Vienna's Golden Knight: A Tale of Science, Symphonies, and Scandalous Art
2010; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 3; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/thr.2010.0012
ISSN1939-9774
Autores Tópico(s)Central European national history
ResumoVienna's Golden Knight:A Tale of Science, Symphonies, and Scandalous Art Anna Harwell Celenza (bio) "Atrocious!" proclaimed Count Lanckoroński, vice-president of Vienna's Society for Cultural Protection, when he first laid eyes on Gustav Klimt's Beethoven Frieze. The Count, a compulsive collector always on the lookout for new artworks to fill his neo-Baroque Palace, had been given special access to the Secession's "Temple of Art" on 13 April 1902, two days before the group's Klinger-Beethoven Exhibition opened to the public. Lanckoroński had garnered a reputation in Vienna as a man with a great appetite for fine food, fine women, and fine art. He was one of the wealthiest men in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Secession had hoped that, if given the opportunity, he would buy a painting on the spot. But the Count expressed nothing but contempt for the artworks on display. Standing in front of the frieze the following afternoon, the twenty-two-year-old pregnant newlywed, Alma Schindler Mahler, experienced markedly different emotions. She found the Beethoven Frieze, far from atrocious, visually stunning. The deliberately masculine power of the armored knight, standing firm against the palpable ferocity of a terrifying gorilla and its entourage of lascivious women, sent a shiver up her spine. Her eyes delighted in the sumptuousness of the gold and mother-of-pearl inlay, warm contrasts to the cool flesh of Klimt's nudes, his symbols of suffering humanity. The sinuous lines of the floating, feminine spirits reminded Alma of herself: the eternal feminine who leads the golden hero beyond life's obstacles to the soothing powers of poetry and music, an "Ode to Joy" symbolized by a solitary, sensual embrace. [End Page 464] One wonders if Alma recognized the face of her husband, Gustav Mahler, in the profile of Klimt's heroic knight. She had caused quite a scandal several weeks before when she married the tyrannical conductor/composer: "Mahler was twenty years her senior and a Jew," ran the gossip. Perhaps Alma's thoughts lingered with Klimt, whose overt eroticism and burly masculinity still enthralled her. It had been three long years since their tumultuous love affair in Italy, and a mere month since she had sealed her fate with Mahler. Looking up at the Beethoven Frieze and pondering its narrative, Alma must have wondered what the future still held for the three of them. Were the Darwinists right, when they said that life was nothing more than a struggle for existence, a search for sexual fulfillment? Or was there a state of being more rewarding than sensual pleasure? The Klinger-Beethoven Exhibition marked the first and last time Alma's two Gustavs worked side-by-side on an artistic endeavor. Much has been written about this exhibition, no doubt because the event, described by the artists themselves as an example of Tempelkunst, included the public unveiling of Max Klinger's Beethoven Monument and Gustav Klimt's Beethoven Frieze and an unusual performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony conducted by Gustav Mahler. Previous scholars, including Alessandra Comini, Wolfgang Dömling and Stephan Koja, have described this exhibition as "the apotheosis of Beethoven reception" and thus a final glimpse of late-Romantic ideology; a Gesamtkunstwerk mounted for the sake of artistic freedom. Carl Schorske, in Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (1980), declared the exhibition "an example of collective narcissism," describing "artists (Secessionists) celebrating an artist (Klinger) celebrating a hero of art (Beethoven)." But there was more to the exhibition than adulation, artistic freedom, and narcissism. The Klinger-Beethoven Exhibition marked the climax in a cultural drama that was played out in the concert halls and galleries of turn-of-the-century Vienna. By pitting art [End Page 465] against music, the Secession brought the most polarizing issues of the day into simultaneous conflict: religion versus science, German versus Jew. At the core of this series of debates were the image of Mahler (as he appeared in Klimt's Beethoven Frieze) and the cultural and political implications of Darwinismus, a mixture of various theories of evolution that swept through Vienna at the turn of the century. Darwinismus reached beyond the confines...
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