The Temple of Night at Schönau

                                                                             Die Himmel erzählen die Ehre Gottes,

                                                                             Und seiner Hände Werk

                                                                             Zeigt uns das Firmament.

In 1796 Baron Peter von Braun, a wealthy industrialist who from 1794 managed the Viennese court theaters, bought an estate at Schönau, about thirty kilometers south of Vienna. There he laid out an elaborate pleasure garden that soon after its completion in 1799 or 1800 became one of the region's most famous tourist attractions. The high point of a visit to Schönau was a tour of the Temple of Night (Tempel der Nacht). Designed by the court architect Johann Ferdinand Hetzendorf von Hohenberg, this domed rotunda, lined with Corinthian columns and illuminated by alabaster lamps, was accessible only by way of a meandering artifical grotto. The Greco-Roman goddess Night, modelled in wax, sat on a chariot pulled by winged horses. The dome of midnight blue represented the firmament glorified in Haydn's Die Schöpfung of 1798; the full moon rose amid sparkling stars. Johann Nepomuk Mälzel, designer of mechanical musical instruments and inventor of the metronome, built into the ceiling a machine whose sound moved visitors to exclamations of delight: "Harmonica tones, carried on charming melodies, floated from the star-studded cupola--the sound of angelic harps, the ancients' music of the spheres!"[1]

            Braun's park required as much money to maintain as to build; and it was not the only luxury for which he continued to pay while the financial crises of the Napoleonic era weakened his business ventures and cut into his income. Reduced to poverty, he was forced to sell Schönau in 1817 to the exiled Jérôme Bonaparte, Napoleon's brother. By the early 1820s the Temple of Night had fallen into ruin. One of Lower Austria's most celebrated marvels quickly disappeared from public consciousness, except in the memory of those who had visited it during its prime.

            "The famous Temple of Night has fallen in," reported a travel guide in 1822.[2] An Austrian encyclopedia published in the 1830s listed a temple among the objects of interest at Schönau, describing it, in what is probably an understatement, as "no longer in its earlier, fanciful state."[3] Shortly thereafter a guidebook to the nearby town of Baden mentioned Schönau's "wonderful garden, traces of whose former glory can be seen in the waterfalls, islands, the Temple of Night, Diana's Bath, the Fisherman's Hut, etc., which will probably be restored to their original beauty by the present beneficent owner [Prince Liechtenstein]."[4] The author was too optimistic. The estate passed through many hands, including those of Archduke Otto Habsburg, who owned it from 1896 to 1910; but none of the proprietors seems to have taken much interest in the slowly decaying grotto.

            Schönau's more recent fate delivered it from the benign neglect of previous owners into the greater potential danger of large groups of people who had no vested interest in preserving it. From 1945 to 1953 the park was occupied by the Soviet army; from 1965 to 1973 it served as a staging post for Jewish emigrés on their way from the Soviet Union to Israel; and from 1973 to 1991 the Austrian Ministry of the Interior used it as a training camp for its elite counter-terrorist "Cobra" unit.[5]

            Recorded attempts since 1820 to see and to describe what was left of the Temple of Night have been rare. In 1894 some intrepid sightseers from Vienna ventured into the woods of Schönau. One of them reported:

Today one can look into this room only from its partly crumbling upper rim. But the remains, even in their decrepit state, the several stately marble columns, and the traces—it seemed to me—of wall paintings, allowed one to suspect that this imposing structure must have made a considerable impression, especially if—and the name tells us that this was indeed the case—brilliant, artistically arranged lighting was taken into account.[6]  

            I first learned about the Temple of Night in the early 1990s during research for a book on Antonio Salieri, who composed the "music of the spheres" played on Mälzel's machine ("Armonia per un Tempio della Notte," for wind ensemble, of which probably only the central part, a transcription of the a-cappella quartet "Silenzio facciasi" from Palmira regina di Persia, was played on the Flötenuhr or musical clock in the Temple). I discovered that the Temple had been the object of little scholarly research beyond the brief discussions of it by Géza Hajós, Austria's leading expert on historical gardens, in his beautiful and learned Romantische Gärten der Aufklärung: Englische Landschaftkultur des 18. Jahrhundert in und um Wien (Vienna, 1989). No description of the Temple's remains (if there were any) had been published by anyone who had actually seen them since 1894; nor could I find a single published photograph of the site.

