![]() ![]() ![]() Yet if the Wittgensteins were among the most cultivated and privileged of families, they were far from the most cheerful. The conductor Bruno Walter, another attendee at those private concerts, described the "all-pervading atmosphere of humanity and culture" that prevailed in the household. ![]() But it was music that was Karl Wittgenstein's great passion, and that of his wife: Brahms, Mahler, Schoenberg, and Richard Strauss all attended the musical evenings in the palace's opulent Musiksaal, and the elder Wittgensteins spent many hours playing music with each other and their eight children. ![]() Their father, a self-made millionaire and one of the leading industrialists of the Habsburg Empire, was also a deeply cultured man, an art collector who provided the funding for the Secession Building at which the "advanced" artists of the period - Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka - exhibited their work (Klimt referred to him as his "Minister of Fine Art"). They were raised in a vast marble palace in Vienna, with liveried servants, seven grand pianos, a Rodin sculpture, and frescoes depicting scenes from A Midsummer Night's Dream. The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War by Alexander Waugh ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |