Agitated in Austria: Taking the pulse of art and politics at a cutting-edge festival. (Postmark Vienna).(Vienna Festival)

The official motto of the Vienna Festival--"Representation among Irritation"--would never put American bottoms in seats, but it somehow seemed apt for a late-summer festival of the arts in the city of Freud and Wittgenstein. The Viennese like things heavy--artistic credos, advertising slogans, dumplings--and they ladle their irony with thick, albeit delicious, gravy.

No wonder they were so taken with Mozart: His sublimely light touch must have felt like cracking a window that had been shuttered for centuries. (Though one of my hosts, accent ripe with Riesling, informed me ...

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