Ifhigh culture, asTheodorAdornoonce proposed, promises a reality that does not exist, why, at the fin de siècle, did it hold such great attraction for Central Europe's populist politicians who were most attuned to the realities of everyday life?Footnote ¹ The answer, at least for imperial Austria, is that those politicians believed high culture to possess an integrative social function, which forced them to reconcile notions of “high” culture with “mass” culture. This was particularly true in Vienna, where the city's public performance venues for art, music, stage theater, and visual art stood as monuments to the values that the liberal middle classes had enshrined in the 1867 Constitution. A literate knowledge of this cultural system—its canon of symphonic music; the literature of tragedy, drama, and farce; and classical and contemporary genres of painting—was essential for civic participation in an era of liberal political and cultural hegemony. This article examines one cultural association that attempted to exploit the interaction between German high culture and two spheres, which are commonly thought to stand at odds with elite, high culture: popular culture and mass politics. Rather than a simple, cultural divide, this relationship created a contested “terrain of political and social conflict” in the decades preceding World War I. This terrain was of enormous consequence for Viennese of every social class.Footnote ²

If this effort seems, at first, an obscure phenomenon, its significance becomes clear when viewed against the social fissures that appeared in Central European politics over the mid nineteenth century. In the last four decades of the Dual Monarchy, mass political parties arose in Austria and Bohemia that were concerned primarily with integrating previously politically nonparticipatory social groups into civil society. Both the Christian Socials and Social Democrats, who claimed to represent the interests of disenfranchised peoples, strove to harness the political dynamism of a system in which traditional privilege was no longer the guarantor of office. In this world, which Margaret Anderson has described as a “world turned upside down,” they attempted to direct the energy of Central European crowds toward the ballot box.Footnote ³ In challenging the requirements of political participation, Austria's populist political parties created and relied on a synthesis of elite and mass culture that served as a vehicle for protest and social integration.

While such conflicts illuminate the role of high culture in the development of Austria's mass public sphere, they also suggest how the exclusionary character of Austrian mass politics could allow its parties to define categories of national and confessional allegiance. In 1882 suffrage reform had enfranchised approximately four hundred thousand artisans who later formed an important basis of support for Karl Lueger's Christian Social Party.Footnote ⁴ Yet until 1897 the curial franchise denied basic rights of political participation to more than five million tradesmen, factory workers, and unskilled laborers throughout Cisleithania.Footnote ⁵ Even in Vienna, where Mayor Karl Lueger fashioned the concept of a paternalistic Vaterstadt, far fewer than half of the city's two million residents in 1910 could be counted among the party faithful, namely, the culturally German, Catholic lower middle class.Footnote ⁶

The Social Democratic Party's effort to transform workers who fell outside the narrow definitions of estate, confession, or ethnicity into politically participatory citizens began in 1890 with the first May Day procession. During the long procession toward the Prater, the party encouraged the crowd to observe an orderly behavior and discipline, which astonished the great number of observers who had regarded the occasion with apprehension. Even the Neue Freie Presse, a newspaper inclined to describe organized labor in the least generous of terms, voiced surprise at the ranks of workers who appeared “predestined to form a new, healthy middle class within the state,” rather than to “overthrow all social order.”Footnote ⁷

Yet the May Day demonstrations, for all of Social Democracy's claims, had much more utility in affecting individual moral regeneration than in actually achieving electoral reform.Footnote ⁸ The party, however, claimed no small amount of credit in 1897 for the creation of a fifth curia that granted Francis Joseph's previously unrepresented subjects the right to elect deputies to the Reichsrat. Still, the disappointing results in the first election held under universal manhood suffrage proved to Victor Adler and other Social Democratic Party leaders that electoral rights alone would not bring about the party's goal of creating a politically participatory electorate, much less guarantee that workers would exercise these rights wisely.Footnote ⁹ Despite the party's receipt of more than one-quarter of the 4.6 million votes cast in the first election held under direct suffrage in 1907, party leaders decided that the creation of a rational electorate required the party to privilege its cultural associations.Footnote ¹⁰ “Cultivating Social Democrats,” wrote Victor Adler after the 1907 election, became just as necessary as attracting voters.Footnote ¹¹

The political value of associational culture was perhaps nowhere more evident than in the response of Austrian liberals when the bulwark of exclusionary liberalism was breached in the late 1870s. At the twilight of liberal political hegemony, Austrian liberals began, as Pieter Judson has shown, to actively establish political and cultural associations as conduits for “rooting their values firmly” within broader society.Footnote ¹² However, this same political ideology had brought liberals into conflict with workers as early as 1867. Viennese workers had decidedly rejected the liberal assertion that property, political maturity, and public service were necessary to integrate the individual into the civic life of the nation. Indeed, Austrian labor leaders had long recognized that associational culture could be an effective method for integrating heterogeneous groups of workers.Footnote ¹³

The most important of the labor associations, the Arbeiterbildungsverein, reflected a vision of state social intervention based on the Lassallean workers' movement. Founded in 1867, this association gave workers access to a wider network of labor associations throughout Austria and Bohemia that included gymnastic clubs, libraries, and choral groups.Footnote ¹⁴ Members of the Verein in turn initiated other associations, such as insurance funds, savings associations, and the labor press.Footnote ¹⁵ Yet even these associations could not guarantee workers greater access to the same rights liberals had granted themselves in the 1867 constitution. When twenty thousand workers gathered before the parliament building in December 1869 to demand equal rights, their challenge to liberal authority produced a swift response: the liberal government dissolved more than twenty-six labor associations, including the Arbeiterbildungsverein, within seven months.Footnote ¹⁶ This event, more than anything, highlighted the tendency of liberals and the ascendant mass political parties to seek members who resembled themselves.Footnote ¹⁷

Victor Adler, who first became involved in the Austrian labor movement in the 1880s, recognized that a synthesis of liberal and labor associational traditions could be a powerful tool for advancing the party's goals of political education. Drawing on their youthful experiences as Wagnerian acolytes, Adler and his compatriot Engelbert Pernerstorfer began to create a vision of group identity that would help workers, as both Carl Dahlhaus and Celia Applegate have observed, to “cohere from within and to insulate themselves from without.”Footnote ¹⁸ The Social Democratic Party's successful efforts at facilitating suffrage reform between 1905 and 1907 allowed it to direct its efforts at group making toward its cultural associations.Footnote ¹⁹ The party in particular placed great hope in the cultural associations it sponsored after 1905. Indeed, associations such as Stefan Grossmann's Viennese Free Peoples' Theater (1906–15) enabled Social Democrats to use art in ways that surpassed what many historians have characterized as the aestheticization of nineteenth-century politics.Footnote ²⁰ David Josef Bach's Workers' Symphony Concert Association (1905–34), however, alone remained faithful to the guiding principle of Socialist mass education: a commitment to draw increasing numbers of people into a more active engagement with public life.

Founding the Workers' Symphony Concerts

The founder of the Workers' Symphony Concert Association shared an experience common to more than half of Vienna's residents at the turn of the twentieth century.Footnote ²¹ David Josef Bach was born in Lemberg in August 1874, the same Galician city where both his parents had been born thirty years before. As migrants to Vienna in the 1860s, the Bachs experienced both the economic prosperity and the severe economic depression that lasted for much of the two decades following the stock market crash of 1873. Eduard Bach's lower-middle-class family of seven endured considerable hardship. The elder Bach worked for a time as a bookkeeper, later as a department store clerk, and sometime after 1882 began to support his family as a hat maker. After her husband's death in 1893, Henriette Nelken supported the family by operating a small store and making handcrafted goods.Footnote ²²

Long before his father passed away, Bach's transition from the confines of the private, artisanal family to the public space of the Volksschule accelerated the process of social and cultural assimilation that had begun to shape his identity as a German, a Jew, and an Austrian. Bach recalled that a town council member or school official was sometimes present in the classroom. This “nice, old gentleman” reserved his approbation for the best pupils to whom he gave a “pair of good sweets.” By reinforcing the students' feelings of patriotism, the school pursued its goal of “rearing loyal citizens of the state.”Footnote ²³ However, the infrequent presence of such representatives of the paternal state created a vacuum filled by the competing moral authority of the church. Bach would later remember his history professor as a pious Catholic whose loyalties sided more frequently with the papacy than with the Habsburg dynasty. The pedagogy of this teacher exercised such a powerful effect that nearly all sixty of Bach's classmates, including fifty Jews, exhibited a near “fanatical fervor for the pope.”Footnote ²⁴ Thus, in these early classes at the Volksschule, Bach was required to negotiate two competing sources of authority: the overbearing presence of the paternal state and the moral coercion of the church.

When Bach and his classmates entered the Akademisches Gymnasium in 1884, a fervent German national feeling began to displace these early influences.Footnote ²⁵ On at least one occasion their history professor was unable to contain the “patriotic fervor” that erupted when the best student in the class described the Germanic character of northern Italy. Within two years their identification with the cause of German nationalism had transformed them into such “terribly chaste aesthetes” that they eagerly consumed the pages of Georg von Schönerer's Unverfälschte deutsche Worte.Footnote ²⁶ Bach later recalled that Schönerer's periodical displaced all other childhood passions to the extent that it absorbed “every waking moment.”Footnote ²⁷

As Bach's classmates matured according to their own “internal laws,” they developed a personal relationship to politics that frequently began on the streets.Footnote ²⁸ Bach's classmate Hugo Schulz, for example, eagerly participated in a mob scene in September 1883 that began when the poor residents of a working-class neighborhood threw furniture out of the windows to “save” it from a fire that eventually engulfed an entire quarter of the Roßauerlände. Schulz's artisan father later blamed the fire on “very bad people whom one calls Socialists, or anarchists … and who have the intention of destroying everything.” His teacher's reticence in discussing the social question merely reinforced Schulz's association of the word “Socialist” with the “image of something extremely evil and criminal … like the terrorists of the French Revolution.”Footnote ²⁹

Still, Bach and his friends only came to an awareness of class relationships when, as Schulz recounted, they renounced the “Indian tales” of Karl May and began to read the classics of the German literary canon. After discovering the existence of exploitative feudal relationships in Schiller's Kabale und Liebe, Schulz felt an urge to ignite the Rococo castle of a mighty noble who would “squander the taxes of the poor on mistresses and barter away the blood of peasants” to foreign princes. When the family's gentleman lodger, a medical student, introduced him to Heine's poetry, Schulz learned of the existence of a social order that upset everything he had been taught in school: the existence of “lords and knights,” “oppressors and oppressed,” and the “saturated parasites” of capitalism who condemned the poor to “toil for starvation wages.”Footnote ³⁰

Although they were inspired less by the nobility of the German mind than these descriptions of social injustice, Schulz and his gymnasium classmates also began to “romanticize about freedom and equality” and soon realized, as he later recalled, that they were Socialists. Together with classmates Pepi Strasser and the future author Franz Blei, Schulz formed a “revolutionary triumvirate” committed to redressing the inequality they observed around them. Such was their “burning idealism” that Blei warned at least one aspiring member that joining the group could “cost him his head.” Nevertheless, the addition of members, such as David Josef Bach, the future music critic Karl Lafite, and the bookseller's apprentice Artur Koditschek, quickly mitigated the group's commitment to establish a revolutionary dictatorship, and their immediacy of purpose soon receded into the sentimentality of a singing club. Rather than becoming the source of an exclusivist nationalist politics, the group's “burning idealism” led its members to develop an avid concern for the broad masses of people who were excluded from narrow social, cultural, and political definitions of the nation.Footnote ³¹

Although the press censorship imposed by Count Taaffe's government in the early 1880s prevented the friends from learning about the existence of the Viennese labor movement, Schulz recalled that they did often read of August Bebel's activity with the German Social Democratic Party. The “burning affection” that they quickly developed for Bebel caused the friends to write him in 1886 and declare their enthusiasm for Socialism.Footnote ³² Bebel referred the group of friends to Victor Adler. The labor leader's activities had brought an end to years of radical working-class violence that had begun during the early 1880s, yet Adler continued to be subject to police surveillance and other restrictions prescribed by the anti-Socialist laws.

Acting on Bebel's warning that the students might be police informers, Adler cautiously advised the friends to continue their studies at the gymnasium. He also referred them to the moderate labor leader Ludwig Bretschneider, who gave them reading material and a copy of the party's newspaper, Die Gleichheit. Bretschneider's assistance, as Bach recalled, helped transform the students from “childish conspirators” into “scholars of scientific Socialism.” After one year the comrades were able to “prattle about surplus value, capital accumulation, class struggle, and the dialectical process of economic development.”Footnote ³³ Bach and his older brother also listened to fiery speeches delivered by two of the most prominent labor advocates in the Austrian parliament, the independent Engelbert Pernerstorfer and the democrat Ferdinand Kronawetter. However, the school authorities prevented the sixteen-year-old Bach and his classmates from going to Vienna's Prater when the Social Democratic Party held its first May Day parade there on 1 May 1890.Footnote ³⁴

Despite his efforts to absorb the most important concepts of Marxism, Bach later reminisced that he was drawn toward music even more strongly than literature, mathematics, or philosophy. Bach recalled that he encountered the adolescent Arnold Schönberg for the first time in 1891, as Schönberg stood before a café on the main boulevard of the Prater, wearing a short, light-yellow overcoat, and “speaking loudly about the music and sounds that rang out from the garden pavilion.” The group of seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds listened intently to a young military bandmaster who led excerpts from Richard Wagner's Meistersinger. For the majority of these students it was their only opportunity to “really hear a little bit of music,” and for Schönberg and Bach it was the beginning of a close friendship.Footnote ³⁵ The two men continued to exercise an extraordinary influence on the development of each other's character. In 1893 Schönberg even dedicated three Lieder to Bach's sister Eva.Footnote ³⁶ Schönberg, in turn, later recalled that Bach was partly responsible for his artistic “resistance to the commonplace and banal populism.”Footnote ³⁷

Bach's early interests in music and the labor movement coincided when he accepted an offer to become the cultural editor of the Social Democratic Arbeiter-Zeitung in January 1904, only five years after completing his studies at the University of Vienna. In this capacity Bach renewed the friendship he had begun with Victor Adler during the 1880s. A common fascination with the idealist philosophy of Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Nietzsche undoubtedly served to solidify the bond between Bach and the Social Democratic Party leader.Footnote ³⁸ Many German-speaking university students during the last decades of the Austrian Empire had embraced Friedrich Nietzsche in particular as a paladin of their national ambitions. Nietzsche believed, as he argued in Schopenhauer as Educator (1874), that art possessed the ability to heal the “unhealthy fissures” that had arisen within society and was even able to contribute to its revitalization.Footnote ³⁹

