The Habsburg Empire
Such a complex history — and the Habsburg kings, historians, and peoples would have it no other way. One could go back to the 11th Century and Radbot of Klettgau who built the Habsburg Castle in Switzerland. The family came to rule Austria in the 13th Century; it was a duchy within the Kingdom of Germany which was rolled into the Holy Roman Empire. You see how a thousand years of histories and millions of peoples from a dozen nationalities/ethnicities/geographies are involved. What we do remember is the end: World War One and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the merciless maelstrom of the 20th Century.
This selection scratches the surface, of course. I am drawn to the history and literature of the Empire because it had such grand concerns (half of modern Europe) and great writers (Banffy, Zweig, Musil, Freud, among many). It also had supremely romantic figures — Empress Elisabeth of Austria, Queen of Hungary, Sissi, a Bavarian girl lifted to the heights of the imperium only to see the beginning of the end before her assassination in 1898, the longest serving Empress in Austrian history. All of History’s wheels-within-wheels seemed to operate in the Empire, all levels of art and science and literature and military tradition.
And we live with the shadows, the ruins, and the consequences of the Empire to these fraught days of the 21st Century.
Gustav Mahler
Gustav Mahler
Conductor, composer, and writer Bruno Walter (1876–1962) worked closely with Gustav Mahler as the composer's assistant and protégé. His revealing recollections of Mahler were written in 1936, marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the composer's death. Walter first encountered Mahler more than 40 years earlier, when he served as the composer's assistant conductor in Hamburg. He worked with Mahler again at the Vienna Opera, and after the composer's death conducted the debut of the Ninth Symphony and Das Lied von der Erde.
A staunch supporter of Mahler's genius and defender of his dour personality, Walter cites the pressures faced by a gifted artist striving for perfection. This edition of his tribute to his friend and mentor features supplemental materials that include a biographical sketch of Mahler as man and artist by Ernst Krenek, the composer's son-in-law and musical heir, and a new Introduction by Erik Ryding, author of Bruno Walter: A World Elsewhere.
Reprint of Greystone Press, Inc., New York, 1941 edition.