The great historian has died, at the age of one hundred. Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, published in 1980, is one of those rare books that change the direction of people's lives. So it was for me: I read it when I was seventeen, and it fired my imagination, showing me how early twentieth-century music related to surrounding cultural and political forces. My book The Rest Is Noise was written very much in Schorske's shadow. (If you see a certain resemblance between the image above and the image above right, it is not by accident.) Fin-de-Siècle Vienna will long remain a model for interdisciplinary writing, although no one will soon match Schorske's inquisitive erudition.