This idea of communal catharsis, which served as the basis of Richard Wagner's music dramas and lived in Nietzsche's early writings, resonated with Bach and many Austrian Social Democrats who strove to improve the conditions of the working classes. In his feuilleton “Beim Schreiben,” written ten months after his appointment to the Arbeiter-Zeitung, Bach had explored possible sources for achieving social transformation through art. Drawing on methods of self-analysis that Sigmund Freud had given “special significance,” Bach argued that culture and experience bury the source of everything that “drives and moves” mankind underneath layers of “memories, thoughts, and feeling…. Sometimes,” he wrote, this “hidden source sends forth a tidal wave which ruptures the dam and for an instant illuminates what we are.” Once unleashed, the “inner power” of this unconscious then becomes free to command the “external life of man,” even when social convention succeeds in suppressing man's instinctual nature. Bach argued that art, thus applied, could subconsciously lead the worker to become the agent of his external transformation.Footnote ⁴⁰

Indeed, this loose association of Nietzschean psychology and Freudian cultural analysis reflected the artistically oriented and culturally infused politics that gained footing among many Austrian Social Democrats during the first decade of the twentieth century. The role of Social Democracy, as Bach conceived it, was to create a lived experience that could uncover the creativity dormant within each worker. The souls of such titans as Ludwig van Beethoven and Richard Wagner exemplified the potential hidden in each individual; they were, as Bach wrote, volcanoes that “threw forth not fiery lava and scorching ashes, but gold smoldered in fire and fashioned into ornate jewelry.” The powerful current emanating from Beethoven's subconscious magically summoned forth “verdant landscapes” from a “secretive depth.” In contrast, as Bach explained, more recent composers had rigorously emphasized the four-movement structure of the symphony with an “almost embarrassing exaction” that ossified the genre and placed too many demands on their listeners. Although he believed Johannes Brahms to be an exception, Bach judged that Brahms's four symphonies still required a specialized knowledge that hindered listeners from surrendering to the symphonies' transformative power. Beethoven's music, Bach explained, retained a freshness and flexibility absent from more recent music. Beethoven alone among all composers expressed an “imminently deep consciousness” that “spoke with all comprehensibility” to his listeners.Footnote ⁴¹

Yet when Bach and Adler attended the dress rehearsal for the Viennese premiere of Gustav Mahler's Third Symphony in December 1904, they discovered, as Bach later recalled, the “ideal origin” for a cultural association that embodied these precepts.Footnote ⁴² Loosely based on the text of Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Mahler's Third, as the musicologist Peter Franklin has described it, represents a “musical panorama of Nature, structured as an allegorical history of human consciousness.”Footnote ⁴³ Bach later recalled that he and Adler sat in silent deference at the end of the rehearsal, able to leave the performance hall only after their amazement at Mahler's “genius” had subsided.Footnote ⁴⁴ The composer's aural depiction of the evolution of humanity from “the heavy shadow of lifeless Nature” to a “mighty leap toward consciousness” quickly became for both Adler, who had been a friend of Mahler since their student days, and for Bach the source of a “burning will to champion the right of the entire people (das Volksganze) to art … in more than just writing and speech.”Footnote ⁴⁵

In his review of this memorable performance, Bach praised Mahler's composition for its depth of expression. In responding to his creative wellspring of “internal elements,” Mahler—like Beethoven—had “transformed everything” around him into music. Mahler's Third Symphony, Bach argued, recaptured the simple expression of subconsciousness that had made Beethoven's music both accessible and understandable to the conscious. In addition, Mahler's music fulfilled the one critical characteristic of all modern music: it engendered new forms of individual transformation. In short, Mahler's music exemplified how art could be placed in the service of Social Democracy. In its exaltation of the “individual ego [Ich],” Mahler's music “hover[ed] a sphere higher over the religious heaven.” Mahler's soul, Bach concluded, was truly “nothing other than harmony.”Footnote ⁴⁶

Bach and Adler's ambition to make the individual worker an agent of collective change soon led to more concrete resolutions to pursue their “conviction of the unity of art and Volk.”Footnote ⁴⁷ This desired collusion of art and politics first took place at a memorial concert that the party dedicated to the poet-revolutionary Friedrich Schiller on the one-hundredth anniversary of his death in May 1905.Footnote ⁴⁸ The day before this auspicious occasion Engelbert Pernerstorfer, their comrade in arms, former fellow student revolutionary, and ranking member of the Austrian parliament, argued in the Arbeiter-Zeitung that such events could in fact “resurrect political life.”Footnote ⁴⁹

In contrast to the superficial pomp and circumstance that would be promoted during other commemorations of Schiller's life, Pernerstorfer proclaimed the upcoming Socialist commemoration to be a “work of liberation.” While the “cultivated members of the middle class” had shown they could become easily “bored with Schiller's tirades” and “frustrated with his ideals,” Pernerstorfer expressed confidence that the workers, who comprised the “largest part of the German people,” would appreciate the “genius of Schiller.” Indeed, the poet's idealism could reveal “vital connections” to workers. Despite the century of revolution that separated the poet from his true audience, Schiller's writings still resonated with the need for community and idealism among the working classes. The workers' “blazing fire of enthusiasm,” Pernerstorfer concluded, would provide the audience Schiller had sought for his work.Footnote ⁵⁰

