Scarcely any playwright is as closely identified with turn-of-the-century Vienna as is Arthur Schnitzler. Once regarded as a one-sided writer whose perspective was limited to upper-crust Viennese society during the belle èpoque, Schnitzler has come to be appreciated as a keenly perceptive critic of his milieu whose moralism is tempered by his own abundant possession of the foibles he illuminates. The older critical commonplace of his narrowness is belied by the variety of dramatic genres in which he wrote: conventional three-and five-act comedies, tragedies, and tragicomedies; one-act plays; dramatic poems; verse plays; historical dramas; play cycles; pantomimes; and puppet plays. He was also an accomplished writer of fiction. In its diversity Schnitzler's work exhibits features of the artistic modes predominant in his day--naturalism and aestheticism--yet his oeuvre resists stylistic classification.

It is little wonder that Vienna served as the setting for the bulk of Schnitzler's work. Born...