The Temple of Night at Schönau: Architecture, Music, and Theater in a Late Eighteenth-Century Viennese Garden (review)

From 1796 to 1800, theater impresario and wealthy businessman Baron Peter von Braun constructed an elaborate garden whose main attraction was a "Temple of Night." After wandering through an artificially created grotto, visitors emerged in a magnificent rotunda presided over by the goddess Night; charming music emanated, as if by magic, into a dome that depicted a starlit sky. Braun's park was a prime tourist destination during the transition from the Enlightenment to the Biedermeier era; by the 1820s, however, it had fallen into disrepair. Drawing on written accounts, iconographic evidence, and the present day ruins of the temple, John A. Rice verbally reconstructs Braun's garden. He then uses it and its stunning Temple as a launching point to examine "related cultural phenomena" such as the influence of the English-style landscape park, changing perceptions of night, and "late eighteenth-century Vienna's fascination with mechanical instruments" (p. 4). Rice's reconstruction of the garden took quite a bit of detective work and obviously is thoroughly researched. The later chapters, which discuss cultural context, vary in quality; at times, the author casts his net slightly too wide and in others not quite deep enough.

The book's first chapter focuses on the garden's builder and places the park at Schönau within the context of Braun's career. The next recreates a visit to his famous garden. The baron clearly knew how to craft effective illusions, as the numerous quotations from eighteenth and nineteenth-century visitors attest. (Engravings and maps support the discussion as well.) The temple had achieved notoriety even before its completion and served as "the climax of a carefully orchestrated experience" (p. 40). Visitors had to walk through a naturalistic garden before they entered a "narrow, rock-lined tunnel" which led to a series of dark chambers; the route was lined with inscriptions by the well-known playwright August von Kotzebue, such as "Dark, like the path of life" and "Upward, downward! Climbing, falling! The fate of man!" (pp. 42, 44). The temple itself gave one the impression of standing under a moonlit sky. The illusion Braun created "consisted not only of conjuring night out of day but also of making his visitors believe that their twisted path through the grotto had led them, by the time they reached the temple, to some mysterious place deep within the earth," when in reality they remained at ground level (p. 7). Sound was an integral part of the experience: Visitors passed by a waterfall; music from Salieri's opera Palmira wafted from a mechanical organ hidden within the temple's ceiling.

The book's subsequent chapters mix further description with cultural analysis. Chapter 3, "Temple as Garden Folly," compares Braun's park with other English-style landscape gardens on the continent. Like Schönau, these often incorporated artificially constructed caves and circular temples. Most temples were supposed to be admired from afar; Braun's Temple of Night, "in contrast, could only be admired from within" (p. 70).

Chapter 4 demonstrates how the temple manifested both eighteenth and nineteenth-century attitudes towards night. Enlightenment philosophers often used darkness as a metaphor for confusion and ignorance; by the late 1700s, however, night increasingly came to be viewed as a time of quiet introspection and the heavens' evidence of a supreme being ("the heavens are telling the glory of God," to quote Haydn's Creation). At Schönau, visitors experienced both aspects of night: they emerged from the frightening darkness of the artificial cavern into a bright, seemingly star-studded dome, a journey many of them described in spiritual terms. Rice employs quotes from a wide spectrum of writers, including Pope, Gray, Schiller, Byron, and Shelley, to depict changing perceptions of...