The subject for this book arose from modest beginnings. In 1994, I was searching for a suitable topic in connection with applying to attend a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar at Columbia University on German modernism led by Walter Frisch. Three years earlier, I had published an article on the circumstances surrounding Vienna's commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of Beethoven's birth, an event that became embroiled in the controversy over the so-called music of the future. With Schubert's centennial falling in 1897—an auspicious year of musical, cultural, and political change in Vienna during which Brahms died, Mahler arrived, the Secession was founded, the Café Griensteidl was closed, Karl Lueger became mayor, and national agitation over new language ordinances prompted the resignation of the prime minister—I thought there might be something intriguing to discover with regard to the intersection of these and perhaps other markers as well. I quickly came to the realization that Schubert was a central figure for Viennese public life at the turn of the century. This was hardly a revelation, but what struck me was the extraordinary array of individuals who invoked the composer. The ways in which they appropriated particular aspects of Schubert's image for their own creative ends suggested a fascinating tension between a received history and the artistic responses to it, which in some cases were designed to challenge the very tradition that had spawned them.