The Vienna Secession

Summary

Podcast Summary: In Our Time – The Vienna Secession

Release Date: July 3, 2025

Introduction

In this episode of In Our Time hosted by Melvyn Bragg, the focus is on the Vienna Secession, a pivotal art movement that emerged in Vienna in 1897. Joined by experts Mark Berry, Professor of Music and Intellectual History at Royal Holloway University of London; Leslie Topp, Professor Emerita in the History of Architecture at Birkbeck University of London; and art historian Diane Silverthorne, Bragg delves into the origins, significance, and enduring legacy of this influential movement.

Background of the Vienna Secession

The Vienna Secession was founded in 1897 by Gustav Klimt and a group of radical artists seeking to break free from Vienna's conservative art institutions. In an environment rich with cultural ferment—spurred by coffee house debates, Freudian psychoanalysis, and the innovative music of Wagner and Mahler—the Secession aimed to unite fine art with applied arts, architecture, and design. Mark Berry explains, “[...] the Secession sought to bring together fine art and music with applied arts such as architecture and design” ([01:12]).

The Secession Movement's Vision

At its core, the Vienna Secession was a rebellion against the status quo of the established art institutions. Melvyn Bragg asks, “what do we mean in this context by the word secession?” prompting Mark Berry to succinctly define it as “breaking away from the status quo” ([04:48]). The movement emphasized total art, integrating various art forms to create a unified aesthetic experience. This vision was encapsulated in their journal, Ver Sacrum, and their iconic slogan, "To Art—To Art—To Freedom" ("Irrekunst Derkunst, Irre Freiheit") ([07:22]).

The Secession Building

One of the most tangible symbols of the Vienna Secession is its building, designed by Joseph Maria Laurencich Ulbrich. Leslie Topp elaborates on its architecture, describing it as “a one-story white and gold pavilion” with a facade reminiscent of a Greek temple and an innovative glass and steel exhibition hall that created a greenhouse effect ([17:47]). The building's distinctive Greek cross design and the use of light and space were revolutionary, fostering a new way of exhibiting art that was immersive and integrated.

Prominent Artists and Works

Gustav Klimt, the leader of the Secession, was central to the movement's artistic output. Diane Silverthorne highlights his work "Nuda Veritas" ([19:05]), a stark portrayal of a naked woman symbolizing truth, which challenged conventional portraiture with its naturalistic depiction and abstract background. This emphasis on symbolism and psychological depth was a hallmark of Secessionist art.

Music and Beethoven's Influence

Music played a crucial role in the Secession's cultural landscape. Melvyn Bragg discusses how Beethoven's legacy profoundly influenced Viennese composers like Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg's "Verklärter Ritter" (Transfigured Knight) was a groundbreaking chamber work that incorporated programmatic elements, reflecting the Secession's innovative spirit ([21:38]). The integration of music and visual arts was further exemplified in the 1902 Beethoven Exhibition, which featured Gustav Klimt's famous frieze depicting scenes inspired by Beethoven's compositions ([33:00]).

Social Context: Anti-Semitism and Patronage

The Vienna Secession operated within a complex social milieu marked by rising anti-Semitism. Alex von Tunzelman discusses how influential Jewish patrons, such as the Wittgenstein family, were essential in funding the Secession building despite the prevalent anti-Semitic attitudes in Vienna ([23:30]). This juxtaposition highlights the tensions between progressive artistic movements and conservative societal currents.

Psychoanalysis and Cultural Impact

The movement was also influenced by the burgeoning field of psychoanalysis. Melvyn Bragg notes the Secessionists' fascination with the unconscious and dreams, ideas popularized by Freud, which permeated their artistic expressions ([14:10]). Diane Silverthorne adds that architectural projects like Josef Hoffman's Perkersdorf Sanatorium embodied these psychological concepts through their design, promoting a cure for nervous ailments via modernist aesthetics ([38:18]).

Legacy of the Secession Movement

The Vienna Secession left a lasting impact on both art and exhibition design. Diane Silverthorne points out that the Secession pioneered the concept of the “white cube” gallery space, which has become the standard in modern art museums ([42:50]). Additionally, the movement's emphasis on integrated art forms and immersive exhibition environments prefigured contemporary trends in immersive and multimedia art installations.

Moreover, the Secession influenced future movements such as the Bauhaus, which similarly sought to unify art, architecture, and design. The legacy also includes the critical discourse that emerged as artists like Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele reacted against the Secession’s perceived elitism, pushing art in more expressionistic and raw directions ([44:56]).

Conclusion

The Vienna Secession was more than an art movement; it was a revolutionary stance against established norms, aiming to redefine the boundaries of art by embracing interdisciplinarity and modernism. Through innovative designs, influential artworks, and a commitment to integrating various art forms, the Secession profoundly shaped the cultural landscape of Vienna and left an enduring legacy that continues to resonate in contemporary art practices.

Notable Quotes

• Mark Berry ([04:48]): “Secession basically means breaking away from the status quo.”
• Melvin Bragg ([27:27]): “Beethoven stands in music almost like Shakespeare does for English literature...”
• Diane Silverthorne ([19:05]): “Klimt's 'Nuda Veritas' was the challenge of this painting, the naked truth, to try to get to what's behind."

Key Themes and Insights

• Interdisciplinary Integration: The Secession’s blending of fine arts, applied arts, and architecture created a holistic artistic environment.
• Innovation in Exhibition Design: Pioneering immersive and thematic exhibitions that influenced modern gallery practices.
• Cultural Tensions: Navigating between progressive artistic ideals and the conservative, often anti-Semitic, societal backdrop of Vienna.
• Psychological Depth: Incorporating psychoanalytic concepts into art and architecture, reflecting a deeper exploration of the human psyche.

This comprehensive exploration of the Vienna Secession offers listeners a nuanced understanding of its origins, cultural context, and lasting influence on the art world.

