Vienna, 1800

Vienna was a large city in 1800, but hardly the largest in Europe. The city was just under 272,000 souls in 1793 living, for the most part, within city walls that could be traversed in well under a half-an-hour. Greater London at the time was home to somewhere around a million residents; Paris, about 600,000. Amsterdam, Milan, Moscow and St. Petersburg were about the same size; Naples was nearly twice as large. Once a frontline city in Europe’s wars with the Ottoman Turks, Vienna had remained relatively peaceful since the Austrians and various allies broke an Ottoman siege in 1683 and drove the Turks back towards the Balkans.

Vienna had been resident city to the Habsburgs and, as de facto capital of the Holy Roman Empire, attracted a steady stream of newcomers. The city’s diversity was particularly evident within its musical community, which long included a significant Italian presence. The Italians were so omnipresent, in fact, that factions formed at court around “Italian” and “German” musical cultures.

Writing about the 1824 premiere performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in his book First Nights (2000), Thomas Forrest Kelly notes, “Vienna, as a cultural and artistic crossroads, had a rich influx of musicians from countries such as Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Germany, and Italy. The orchestra certainly consisted of players who used a variety of bows and reflected the styles of many different teachers. Even among those who regularly played together in the theater orchestras, such a diversity of styles was entirely normal.” 21

The court dominated musical life in seventeenth century Vienna. Proudly Roman Catholic, the Hapsburgs celebrated major events in the religious calendar with operas and concerts. Major family events similarly gave cause for musical celebration. Opera lavishly legitimated their regime by celebrating virtues and values that were thought central to the Hapsburg dynasty. Religious music constantly carried the court through overlapping cycles of court life. Under Emperors Leopold I, Joseph I, and Karl VI (1657 – 1740), music in various forms stood at the core of court life.

The imperial household supported between 44 and 98 musicians during these years as well as an extensive company of designers, constructors, composers, librettists and managers to support their work. Employment was for life, with stipends often continuing after age-related infirmities set in. Performances of operas were private to the court, with this large musical entourage moving among the Hapsburgs’ formal residences

with the season. Landing a position as a musician at the Hapsburg court of the era was a sought-after position with several noteworthy musicians, composers and librettists finding their niche during these years including Giovanni Bononcini, Antopio Drahi, Johann Joseph Fux, Pietro Metastasio, Giovanni Pierluigi Palestrina and Apostolo Zeno.

In 1723, the court relocated to Prague for a four-month celebration of Karl’s coronation as King of Bohemia. The extravaganza included several productions of opera, masses and coronation events, all designed to produce extravagant splendor. Prague, however, was a very different sort of city not having an indigenous court life at the time. That city’s lively musical scene necessarily embraced public performances at theaters and venues sustained by patrons far out of courtly bounds. Prague’s aristocratic artistic sponsorship offered an alternative model at a time when the constant drumbeat of war and imperial expansion placed ever more stringent constraints on courtly budgets. Imperial finances would only weaken further once Europe — and the Hapsburgs with it — descended into the Napoleonic War.

The ever parsimonious reforming Empress Maria-Theresa trimmed courtly ceremonials and household budgets for the extravagant spectacles of decades past. Musicians turned their attention to alternative financial patrons and, as they did, aristocratic support for culture expanded. Public concert halls and musical venues began to appear ranging from well-used music rooms in the city’s

Gesellshaft der Musikfreunde (Society of Music Friends) in Vienna. Photo: Miguel Mendez. 2012. Flickr.com. CC License 2.0.

burgeoning family bastions to theaters such as the Burgtheater and Teater am Kärntnertor. Music increasingly took printed form, vastly extending its reach, while a growing press breathlessly covered the music scene, educating novice listeners in the process.

By the time Mozart arrived in town in 1781, Vienna’s musical life already was changing. Mozart’s personal trajectory reflected the broader pattern. Much to the horror of his father, the brash young composer fled steady employment with the archiepiscopal court in Salzburg to become a freelance musician in Vienna.

As David Wyn Jones writes in Music in Vienna: 1700, 1800, 1900 (2016), “There had been a fundamental change in musical patronage, a considerable weakening of the near-monopoly in which the court operated early in the century to a more pluralist environment in which the aristocracy, later joined by the bourgeoisie, played leading roles. Music at the imperial palace could still serve the old certainties of political and religious authority on occasions, but its presence within the court was now more likely to be as a form of diversion, and private devotion rather than presentation.” 22

Music was changing as well. Bartolomeo Cristofori’s newfangled pianoforte had, over the course of the eighteenth century, replaced the harpsichord as European music’s lodestone. The new instrument, which involved felt-covered hammers striking strings rather than levers plucking them, opened up new horizons. The years surrounding 1800 were ones of rapid musical invention; and, the Viennese stood at its center.

By the early years of the nineteenth century, musicologists would begin to speak of a “Vienna School” surrounding Joseph Haydn (1732-1809), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791), Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) and Franz Schubert (1797-1828). Together with their students, fellow musicians and publishers, the Viennese four re-invented European music. They collectively turned the Baroque into more Classical forms (such as quartets, oratorio, symphonies and concertos). None of the four were native Viennese (although Schubert was born in a nearby suburb). They came together with musicians from across Europe, to join in what many saw at the time as Europe’s most inventive musical scene.

“Papa” Haydn in many ways stood at the center of the Viennese musical transformation. Haydn’s parents sensed their son’s talent early on and moved from the village of Rohrau along the Hungarian border to Vienna to expand the opportunities to develop his musical skills. By 1740, at the age of eight, Haydn joined St. Stephen’s Cathedral choir. He later struggled as a freelancer before landing a position as Kapellmeister for Count Morzin. These duties led him to his life-long patrons, the Esterházy family. Securing the rights to his own music from his patrons in 1779, Haydn moved beyond

the opera and religious music required by the Esterházys to compose quartets and symphonies. In doing so, he established the standards for what became central genre within the European classical canon. He travelled to London, became a figure at court in Vienna, and one of the city’s most celebrated citizens. Along the way he befriended Mozart and tutored Beethoven.

The premiere of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at the Teater am Kärntnertor on May 7, 1824 marks a culmination of the revolution begun by Haydn. With the city’s musical tastes shifting toward the Italians, the composer initially planned a Berlin premier. However, friends, supporters, patrons and performers signed a petition for a Vienna début. The colossal symphony was both unlike anything played before and built around smaller more customary components.

The theater’s Kapellmeister Michael Umlauf shared the stage with Beethoven and several performers taking note that they followed Umlauf’s directions as the deaf composer gesticulated wildly with his baton. Beethoven was still conducting when the music ended. The overflowing hall erupted in applause which Beethoven did not hear. Contralto Caroline Unger gently turned him around to even wilder acclaim. European performance music would never be the same again.

Eventually shifts to a rising middle class enabled another great era of Viennese music to coalesce around 1900. Vienna’s identity as Europe’s music capital had long been secured as a new generation of composers emerged such as Johannes Brahms, Anton Bruckner, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg and the Strauss Family. No matter how sour the politics and enfeebled the Austro-Hungarian state became, musicians continued to flock to the city to test their talents against other masters, discerning audiences and astute patrons. Throughout the decades leading up to the First World War, Vienna remained an inventive hotspot for European concert music.

Vienna at sunset. Photo: Alex Poison, shutterstock.com