When Samuel Johnson published a critique of Milton’s versification in 1751, he felt obliged to apologize for deigning to address familiar material: ‘There are, in every age’, he went on to justify, ‘new errors to be rectified, and new prejudices to be opposed’.Footnote ¹ Two centuries later Walter Benjamin felt no such obligation, reversing the onus of responsibility with an ethical prerogative: ‘To articulate what is past … means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger. … In every era, the attempt must be made to wrest tradition away from the conformism that is about to overpower it’.Footnote ² These two perspectives sum up the challenge and virtue of Kevin Karnes’ erudite book, A Kingdom Not of This World. Most of the artists and composers he addresses are long familiar and carry significant literary baggage – Wagner, Klimt, Schopenhauer, Klinger, Nietzsche, Schoenberg, Zemlinsky, Mahler – but the musty air of conformism around fin de siècle culture is palpable to the extent that assumed knowledge risks calcifying into cliché: an age of decadence, ‘the world of the waltz’,Footnote ³ Wagnerism, degeneration, philosophical pessimism, epigrammatic protests against ‘the decay of lying’,Footnote ⁴ and all of this underwritten by the exciting – if unstable – emergence of psychoanalysis. Not since Carl E. Schorske’s Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (1979)Footnote ⁵ has a major book been devoted exclusively to ‘high’ culture of the middle classes in this city (a narrow perspective, to be sure, given the panorama of pride and poverty passing before any turn-of-the-century Kaffeehaus).Footnote ⁶ Precisely 35 years have since elapsed – half a (biblical) lifetime. So what is gained in this new contribution to the field?

Karnes’ investigation offers a nuanced, richly interpretive account of the philosophical and aesthetic sensibilities of Austro-German culture during the 1890s and 1900s. In this sense, it dialogues with Walter Frisch’s German Modernism,Footnote ⁷ and while Karnes’ tendency towards detailed critique resists summary, his book achieves, broadly speaking, an interdisciplinary reception history of Wagner’s socio-aesthetic vision of art: ‘utopian longings in artistic form’ (p. 2). Wagnerism in this sense is not subject to hyperbole, it seems:

To substantiate this bold claim, Karnes divides the book into six chapters and a short epilogue. After the first chapter establishes the potent legacy of Gesamtkunstwerk for Vienna’s elite, and delineates three different kinds of utopia, Chapters 2 through 4 present Max Klinger’s explicitly Wagnerian aesthetics, the burning (if blinkered) ambitions of Vienna’s Secessionists to awaken a communal spirit in Austria, and Klimt’s extraordinary role as inheritor of a complex of ideas concerning the human psyche and nature. Chapters 5 and 6 turn their back on Wagnerian visions to add musical case studies from Schoenberg, Zemlinsky and Mahler, each of whom seemingly remodels Schopenhauerean pessimism as ‘optimism’ – here attributed to Nietzsche – towards humanity’s place within nature’s cyclic patterns of renewal. Finally, the epilogue embraces the exclusionary implications of utopian visions that concern race.

The book rests on an axiology of idea and place: ‘the utopian imagination’ (pp. 8ff) – the inheritance of 1810s idealism – is the book’s central organizing concept, and Wagner’s shifting legacy in Vienna, the fulcrum on which all else turns.Footnote ⁸ Geographies do not constrain ideas, of course, and the book’s enterprise becomes artificial after a point, but it avoids conformism in at least one important sense: Karnes seeks to overturn the assumption that narratives of decline – biological, cultural, socio-political – dominate the discursive field. On the contrary, ‘a powerful current of cultural optimism ran counter and parallel to the cultural pessimism’ (p. 13), we learn, and this crystallizes through the belief that art can transform society, and that ‘redemption from suffering’ (p. 5) is possible by a certain retreat into the mind, that is, without the impracticalities of Wagnerian death predicated on transfiguring love.

We are long familiar with Wagner’s idealizing claims in Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (1849) for an ‘artistic fellowship’ that enables social change by divesting individuals of ‘personal egotism’, a condition native to Classical tragedy, for Wagner, and one reinterpreted by Otto Weininger in 1903 as ‘the “I” problem and genius’.Footnote ⁹ But it is striking that Secessionist interpreters of this idea, such as Max Klinger, remained uncritical (or unaware) of Wagner’s protean statements that rapidly disavowed the belief in a fellowship, replacing it in Oper und Drama (1851) with an individual artist-creator. No less intriguing is the paradox that the metaphysical concept of his vision – attributable to an increasing psychological interiority typical of Karnes’ witnesses (‘Klinger turned his gaze within. … His utopia was one of the mind’ p. 39) – was strictly at odds with the scientific environment that grounded the material progress sustaining Viennese society, with its telegraphs, inoculations, steam tramways, and steam-powered printing presses. Despite claims in Ver Sacrum (the Secessionists’ illustrated journal) that there is ‘no distinction between art for the rich and art for the poor[.] Art is the common property of all’ (p. 75), the art produced remained extraordinarily expensive. (Not coincidentally, its most comprehensive, singular expression – the collaboratively created Stoclet Palace in Brussels – has always been closed to visitors, including art historians, and an ongoing legal dispute between Adolphe Stoclet’s descendants promises to keep it so.) The artists staged 28 exhibitions between 1898 and 1903 to advance their goals ‘of unlocking the promise of the Gesamtkunstwerk to transform lives and society’ (p. 78). But their disinterest towards material help – including new means of industrial production – bears consideration. Indeed, there is bathos in painter Karl Diefenbach’s pronouncement that by observing natural laws we can ‘ennoble ourselves as “god-men” – even to the level of becoming “god-like” ourselves’ (p. 23), after which he was imprisoned for mortal debts.

