Wednesday 1st May 2019 – The Art and Culture of Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

The Art and Culture of Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

Lecture_2018_Gavin_Plumley

Wednesday 1st May 2019

Gavin Plumley

At the turn of the last century Vienna was the capital of a vast empire and one of the most exciting artistic laboratories in the world. It produced painters such as Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Oscar Kokoschka, architects like Otto Wagner, Adolf Loos and Josef Hoffman, the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, the composer Gustav Mahler and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

This lecture looks at these and other figures in the context of the society in which they worked and asks how and why the City of Dreams became a cultural hotbed around 1900.

Gavin is a writer and broadcaster. Well known for his work on Vienna and Central European music and culture, he is equally at home on Broadway and in Tolstoy’s Russia. His work can be found in newspapers, magazines and opera and concert programmes around the world. He appears frequently on BBC Radio 3, both as a guest and as a presenter, and on BBC Radio 4. Gavin also edits other people’s writing, as a commissioning editor for the Salzburg Festival and for the Oxford Lieder Festival.