A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888-1889

The book is a snapshot of a year in the life of an imperial city as lived by disparate Viennese (including Freud, Klimt, Bruckner, Brahms, as well as Mary Vestera, "The Bird King," and the disturbed Crown Prince Rudolph).

Morton focuses heavily on Rudolph's frustrated life and its bizarre end in the murder/suicide pact with the beautiful socialite, Mary Vestera. Rudolph is a frustrated liberal confined to carrying out increasingly meaningless imperial functions -- making the rounds at receptions, smiling for official portraits, and otherwise participating in the empty pageantry that is life in the Habsburg Court and aristocratic Vienna. His democratic leanings are thwarted by his father, the omnipresent Emperor Franz Joseph, and his father's retinue. To make matters worse, Rudolph is trapped in a loveless marriage. Enter Mary Vestera, the beautiful Baronness who has set her sights on Rudolph. Her slavish devotion to the Crown Prince, and his desperate frustration with life, culminated in a gruesome(and scandalous) end at Rudolph's hunting lodge, Mayerling. The author portrays this sad story as a reflection of the malaise that infected the imperial city as the Austro-Hungarian Empire moved unknowingly toward its own demise.

"A Nervous Splendor" is one of those histories that reads like a novel. Frederic Morton utilizes firsthand accounts, anecdotal stories and wonderfully descriptive writing to bring to life a society long gone.

Morton's narrative does require the reader to have a bit of context about Austrian, and broader European, history. But even for the reader without this grounding, there's much here to appreciate. While he does seem to take author's liberties sometimes -- how can we really know all Crown Prince Rudolf was thinking in his final days? -- the image he paints of a crumbling society held together by gilt and glitter is remarkable. So too are the individual portraits: Rudolf, his father the Emperor, Freud, Klimt, Mahler, Brahms, and many more. There were many strains of genius at work in Vienna in 1889, building a new world under the looming threat of the old world's collapse, and Frederic Morton captures them.

The late Austrian author Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn once noted that World Wars I and II could properly be termed the second War of Austrian Succession, and that the most important long-term consequence of the First World War was the destruction of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Churchill, too, argued that it was the collapse of the Central European thrones that allowed the "Hitlerite monster" -- an Austrian monster Morton foreshadows in this book -- to crawl to power in the 1930s. In more ways than most of us appreciate, we still live in a world with deep roots in Old Vienna. Frederic Morton's interesting and insightful portrait of a key moment in that city's history illuminates both that era and ours in a fascinating new way. It's a book that will reward more than one reading.

The limitations paid off, however, mainly because Morton's selection of those few months enable him to cover a highly significant moment of Austrian history, but also to bring in a cast of characters that would normally have been only peripheral to the usual story of history. The reader, thus, gets a sense of not only the political tenor of the times, but also an insight into the medical (through the description of a young Sigmund Freud), the literary (Theodor Herzl and Arthur Schnitzler), the musical (Johannes Brahams and Anton Bruckner), the artistry (Gustav Klimt), and the everyday (a street-player known as the King of Birds). History is not a novel, so these lives do not intertwine as they would in a fiction, but each does bring an expanded understanding of what Vienna was like.

The central "story" to the book is Crown Prince Rudolf and his frustration with being heir to the Austrian empire with nothing to do except ceremonial duties. Morton depicts Rudolf as a freethinker who might have changed the course of history had it not been for Emperor Franz Joseph's wonderful health. Instead, Rudolf, in the course of nine months, goes from being a revolutionary who must have his writing published under someone else's name to a drug-addled conspirator, who, with his nubile, fashion-setting mistress, decides to commit double-suicide. The tragedy is heir-apparent (pause for groans to subside), as Rudolf would have likely been much more palatable to the subjects of Sarajevo than Franz Ferdinand.

I must admit to being fairly ignorant of European history (okay, I was schooled in America--I'm pretty ignorant of history, per se), so when Morton drops the fact halfway through A Nervous Splendor that Rudolf commits suicide, I was surprised. But such is the difference between history and fiction. Morton expects the reader to already be aware of the high points in his narrative, and seeks to illustrate the base of those icebergs (this is also why I don't feel guilty for discussing the suicide myself). He succeeds, and I now am quite interested in his follow-up to this book, a volume called Thunder at Twilight which depicts Austria right before World War I.