Speculating that Vienna’s ‘fin de siècle’ started with the stock market crash of 1873, followed by Johann Strauss’s ‘Die Fledermaus’ in April 1874, I started looking through the journals of the period in… Continue reading
Having pulled out one article about the advent of sound-Cinema from June 1929, I thought I would also translate this far more informative and entertaining review from the following month by Paul Goldmann,… Continue reading
While raking around my collection of digital clippings from the Neue Freie Presse, I found this fascinating article anticipating the advent of the ‘talky’ from June 15, 1929. The night before the premiere… Continue reading
Berta Zuckerkandl (in the accompanying photo), Eugenie Schwarzwald, Josephine and Franziska von Wertheimstein were just four of Vienna’s Jewish salonnière who could justifiably be referred to as the engines of fin de siècle… Continue reading
Max Reinhardt (1873-1943) was probably too much of a pathological optimist to have viewed as tragic the manner in which his career ended in Hollywood. According to Otto Friedrich’s entertaining and highly informative… Continue reading
There was an excerpt from a documentary on the internment of enemy aliens that was made by British Television (Channel 4), and shown in a 2004 exhibition I curated at Vienna’s Jewish… Continue reading
The most articulate dismantling of Wagner’s arguments in his 1869 tract ‘Jewishness in Music’ is provided by Eduard Hanslick in the ‘Neue Freie Presse’. I quote it at length in ‘Forbidden Music’. Hot… Continue reading
Political environments shape the arts. For this reason, it’s important to understand the debates and issues that surrounded and often engulfed both the Jewish and non-Jewish ‘Hitler-generation’ of composers. One of the most… Continue reading
Ernst Toch and Paul Hindemith were initially ‘Terrible Twins’, though Hindemith was the younger, bolder and more mischievous. His sense of music’s possible ‘usefulness’ was more idealistic and he saw in this idea… Continue reading
For those who read German and would appreciate both the aid of graphics and explanations of who is who, this – as yet unfinished – start to ‘The Last Days of Mankind’ (Die… Continue reading
