David Wyn Jones’s new book grew from courses he taught on music and society in Vienna, courses intended for students of history and European studies as well as for those of music. Music in Vienna has an atmosphere appropriate to a general readership, with broad rather than detailed treatment, lively anecdotes, and evocative descriptions of the city, sites of musical performances, and events and ceremonies. The book is divided into three sections, each focusing on a different epoch. Each section is defined historically: the first extends from the last siege of Vienna by the Turks in 1683 to the consolidation of the Habsburg succession in the 1720s; the second, from the death of Joseph II to the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15; and the third, from the 1860s to the First World War. Jones also links these sections with concepts of patronage (imperial, aristocratic and bourgeois) and of cultural self-identification (Habsburg, Austrian, Viennese). Through this plan, Jones expects ‘contrasts to emerge and continuities to be articulated’ (p. 2).

In the first section of the book, ‘1700’, Jones presents an evocative picture of imperial splendour, as seen through the eyes of visitors to the city. The complex court musical establishment is lucidly explained, with many interesting details of individual musicians to bring it to life. In chapters treating music at court, ‘Catholicism, ritual, and ceremony’, and Italian opera, Jones shows how music played an important role in Habsburg identity, particularly useful in such a diverse realm. One of the era’s major composers, Johann Joseph Fux, serves as an example of how a musical career could be bound to an absolutist court.

Treating a large amount of material requires a writer to choose what to discuss and what to leave out, and in general, Jones’s choices work well. The financial side of musical life could use more detail, as how people were paid, how they lived and how they were treated can be very revealing. The salaries listed on p. 15, are, in fact, not well enough explained to allow readers to determine that those for the musicians are monthly salaries, while the Kapellmeister’s salary is annual.Footnote ¹ More attention to the musicians themselves would also broaden the ‘top down’ focus of this section, enriching the narrative with a concept familiar to cultural historians.Footnote ²

I was surprised to read that ‘around 1700 most music in Vienna was composed and performed at the imperial court’ (p. 4), a manifestation of the ‘top-down’ approach if ever there was one. The comparison of musical life in Prague and Vienna (p. 69) reveals this approach as well, with a comment by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to support it. I don’t doubt that more entertainment – high-status entertainment – was available to a Lady Mary in Prague than in Vienna, nor that the court in Vienna sought a unified artistic vision in support of its aims, in which music played a prominent role. But for Vienna, Jones’s conclusions concerning music are incomplete, even as they fit his own narrative and research trends of the twentieth century. Jones opens a door to discussion of some non-court music when he mentions the practice of ‘stational’ worship, through which the court processed through the streets to the various churches, where members of the imperial family worshipped on different feast days, to music provided by the Hofmusikkapelle (p. 4). But most of Vienna’s many churches functioned for much of the year without the court and the court music. They employed (or otherwise had available) musicians, had musical instruments and performed music of their own. For example, according to the Viennese cleric Johannes Matthias Testarello della Massa, writing in 1688, the nuns at the convent of St Agnes zur Himmelpforte performed a mass daily ‘with singing and organ playing intermixed’.Footnote ³ Although some young musicians trained at the court, which had a system of apprenticeships occupied mostly by sons (and the occasional daughter) of court musicians and other employees, those coming from elsewhere (and even some who were native born) began their careers working for monasteries, convents and parish churches, establishing themselves in the city and gaining the experience needed to move to the court. Fux, for example, was organist at the Schottenkirche in 1696, a few years before he officially joined the court music.

Some further material on music outside the court may be gleaned from the Wienerisches Diarium, a source now readily available on the website of the Austrian National Library.Footnote ⁴ Using the online version’s search function (which is not entirely reliable, as the scanning sometimes misreads the text) unearths accounts of annual ceremonies with music held at important city churches by the university and the various national societies of the empire, such as the Ungarische Landes-Genossenschaft. Searching for ‘Musicus’, ‘Musicant’, and, especially, ‘Geiger’ brings up death notices for many musicians (or members of their families), who were not part of the court music and made a living performing in churches and elsewhere around the city. Although it has been little investigated in recent scholarship, musical life outside the court was clearly lively, and some acknowledgement of this would have enriched Jones’s discussion.

