The Making of Music (Part 4) If you were trying to think of a
time and place to witness one of the great periods of musical
celebration and innovation, where would you direct your time
machine? You might think of Venice in the last decade of the
16th century (to watch Monteverdi’s arrival), or Vienna in the
1820s where you might run into Beethoven and Schubert in the
coffee houses, or Paris in the 1920s where jazz and neo-
classicism were working on each other. I wonder whether Vienna
at the turn of the century mightn’t be one of the most exciting
of all. Mahler was at the opera house. Bruckner had just died,
leaving his nine symphonies. Schoenberg was beginning to think
of how 20th-century music might be fashioned. In The
Interpretation of Dreams (1900) Freud was arguing that the inner
life could be revealed; in art Gustav Klimt and others were
‘seceding’ from the mainstream and Nietzsche’s gloom was
fashionable. This conservative city, temple of the Germanic
musical tradition, was prosperous and confident, t