Portal de Turismo de Castilla y León

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January 21, 2026

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Vienna, threshold of modernity (1900–1918): sounds, forms and masks

Between 1900 and 1918, Vienna was a laboratory where the arts learned to listen to the same restless spirit. While the city inherited from the Ringstrasse (its boulevards, train stations, and Otto Wagner's Stadtbahn) embraced a technical modernity, architecture sought an ethic of form: the Secession, the Wiener Werkstätte, and, later, Adolf Loos's rejection of ornament. In painting, Klimt, Schiele, and Kokoschka pushed portraiture toward intimacy and vulnerability. The literature of Arthur Schnitzler and Hugo von Hofmannsthal explored the social mask, the ambiguity of desire, and language as a stage. In music, Mahler and Richard Strauss pushed the symphonic and operatic tradition to its limits, and the generation of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern embarked on the emancipation of dissonance: from saturated chromaticism to atonality as a new clarity. This talk intertwines these transformations to show how, on the eve of imperial collapse and the Great War, Vienna invented a modernity that still challenges us.

Talk by Carlos Gutiérrez Cajaraville