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. 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"). 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.
The conductor Bruno Walter, another attendee at those private
concerts, described the "all-pervading atmosphere of humanity and
culture" that prevailed in the household.
Yet if the Wittgensteins were among the most cultivated and
privileged of families, they were far from the most cheerful.
Hermine, the oldest child, never married and became increasingly
depressed and reclusive as she grew older; Gretl, the most
intelligent, most adventurous daughter -- immortalized in a painting
by Klimt that now hangs in the Neue Pinakothek in Munich -- entered
into a disastrous marriage with an impoverished American who turned
out to be a paranoid hysteric, is rumored to have consulted Freud
about her frigidity, and spent most of her life searching restlessly
for a cause or project to devote her energies to. Nor were the sons
any happier.
<http://www.powells.com/review/2009_08_21>Link
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Posted By johannes to
<http://www.monochrom.at/english/2009/08/unhappy-together-wittgenstein-family.htm>monochrom
at 8/24/2009 11:24:00 PM
