Carnegie Hall’s imminent festival, Vienna, City of Dreams, promises to be one of the most lavish in its rich history: a three-week citywide celebration with more than 50 events, anchored by five programs from the Vienna Philharmonic and two concert operas from that orchestra’s parent company, the Vienna State Opera, at Carnegie. A broad representation of Viennese music from the 18th to the 21st centuries will range from Strauss family waltzes and other froth to those cathartically harrowing operas Richard Strauss’s “Salome” and Alban Berg’s “Wozzeck.”

The festival officially begins on Friday with the 59th Viennese Opera Ball in New York, at the Waldorf-Astoria. But not everything will be festive and celebratory. Vienna has, after all, also been a city of nightmares at times, and the bleaker aspects of its history will be examined in some detail during the festival.

On Feb. 24 — even before the first concert, with Franz Welser-Möst conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in an edifying program of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Schoenberg’s “Friede auf Erden” (“Peace on Earth”) on Feb. 25 — the Chumir Foundation for Ethics in Leadership will begin a symposium on Vienna’s history and legacy of the last 150 years at the Paley Center for Media. In the first panel, “Vienna, 1860 to 1914: Creativity, Culture, Science and Politics,” speakers including Mr. Welser-Möst will discuss topics including “the roots of societal breakdown.”

If that doesn’t start the fur flying, the second panel, on Feb. 27, should: “How Did the Cultured, Creative Society of Vienna Lose Its Moral Compass?” Presenting the Vienna Philharmonic as the prime specimen, and with Clemens Hellsberg, a violinist and president of the self-governing orchestra, as one of the speakers, the panel will inevitably reach to a deeper, more universal issue: the moral responsibility of artists and artistic institutions both to their time and to history.