Transcript

[Melvin Bragg]

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the uk. Ben hadn't had a decent night's sleep in a month, so during one of his restless nights, he booked a package trip abroad on Expedia. When he arrived at his beachside hotel, he discovered a miraculous bed slung between two trees and fell into their best sleep of his life. You were made to be rechargeable.

[Alex von Tunzelman]

We were made to package flights and.

[Melvin Bragg]

Hotels and hammocks for less Expedia. Made to travel.

[Alex von Tunzelman]

This is history's heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War.

[Diane Silverthorne]

You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you.

[Alex von Tunzelman]

Join me, Alex von Tunzelman for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. BBC Sounds Music Radio podcasts.

[Mark Berry]

This is in our time from BBC Radio 4 and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you can you find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. In 1897, Gustav Klimt led a group of radical artists to break free from the cultural establishment of Vienna and found a movement that became known as the Vienna Secession. In the vibrant atmosphere of coffee houses, Freudian psychoanalysis, and the music of Wagner and Mahler, the Secession sought to bring together fine art and music with applied arts such as architecture and design. The Secessions Art Nouveau exhibition hall became a showcase for the international avant garde and a place to exhibit new ideas about freedom in both art and life. With me to discuss the Vienna Secession are Mark Berry, professor of music and intellectual history at Royal Holloway University of London, Leslie Topp, professor emerita in history of architecture at Birkbeck University of London, and the art historian, Diane Silverthorne. Diane, how and when did the Vienna Secession emerge as a movement?

[Alex von Tunzelman]

Just to go back to your introduction, the critical year was 1897. 1898. That was a year when Gustav Klimt, who had already created quite a reputation for himself as an artist, approved of, if you like, by the government of Vienna. And he'd already been decorating panels in some of the new buildings created as part of a big development mandated by the ruling Habsburg emperor. And he was a member. He had to be a member in order to exhibit of the only exhibiting body in Vienna simply called the Kunstlerhaus, or exhibition body, which in fact was a privately owned exhibition gallery, a new building which had also been built on what was called the Ringstrasse Ring street development, and that was in cahoots, if you like, with the Academy of Fine Arts. And both the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and the Kunstlerhaus was, were extraordinarily conservative about the kind of art that they promoted and that they exhibited. And this led through the years, in fact, leading up to 1987, from the early 1900s to 1890, to a great deal of frustration amongst some of the younger artists who also wanted careers, just like Gustav Klimt. So Klimt firstly tried to create a kind of breakaway group within the Kunstlerhaus to gain more freedoms to exhibit the kind of art they wanted. And when that was unsuccessful, he resigned from the Kunstler House after he'd already sort of gleaned support from a number of notable young architects, designers and other fine artists, and within two years had established the Secession as the leading avant garde art group of Vienna. He had these wonderful portraits, society portraits, which were also rather mysterious. And they were mysterious because they were not like portraits that were painted in order to illustrate the sort of personality of the sitter, were much more about a telling story about what was happening underneath the surface of Vienna through the decorative elements of the portraits. The faces and hands of the women, for example, were the only bits, if you like, of the portrait that looked real. And often the hands looked terribly tense, which again, was a feature of Gustav Klimt's art.

[Mark Berry]

Mark Berry, can I turn to you, first of all, what do we mean in this context by the word secession?

[Melvin Bragg]

I suppose we mean really seceding from official bodies in some sense and actually creating your own. And as Diane said, the Parisian love of controversy back to the Ancien regime. This had been something very much from the creation of what we used to call at least a bourgeois public sphere in the 18th century, and perhaps still do. But in terms of Viennese institutions, this is probably rather less so, but had been preempted in a way by a similar Secession in Munich. Before a Munich Secession, the Berlin Secession would happen shortly afterwards. So this was.

[Mark Berry]

Secession basically means breaking away from the status quo.

[Melvin Bragg]

Yes, exactly. And from those organizational structures. In terms of visual art, was there a guiding vision?

[Mark Berry]

We talk about coffee houses meeting together and so on, but was there a guiding vision about this? I mean, it seems more than when two or three were gathered together, doesn't it?

[Melvin Bragg]

Yes, I think so. And as Diane Said in these coffee houses. There's a wonderful book by Edward Timms on Vienna at this time, which has a diagram actually of circles and people who are a member of those circles and how they interact, almost mirroring the tables of the coffee houses in a way. And one of the great things about coffee houses at the time was they were clubs to which anyone could enter and read the newspaper, take the coffee, discuss at a much lesser price than gentlemen's clubs, which would have been the way one might do it in Pall Mall or something like that. And that tension, I think, between the individual and not so much the collective, because that's a perennial tension. You can hardly have society without that. But between those and those organizational structures, musicians were doing very much the same at the time. Arnold Schoenberg's early music was rejected by the Viennese musical institutions. He and his colleagues going on to found new musical institutions of themselves. They didn't actually call it a secession, but I think it's part very much of this Secession movement.

[Mark Berry]

How did they all come together as effective groups to overthrow an established gallery, an established way of making your way as an artist in those times. Quite a big thing to do. It wasn't just two or three people, but the strategies, what was happening.

[Melvin Bragg]

Yes, and in many ways quite a modern publicity movement. You know, they have a journal, Versacrum, Who's. Who's. Holy Spring.

[Mark Berry]

Holy Spring, yes.

[Melvin Bragg]

And you know, it's designed by one of their members, Joseph Hoffman. And the celebrated slogan that meets you when you enter the Secession house. Dead sight. Irrekunst Derkunst, Irre Freiheit. To this time, it's art to art, it's freedom. And I think that issue of timeliness is very important there. And, you know, is something of a modernistic emblem in that sense. The idea that art is appropriate to a time, rather than necessarily observing classical verities that continue from time to time, I think is part of what is going on here.

[Mark Berry]

It's still quite amazing watching it happen. These different architects, artists, all coming together with one idea and forcing it through. How do they do that?

