Paris and Vienna as Cultural Centers

Between the years 1870 and 1914, Paris and Vienna were two of the greatest cultural centers of Europe. Paris was noted as a center for progressive trends in art and fashion. Vienna was noted as being the seat of power for the Habsburg dynasty. Both cities were influential in the development of modern literature, music and art. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they were competitors in the quest for dominance over Western culture. However, both cities experienced a decline during the brutal years of the First World War. Following the devastations of that war, neither Paris nor Vienna were able to recover their former dominance in world cultural affairs.

In 1870, France had just undergone a long period of revolutionary change. Starting in the late eighteenth century, the nation had experienced several radical changes in government. These changes culminated in the constitutional Third Republic which was established in 1871. A bit less than eighty years before, in 1792, the French Revolution brought an end to the system of aristocratic rulership which preceded it. Prior to the French Revolution, the country was ruled by monarchs who passed the kingdom on from one generation to the next. In 1792, the king of France was Louis XVI of the House of Bourbon. In that year, the people of the French middle class rebelled against the king's authority. Louis XVI was forced out of power and, in 1793, he

Related Essays

Modernity and Urban Life .... Schorske, Carl E. Fin-de-siFcle Vienna Politics and .... as a potent cultural symbol of moral disintegration and .... themes of Reid's treatment of the Paris sewers as .... (2577 10 )

The New Super Regions of Europe .... He makes a strong case for Paris, as the still-potent .... Eastern Bloc but also sweeps in Venice and Vienna, cities with historic and cultural ties more .... (2414 10 )

Women of the French Impressionist Movement .... There were actual centers of world culture in those days: Rome, London, Vienna and - most importantly, Paris. Any person of cultural or intellectual pretention .... (4058 16 )

Modernism Defined .... Drabble maintains that a sense of cultural relativism pervaded .... Part 2, Belacqua has traveled to Paris to distance .... Cusa and, when called back to Vienna to spend .... (3682 15 )

War and Society in Europe .... larger social, political, economic and cultural context" (ix .... and the 1815 Congress of Vienna offered an .... the emperor's remains ceremonially transported to Paris. .... (3813 15 )

opedies. The three short compositions which make up Gymnopedies are representative of Satie's rejection of complexity in music. In all three of the pieces, "a slender, undulating melodic line is traced thinly over a rocking 'pedal' bass of shifting, delicately dissonant chords" (Myers, 1968, p. 69). Satie's use of dissonance in the late nineteenth century paved the way for one of his most important contributions to modern music. Thus, in the early twentieth century, Satie developed the idea that music need not be limited only to the sounds which are created by musical instruments. According to his theory, any sound at all - even noise- could be used as building blocks for a musical composition. According to Salzman, Satie was "the first to use sound - disconnected, static, objectified sound - in an abstract way, essentially divorced from the organizational and structural principles of tonal form and development" (1967, p. 17). In this way, Satie was a forerunner in the development of the avant garde ideas of the mid-twentieth century. At that time, composers began taking Satie's ideas to their extreme and began incorporating all sorts of unorthodox "noises" in their music. An example of this development can be seen in

Category: History - P