Liberating workers from everything from sedentary routine to inhuman toil is precisely one of the historical justifications for mechanizing society during this period: ‘Instead of reducing human beings to work-mechanisms’, Lewis Mumford observed in 1934 ‘we can now transfer the main part of burden to automatic machines’.Footnote ¹⁰ In his discussion of slavery, Aristotle claimed that when the plectrum does its own harp playing and the shuttle weaves unaided, chief workmen would no longer need helpers, nor masters slaves. If at the time he was justifying the existence of slavery, today – for us – he is justifying the machine. While Karnes touches upon pragmatic concerns over space (Raumkunst) and architecture, and assigns Zemlinsky and Strauss a pragmatic stance in rejecting Wagner’s model of redemption (p. 146), it may be worth pondering where such pragmatism is rooted, culturally speaking, and why no image of machines or scientific spectacle emerges from within the Secession. If utopianism itself isn’t elitist, why is this particular manifestation? Does this reveal objects in the ‘real world’ (to coin the antithesis of Karnes’ title) to be simply a failure of imagination, an artistic failure? Leaving vulgarly real objects aside, the group’s idealism failed of its own accord, we learn. Its self-censorship of Ernst Stöhr (‘subjugation by the organization’s elite members’, p. 90), and disbandment – Karnes argues, citing Richard Taruskin – foretold a darker side to utopian longing ‘because if perfection is the aim, and compromise taboo, there will always be a shortfall to correct – a human shortfall’ (p. 90). For this reason, Karnes demurs, the Secession’s demise ‘might not have been a bad thing’ (p. 67).

The fourth chapter, linking Klimt to Schopenhauer via Wagner, arguably serves as the heart of the book. Ostensibly a case study of Klimt’s artistic path that looks beyond the Beethoven Frieze (1902), it weaves together a detailed reading of Schopenhauer’s worldview and Wagner’s Beethoven essay (1870), and pairs both with the role of dreams, madness and comprehensible creativity in Die Meistersinger (1868), a work whose notable popularity under Mahler’s baton at the State Opera makes it likely, if not certain, that Klimt knew the opera. These are the teeth of an interpretive key Karnes uses to unlock symbolic meaning in Klimt’s art from works of transcendence (Beethoven Frieze 1902), to ‘fantasies of confinement, control, and denial’ (p. 95) that – for him – register the impossibility of realizing transcendent utopian inclinations. The latter ‘fantasies’ in post-1907 works become a ‘dehumanized’ subject: ‘Field of Poppies is utopian indeed. But its utopia is not merely unattainable, it has become inhuman’ (p. 124). Readers may query whether the trope of dehumanization and the ‘inhuman’ are synonymous here with the mere absence of human form. Klimt’s women are presented as sex objects, but this is neither metalicizing the biological body nor ‘shattering [the] human aspect’ of reality, as Ortega put it in 1925, by, for instance, painting ‘a man who resembles a man as little as possible’.Footnote ¹¹ Klimt’s taciturnity on matters relating to art is legendary, making his art ‘all Kiss and no tell’ as one wag remarked.Footnote ¹² This condition has led to correspondingly bold interpretive statements about his work from commentators. For Karnes, he was ‘conspicuously unconcerned with the social dimensions of the [Secessionists’] utopian program’ (p. 93), and explored humankind’s psychological interiority in the Beethoven Frieze through symbolic means before proceeding to non-human subjects, splitting off ‘the erotic, instinctual aspects of his imagination from his painterly visions of peaceable harmony’ (p. 125).

Among the most enjoyable aspects of this study are its telling details, surely the gems in any historical account. Klinger claimed to read Schopenhauer’s Parega and Paralipomena almost daily ‘throughout his adult life’, (p. 42), and regarded colour (not drama) at the lynchpin that united architecture, painting and sculpture (p. 43); the conductor Felix Weingartner found time to pen his own vision of a utopia ‘unconcerned with social or political institutions’ that includes a prose outline for a drama entitled The Redemption (pp. 28–30) in 1895; and Klimt described his work in absurdly banal, laborious terms – ‘I am a painter who paints, day after day, from morning until night’. (p. 97).

