MUS 238 - Empire, Madness, & Decadence in Viennese Music

Course unit(s): 1
Meets GAR: Meets general academic requirement HU and IL.
In this course, we examine music in Vienna (and beyond, to the broader Hapsburg empire) alongside broader shifts in Viennese culture from the time of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to the early post-WWI era. By focusing on this relatively narrow temporal and geographical span, we will examine the interconnections among the arts in Vienna in late romanticism and early modernism. Questions that will shape our discussions include “How are political trends—Viennese liberalism and the reaction against it—reflected in the arts and discourse about them,” “What consequences did the revolutions in thought about psychoanalysis, gender, and sexuality have for in the arts, and how did artistic works in turn shape the ways these ideas were understood?,” “How did the mythology around Beethoven shape not only music of the romantic era but romantic art more broadly?” and “What role did artists play in shaping ideas about identity in a multi-racial, multi-ethnic state like the Hapsburg empire?” Texts studied may include texts by Freud, Schnitzler, Hofmaansthal, art by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Oskar Kokoschka, architecture by Otto Wagner, Gottfried Semper, and Adolph Loos, and music by Beethoven, Hugo Wolf, Gustav and Alma Mahler, and Johann and Richard Strauss.