Innovation and reproduction are dominant forces in the culture of Austria, where history, tradition, and authority loom large, providing powerful models to follow, reinterpret, or rebel against. Contrast between traditional, established and rebellious, innovative art is easy to see in comparing waltzes and atonal music, Baroque and Hundertwasser architecture, or Biedermeyer and Wiener Werkstätte decorative styles, but literature and drama often combine tradition and revolt and portray negative as well as positive aspects of society. Franz Grillparzer is the founding father of classical Austrian literature; and yet, one of his best known works, "Der arme Spielmann," (1848) portrays a failure, victimized by Austrian social and artistic ideals -- with music a major testing ground of life - and anticipates Freud's analysis of mental illness and its origins in parent/child interactions. Joseph Roth is an "establishment" figure in his role as the chronicler of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its fall, but his major "Imperial" novel, Radetzkymarsch (1932) centers on an inadequate, maladjusted protagonist psychologically harmed by the demanding expectations of his father. To him, parental authority represents the ideals and demands of the Empire itself and its military, as does the patriotic march of the novel's title. The 1983 novel, Die Klavierspielerin, by 2004 Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek, a political radical and "shock" writer," innovative in its graphic portrayal of sadomasochism, also portrays an individual victimized by destructive parental authority; here again, music is a proving ground, and the cost of failure is devastatingly high. Each of these three very Austrian texts is innovative and original, but they all produce and reproduce the image of an Austria in which societal and parental authority can be harsh and oppressive, and music, the pride and glory of Austrian identity, can be toxic and destructive. These elements comprise one version of the more general image of Austria as a place whose beautiful facade covers ugly secrets.