            That few scholars had shown interest in the Temple is attributable partly to its collapse so long ago, partly to the fact that the uses to which the park had been put during most of the second half of the twentieth century had made visiting the site difficult or impossible, and partly to its lying outside the purview of any single academic discipline. But the multiplicity of cultural activities that it represents promised to reward indisciplinary study. Brought back to life through archival research and synthesis of the many enthusiastic accounts of those who visited it, the Temple, I hoped, could be profitably analyzed as a microcosm of Viennese culture during the complex and fascinating period of transition from Aufklärung to Biedermeier.

            The result is a series of interrelated chapters that examine the Temple from various perspectives and that use it as point of departure for the study of related cultural phenomena. Chapter 1 follows Braun's life, placing the construction of the Temple within the context of his other activities and showing how the Temple functioned as a tourist destination during its brief existence. The survival of several eyewitness accounts as well as some visual documentation allows us to reconstruct, in Chapter 2, a tour of the grotto and Temple—and to learn something of what visitors saw and felt. The grotto and Temple constituted a garden folly, or, to put it another way, a pair of follies ingeniously combined. Chapter 3 considers Braun's garden within the history of the English-style landscape park, especially as Christian Cay Lorenz Hirschfeld codified and popularized its aesthetic principles for the German-speaking part of Europe in his five-volume Theorie der Gartenkunst (1779-85). 

            As I assembled historical documentation on the Temple of Night in 1998, the idea that what was already a ruin in the 1820s could have survived the twentieth century seemed far-fetched. It was with much surprise and delight that I received a letter from Géza Hajós inviting me to accompany him on a tour of the Temple during my next visit to Austria.

            On the afternoon of 1 July 1999 I met Hajós and his wife Beatrix at the base of the equestrian statue of Prince Eugene of Savoy in the Heldenplatz in downtown Vienna. Hajós drove us south, across the Ringstraße and through neighborhoods of Vienna that had, before the walls surrounding the old city were torn down in the nineteenth century, been known as Vorstädte, suburbs. We found our way onto the A2, the main highway south, and apartment buildings and factories soon yielded to flat farmland and, on our right, a view of the forested hills of the Wienerwald.

            About fifteen minutes on the highway brought us to the exit to Leobersdorf; and a few minutes later we drove down a gravel path and parked behind Schloß Schönau, a late nineteenth-century mansion with which Archduke Otto had replaced the neoclassical house that had sheltered Braun and Bonaparte. The soldiers, emigrés, and commandos had disappeared. The owner of the estate had leased out much of his land to a school that now occupied the house, and to a cultural foundation—the Verein Schloßpark Schönau—with ambitious plans: a summer season of open-air Italian operas in the shadow of the Schloß (scheduled for 1999: four works by Verdi, "with soloists of the opera houses of Milan, Verona, Naples, and Venice," according to the poster to be seen at streetcar stops in Vienna) and an Indian Village: an open-air living museum of American Indian culture.

            Although the grotto was not open to the public, Hajós had arranged our visit with the foundation, one of whose members, Helmut Stein, had kindly agreed to be our guide. He soon appeared, leading us first to what was perhaps closest to his heart. In a few acres of pleasant parkland we could see recreations of villages of Indian tribes from various parts of North America: a field of white teepees on one side, on the other a longhouse of the Pacific northwest, lovingly constructed of old-world logs. The foundation had invited Indians of several tribes to come to Schönau to demonstrate traditional crafts, to dance, to sing, and to tell legends over campfires to children who, in the hopes of the organizers, would come to the park in ever increasing numbers. (Visiting Schönau again a year later, I learned that the Indian Village, having suffered disastrous financial losses, had closed. Hardly a trace of it remained.)

            From the Indian Village we followed a sign that promised canoes, on a wooded path that led toward the sound of excited children. In a minute or two we found a brook on our left, spanned by a single arch of rough-hewn stone. In front of us a crowd of children waited for canoe rides. And on the right a cliff, consisting of large rocks artfully arranged so as to give an impression of nature at its most rugged and sublime, rose up to form the side of an enormous artificial mound, covered with trees.