In his speech before the Schiller concert, Pernerstorfer explained that the party sought to realize this model of collectivity with the creation of a harmonious working-class soul modeled on Schiller's aesthetic man. Because he had been surrounded by the “coarse and uncultivated masses” and the “petty princes and dignitaries” of the eighteenth century, Schiller had placed his hope in the “transformation of the inner man.” Schiller's solution to the dilemma of mass political education thus required a new political state that, as he wrote in the 1795 On the Aesthetic Education of Man, respected the “subjective and specific character of the individual.” By dismantling the authoritarian states that were founded on the annihilation of the individual, Socialism, Pernerstorfer argued, could realize Schiller's dream of a new state and facilitate the rise of a harmonious new man who was a “self-conscious” and “solidly secure personality.”Footnote ⁵¹

In response to Pernerstorfer's call for aesthetic renewal, Viennese workers staged their Schiller commemoration on 8 May 1905 in the Katharinenhalle in Vienna's Dreher-Park.Footnote ⁵² Although this venue was one of Vienna's largest public meeting halls, the Arbeiter-Zeitung reported that it was scarcely able to accommodate the throngs of “celebratory and happily disposed people.” The stage was decorated with a “thorough simplicity,” unadorned except for a bust of Schiller surrounded by oleander bushes and palms. Audience members received a concert program whose cover bore a portrait of Schiller, accompanied by passages that were both “enthralling and deeply compelling for the proletarian sense.”Footnote ⁵³ The only other embellishments were the orchestra and the atmosphere created by Pernerstorfer's dedicatory speech.

The initial effect of the sparse decorations, as the Arbeiter-Zeitung reported the following day, made for a “sublime and august” event.Footnote ⁵⁴ The concert began with an orchestral prelude to Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Two workers' choral societies, the Freie Typographia and Helios, followed with several small choral works. Among these were a “festive hymn,” which the editor Josef Reiter of the Arbeiter-Zeitung had “powerfully composed” to the words of Ferdinand von Saar. Reiter's hymn was followed by a “compelling chorus” by Schubert, an “old folk tune,” and a newly composed setting of Schiller's “Ode to Joy.” The prelude concluded with Felix Mendelssohn's “Festgesang an die Künstler.”Footnote ⁵⁵

As the sounds of the prelude faded, Pernerstorfer rose to deliver his address. Elaborating on themes that had appeared in the previous day's article in the Arbeiter-Zeitung, Pernerstorfer challenged his audience to look beyond the fleeting illusion of a spiritually and culturally unified German nation. Tomorrow, he proclaimed, the feeling “that there is really one ‘single nation of brothers’” will again be replaced by the “hard reality … that our nation is far from being an organic unity. Then we will recognize that one part of the nation celebrates one Schiller, and the other a different Schiller.” Pernerstorfer went so far as to charge those who honored Schiller as a conservative force with counterfeiting the poet's memory by “ascribing to him their own narrow thoughts and perceptions.” In contrast, he exhorted his listeners to follow the example of such “giants of our nation” as Kant, Goethe, Beethoven, and Schiller. “Even the most humble among us,” he concluded, “can strive after his ambition. And that is, by exerting all of our power to draw forth what lies within us.”Footnote ⁵⁶

Pernerstorfer finished his speech with a rousing recitation of the text from Schiller's “Ode to Joy.” As audience members continued with “ecstatic applause,” the orchestra concluded the evening with a performance of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. The finale of the Fifth, the Arbeiter-Zeitung proclaimed, portrayed a “powerful struggle with destiny” that mirrored the struggle of the working classes. When the last chords faded, those workers who heard the music for the first time were “wrenched immediately from their seat” with an intensity that exceeded even their earlier appreciation of Pernerstorfer's speech.Footnote ⁵⁷

The day following the Schiller concert, the Arbeiter-Zeitung praised conductor Alexander von Zemlinsky for having achieved something “truly exceptional” with an orchestra cobbled together with members from the Währinger Volksoper and other orchestras. Despite the demands the program had placed on its audience, the workers' “endless applause” had affirmed the belief of many party leaders that a “deep desire for true art reside[d] in the masses of the people.” The party, as the Arbeiter-Zeitung explained, attempted with this first concert to proceed with a program that placed the “greatest demands” on its listeners. Given the number of uninitiated listeners in the audience, the prelude to Wagner's Meistersinger von Nürnberg was not as transparent as some critics might have wished. Still, the proof that a demanding concert could succeed lay in the exhibition of “primitive power,” which the prelude had unleashed in the masses of “uncorrupted but sensitive” audience members.Footnote ⁵⁸

