This book is fairly good, though narrow and somewhat overwritten (too novelistic -- the author is, after all, a novelist, and not an historian). The truth is that I grew a bit impatient with it, as the topic continued to narrow even after the suicide of Rudolph, rather than broadening out to take on at a deeper or more serious level the implications of this 'peaking' of the Golden Age of Vienna.
At any rate, Morton's Rudolph is a fascinating and attractive figure, though Morton possibly downplays (in fact, almost buries) the role that depression over his (i.e., Rudolph's) gonorreah (then uncurable) may have played.
3 1/2 stars