This month's Arts Society, Colchester was about Fin-de-Siecle Vienna. Based on what I knew from the BBC 4 programme with Dr James Fox (which was delightful and is sure to be repeated, frequently, so you can watch it too) I was expecting Gustav Klimt and middle class angst in about equal measure. Today's lecturer took the same view of affairs as Dr Fox, and the lecture contained plenty of both, plus Egon Schiele. I'd forgotten about him, despite having been to the Courtauld's 2015 exhibition.
Happily, today's lecture also contained a fair proportion of architecture, which Dr Fox didn't cover so much. I was pleased to be introduced to the work of Otto Wagner, no relation of the composer, who worked in variations of the modernist and Art Nouveaux idioms. The lecturer did not use either of those terms, but that is how Otto Wagner was characterised on a tourist website which I found afterwards. However you would label him, I liked his plain, square buildings with their ebullient gold decorations and colourful tiles. He designed some beautiful railway stations, although they failed to convert the elderly Kaiser to the pleasures of rail travel, and if I were planning to visit Vienna I probably would get the bus out of town to see the church with its soaring gold dome he designed for a mental institution. Only I'm not.
My only disappointment was that the lecturer did not mention Stephan Zweig or Joseph Roth and so I could not award myself points for having read their collected correspondence (in translation) and my full and sincere intention to read the book about them, Summer before the dark, which came out two years ago and has been on my Amazon wish list since then after reading the reviews.
I was rather late meeting the friend who introduced me to the society, though she touchingly insisted that she'd been sure I was coming. Firstly, I had forgotten that proceedings would start a quarter of an hour early to allow time for the AGM before the lecture. My usual rule is never to go to AGMs unless I am on the committee, but there was no escaping this one, and it lasted longer than some. But secondly, I was delayed playing an ineffectual good samaritan as an elderly chap who was making his way up the road just ahead of me fell over outside the church. I initially assumed he'd tripped over a small bollard sticking up at the edge of the car park, and as he seemed keen to get back to his feet I tried to help him, but it soon became clear that he couldn't get up.
We were joined by a woman who said she didn't like the look of this and she was going to ring for a paramedic. The chap said he didn't want a paramedic, and I had grave doubts as to how quickly they would come, given that the patient was conscious and quite voluble. He said his legs had gone under him, and that he'd been fine most of the way walking from central Colchester. A little group of people en route to the lecture stopped to see what was going on, and we talked at cross purposes as it transpired that the first rescuer behind me was not going to the meeting herself, and had assumed that the old chap was trying to go home rather than into the church twenty yards away. Once she discovered that he was among people some of whom knew him she left him in their care, somebody fetched a chair, somebody else offered water, he said he'd rather have a coffee, and two men helped him in to the building. I expect he ought to go and get himself checked by his GP fairly soon, but he really didn't seem to be having a stroke or a heart attack at that minute. The chairman of the music society was among the crowd, and I explained that I'd been walking just behind him and he had been staggering a bit but I'd put that down to age. The chairman snorted and said that he was not that old, and was supposed to be going on the Arts Society holiday with them. I hope he makes it.
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