This important demonstration of working-class strength followed little more than one week after the Social Democratic Party had orchestrated the annual May Day demonstration drawing nearly one hundred thousand workers along the Ringstrasse in their procession toward the Prater.Footnote ⁵⁹ By placing the two events in such proximity, the party associated its goal of winning workers to Social Democracy with the objective of cultivating party members. Bach's review of the Schiller concert even appropriated language that the party's detractors used to describe the annual May Day demonstrations. On this fifteenth anniversary of the first May Day parade, the Neue Freie Presse and other newspapers patronized by the city's elite continued to voice a fear of the primitive, uncontrolled power of the masses. While Socialist processional culture had become an integral part of the party's attempt to shape working-class behavior, Bach and other party leaders believed that effective political participation required the capacity for critical reflection. The party thus attempted to institute musical listening as a supplement to the mass education required to achieve these faculties. By providing literary and artistic models from the stage, the party sought to inspire workers to emulate these examples, both for individual improvement and for a collective restructuring of Austrian public life. Word and music, two vital components of the labor movement's alternative culture, became an integral part of Social Democracy's attempt to shape the values and identity of its membership.Footnote ⁶⁰

For Bach, the workers' positive response to the Schiller concert served as a sign that he could proceed with plans for a symphony concert association dedicated to Viennese workers. Bach first registered the association with the municipality, which gave it legal privileges for staging performances without prior approval from the government censor. The second and most important step, as Bach later claimed, was his effort to give the association administrative autonomy from the Social Democratic Party.Footnote ⁶¹ Members from the core of the Social Democratic Party formed a new executive committee led by Ludwig Bretschneider, the former moderate labor leader who had first advised Bach and his friends on the principles of Socialism almost two decades before.Footnote ⁶² The committee began by placing the price of admission within the reach of every worker without, however, sacrificing the quality of performance. Bach wrote in an announcement that appeared in the Arbeiter-Zeitung on 12 December 1905 that low-priced admission tickets, which could be had for as little as twenty heller, would allow even the unskilled factory worker an opportunity to “appreciate good music” performed by soloists of the “highest rank.”Footnote ⁶³ Moreover, the committee selected a performance venue appropriate to the lofty goals of the association, Theophil Hansen's 1870 Musikvereinsaal.Footnote ⁶⁴ By instituting such an associational structure, Social Democracy attempted to undermine the class referent of a concert hall associated with the patronage of the city's privileged elite.

In addition to opening admission to the working classes, Bach brought increased visibility to the association by winning the collaboration of two important figures in the Viennese musical world. The first, Ferdinand Löwe (1865–1925), was professor for piano and choral singing at the Vienna Conservatory. Löwe had been a student and admirer of Anton Bruckner and gradually began to assume a leading role in promoting Bruckner's work through the Wiener Konzertverein, the orchestra he founded in 1900. Under Löwe, the Konzertverein's first concert series had resumed a tradition of Volksconerte that filled exhibition halls with a “loyal and devoted core audience” during the previous decade.Footnote ⁶⁵ The popularity of these earlier concerts had, however, been unable to sustain a long-term commitment from their audience. Yet by gathering sufficient financial support for the Konzertverein and committing to the performance of programs that combined serious symphonic music with lighter genres, Löwe had addressed the failures of these earlier concert series. When Bach approached him in early 1905 with a proposal for the workers' concerts, he recalled that Löwe “accepted his idea for spreading music among the broad masses with enthusiasm … systematically, cautiously, but decisively.”Footnote ⁶⁶

Bach also won for the association the collaboration of Robert Hirschfeld (1857–1914), the music critic, music scholar, and convinced democrat who took joy in antagonizing Eduard Hanslick—the great champion of Johannes Brahms and the Apollonian forms of romanticism—in the pages of the Frankfurter Zeitung and the semiofficial Wiener Zeitung.Footnote ⁶⁷ As a long-time advocate of classical music for the working masses, Hirschfeld took an active part in planning the association's orchestral events and championing its work in his feuilletons.Footnote ⁶⁸

Audience Profile

Bach's program of spiritual and cultural liberation was, however, not directed entirely from above. The transport worker August Forstner recalled that for a long period before the first concert he had already begun to show his comrades collections of the “beauties of the world,” things that were more uplifting than the “musty, smoky, stinky taverns,” which they were accustomed to visiting after working hours. Through readings from the classics, Forstner attempted to awaken in his comrades desires to see the “giants of the stage.” He recounted that he first began to read comedies to them before advancing to more serious works. He started with Kleist's The Broken Pitcher (1807) and Smetana's The Bartered Bride (1866), among others, and then moved on to Schiller's William Tell and Wallenstein in addition to other works by the Austrian playwright Ludwig Anzengruber. After attending performances in the Burgtheater and the Oper, they finally acquired enough knowledge to hear Wagner. “Thus prepared,” Forstner wrote, he and his comrades were “ready to attend the first Workers' Symphony Concert” when it was announced in the Arbeiter-Zeitung on 12 December 1905.Footnote ⁶⁹

