They were raised in a vast marble palace in Vienna, with liveried servants, seven grand pianos, a Rodin sculpture, and frescoes depicting scenes from A Midsummer Night's Dream. Their father, a self-made millionaire and one of the leading industrialists of the Habsburg Empire, was also a deeply cultured man, an art collector who provided the funding for the Secession Building at which the "advanced" artists of the period -- Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka -- exhibited their work (Klimt referred to him as his "Minister of Fine Art"). But it was music that was Karl Wittgenstein's great passion, and that of his wife: Brahms, Mahler, Schoenberg, and Richard Strauss all attended the musical evenings in the palace's opulent Musiksaal, and the elder Wittgensteins spent many hours playing music with each other and their eight children. The conductor Bruno Walter, another attendee at those private concerts, described the "all-pervading atmosphere of humanity and culture" that prevailed in the household.

Yet if the Wittgensteins were among the most cultivated and privileged of families, they were far from the most cheerful. Hermine, the oldest child, never married and became increasingly depressed and reclusive as she grew older; Gretl, the most intelligent, most adventurous daughter -- immortalized in a painting by Klimt that now hangs in the Neue Pinakothek in Munich -- entered into a disastrous marriage with an impoverished American who turned out to be a paranoid hysteric, is rumored to have consulted Freud about her frigidity, and spent most of her life searching restlessly for a cause or project to devote her energies to. Nor were the sons any happier.