Overview

Between 1796 & 1800 Baron Peter von Braun, a rich businessman & manager of Vienna’s court theaters, transformed his estate at Schonau into an English-style landscape park. The most celebrated building was the Temple of Night, a domed rotunda accessible only through a meandering rockwork grotto. A life-size statue of the goddess Night on a chariot pulled by two horses presided over the Temple, while from the dome, came the sounds of a mechanical musical instrument. Only the ruins survive, & the Temple has received little scholarly attention. This book brings it back to life by assembling the descriptions of it by early 19th-cent. eyewitnesses. “Will appeal to anyone interested in the history of garden design, arch., theater, & music.” Illus.

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9780871692580

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""A wonderful reconstruction not just of a lost piece of splendid eighteenth-century garden architecture, but also of the cultural world that celebrated its construction and of the later decline of both the garden and its cultural milieu…Immensely readable—a great excursion into a lost world."" -- Rita Krueger * Austrian History Yearbook * ""As the first book-length study on the Temple of Night, this carefully detailed investigation, richly illustrated with engravings, architectural plans, and photographs of the site, has filled a significant gap in Viennese cultural studies."" -- Estelle Joubert * Newsletter for the Society of Eighteenth-Century Music *

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