[Melvin Bragg]

I'm not so sure it is simply one idea. I mean, there's the idea of seceding, I suppose, if that's what we're talking about. Yes, but there are many artistic ideas that are part of that. And it's more, as it were, an opposition. Well, almost having been forced out, because they need to be able to show their art.

[Alex von Tunzelman]

One of their great motives was to create an art which was specifically for Austria and some of the commentators at the time. Herman, who was a great supporter of the Secession, theatrical director and impresario, was writing great tracts and criticisms of the cultural environment of Vienna at the time, in terms of the visual arts, that Austria didn't have its own art. And the other guiding principle essentially, was to create new art which would rejuvenate life. So the importance really coming out of that whole Jugenstil Art Nouveau period was to bring together the fine arts, the applied arts and architecture to create some greater art form would not only be beautiful, but would beautify life. And those were two of the driving missions, if you like, of the Vienna Secession.

[Mark Berry]

Leslie, can you tell us more about what they were breaking away from?

[Alex von Tunzelman]

Yes.

[Diane Silverthorne]

So the group that they were all members of initially was called the Society of Visual Artists of Vienna, and as Diane mentioned, it went by a kind of nickname, as it were the Kunstler House, which is the name of the building where they exhibited the artist's house. That translates as it ran all the juries that would select artists for international exhibitions, and it put on its own exhibitions in its premises. So what started happening, especially in the 1890s, is there were a series of scandals where young artists submitted works to be exhibited as part of the Kunstlerhaus exhibitions, and these were rejected by the jury. There's one instance of a young artist called Josef Engelhardt, who'd been in Paris for a couple of years. He came back, he had a watercolor of a young female nude figure done in a naturalistic mode, so it looked like it could be a real woman rather than some kind of allegory. And she's picking cherries in an orchard. This was, as I say, rejected by the jury on both aesthetic grounds and moral grounds. It was seen as not suitable viewing material for the respectable audiences, especially female audiences of Vienna. And so people rallied around Engelhard and protested, and camps developed within the institution. The young ones and the old ones, the Jungen came to be this camp around which people rallied, looking for change within that institution initially, and then eventually they turned their backs on it.

[Mark Berry]

Was Vienna singular in having this Secession going on, or was it happening in other cities and other places? In a not dissimilar way, it was.

[Diane Silverthorne]

Happening in other places. So the Munich Secession was. A couple of years before, as Mark mentioned the Viennese Secession in their journal, they published a short blurb about why they had called it the Secession, and they referred to the Roman Republican phenomenon of secessio plebis, when the plebeian population withdrew from the city in about 495 B.C. onto the sacred mountain and left all the patricians to try to get by without them as a kind of ethical protest against the conditions in which they were being made to live. And so the Munich Secession initially, and then the Vienna Secession, pick up on this idea of a group that is named after the split and named after this kind of ethical stance that they're taking against the elites that they were subject to.

[Mark Berry]

Thank you very much. Can we go back to you for a moment, Mark? What was it about Vienna that made this such a potent movement?

[Melvin Bragg]

I think part of it is that there is a very engaged public there as well, that, you know, artists are really doing battle not only with institutions but also with sections of a hostile public and that, you know, that publicity makes good stories. Vienna at the time was a very febrile place politically, socially. I mean, it was an extremely multicultural city, for one thing.

[Mark Berry]

Why is that, do you think?

[Melvin Bragg]

It's the seat of a multicultural empire, Austria, Hungary, which has a huge influx of migration. For example, you know, Jewish people coming from Eastern Europe, but also from all parts of the empire, from Bohemia, from Hungary, from other parts of Europe as well. And they are partly coming because it is a city of art, of the arts in general. I mean, it has a very lengthy musical history in that sense. And there's this intermingling and that's attractive to young people, to young artists. But there are also very conservative institutions, as both Leslie and Diane were telling us, and they are sort of upholding those sort of classical verities we talked about. You know, for example, there's the Vienna School of Art History, very influential at the time. The debating ideas of what is beautiful, what is ugly, whether these are actually terms that in contemporary Vienna, that is, the Vienna around about 1900 even have any meaning anymore. This blurring of the ethical and the aesthetic is called into question, particularly as newer drives are being taken more into account, whether it be by writers, painters, musicians, particularly ideas of the unconscious, the truths that lie beneath the surface of the city and of the person.

[Mark Berry]

So you think that psychology has an important part to play in all this?

[Melvin Bragg]

Very much so. I mean, there's the preoccupation with dreams, for example. I mean, everybody, in a sense, has been preoccupied with dreams at some time or another. But it's very important. The idea that they are getting to a truth that is being conservative, sealed by reality, I think, is an extremely potent one at this time. And, of course, it's the Vienna out of which Freud emerges as well, one.

[Diane Silverthorne]

Of the really practical reasons why that was such a draw Vienna, for people in all these areas in the visual arts and beyond, was the education that was offered there. So the Academy of Fine Arts was the Imperial and Royal Academy of Fine Arts. And that was where, if you wanted to make it as an artist at the highest level, you sought to come and study, whether that was as a painter, sculptor or architect. So, for instance, there was an architecture kind of masterclass being run there by Otto Wagner, who's seen as the real progenitor of modern architecture in this period. And he has students from all over the Empire, the Czech lands, Poland, et cetera, studying with him Italy as well. And there's also another art school equally important, the School of Applied Arts and Industry, which was a great crucible for design. Innov and had two of the key Secession members, Joseph Hoffman and Colomann Moser, were very important professors there.

[Mark Berry]

Diane, can I come to you and then I'll come back to you. Lesley, let's talk about the Secession building, what it was and why it was so important and why it worked.