Section 2 (chapters 5 through 7) of Music in Vienna concerns music in the decades around 1800, the era of Mozart, Haydn, and the young Beethoven. Several works that exemplify then-current attitudes are discussed, including Mozart’s coronation opera La clemenza di Tito (which, as Jones notes, was written for Prague rather than Vienna) and Haydn’s Te Deum, Hob. XXIIIc:2. Both link to older musical and cultural traditions, but wear modern dress. Several members of the imperial family were lovers of music and private patrons. But the leaders of the city’s musical life were aristocrats, who organized private concerts, supported composers, purchased publications from Vienna’s recently established music publishers, formed societies to promote musical performance and themselves performed. Their efforts were hampered somewhat by the Napoleonic Wars, which created uncertainty and inflation. Aristocratic musical activity ‘was a participatory culture, an ambitiously discerning culture, and socially extensive, but was it also a reflective culture?’ asks Jones (p. 87). As public debate was not in general encouraged, critical evaluation of any sort is rare; surviving sources include diaries of Count Carl Zinzendorf (which Jones does not mention directly) and Count Johann Nepomuk Chotek (about which Jones provides no information in the text or endnotes – but he is surely drawing on Rita Steblin’s Beethoven in the Diaries of Count Johann Nepomuk Chotek,Footnote ⁵ listed in the bibliography), and the travel diary of J. F. Reichardt.

Chapter 5 ends with a subsection entitled ‘Women play and sing their part: a forgotten history’. Jones is startled to find that quite a few of Vienna’s connoisseurs of music were women. Although the subsection is short, it points up the importance of female musicians and patrons, and seems to have inspired Jones to include a few more elsewhere in his discussion of music and society around 1800. The following chapter, devoted to music in the marketplace, details the contributions of a variety of musicians, both men and women, as patrons, performers, and dedicatees of publications, thus illustrating the turn to private and group patronage. Johann Ferdinand von Schoenfeld’s very rich Jahrbuch der Tonkunst von Wien und Prag is his starting point. Chapter 7, devoted to ‘Music, War and Peace’, discusses many works inspired or influenced by the war or by peace, and includes a brief but nuanced review of the evidence on Beethoven’s political views as related to the Eroica symphony. The music includes some in a more popular vein than hitherto mentioned, such as Weigl’s ‘Österreich über Alles’ and Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory. It all well supports Jones’s idea that music at this time focused on Austria the nation rather than Vienna the city.

The third section of the book, devoted to music around 1900, pursues the idea of Vienna as a city of music, of that art as a defining feature of the city. Among the locations that were constructed or came into use as venues for musical performance in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth were the Musikverein, the new opera house, and the Bösendorfersaal within the city’s first district and the Volksoper and the Konzerthaus without. Jones describes the musical life of these institutions – spaces, administrative structure, programming, musicians who appeared. Chapter 9 focuses on repertoire, and on the ‘sense of historical legacy’ (p. 192) that led to conservatism in musical taste, but also to scholarship. The Musikverein and its sponsoring Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde receive special attention, and are lauded so much that the section seems almost like promotional material; but indeed, the contribution of this society, its performance space, and its musical events, to Vienna as a city of music was great. The final chapter deals with musical works that epitomized the city, the Viennese operetta and Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, all featuring waltzes and evoking the idea of ‘old Vienna’.

The third section, like the first, is less well balanced than the middle one. In this case, the focus is on public concerts and opera – the most prestigious sorts of performance – while the private and amateur music making that truly made Vienna a city of music receive little attention. Jones mentions choral singing as playing ‘a notable part in integrating many migrants into a German-speaking culture’ (p. 158) and the amateur orchestra of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. But that’s about all he says, although Ludwig Bösendorfer complained of the ‘plague’ of the demand for music instruction in the 1890s.Footnote ⁶ Arnold Schoenberg’s early musical experiences are instructive – unable to afford concert tickets, he and his friends formed an amateur ensemble to acquaint themselves with musical works and lingered outside café enclosures to listen.

Jones set out to write a book that would provide a new look at the history of music in Vienna; it would be different in concept from the plan (usual, until quite recently) of a chronological succession of great composers or musical styles, privileging ‘the new over the continuing and … the challenging over the approachable’ (p. 2). This brought him to muse on the idea of music history and Vienna’s place in it. For example, as Vienna was not, in the Baroque era, home to composers deemed progressive, it has tended to be omitted from the composer- and style-centred narrative. Yet music played an extremely important social and political role there, and court music was of very high quality. Having started in this direction, it would have been nice to see Jones question more deeply other aspects of the traditional presentation, such as its focus on high-status court and professional music making. The discussion of women musicians in Section 2 brings out the ideas of private and amateur music making, which could have been pursued to create a more nuanced view of musical life.

All in all, Music In Vienna generally does well what it sets out to do. The book is well produced and attractive, and the illustrations are nicely chosen; Jones draws on and summarizes a literature covering several centuries and moulds it into a narrative that moves some distance from the usual one. It should readily spark contemplation and further inquiry in the curious student, as it did for me.