people whose work would later touch not only Vienna, but resound world-wide: Freud in psychiatry, Mahler in music, Hertzl with the Zionist movement and Klimt in art. And at the center of political and social life of the city is its bright hope for the coming new century - Crown Prince Rudolf. Through 1888 the pace in the city builds to a fever pitch as Vienna begins its season of Carnival.
The other side of Vienna - hopeless poverty. A repressive regime. Catholic Vienna is rich in suicides - more per capita than other European cities. And not just simple suicides, but bizarre suicides staged with flair... The tightrope walker who leapt from a window with a rope attached to his neck, his note explaining "The rope was my life and the rope is my death." Morton tells us "he left a diary which consisted of paper scraps artfully tied together by a miniature rope."
On January 30th, Vienna's bright hope faded when the Crown Prince Rudolf capped the suicide season by killing his mistress, Mary Vetsera, and then himself at his hunting lodge, Mayerling. The hopes for the new century were gone. And then, just four months later, on April 20th, 1889 the harbinger of the new century, Adolf Hitler, was born. And none of us were the same again.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
A mesmerizing cover-to-cover experience that places the reader firmly in 19th-century Vienna. Cuts across rigid social strata, varieties of local peoples' experiences, current events and controversies, and human foibles in illuminating life and thought in a vibrant city over a century ago.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Seductive Snapshot of a Volatile Vienna
A Nervous Splendour is a history book written mainly in the present tense as a snapshot of the actions and activities of a select few aristocrats and intellectuals in 1888-89... Read more
Published on 21 Sep 2009 by MLA
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. Read more
Published on 18 Jun 1999
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