A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888-1889

by Frederic Morton

Overview

On January 30, 1889, during the Viennese Carnival, Emperor Franz Josef's son and heir, Crown Prince Rudolf fired a revolver at his teenaged mistress and then at himself at Mayerling in the Vienna Woods. In this National Book Award finalist, Frederic Morton tells the story of the Prince and his city, where, in the span of ten months, "the Western dream started to go wrong." In 1888-89 Vienna, other young men like Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Theodor Herzl, Gustav Klimt, and Arthur Schnitzler were as frustrated as the Crown Prince, but for other reasons. Morton interweaves their fates with that of the Prince and the entire city, until Rudolf's body is lowered into its permanent sarcophagus and a son named Adolf is born to Frau Klara Hitler.

"Riveting" — John Leonard, The New York Times

"As lush, beguiling, and charming as an emperor's waltz" — Publishers Weekly

"[A] spirited tale of Viennese life... by his skillful use of rich but forgotten daily details [Morton] construct[s] a fascinating account of ten months in the lives of Anton Bruckner, Johannes Brahms, Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo Wolff, and others." — Kirkus Reviews

"On every page, great names and odd moments glitter... a remarkable and unusual slice of history." — Robert Kirsch, Los Angeles Times

"1888/1889 is my favorite year in the life of 'the Imperial City,' and Frederic Morton's A Nervous Splendor is my favorite book about Vienna." — John Irving, author of The World According to Garp

Product Details

BN ID:	2940185687970
Publisher:	Plunkett Lake Press
Publication date:	01/16/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Born Fritz Mandelbaum in Vienna, Frederic Morton (1924-2015) fled to London with his family in 1939 after Hitler’s 1938 Anschluss of Austria and the family settled in New York, where Frederic’s father, who had owned a factory supplying belt buckles to the Austrian army, changed his last name to Morton to join an anti-Semitic union. Morton learned to be a baker in a trade school before earning a bachelor’s degree from City College of New York in 1947 and a master’s degree from the New School for Social Research in 1949; he also attended Columbia University.

Morton always wrote in English. His first novel was The Hound (1947) about a privileged youth in 1939 Vienna, followed by other novels including The Schatten Affair (1965) about a German-born American Jew who returns to Berlin as the publicist for a financier, Snow Gods (1969) about wealthy habitués of a resort in the Swiss Alps, An Unknown Woman (1976) about a brilliant orphan of Jewish immigrants who ascends to intellectual celebrity and financial riches, and The Forever Street (1984), a family saga set in Vienna over three generations until World War II.

His books of non-fiction include The Rothschilds (1962), a National Book Award finalist about the banking family turned into a musical in 1970 which ran for over 500 performances on Broadway; A Nervous Splendor: Vienna, 1888-1889 (1979) about the life of the city — including Freud, Mahler, Klimt, Schnitzler, Bruckner and Herzl — and the murder by Crown Prince Rudolf of his mistress and his suicide at Mayerling, also a National Book Award finalist turned into a musical staged in Budapest and Vienna; Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913-14 (1989) about the city as Europe heads toward World War I; and a memoir, Runaway Waltz (2005).

Morton also wrote for many publications, including Esquire, The Atlantic, Playboy, Harper’s, the Hudson Review and The New York Times. He received Austria’s Cross of Honor for Arts and Sciences in 2003.