Vienna. Ask yourself to picture the city, and your mind will likely supply you with a series of snapshots: respectable middle-class citizens nursing glasses of frilly coffee in ludicrously baroque cafes on the Ringstrasse; the solemn rhythmic circles of the Blue Danube waltz; the operettas of Strauss and Lehár. Vienna has become a byword for everything that is conservative, staid and more than slightly passé.
Yet for several illustrious centuries, Vienna was the hub of Europe's artistic and intellectual life. In the early years of the last century, in particular, it was a veritable cauldron of ideas, the residential city of choice for those who were interested in whatever was new, subversive and - from the point of view of the respectable middle classes - potentially dangerous. In those days, if you strayed into one of those oh-so-polite cafes, you might have found yourself in the company of Sigmund Freud or Gustav Klimt. Joseph Roth, that master of literary melancholy, was there, and so was the poet of the imperceptible, Peter Altenberg.
There was a chap called Bronstein, also known as Trotsky, who spent so much time nursing glasses of frilly coffee that one Austrian minister - warned by the secret services that preparations were being made in the event of revolution in Russia - is said to have replied: "And who on earth is going to makes a revolution in Russia? I suppose you're going to tell me it's that Bronstein who sits all day at the Café Central!"
You might also have caught a glimpse of a fresh-faced young man by the name of Adolf Hitler. Vienna's association, first with its own brand of authoritarian Catholicism, and then with Nazism, caused a catastrophic fall from intellectual grace. Yet the city was once the ideological saviour of Europe. When the armies of Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent laid siege to Vienna in 1529, it was a moment of profound culture shock; and when the Turks were finally defeated in 1683, relief swept over Europe. Austrian culture, with its devotion to order, decency and the solidity of large square buildings, had conquered the unpredictable nomads from the untamed vastness of the Asian steppes.
The Turks, however, have left their mark on Vienna - as have, at various times in the city's history, Greeks, Jews, Hungarians, Romanians; and, indeed, the Irish. Look a little more closely at Vienna's cultural heartbeat, and you find that it throbs with conflicting influences, bristles with tension between the familiar and the experimental, the known and the unknown. This tension is especially marked in the field of music, Vienna being, more than any other European city - with the possible exception, now, of Prague - the unchallenged capital of musical excellence.
Think of music in Vienna and you think, first, of the extraordinary lightness of Mozart and the unshadowed sunshine of Haydn. In its own day the work of these composers was considered new and challenging. But there is also a second, more recent, school of Viennese composition, one which did not merely challenge the certainties of Western classical music but turned them inside out - the exquisite mathematical musings of Schoenberg, the delicate lyricism of Webern. Here is another creative tension - one that will be explored over four successive Saturdays, beginning tonight, in a series of concerts, Tales from Vienna, by the RTÉ Concert Orchestra at The Helix. "What unites all these different personalities," writes the RTÉCO's principal conductor, Laurent Wagner, in an introductory note on the series, "is a very strong forward-looking urge, a break with the past. Yet not a past one despises, or one which is an unknown quantity - as would often be the case with self-styled modernisers - but a past held to be what it is: past. A past absorbed and now being built upon again from scratch. A new, virgin page to be written on. . ." Wagner's programming is clever and appealing: Schoenberg back-to-back with Haydn, Webern followed by Beethoven.
The familiar and the experimental, side by side. And by way of visual accompaniment the Austrian Embassy has provided, from the archives of the Austrian National Library, an exhibition of elegiac images of Vienna by the Jewish photographer Harry Weber. Ranging over half-a-century of life in the city, these wry studies perfectly capture what Claudio Magris, in the chapter on Vienna in his book Danube, has called "the sadness of symmetry": kettle-menders hammering away beneath a huge advertisement for Kodak Gold; a Jewish boy surrounded by three bearded elders at his circumcision ceremony; a Romanian gypsy man clutching three battered violin cases at the flea market. A different series of Vienna snapshots entirely.
Tales from Vienna opens at The Helix , Dublin tonight with the RTÉCO, conducted by Laurent Wagner, playing Beethoven, Zemlinsky and Haydn.