Still, there were other obstacles to overcome. The party made it known that it counted on the presence of the transport workers at this first concert, which, as Forstner claimed, was organized “by and for the working classes.” Bach had scheduled the concert on a weekday evening when most workers would be able to attend, including those men who were “occupied with horses in the stalls and streets,” the shipping workers, and furniture packers. However, Forstner wrote that he still encountered great resistance on the part of workers who felt bound to their own traditions of respectability.Footnote ⁷⁰ Although the transport workers had time at the end of the day to feed and water their horses, they still had little time to wash and dress for the concert. Forstner later recalled that he overcame their opposition to entering the Musikvereinsaal in their work attire by convincing them that the concert was being performed for their sake and that other members of the audience would take no offense at their appearance.Footnote ⁷¹

Consequently, the transport workers entered the hall, “the blue aprons of the coachmen, the white overalls of the shipping workers and furniture movers rolled up and hidden under their vests.” Their trade union had purchased a block of fifty seats, and many of the concertgoers were noticeably surprised to see the transport workers enter in their heavy boots with their wives at their side, one after another, carrying their broad-brimmed hats.Footnote ⁷² Many of the workers were followed by their mothers, who wore the traditional and decidedly unstylish Gugel. Despite these efforts at respectability, most of the workers had disregarded Forstner's suggestion to find a “more pleasing scent for the evening.”Footnote ⁷³ The scent of the horses, which they did bring with them, was one of the many characteristics that made these concertgoers foreign to the middle-class and aristocratic milieu that normally resided in this most famous of Viennese concert halls.

However, the most significant aspect of the association's first concert lay in the fact that the party had made it accessible to its intended audience. In an announcement for the Schiller concert six months earlier, Engelbert Pernerstorfer had proclaimed that no one had more of a right to celebrate Schiller's memory than the “organized proletariat, in whom thoughts of freedom today find their most earnest and enthusiastic representatives.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Yet the party, in spite of its proclamation of the event as a celebration of revolutionary freedom, had set the ticket prices too high for all but the most well-off workers—such as craftsmen and electricians—to afford. The price for an advance ticket to the Schiller concert had been set at fifty heller, while tickets bought at the door cost twice as much. These prices must have been viewed as an extravagant expense for most of the party's membership, for whom the advance ticket prices were between one-half and one-third of an unskilled worker's daily wage. The Schiller concert had been clearly inaccessible to the majority of Viennese whom the party most wanted to reach.

In contrast, the party set the price for standing-room tickets to the first workers' symphony concert at only twenty heller, enabling a broader spectrum of the working-class public to attend the concerts. Even at these prices, however, Forstner's description of the surprise aroused by the entrance of the transport workers suggests that workers formed only a minority of the Viennese public in attendance. The two thousand-seat auditorium of the Grosser Musikvereinsaal was likely filled by civil servants and university graduates who identified with the aims of the Social Democratic Party, as well as regular concertgoers who paid little attention to the fact that the concert was sponsored by a political party that represented the interests of the so-called dangerous classes.

The Ideology of the Workers' Symphony Concerts

Many of the ideas that guided the party's efforts to introduce workers to musical art were relayed through Der Strom, the periodical sent to the members of the party's theater association. Engelbert Pernerstorfer's “Theater and Democracy,” the leading article of the first issue in April 1911, contained a synthesis of Schiller's ideas about the aesthetic education of man, Wagnerian principles of national regeneration, and Marxist notions of class consciousness. With an argument that closely followed his keynote speech from the Schiller concert, Pernerstorfer asserted that art alone was capable of cultivating the soul, and he charged the party's cultural associations with the task of the “complete transformation of society.” This could be accomplished first by redefining the audience as the proletariat and the proletariat as the Volk and, second, by infusing the content of the dramatic and the orchestral stage with Socialist, secular (weltlich) values.Footnote ⁷⁵

In a second article, titled “The Cultivation of Popular Music” (“Volkstümliche Musikpflege”), Bach argued that these uniquely Socialist values could exist only in an art that emanated from the collective memory of the people. This art was not necessarily popular in the sense of having a broad audience. On the contrary, a volkstümlich art could have limited public appeal, but the examples Bach viewed as most important, such as the overture to Carl Maria von Weber's Der Freischütz, contained “characteristics of the people” that could “unlock the greatness in musical art.”Footnote ⁷⁶ A volkstümlich art, Bach asserted, possessed the ability to cultivate, refine, and shape its listeners.

With this article, Bach joined Pernerstorfer in praising Friedrich Schiller as the most celebrated of the “freedom poets” who had striven for the aesthetic education of the masses. Yet even an incomplete understanding of such classics as Schiller's William Tell presented challenges to a working-class audience, most of whom possessed only a functional literacy. Because the most effective works of art required a less “trained power of receptivity on the part of the listener,” Bach argued that music could foster critical modes of reflection among listeners.Footnote ⁷⁷ Bach pointed in particular to Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony as an example of a piece that could work “unmediated and powerfully” to accomplish this purpose.Footnote ⁷⁸ In the Sixth Symphony, Beethoven, as the musicologist Stefan Kunze has explained, “invoked the idea of a … harmony between human existence and nature.” The first movement depicts a wanderer's arrival in the country; it is the “musical expression of the spirits rising in anticipation of an agreeable sojourn in the country,” and it forms the “entry into the imagined world permeated by nature.” The peace and tranquility of the second movement, the “Scene by the Brook,” envelops the “merry gathering of country folk.” In the third movement, the assemblage quickly loses its cares in dancing. The fourth movement portrays man's experience of the destructive, violent capacity of nature when a thunderstorm interrupts the gathering without warning. In the final movement, a group of shepherds lift their collective voices in a song of “happy and thankful feelings” after the storm passes.Footnote ⁷⁹ While the symphony as a whole represents the relationship between man and nature, each of the work's five movements reveals a different aspect of man's fragile coexistence with these unfathomable forces.

