ABSTRACT
If Paris, as Walter Benjamin once claimed, was the capital of the nineteenth century, Central Europe surely has good reason to consider itself the heartland of the Fin De Siècle. Characterized by the vivid and sometimes violent interplay of multi ethnic populations and the clash of retrenched traditionalism with absurdly accelerated modernization, Central Europe in the decades preceding 1914 exerted greater cultural impact on the world than ever before or since. The most expensive and public of the arts, architecture, enjoyed a particularly impressive efflorescence in Fin-De-Siècle Central Europe. This was linked to demographic and economic factors. Most striking in the musical world is the immense and, for nineteenth-century tastes, devastating influence of the works of Richard Wagner, who accustomed avant-garde audiences to dissonances, to mythological emplotments, and to the mesmerism of the Gesamtkunstwerk. On the Austro-Hungarian periphery, in music as in architecture, modernism was combined with the 'folkish' revivals to inspire works both modern and in some way ‘national’.
