Writing in 1905, a certain “Lady Paget” explained the double layers of society in the Viennese culture in “Vanishing Vienna. Like Mahler and Freud, the Wittgenstein family was Jewish, placing them socially into a lower tier, regardless of talent and intellect. ”The limits of my language means the limits of my world” is a very simple statement that reminds the listener that the only mode we have of expressing ourselves is the words we utter.These words are inherently limiting and we must restrain ourselves from using language to speculate and then, in an act of circular reasoning, to believe our own magical thinking.” As he said in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”īut it is of Wittgenstein’s father, Karl, who is important to the Secession building. He lived most of his life at Cambridge teaching British students who listened to his pithy propositions with rapt attention. Equally famous for those of the twentieth century, searching for signposts leading to the new modern mode of understanding was the philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) who explored the outer edges of the most arid of the philosophical branches: analytic philosophy. This awareness of the mind, its vulnerability to trauma, its ultimate malleability, allowed an analyst to hear a patient’s speech acts as pointing elsewhere, to other territories, where the depths of her mind could be found. With his–again theoretical–division of the conscious mind into Id, Ego, and Superego, Freud provided not just his colleagues, but an entire culture to interpret and understand personal and political and social behavior. The Interpretation of Dreams was written very early–1899–at the edge of the new century. For Freud, language whether verbal or visual, emanated from a new theoretical part of the human mind: the unconscious. Meanwhile, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) practiced a new dark art, psychoanalysis, in which the doctor listened to the patient and analyzed the language, the words used. His symphonies live in the present tense, progressing on their nerves, each fearlessly unconventional and unpredictable.” Four of his symphonies have parts for choirs and vocal soloists, and his sound-world includes everything from the quietest, most intimate instrumental lines (an offstage posthorn solo in the Third Symphony) to the loudest noises that had ever been heard in a concert hall: in a passage at the end of the Seventh Symphony, a carillon of cowbells overwhelms the orchestral instruments, an inversion no other composer could have conceived of. He didn’t just prefigure musical moderns like Schoenberg and Stravinsky he was thinking and composing like an avant-garde composer. In his interesting 2010 article on Mahler in The Guardian Tom Service wrote, “Mahler’s embracing of musical and cultural difference marks him out not as the last gasp of Romanticism, but rather as a composer of the 20th and 21st centuries. He wrote nine symphonies and part of a tenth before his premature death, and, for their time, these compositions were highly experimental, making it difficult to find a musical consistency. Gustav Mahler (1880-1911) held the powerful post of Director of the Vienna State Opera and was the musical hinge between the past and the avant-garde future that was to come in music. Figures who would define modern life lived and worked in the same city at the same time, many of whom knew each other. Beneath this overlay of anachronistic social practices was a thriving counter-culture or modernism and resistance to what Karl Marx called the “dead hand of history.” This independent stratum teamed with men and women who were pioneers in intellectual and artistic achievements. The regime with its outmoded and ineffectual monarchy represented a long-dead past and the members of the court and the governing bodies of the Empire spoke in dead languages. One of the tropes of Fin-de-Siècle Vienna is the contradiction within the culture.
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