In contrast to Klimt’s landscapes that purge nature of human presence, the fifth chapter explores Nietzsche’s view of humanity as intrinsic to nature, wherein each ‘regards, affirms, and validates the other’ (p. 127). Karnes uses (critic Maudemarie Clark’s reading of) the nature–human nexus to differentiate a Wagner-Schopenhauerean doctrine of suffering and redemption from that presented in Gurrelieder (both Jens Peter Jacobsen’s poetry and Schoenberg’s music), wherein redemption is ‘predicated on nothing more fanciful or unachievable than a simple change in one’s outlook on life’ (p. 133). This approach, we learn, also works for Zemlinsky’s songs, despite the numerous musical borrowings from and allusions to Wagner.

Indeed, methodologically speaking, the book offers a comparative history in excelsis. Karnes consistently views each composition, philosophy or poetic statement in terms of another, and evaluates according to degrees of similarity. This throws up a wealth of important juxtapositions, and presents us, in parts, with detailed analytical insights tied to subtly differentiated philosophical worldviews. But it also raises the question of where such comparisons end. Chains of comparative sources need to be severed, perhaps arbitrarily. One example is the key association of C major with the rising sun (redemptive nature), operative in Part 3 of Gurrelieder, the ‘Drinking Song of the Earth’ and ‘The Farewell’ of Das Lied von der Erde, and which ‘borrow[ed] its key from the sunrise that opened Strauss’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra’. (p. 159). The obvious model for sunrise in C major, Act 3, scene 3 of Wagner’s Siegfried (Brünnhilde: ‘Heil die, Sonne!’), goes unmentioned, perhaps because it is too temporally remote. Holding this in abeyance, the larger connection Karnes’ analysis establishes concerns C major with added sixth, which, by telescoping major and relative minor into a vertical sonority:

This chord becomes a skeuomorph in Karnes’ archaeology of tonal patterns, and it would seem, on this basis, that hermeneutic approaches to music are far from faltering. The method reveals its vulnerabilities, however, in the string of admissions that no evidence exists that ‘x actually read y:’ Klimt and Schopenhauer (p. 100), Klimt and Nietzsche (p. 119), Schoenberg and the Secessionists (p. 15). And links between works and ideas remain similarly unconfirmed: Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde and Schopenhauer (p. 167), and Mahler’s familiarity with Gurrelieder (p. 175). Strictly speaking, these connections remain aesthetically guided hypotheses, but, in a less severe view of historical evidence, they also accomplish the potentially more valuable task of enriching the way we hear certain works – Gurrelieder, Das Lied von der Erde, Sarema, Feuersnot – and of bringing into focus certain harmonic resemblances that have hitherto lacked an interpretive frame.

The epilogue pairs two culturally narrow movements that essentialize identity: anti-Semitism (from Wagner to Chamberlain and his epigones) and Zionism (from Mahler’s social critics). These are two sides of the same coin, for Karnes, because as critic Fritz Lienhard observed they rely on the same logic: that birth and biology determine identity rather than individual religious belief or behaviour. Hence, for literary critic Max Brod, Mahler’s music expresses ‘the Jewish soul’ that gave rise to Hassidic songs, even though ‘he probably never knew them’ (p. 188). While Karnes’ discussion of Bayreuth, Gobineau, Parsifal, Chamberlain and Hitler may not uncover new knowledge as such, it is a thoroughly useful weaving of the red threads of nineteenth-century racism commonly traced (with greater or lesser degrees of causality) to Hitler’s programme of extermination as the logical extension of a programme of breeding. It reminds us that if utopian desire points towards ‘the end of history’ (p. 192) in the sense of securing an eternal condition of social perfection invulnerable to change, when it surfaces as reality, it does so in potentially both ‘transcendent and terrible ways’ (p. 193).

With this book Karnes couples an unapologetic interest in the study of ideas for their own sake with an array of source material, interpretive daring, and a rare ability to tie philosophical concepts to analytical detail. With a generous supply of pictures and examples, the presentation of the Secession’s collaborative Elf Lieder (1901) as art celebrating ‘the communion of individuals in true Wagnerian fashion’ (p. 84) – nine artists presenting illustrated scores from 11 contemporary composers – offers an intriguing glimpse of what a literal-minded interpretation of Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft might begin to entail. One blip needs to be corrected: Wagner participated in revolutionary uprisings in Dresden, of course, not Leipzig (as stated on p. 31). But this is anomalous against the text’s overall erudition.

The book is – for this reader – consistently engaging; it will surely become a useful tool for drawing students towards an interdisciplinary vantage, one that is capable of linking abstract ideas to unpleasant political realities. With some very notable exceptions, few writers outside musicology and music theory are in a position to comment on musical detail of this period in quite the same way that musicologists and theorists can, so it may be some time before the book receives a sympathetic echo from without our discipline. For now, it has surely expanded the discursive space within.