John Rice's account of the once famous Temple of Night at Schönau is a wonderful reconstruction of not just a lost piece of splendid eighteenth-century garden architecture, but also of the cultural world that celebrated its construction and of the later decline of both the garden and its cultural milieu. Peter von Braun's garden and most particularly its Temple of Night hoped to unite experientially temporal and heavenly spaces and to invert the reality of the surface and subterranean worlds. When Rice visited the decrepit remains of the garden, he was left “not knowing what to make of this odd, wonderful place” (16). Like a detective, Rice proceeded to pursue the garden and its demise through contemporary accounts, music, and material culture. As Rice argues, the garden's fate was tied ineluctably to the wealth and welfare of those who constructed it, as well as to the vicissitudes of the Austrian state. In spite of its brilliant use of technological innovation to create a fanciful world, the garden, and specifically the grotto and Temple of Night, fell quickly into ruin and public forgetfulness.

Rice wants to use the Temple of Night as a window into Austrian history and culture at a moment of significant transformation—in industry, to war, and toward modernity. As Rice correctly argues, gardens are perfect locations for interdisciplinary inquiry. In their construction, maintenance, and use, gardens display particulars of their creators' world in terms of social understanding, aesthetics, culture, economics, consumption, and politics. This worldview extended beyond any attempt to capture or represent reality, as the Temple in the garden was a site of manufactured illusion, turning day into night and blurring the lines between the earthly world and some other fantastical plane.

In his descriptions of what visitors experienced of the Temple of the Night, Rice makes clear that visitors were (intentionally) struck silent, awed by the experience of the Temple. Visitors did not move through the greenery and constructions in an individual journey of accidental discovery. As Rice beautifully describes, contemporary visitors instead experienced an intricately orchestrated, mediated, and guided path that insured the maximum impact. The Temple of Night, in the fashion of eighteenth-century gardens and more successfully than most, inspired profound contemplation, thoughtfulness, and wonder in its visitors. In this sense, the garden was effectively a new location for the divine.

In many respects, the garden at Schönau was typical of the style popular at the turn of the century. Its English style, follies, use of technology and mechanization to induce wonder, reification of freemasonry and its rituals, influence of high art on its form, and system of patronage that built and maintained it were all shared aspects of gardens across the region. Rice's discussion of the garden necessarily remains contingent in certain respects, and a more explicit discussion of how the Temple of Night fits in with other contemporary constructions would have bolstered his account. Garden construction, like other forms of artistic production or the reworking of public (and private) spaces, captures a fascinating amalgamation of interests, and Rice grapples with this question in different parts of the work. As Rice makes clear, the Temple could be seen as garden folly, as cradle of Romantic sentiment, as backdrop for musical and technical innovation, as masonic expression, as theater, and as art gallery. Rice thus uses the Temple of Night to explore different aspects of eighteenth-century cultural production that reflected altered notions of darkness/night, and in particular tension between darkness as evil and night as an extended moment of quiet contemplation that muffled the daily world and revealed the true nature of the starry heavens.

Peter von Braun remains a bit elusive here, though Rice does provide a sketch of Braun's background, other cultural activities, and ultimate financial implosion. Putting his personality aside, it is perhaps no surprise that a nouveau riche like Braun would have been so dedicated to the external display of his wealth and prominence. Although Rice's interest is focused primarily on the music, material culture, and aesthetics surrounding the Temple, the narrative begs in parts for a more contextual and social unraveling of what is a rather startling demonstration of social aspiration. It also remains unclear if we should read more into this story to make sense of what was changing in the late eighteenth century. Like other social spaces, the garden was a stage upon which individuals' concerns, ambitions, and failures played out, and Braun's guestbook bears witness to the “see and be seen” nature of this endeavor. Garden style and use were a way to trumpet one's position or delineate one's commitment to a particular worldview, whether in support of the Enlightenment or a romanticized view of nature, God, or the state. As Rice describes, the destruction of the garden and the ruin of the Temple mirror the financial failures of Braun in his bid for greater recognition as patron of the arts and might be read also as a morality play for the experience of the monarchy during the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon.

The criticisms one might have of the book are mostly not ones Rice could have easily fixed, given his desire to imagine a place that so quickly disappeared. Rice too often ascribes intention when we cannot know for certain, including in the discussion of Braun's ambitions and one-upmanship in the construction of lavish garden architecture and follies, or in the ethos and even aim of the garden from Braun's perspective. The lack of definitive sources drives Rice to use guesswork (for example, about the source of energy used to power the organ in the Temple). One could have also wished for more sustained discussion of iconography and in the end, although Rice reconstructs the different facets of this fantastically curious place, its wider significance remains elusive. This latter problem is compounded by the fact that Rice does not provide a conclusion that draws together his account of the Temple, its visitors, its builders, and its meaning. Much of the volume draws on other literary and garden sources that put the Temple in a rich European context, but parts of these discussions are not linked robustly to the story Rice tells about the Temple. In this respect, Rice also makes correlations that do not entirely convince, as in the discussion of French examples like Étienne-Louis Boullée and his planned cenotaph, drawings with which Rice admits neither Braun nor the architect Johann Ferdinand Hetzendorf von Hohenberg were familiar. Moreover, Rice's attempts to portray the intellectual climate that gave rise to the Temple of Night are not entirely successful in that he paints the European cultural milieu in very broad strokes. Thus, although Rice beautifully describes the music and the place, it is occasionally frustrating to have so much of the volume remain focused on description without giving the reader a real sense of what should be taken away from it all. Rice stops just short of successfully linking the component parts of literature, music, musical instruments, and place. He is often willing to let literary source material, particularly poetry, speak for itself; but some readers might hope for more critical textual analysis that brings us closer to a historical understanding of the cultural experience of the Temple.

The book includes copious illustrations to help the reader visualize the material experience of these temples of the senses and the musical components that were clearly central to the experience of visitors. Rice does provide a significant appendix that includes references to the Temple of Night in the original language primary sources between 1799 and 1894, which will be of great interest to those researching this period of Austrian history. Rice's book is immensely readable—a great excursion into a lost world—and is recommended particularly for those who are interested in exploring the connections among gardens, culture, music, and society.