[Alex von Tunzelman]

Yes. So if we can imagine the Secessionists gathering round, as Malka said, not just mythical coffee tables and planning to create this exhibition building which was going to be radical in the way it was designed and the place where they could not only exhibit Austrian art, their own new art, but also bring artists from across Europe to exhibit. And there hadn't been much interest previously in bringing artists together. So they, amongst their membership, they kind of recruited two architects, one in particular, Joseph Maria Ulbricht, who was a Prix de Rome awarded architect and had also come up through Otto Wagner School. And this incredibly talented architect started to create a one story white and gold pavilion which the front of the building was strikingly different in its simplicity and whiteness, if you like, looked rather like and was often compared to a Greek temple. And the top of the, the back end, if you like, where the exhibition hall was created, essentially used new materials like glass and steel to create this extraordinary greenhouse effect on the back of the building. So that the main hall, the main exhibition hall was flooded with light. Not only that, it was also, as I said, utterly simplified. There were large areas of just empty white wall at the front of the building inlaid with golden flattened decoration. It had a golden dome of laurel leaves, which again had symbolic and allegorical meaning. Inside the hal, although it was a very specific format, the shape of the building was in a Greek cross design. There were no barriers, apart from very slim pillars around which to create exhibition Design. So one of the great talents, if you like, that several of the leading Secessionists brought to bear on this amazingly versatile space was the development of exhibition design, which essentially meant that they could create a new way of looking at exhibitions that have really never been seen in that way before in Europe.

[Mark Berry]

Can I come back to you for a moment? Did it have a distinctive drive, this place that they'd built, this white palace?

[Diane Silverthorne]

It was highly distinctive and highly controversial at the time. It might be worth saying that there was an initial site for the building right on the Ringstrasse. Diane mentioned this Ringstrasse boulevard built on the old city walls, which was the big project of monumental historicist revivalist architecture from the 1860s onwards. They initially wanted to build their building right there, which is interesting, and that would have really made quite a splash. But the land that they were hoping to be granted was controlled by the Defense Ministry, which complained that it would bring the land values down in the surrounding area. And as a result, they had to find another spot. So they end up in a kind of outer zone of the Ringstrasse. Really interesting site, facing the St. Charles church, which is a very important baroque church, also very white, with a very prominent dome. And some of the visual language of the building is a much modernized kind of nod to the St. Charles church. It also has all around it the big vegetable market of Vienna, which is still a very famous place.

[Mark Berry]

Can we get your people now? Which artists were prominent and why were they prominent there?

[Diane Silverthorne]

So I think the first one, really, to start with, is Klimt. And he of course, is the leader of the group. But he's also extremely important as an artist, not just as someone that people rally around. One way into this is to think about two particular works that he creates right in this first couple of years of the Secession. One of them was called Nuda Veritas, the Naked Truth. And like a lot of his works, it experimented with format. So it was 2 meters high, this work, and only 50 centimeters wide. So a very tall, narrow format, very unconventional. It depicted a naked woman who was supposed to be a kind of allegory of truth. But what was so unusual and really very jarring to people about this painting is that she seemed to be a real woman. She was depicted in this naturalistic mode. Even her pubic hair was shown, which would have been completely unheard of in allegorical female nudes, which were, of course, very common before that. And she had coal rimmed eyes, a red mouth, luxuriant red hair, in a kind of pre Raphaelite mode. And she's depicted right up against the picture plane with a abstracted background, zones of abstract color with some quite abstracted ornamentation, not any kind of recognizable space. She's in. It's almost like a kind of graphic art rendition, the background. And she's holding up a mirror to the viewer, not for herself to look in, but for the viewer to look in to. And Mark mentioned this search for the truth in Vienna, this idea that you're constantly trying to get away from surfaces and into something behind. And this was the, the challenge of this painting, the naked truth, to try to get to what's behind. Surf.

[Alex von Tunzelman]

This is history's heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War.

[Diane Silverthorne]

You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you.

[Alex von Tunzelman]

Join me, Alex von Tunzelman for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.

[Mark Berry]

Mark, let's turn to music Now. There were a great number of important composers associated with the movement. What were their most influential works? Maybe you just want to concentrate on one or two of them.

[Melvin Bragg]

Well, I think I would start with Schanberg, whom I mentioned before, who unlike many so called Viennese composers, was actually Viennese, was born in Vienna. Vienna has a great history of importing composers whom it reveres and actually ignoring those who come from Vienna itself. Schubert being another example. But Schoenberg was also unusual in that not that he was a Jewish composer, but that his background was not a wealthy Jewish background at all. He was from rather, as it were, lower middle class stock and didn't have the education that many of his Jewish and other peers was. I mean, he essentially taught himself. But a work more or less constant with the Secession in many ways would be his string sextet, Transfigured Knight or Fickledenacht in the German. And it's very interesting in many ways, partly because it is more or less, I think, the first and may even be the first piece of chamber music that uses what we call a program that is a text from outside music, a poem which it sets more or less verse to verse, but only in music. And the text is not unclimt like in that sense. It's a text by the poet Richard Daemel and is the story of a woman going into a forest. She's married someone, she was not in love with. She meets a man and bears his child. And this isn't a tragedy. This isn't some horrible situation where everything is screwed up. It's presented as natural, as a transfiguring moment.

[Mark Berry]

You mentioned the word Jewish there. A lot of this was subsidized by Jewish patrons, am I right?

[Melvin Bragg]

Yes, I mean by patrons of all sorts. But certainly there were a lot of wealthy patrons who were Jewish and in many ways tended actually to be rather more artistically adventurous than the sort of institutions the Secession was rebelling against.

[Alex von Tunzelman]

Yes. Just to go back to that earlier question about the Secession building and how it was established. Leslie very well described that it. It had this extraordinary position on land which was given to them by the state in the end by the government. But it wouldn't have come into being unless the Wittgenstein family hadn't funded it almost entirely. So Carl Wittgenstein did fund the Secession building. Again, rather like one of these very wealthy industrialists, assimilated Jewish families, second generation, who were passionately interested in driving forward and supporting art and architecture into the modern period.

[Mark Berry]

Was there any sense that there was friction between that and an anti Semitic feeling in the city?

[Alex von Tunzelman]

Anti Semitism in Vienna was a way of life by 18.

[Mark Berry]

What does that mean?

