Word: hapsburg
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...sure to follow (that is, if the U.S. has not, in a mood of euphoric anticipation, left first). As the smoke and fog of the cold war dissipate, so does the postwar division of Europe. With the receding of the two empires, many long dead questions return -- the Hapsburg, the Balkan, even the Danzig question. But none are so formidable as the one the wartime Allies thought they had buried in Berlin in 1945, the German question...
This Amadeus dares to pose the riddle of genius in the form of a traditional celebrity bio pic. In 1781 Mozart (Tom Hulce), once the put-upon prodigy of musical Europe, comes at the age of 26 to the Viennese court of Hapsburg Emperor Joseph II (played with a sly, thin smile and a delicious air of cagey indecisiveness by Jeffrey Jones). There the man of the moment is Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham): court composer, consummate technician and politician, Emperor's favorite, a musical lion of Vienna. Most important, he knows his place, as an educated servant among...
...mention these commercial risks, though, is to take a Hapsburg Emperor's narrow view of art's bottom line. Amadeus may be a popular film for the same reason it is a good one: it paints, in vibrant strokes, an image of the artist as romantic hero. The textbook Mozart, embalmed in immortality, comes raucously alive as a punk rebel, grossing out the Establishment, confuting his chief rival, working himself to death in an effort to put on paper songs no one else can hear. Who among us cannot sympathize, even identify, with such an icon of iconoclasm...
...image of their old European homes. Speaking the Judeo-Spanish language of Ladino, the Sephardim could not follow the cadences of its Central European equivalent, Yiddish. Accustomed to Middle Eastern pastimes, they were little taken with cafes based on the coffeehouses of Vienna and Budapest and filled with Hapsburg-era music. Raised on couscous, they had no taste for gefilte fish. Even their religious customs differed from those of the Europeans: at Passover, for example, the Sephardim are allowed to eat rice and legumes, which are forbidden the Ashkenazim. They also sometimes indulge in exuberant rites, energetically re-enacting...
There are two outstanding exhibitions this year. One is historical: "The Arts in Vienna from the Founding of the Secession to the Fall of the Hapsburg Empire," a stupendous collocation of more than a thousand objects that fills the Palazzo Grassi: paintings by Klimt and Schiele, furniture by Hoffman and Moser, posters, stage designs, textiles, jewelry, ceramics by dozens of artists both famous and obscure. Apart from Venice itself, this is the main reason for going to Venice. The other is a one-man show by Howard Hodgkin at the English pavilion. Not since Robert Rauschenberg's appearance...