William Ritter (writer)

[1] After he graduated from the Academy he travelled extensively in Europe, first in the west (Paris, Vienna, Munich), then in the east (Czechoslovakia, Poland, Montenegro, Romania, Slovakia), gathering material for his novels.

[1] The near East provided Ritter with a taste of the exoticism, comparable to the Istanbul described by Pierre Loti,[6] that was a particular fascination to figures within the Decadent movement in Paris, notably the aesthetes Robert de Montesquiou and Sâr Péladan.

[6] Ritter went to Prague in 1888 to learn German, then studied the history of art and music at the University of Vienna for a term, taking a course in harmony from Anton Bruckner.

[4][6] In 1889, his friend the French architect Léon Bachelin invited him to Bucharest, the first of a ten-year-long series of repeated trips that Ritter undertook to the east and the Balkans.

After the First World War, Ritter spent much time in the newly created Czechoslovakia, but, as a homosexual aesthete and Catholic conservative he felt disillusioned with this progressive and modern democratic country that had thrown off the shackles of empire.

[6] Ritter was the correspondent for the Parisian literary review Mercure de France in Prague from 1904 to 1905, writing on musical matters, and 1907 he wrote the first French-language book on Bedřich Smetana.

4 in Munich on 1901 he wrote, "Jewish wit has invaded the Symphony, corroding it,"[10] and that the work was so "moist and persuasive, tantalizing and seductive" that it provoked "lewd glances in the concert halls, the salacious dribble at the corners of the mouths of some of the old men, and above all the ugly, whoring laughs of certain respectable women!".

Ritter viewed Mahler's music as symbolic of modern Vienna, in the same way as the architecture of Otto Wagner and the painting of Gustav Klimt and Koloman Moser.