A Nervous Splendour : Vienna 1888-1889

This narrative history confines itself to Vienna between July 1888 and May 1889. At the centre is Crown Prince Rudolf, heir to Franz Joseph, whose political isolation and private life end at the hunting lodge of Mayerling with the deaths of Rudolf and the young Mary Vetsera. Around that court story Morton sets other young men then working in the city-among them Freud, Mahler, Herzl, Klimt, and Schnitzler-and the pageantry of Habsburg ceremony. The book treats the ten months as a single atmosphere: a capital of music, newspapers, and rigid etiquette under an ageing empire.

Bound in. Map of Vienna. Colour picture endpapers. Bound in blocked red moire silk with gilt spine title. Dark red slipcase with two tone pictorial wrap-around.