[Alex von Tunzelman]

Well, I will explain what I mean if we just go back to 1897, 1898. A number of things happened that year which is a way of getting into this whole subject of, of the sort of swirling, institutionalized, one might say, anti Semitism. Gustav Mahler was appointed as director of the Vienna Court Opera. But before he was allowed to take his position up, he had to convert from his Jewish born origins to Catholicism. Nevertheless, he was still, as he went through the years, he was both applauded but also criticized and vilified by the institutionalized anti Semitic press. In the same year the mayor of Vienna, a figure called Karl Weyger, who was the Christian Socialist Party, was elected as mayor of Vienna on what might describe as an anti Semitic ticket, borrowing from German nationalism, which was also a prevailing politics, if you like, of the time, led by a politician called George Schoenera. So we have this very strange mix around the time that the Secession was established of this sense of liberal enlightenment which was portrayed by the emperor and the way that he created these amazing buildings of the Ringstrasse to represent the arts, culture and universities in all sorts of different historical styles. And we have this sort of driving anti Semitism also partly caused by what Mark referred to earlier, which was the hundreds and hundreds of people who were bound, if you like, from. For Vienna, which became very, very crowded, in fact, and very polyglot by the end of the century from across the whole of the empire. And going back to Leslie's example of Gustav Klimt being our sort of leading exemplar of what was going on in the art world. The Secessionists themselves, the art. The artists of the Secession, unlike most of the musicians who were successful at the time, were themselves not Jewish. So there wasn't a sense that the Secession was established and also joined in, if you like, the sort of anti Semitic movements and tendencies. But of course, as with the Secession House, we also have Klimt's art and also the art of other protagonists of the Secession, the applied arts, as the most important patrons who helped to create an environment in which modern art, Klimt's very important portraits of the wealthy wives of some of the industrialists were created essentially using and being supported by Jewish circles, if you like, middle class circles.

[Mark Berry]

Thank you very much. Can I switch to music now with Beethoven and the influence he had, it was massively important in the city. Why? What was the consequence of that?

[Melvin Bragg]

Beethoven, I mean, it's impossible to imagine the history we have of 19th century music without him. He stands in music almost like Shakespeare does for English literature in that sort of sense. And certainly Richard Wagner saw them as similar progenitors of his art, which his music, drama, which sought to combine the two. But Beethoven's art was mostly not musicodramatic, it was instrumental, it was orchestral. So it had something in a sense for everyone. Wagner and his Viennese disciples claimed the Beethoven of the ninth Symphony, who was honoured at the succession. Mahler arranged music from the ninth Symphony when the word enters the symphonic realm. And that was part of. But also most of Beethoven's music fit in very well at the official institutions. The Musikverein fit very well with the Brahms strand of 19th century music. And Viennese musical culture at the time had these two factions broadly, one might say progressive Wagnerian, at least in aesthetic terms, not necessarily. I mean, often highly questionable in political terms and more conservative, Brahmsian in the sense. And Brahms was another of those adopted sons of Vienna. So everyone could claim something from Beethoven. And Schoenberg was one of those composers who were really the first composer to try to reconcile those two Beethovenian strands, those of Wagner and of Brahms. And that was in a sense what his early music was all about.

[Alex von Tunzelman]

As Mark has said, and as you've spotted, Beethoven cast a hugely long shadow across the whole of the century in Vienna in various ways. The myth of Beethoven wandering the streets of Vienna in the early part of the 19th century, looking deep in thought. He was by then, you know, he's often pictured actually in graphic designs, in graphic illustrations as the man with the hands behind his back, looking very stern, walking through the streets of Vienna. And people felt that this sort of magical moment, he was listening because of his deafness, he was able to hear the sort of spheres of music coming from space almost. And he was also quite a champion ultimately of Napoleon until Napoleon turned rotten. And even after he died and his funeral was attended by thousands and thousands of people, his music was still being puzzled by, even though people knew it was extraordinarily innovative. And particularly the Night Symphony, when the voice and the poetry of Schiller was used for this great chorus. And if I just might add, in 1902, thanks to a promise by a then a very well known Leipzig artist called Max Klinger, who is not very well known now, but was an extremely important artist at the time, who also adored and loved music and was very knowledgeable, the Secessionists were promised his monument to Beethoven, which he sculpted out of marbles, this figure of Beethoven sitting on an articulated bronze throne. And he had promised the Secession that when this extraordinary monument was completed, they would have first dibs, if you like, at exhibiting it. So bringing together the kind of mythological status of Beethoven and the extraordinary flexibility of the Secession house, they created one of their most, if not their most famous exhibition is the 1902 Beethoven Exhibition, which was entirely devoted to the spirit and ideas of Beethoven.

[Mark Berry]

Georgia coming here.

[Melvin Bragg]

And I think something that was attractive about Beethoven as well as, you know, the glowering images of the Romantic artist we see in the paintings and so on. I mean, he looks just like he ought to, was the idea that he had composed for posterity, which is a semi fiction in some ways. But his late music and late Beethoven, I think became an idea in itself, particularly the Beethoven of the late string quartets, which was seen as not understood by the publics of their time, perhaps not even understood by the public 70, 80 years later. But they were considered to be very difficult, introverted music written by a deaf person. And that trope in Beethoven discussion keeps coming up again. I mean, it's a very questionable one in many ways. But he certainly wasn't writing for the instruments of the time in the sense that he could hear them. He was having to resort to his imagination, to what he thought things sounded like. And when you have his late piano Sonata the so called Hammer Clavier Sonata. It's more or less unplayable on any piano, but it's pretty much impossible to play on a piano at the time. Some of the tempo markings are simply impossible really to observe in performance or it becomes a mess when they did so. There's something cultish about this, the idea of someone who was hurling his lance into the future as another of his disciples with very strong Vienna as aspect to his history. Franz Liszt described his music so that avant gardism, I think is very important in the idea of Beethoven, which is.

[Alex von Tunzelman]

Why he was such an attractive figure in a sense for the Secession, because they were aligning themselves with this extraordinary avant garde characteristic of Beethoven.

[Diane Silverthorne]

An important manifestation of that in the Beethoven exhibition is this very famous frieze by Gustav Klimt that he paints around four walls of the main exhibition room that tells a story of this piece of music and combines figures of great kind of idealism and beauty with very grotesque and quite irrational figures in this medley that was really fascinating to people at the time and is still really fascinating. People can still see this frieze in the Secession house where it's been moved down into a basement room. And it's a. An amazing work of art that as I say, has. Is unique in Klimt's work in being a story told over space.

[Mark Berry]

While we're with you, could you talk about architecture at the time?

[Diane Silverthorne]

Yes. So architecture was really central to what the Secession was doing, which is important because that's unusual. You don't get that, for instance, in French avant garde movements where you have painters joining together with architects and designers. It was something that was characteristic of this Central European milieu where there was seen to be a lot of shared ideals among.

[Mark Berry]

Why do you think it took place so strongly in that area?

[Diane Silverthorne]

I think this has a lot to do with the legacy of the Ringstrasse we've talked about a few times. Suddenly over a couple of decades, they needed to build these monumental buildings for the opera, the art history museum, the parliament, the City hall, the university, the Imperial Theater. And all of those were total works of art. They were combinations of architecture, sculpture, and they were heavily decorated inside with painting as well. And so that idea that the three arts work very much together had an older legacy in Vienna that is really baked into institutions like the Kunsterhaus. And so it's not surprising that it is then these three aspects, plus the very, very important role of modern design coming into it as well.

[Alex von Tunzelman]

Mark has mentioned to every age it's Art to artist freedom, which was written in relief in gold lettering, very modernistic gold lettering. Something else that the Secession were very able to do. Drive lettering as a decorative art form into the future. But underneath that sort of motif, which is as close as we can get to some kind of manifesto also there are the three gold heads in relief of three gorgons. And their snake like a hare is essentially guarding three architecture, painting and the plastic arts. So it was always the intention of the Secession to bring together the three arts into this new age.

[Mark Berry]

Did women have any place in this movement?

[Alex von Tunzelman]

The Secession was a sort of club. There were Secession members who were Austrian and there were also what were called foreign members who were artists from around Europe, prominent artists who also supported the Secession movement, as they had done when the Munich Secession got going in 1892. And when the Secession was formed, there were no female artists members. So what's come down through the last hundred years really is not a story of women artists who participated in the Secession exhibitions or who gained a reputation anything like even some of the applied artists artists in the Secession. On the other hand, there were female artists who did exhibit not only within the Secession building, but also in two major exhibitions that were called the Kuntschau exhibitions, which simply again means just art show, which were created in 1908 and 1909 when Klimt and what were pejoratively called the decorator artists, the painters and decorators, actually left the Secession house and created two magnificent self standing pavilion like art exhibitions in the center of Vienna, where the same figures who were dominating the Secession were also leading a whole new way of teaching at the Applied Arts School, the Kunstgewerber Schule, where they were appointed to rejuvenate teaching. And a lot more women were then being trained at the Applied Arts School and exhibited in these two great exhibitions in 1908 and 1909.

[Mark Berry]

Mark, can we now turn to yet something else that was going on there, which is psychoanalysis? What part did that play in the general melee or organized well organized? Wasn't chaos organization of artists pushing forward on apparently a united front?

[Melvin Bragg]

In some ways, yes. I mean, I think it's certainly part of what is going on here. Although I think in some senses we perhaps exaggerate the importance because Freud has been so foundational to 20th century thought and culture thereafter that we see him perhaps as more central to the life of Vienna at the time than perhaps he was. But nonetheless the great interest in the unconscious, in perhaps in the idea also that even if one buries down to what is at the bedrock of human existence. One might still find a lot, one might never actually get to truth at all. And that that might be the sort of riddle we have to deal with is, of course, a very rich idea and one, I think, that is perhaps particularly amenable to artistic expression in all sorts of spheres.

[Diane Silverthorne]

Leslie I agree with Mark that it's hard to draw a direct line between what's happening in the Secession and psychoanalysis particularly. But there was a lot of interest in other approaches to what were called nervous ailments at the time. There was a huge amount of writing and indeed of lived experience of what we would now refer to as depression, anxiety, disorders of the nerves of various kinds. And we can see a direct connection when we look at a building that Josef Hoffman, one of the key architect members of the secession, builds in 1904, which is called the Perkersdorf Sanatorium. It was built in a very beautiful area in the Vienna woods, on the outside outskirts of Vienna. It's a white, cubic, highly advanced, innovative building in which one was supposed to live a very regimented, simple life, surrounded by beautiful objects of again, highly simplified, technologically advanced design. And there you would experience a cure for. For the nervous ailment that was bothering you. Of course, this was a bit like Freud's psychoanalysis. This was really only for people that could afford that kind of treatment. There was also a large state psychiatric hospital designed by Otto Wagner.

[Alex von Tunzelman]

If we go back a few years again to the early 1890s, Arthur Schnitzler, one of the most important members of the. What were called Jung Wien, which were the literary figures who in a sense predate the beginning of the Secession, had already started writing the most extraordinary stream of consciousness novellas, if you like. One called Lieutenant Gustel, which is about a sort of senior soldier who spends the whole of the night wandering around the Ringstrasse trying to argue in his own mind about whether or not he's been insulted and whether or not he should commit suicide. And Arthur Schnitzler was latterly seen again. We look at the forthcoming sort of shadow of Freud as a kind of precursor to. Freud recognized him, in fact, in his writings, as a precursor of having an understanding and exposing sexual and other social tensions through his stories, very much as Freud would later do through the talking cure. So in a sense, there was already this fascination. There was also hugely sort of repressed idea about sexuality, particularly amongst younger generation. And that was also part of the context in which the story Secession came into being, if you like.

