Certainly a remarkable product of ‘sensitive introspection’, La Ronde is also a portrait of an entire society. It is delineated by that characteristic literary figure of the nineteenth-century metropolis, the writer who observes the teeming life of the streets and cafés with the familiarity of the habitué and the curiosity of the social anthropologist: what the poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) called ‘the painter of modern life’. This tradition begins with Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) and his Comédie Humaine, the cycle of realist novels written in the 1830s and 1840s, whose cross-section of society reminds us how close the salon can be to the gutter. It continues with Charles Dickens (1812-70); and in the finely-wrought prose of Gustav Flaubert (1821-80), from whose Madame Bovary (1856) Schnitzler mischievously borrows the names of Emma and her cuckold husband, Charles (Karl), for the bourgeois couple in La Ronde. Its modernist and reformist tendencies are emphasised in the naturalism of the novels of Émile Zola (1840-1902), with their portrayal of harsh lives of the Parisian working class; while the boulevardier novellas and tales of Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893), the plays and short stories of Chekhov and the great cycle of naturalist dramas of Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) reveal the currents of anxiety, repression and hypocrisy beneath the placid surface of bourgeois life.

La Ronde is a late and consciously daring product of that humanistic, liberal and realist tradition, with which Schnitzler identified and to which he belonged. The world of the play is not that of the Viennese cultural avant-garde in which Schnitzler himself moved, but its antithesis: low, high or middling, these are the ordinary people of the metropolis, oblivious to the artistic and cultural innovations going on around them. Even the Poet seems unaware of it all: evidently third-rate, he spouts pseudo-Symbolist nonsense. Though these characters are driven by their sexual appetites, they are not presented as being especially promiscuous, and certainly not as depraved.

Theatrical censorship was the norm throughout Europe in the 1890s (and remained so for many decades beyond). Any allusion on stage to sexual activity was banned; the actual depiction of it, unimaginable. In that cultural context, ‘avantgarde’ would be a fair way to characterise a play about ten acts of copulation, mostly casual and all but one outside marriage. It is not surprising that early critical reaction to La Ronde – in the relatively few instances where the work was not condemned as an affront to public decency – focused on how radical a departure it represented (see ‘The Struggle for Acceptance’, below). But the play’s modernity has deep roots, stretching back to the liberal, secular tradition of literary realism of the mid-nineteenth century; to the sceptical rationalism of the eighteenth century; and arguably, all the way to the scientific revolution of the century before.