On June 2 1914, Picasso accompanied his friends Georges Braque and Andre Derain to Avignon railway station. Picasso was Spanish and couldn't be called up. He waved his fellow painters off. Then, he was left alone on the platform. The war that had just begun would change Europe's cultural life forever.
One small (or large) event that would be multiplied a thousand times across Europe's capitals on the eve of the First World War.
As part of BBC Radio 3’s ‘Music on the Brink’ season examining the cultural life of Europe in 1914, this weeks Essay sees five BBC News correspondents evoke the capitals of the major European powers involved in the Great War.
Stepping back exactly a hundred years, BBC News correspondents present personal perspectives on the capital cities of the major European powers that, later in 1914, would face each other in the Great War. We start in the capital of the Habsburg Empire and the rich multiculturalism of Mitteleuropa.
In this first programme, Bethany Bell, the BBC's Vienna Correspondent, evokes both the public face of Austria-Hungary's capital and the simmering tensions which underlay its multinational empire on the eve of the greatest conflagration the world had yet seen. Taking us on a richly evocative tour of the embodiment of Mitteleuropa, she recreates a world that was soon to be torn asunder but of which telling elements remain.
It is all too easy to forget, she reminds listeners, that within months Vienna was home to Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, Siegmund Freud and Josef Broz (later Marshal Tito) - figures who defined the 20th century.
For the multiple nationalities of 1914 Vienna, indeed, the chronic weaknesses and divisions of this polyglot empire were painfully familiar, but the programme also reveals what has survived to this day of Vienna's glory, sophistication - and radicalism - in the era of Zemlinksy and Schreker and of Schoenberg, Webern and Berg.
Subsequent programmes cover Paris with Hugh Schofield as he tells the story of the pacifist Jean Jaures assassinated on the eve of war; Berlin as Stephen Evans takes listeners to a city already seething before war even began; St. Petersburg in 1914 as Steve Rosenberg revisits an event that would define modern Russia; and London as Allan Little steps back a century and evokes the sharply divided imperial London of 1914.
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