[Mark Berry]

Can you talk a bit about the legacy of the Secession, starting with you, Diane.

[Alex von Tunzelman]

One of the important legacies of the Secession goes back to this whole idea of the applied arts coming together to create some greater whole. And I suppose you could also trace that into the 20th century by looking at the Bauhaus, for example, which was not directly inspired by the Secession, but some of those principles of the applied art were certainly brought forward into modernity. And I think the second thing is also the way they design their exhibitions to in a sense, take ideas, strangely enough, which in fact were written about by Max Klinger, the artist of the central feature of the Beethoven exhibition, this idea of a unified design inside the Secession house to create an atmosphere, a theme exhibition was completely new and completely different. And we might look at that they actually called it a particular name, Raumkunst, or spatial art, which then became known as the new art of exhibition design. And we might look back to some of those succession exhibitions, particularly the 1902 Klinger Beethoven exhibition, where a prevailing environment was created and the audience, in a sense, were manipulated through a series of. Of passages and spaces in order to be immersed in the art itself. And one could say that's a precursor of immersive art, which is one of the buzzwords of the 21st century.

[Diane Silverthorne]

The notion of the white cube, which you hear about as the kind of dominant form of art viewing, especially of modern art in museums today, where you have completely white walls, white ceiling, white floor and artworks isolated in a large white plain. And so that you're supposed to be able to commune with those artworks and really get absorbed in them, that has its roots in the Vienna Secession, especially in some of the slightly later exhibitions. 1904, 1905. Koloman Moser designed the exhibition of Klimt's work that they showed around that time. Amazingly forward looking, if you see the images of it.

[Melvin Bragg]

One thing that interests me about the Secession now, as it were, I mean, quite apart from the fact that it still exists, there are still Secession exhibitions and so on. Now, we shouldn't think it's entirely historical. But leaving that slightly aside, the idea of the Vienna Secession as a moment and as a visual moment seems now to be almost the primary visual idea of what Vienna as a city is. This idea of Vienna, city of dreams, you think immediately of a Klimt picture. And this art that in many ways was trying to dig beneath the surface has almost paradoxically or dialectically, I suppose one might say, has become. The surface of it has actually become the most alluring thing. And that has endured as an idea of what Vienna is.

[Mark Berry]

Well, thank you all very much. Thanks to Mark Berry, Leslie Topp and Diane Silverthorne. Next week, the evolution of Lungs. Thank you for listening.

[Diane Silverthorne]

And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

[Mark Berry]

Lesley, did you not get time to say something you'd like to say?

[Diane Silverthorne]

I think it's important to think about what comes directly after this kind of heroic moment of secession, because that's part of its legacy as well. There was a. A really interesting backlash really against the Secession that pointed to the way that the Secession was quite implicated in elite power structures at the time, in kind of providing decorative objects for the interiors of wealthy people and so on. And so you get artists like Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele, also two very well known Viennese artists of this very slightly later period, who can be seen as developing an artistic language that's much harsher, that's expressionist, in a much more rough edged way, both aesthetically and in terms of the vision that underlies it. And the same thing happens in architecture. In fact, Adolph Loos is a great friend of those two artists. He's an architect who from the very beginning is highly critical of the Secession as kind of spending too much time on surface. And his friend Carl Kraus, the cultural critic, has the fantastic saying, the more exquisite the packaging, the more dubious the content. And so that kind of gets across that, that razor sharp critical idea that comes to the fore in Vienna, that that Ludwig Wittgenstein, the philosopher, is also associated with. And that can be seen as a legacy of the Secession in that they were kind of bracing themselves against the Secession and developing the modern in a different direction.

[Mark Berry]

Can I come back to you, Mark?

[Melvin Bragg]

Yes, and I was going to say the names Leslie mentions there, for example, Kokoschka, Schiele and Karl Krauss, these were all people Shadberg knew very well as well. And Schoenberg's very interesting in that he was a painter as well. He was an exhibited painter. And Kandinsky thought very highly of him, asked him to contribute to the Blauer Reiter, the Blue Rider Almanac and so on. And the idea of the arts coming together, which many of these people talk about, they speak about music as if it were visual art. And the other way around, Schoenberg, in his opera of this time, the Hand of Fate, actually devised something that he called a color crescendo, which was to be part of the staging. It's very much a multimedia idea in which the orchestra and the staging work together visually and musically, and you really can't dissolve them. And one certainly sees that sort of influence in Kandinsky's art as well.

[Alex von Tunzelman]

To pick up on that very important point of Schoenberg's circle, which was very much the Krause Circle. Adolf Loos Schoenberg's Die Gluckliche Hand was in part inspired also by a legacy, a little, little written about, little known legacy of the Secession. One of their rather behind the scenes figures, a designer called Alfred Roller, was essentially airlifted in a way out of the secession in 1902, 1903, after the Beethoven exhibition, where Mahler had actually played a small part and was appointed as Mahler's stage design director for a very groundbreaking production of Tristan and Isolde which took place in Vienna in 1903. And that was the first time when it's very well accounted for that Wagner's ideas about light and lighting effects that were part of the atmosphere of this, perhaps one of his greatest works, Tristan and Isolde, were actually put into action by Roller. And the music also had a sort of transformative element to it in the hands of Mahler, which was then in a sense certainly influenced Schoenberg, who saw that production of Tristan Isolde. And Alfred Roller, unlike a lot of other of the figures we've been talking about, didn't die in 1918 and went on in fact to become part of a theatre reform movement which completely transformed the way drama and opera were presented. Also on behalf of other figures like Richard Strauss, was there a sense in.

[Mark Berry]

Which other cities, artists in other cities, were saying, we've got to get to Vienna to join in this great thing, we're being left behind?

