Baroque Vienna: Nightwood’s Lost Enlightened Modernity

Abstract

Sacheverell Sitwell’s 1928 German Baroque Art identifies Vienna as the quintessential baroque city, with Germany as a whole perfecting the baroque style and providing Bach, Handel and Mozart with a beautiful and inspirational cultural setting. Sitwell writes at a time when original baroque and rococo documents had come to light in both the British Museum and Vienna’s Hofburg Library, and, like many of his German counterparts, he responded with a reappraisal of the period. My analysis investigates these sources and Sacheverell’s subsequent use of ‘baroque’ as a historical term applied to architecture, art, theatre and dance. I question why and how Vienna was able to supersede equivalent French, Spanish and Italian cities during the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, paying particular attention to the achievements of Lukas von Hildebrandt and Fischer von Erlach, the two architects responsible for the Schwarzenberg Palace in Vienna, the Schönborn, Prince Eugene’s Winter Palace and the Belvedere. My account does not focus exclusively on the city’s palaces and state buildings but acknowledges the importance of theatre in its own right, and as an influence on interior design and architecture. Alongside so much splendour and refinement baroque Vienna developed its own particular aesthetic of cruelty, with the Jew in particular suffering under the absolute regimes of the German princes and electors after the Thirty Years War.