Music + Word: City of Dreams

About

Internationally acclaimed pianist Melvyn Tan returns to Charleston, joined by legendary actress Sheila Hancock, for an autumnal edition of 'Music + Word' - an evening of music and literature, specially created for this setting to celebrates the blazing creativity of fin-de-siècle Vienna.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, Vienna dazzled as Europe's cultural capital. Its cafés and concert halls brimmed with new ideas, where Gustav Mahler's symphonies stretched beauty to breaking point, Arthur Schnitzler exposed the desires beneath bourgeois life and Sigmund Freud uncovered the unconscious. Writers such as Thomas Mann and Virginia Woolf absorbed these shocks, reshaping the novel to reflect fractured selves and dissolving certainties.

But beneath the brilliance lay unease. The harmony of old Europe was fragile, and modernist art and literature became its mirror, shimmering with both ecstasy and dread.

This evening of music and words explores Vienna 1900 as the prelude to Europe's great unravelling and the onset of war.

There will be 6.15pm pre-show talk about the programme by Paul Boucher, curator and research director of The Montagu Music Collection at Boughton House.