[Alex von Tunzelman]

I think I'd like to think there were, and certainly the Secessionists were seen by British artists in the Arts and Crafts movement and by critics across Europe as being at last having kind of woken up from a deep slumber as taking part in modern art. And what fascinated some of the critics and writers of their work, and also who actually were invited to the exhibitions to write about them, the reviewers, was the strange term, a German term, Stimung, which in fact Wagner used to a lot in his written works, artwork of the future and music and drama, to convey the affect of not only the music drama, but the affect of what he wanted to create on the stage, which he did eventually in Bayreuth. This idea that the artwork and that Klimt's portraits and these exhibitions created something called Stimmel A highly prized aesthetic element of effect was the prize that they'd been reaching for across all of these arts in music, drama and the theatre.

[Diane Silverthorne]

There's an interesting legacy of the Secession, which is a kind of worry about commercializing art. And that goes right back to the time of the Secession itself, where there were phenomena that people referred to as the false Secession. The leaking of Secessionist ornament and style into mass produced objects of everyday use of fabrics and furniture and dishes and things like that. Posters, advertising. That was very, very common right from the very beginning. And you still see it as a way of kind of undermining what the Secession was doing, or seeing it as somehow superficial, the fact that it had that reach.

[Mark Berry]

I know that this is repeating to a certain extent what we did earlier, but I think it deserved maybe a bit more attention. You tell me the relationship between the Secession and anti Semitism.

[Alex von Tunzelman]

Right. As I said earlier, the Secession themselves, unlike the musicians that Mark has mentioned, Schoenberg and Mahler and Zemlinski, of course, who was Schoenberg's brother in law and who was partly helpful in helping Schoenberg come to his kind of musical compositions, were Jewish born, even if assimilated. And the main Jung Wien, who were already sort of pushing the boundaries of what was possible in a highly controlled society where politeste and sexuality and gender were highly topical issues were also mainly Jewish born Schnitzler, particularly Hugo von Hoffmanstahl, who was a child prodigy poet, who was also Jewish born, who ended up again writing, working with Richard Strauss and writing libretti for some of his important operas. I think one way of looking at all of this, this sort of swirling atmosphere of anti Semitism and indeed misogyny, is to look at the writings of not perhaps Freud at this time, but of a young man called Otto weininger, who in 1902 published a thesis called Geschlechtung Karaktur, which is Sex and character, which was highly controversial but also taken quite seriously and widely circulated in cultural circles in Vienna, which essentially elided the demise of masculinity. And the sort of state of the Austro Hungarian Empire was blamed on the way in which irrational women undermined the rationality of men. And then when he managed to allyed the feminization of culture, also blamed it on not only women, but the Jewish population who were also feminizing the culture and society. And even Freud gave some credence to these ideas. So around the Secession we have this kind of extraordinary, these contested ideas about both the woman question and the Jewish Question.

[Diane Silverthorne]

I could just come in briefly on that. There's this phrase that circulates too, isn't there? La Gout Juif. It's a French phrase that gets, for some reason used in the French Jewish taste to label what the Secession was doing. So that was a way of, in a way identifying these non Jewish artists with their Jewish patrons because they were serving a so called Jewish taste, which was obviously a kind of anti Semitic idea. The other way in which you see. See anti Semitic tropes come in in a rather indirect way is by the identification of the building as having Eastern roots.

[Mark Berry]

Which building?

[Diane Silverthorne]

The Secession building itself. Yeah.

[Mark Berry]

By Eastern, what do they mean?

[Diane Silverthorne]

Well, it was called things like a Mahdi's tomb or an Assyrian convenience, for instance. It was. The Eastern idea, I think comes from the way that the building couldn't be pinned down to any particular historical route. And that was very deliberate on Ulbricht's part that he did not want the building to look like a copy of something from the past the way that so many other buildings in the city did.

[Mark Berry]

We're coming to the end now. Would you like to go for the final word? Mark?

[Melvin Bragg]

I was just going to say, paradoxically, of course, I mean, you could hardly have a more Catholic name than Joseph Maria Albrecht, but so I think it's actually quite a good indication of how even people who are clearly not Jewish in any sense that can be elided. And Carl Luege, one of his most celebrated utterances was I decide who a Jew is. And that anti Semitism that is not even necessarily always focused on Jewish people, but some amorphous idea of Jewish culture as a threat, I think is perhaps the most insidious thing about Vienna at the time.

[Mark Berry]

Final word.

[Alex von Tunzelman]

Yes, I mean, I would agree with that. That extraordinary mix of paradoxes and opposing views on these issues. You asked a question. Why Vienna? Vienna was unique over a period of that 10 to 15 years of having this kind of melting pot, this heated melting pot of ideas underlined by all these other difficult political, anti Semitic, misogynistic sexual ideas which caused this extraordinary outflowing of art and culture in so many different ways. Music, literature, the arts.

[Mark Berry]

Well, thank you all very much.

[Alex von Tunzelman]

Diane, would you like some tea? Coffee? Are we still being recorded? Yes, thank you, Elian. I would love some coffee.

[Diane Silverthorne]

Leslie, could I have just a cup of hot water, please?

[Alex von Tunzelman]

Hot water?

[Diane Silverthorne]

Tea, please, Melvin.

[Mark Berry]

In Our Time with Melvin Bragg was.

[Melvin Bragg]

Produced by Elianne Glaser and It is a BBC Studios audio production for Radio 4.

[Diane Silverthorne]

Hi, guys, this is Rylan And I'm.

[Melvin Bragg]

Here to tell you about how to Be in Love from BBC Sounds. Now, as a single divorcee, I feel ready to find love again. But I want to see if there's.

[Diane Silverthorne]

A better way of going about it.

[Melvin Bragg]

In this series, I'm going to sit down with 12 incredible guests who have really going to help me rediscover what love truly means and how I can find it again. People like Stephen Fry, Louis Theroux, Matt and Emma Willis, and many more. So join me on this journey as I explore how to be in love. Listen on BBC Sounds.

[Alex von Tunzelman]

This is History's heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War.

[Diane Silverthorne]

You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, sonny. You'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you.

[Alex von Tunzelman]

Join me, Alex Von Tanzelman for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcast.