Vienna, Innere Stadt: Above the entrance of the house Seilerstätte 10 an angel made of stone blows the trumpet. The house is home to the widely ramified Alt family of piano makers, whose rise and fall is told in a panorama spanning generations. At the centre is the beautiful Henriette Alt, with twenty lovers of Crown Prince Rudolf, then married into the family and there an eternal foreign body, with seventy finally victims of Hitler's Gestapo. In the midst of catastrophes, intrigues and budding fascism, Henriette is the symbol of hope and the end times - her fate is the fate of an entire epoch.