The Last Waltz

Austrian writer Robert Musil, like his contemporaries, addressed the crisis in values that swept through Europe, and Vienna in particular, at the turn of the 19th century. He levelled bitter criticism at the ideological chaos and misleading generalisations of the reactionary nationalists. He witnessed the upheavals of the 1910s, the catastrophe of the First World War, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the utopian visions of the 1920s.

The relationship between Johannes Brahms, Alexander Zemlinsky and Arnold Schönberg is the expression in music of this extraordinary moment, a moment when values were called into question, a moment of flux and change. The concert The Last Waltz. Music for the End of an Empire causes Musil’s words to ring out and, when all is said and done, allows music to do the talking.