Such music, as Bach was quick to point out, embodied the essence of a monumental art by incorporating the timeless, volkstümlich qualities of the people. In his treatise on Beethoven from 1870, Richard Wagner had claimed that the aural depictions in Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony “spoke to the listener and showed him the essence” of the idea within the music. The listener “understands the forest, the brook, the meadow, the blue ether, the jolly crowd, the loving couple, the song of the birds, the passage of the clouds, the rushing of the storm, the joy of blissfully moved peace.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Moreover, Beethoven's Pastoral provided a solution to the central problem that Pernerstorfer had raised in “Theater and Democracy”: it made the “inner essence of natural phenomena” perceptible. Such monumental music was not merely a transcendent form of literature; it was, as many of Beethoven's contemporaries had claimed, a “loftier form of revelation.”Footnote ⁸¹

Yet if Beethoven was the prophet of a revealed truth, Richard Wagner was its Messiah. Pernerstorfer and Bach both regarded Wagner's music dramas as the source of a new artistic genre that would allow the party to return drama to its original meaning. Pernerstorfer in particular praised Wagner's music as one of the few exceptions to the banality of contemporary art. In “Theater and Democracy,” Pernerstorfer had described Wagnerian drama as a “singular occurrence” that survived as the traditional guardian of the “old democratic tradition.”Footnote ⁸² The Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk—the “total work of art” that unified drama, art, and music, and all other artistic genres—erased the boundaries of class and estate that prevented audience members and performers from fully experiencing a feeling of community.Footnote ⁸³ Wagner, Bach wrote, “has given us a new music, a new poetic art through the unification of sound and word, he has bestowed on us unforgettable forms, unforgettable sounds, and has enriched our being.”Footnote ⁸⁴

Wagner's innovations, however, extended beyond his music, encompassing, as Bach claimed, the “totality and entire body of his art.”Footnote ⁸⁵ The extramusical development of character and scene often played as important a role within his dramas as the musical development itself. Indeed, Friedrich Nietzsche once observed that Wagner's ability to represent the natural world in his music “bestowed a language upon everything … which has hitherto not wanted to speak.… He plunges into daybreaks, woods, mists, ravines, mountain heights, the dead of night, moonlight, and remarks in them a secret desire: they want to resonate.” Moreover, the characters in all of Wagner's dramatic works, as Nietzsche also observed, contain a “subterranean current of moral ennoblement and enlargement which unites them.”Footnote ⁸⁶

Contemporaries believed these characteristics were particularly true for Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, where Wagner, as he wrote to his publisher, portrayed this self-governing community of sixteenth-century craftsmen dedicated to the arts as the “real nerve-center of German life.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Bach similarly praised Wagner's music as the musical form that was the most volkstümlich of all the arts. Nowhere else, he claimed, was this ideal of socially organic wholeness more faithfully represented than in the examples of Singspiel that abounded in the Meistersinger. This German form of comic opera that first developed in the medieval mysteries and church plays of the early eighteenth century was characterized by the use of the German vernacular and German songs.Footnote ⁸⁸ The dialog and songs of the Meistersinger's main protagonist, Hans Sachs, vividly portrayed his exemplary qualities.

So great was the potential cultivating value, which the party saw in such Wagnerian characters as Hans Sachs, that it encouraged the Viennese working classes to emulate these noble qualities in their own lives. The artisan Robert Müller wrote in Der Strom that Sachs “characterized in his personal union of cobbler and poet that good German artistic type which we no longer have.” Modern conditions, Müller lamented, had divided the handicrafts from the fine arts. While “only-cobblers” were an “important cultural factor” because of their ability to “bestow the ideally anatomically correct and formally harmonic shoe,” they remained “poets and reformers” in their own domain. The “only-poets,” on the other hand, were a “regression.” Contemporary poets placed themselves outside of the “connections of social work” and withdrew into a closed community (Gemeinde) of “highly interested, highly educated, highly wealthy individuals.”Footnote ⁸⁹

Hans Sachs, in contrast to the decadence and exclusivity of the modern educated elite, embodied all of the admirable qualities of the Bürgertum. Through his health, industriousness, love of pleasure, and modesty, he formed an integral part of his community. Although he often thought about giving up his “poetry-making” (Dichterei), he remained loyal to his poetic and artisanal calling despite the demands they placed on his personal and professional life. His “boundless respect” for his trade was mirrored in his “happy blond face,” “muscular limbs,” and his loving stewardship of his wife, seven children, and seven apprentices. In addition to “a little Greek and Latin,” