Chapter 4 - Student Culture in 1870s Vienna

Summary

Mahler’s move to Vienna in 1875 brought him into contact with a thriving culture of young intellectuals, many of whom would go on to become social, political, and artistic leaders in the new century. The center of gravity of this group was the University of Vienna, where Mahler enrolled in 1877 (concurrently with his last year at the Conservatory). This chapter lays out the University’s distinctively modern blend of Enlightenment humanism and rational science, surveying important figures on the faculty (the philosopher Franz Brentano, the physicist Ernst Mach) and those among Mahler’s student cohort (Engelbert Pernerstorfer, Victor and Sigmund Adler, Max Gruber, Heinrich Braun, and, above all, Siegfried Lipiner). Organizations founded by these students also receive consideration, among them the Academic Wagner Society, the Pythagoreans, the Saga Society, and the Pernerstorfer Circle; in these venues Mahler encountered many of the ideas that would drive the main artistic decisions of his career.