Edith Wharton once wrote of returning from a journey "laden with a new harvest of beauty." She might have been coming from Vienna, the grand old city of fanciful Baroque spires and gilded Secessionist domes that now lies at the heart of the new Europe, and she might have been speaking of this very moment. The erstwhile Austro-Hungarian capital has gained a fresh lease on life, thanks in part to lavish spending by Wolfgang Schüssel, the Austrian chancellor. Shaking off its cloak of dusty memories, it is enthusiastically reshaping itself as a lure for today's lovers of the arts.
No, they haven't put the Lipizzaner steeds out to pasture yet. The giant Ferris wheel in the Prater still turns, and elegant waltzers still twirl at gala balls at Christmas and New Year's. The Danube flows on, often gray, seldom blue. Mahler and Mozart are revered and performed with panache for some of the world's most knowing audiences, and Vermeer's magical lesson in The Artist's Studio still hangs with the Brueghels—oh, my goodness, those Brueghels!—in the Kunsthistorisches Museum.
But now the older institutions must share the limelight with the new. A brightly reinvented Albertina museum, with its universally admired graphic-arts collection. A refurbished applied-arts museum housing iconic works by Josef Hoffmann, Kolo Moser and other early-modern geniuses of the Wiener Werkstätte. The MuseumsQuartier, in what once was the 18th-century royal stables and including a museum of modern art and the Leopold Museum, where most of the works of Egon Schiele and many by Gustav Klimt and Oskar Kokoschka are hung. And finally the Liechtenstein Princely Collection, hidden away for seventy years in a castle in Vaduz, one of Europe's most obscure capitals, but back home at last in the Baroque palace in Vienna where the princes of Liechtenstein lived for 200 years, with Van Dyck, Rembrandt, Raphael and Rubens in stunning profusion.
Conscious of the city's reactionary image, its legacy of Nazism and anti-Semitism and the damage done to its reputation by the extreme xenophobic policies of Jörg Haider's Freedom Party in the mid-1980s, former chancellor Franz Vranitzky lamented what he called the dead hand of tradition in Vienna. "It's our fault too," he told me in an interview a decade ago, "not just the people who live here and come here to visit. It's the politicians' fault for not lifting the public's vision."
Herr Schüssel, the conservative who assumed the post of chancellor in 2000, came to much the same conclusion, remarking recently, "The old clichés—Lipizzaner horses, Mozart chocolates—are no longer applicable in the complex reality of the 21st century." So, as it often has in its long history, notably a century ago, when artistic and intellectual innovation coexisted with political decadence, Vienna is looking forward and back at the same time. "Electronic DJs are a part of Vienna as much as the Vienna State Opera," says a flashy brochure recently published by the city's tourist authorities, a brochure filled with words like "young," "modern" and "trendy." Vienna cool? Who knew?
The city finds itself "standing with one leg in the old world, in tradition, and with the other in the new world, in the future," said Hans Hollein, the Vienna-born architect who redesigned the Albertina, in the speech with which he accepted the 1985 Pritzker prize, architecture's top honor. But that is merely one of many paradoxes awaiting the visitor who looks beyond the fairy tales the city has long lived by. Listen to the music. One night Vienna's frothy merriment is reflected in Johann Strauss Jr.'s "Blue Danube"; the next, in the same hall, its sunset sensibility, its conviction that the best days are over, is reflected in the nostalgic despair of Schubert's Winterreise.
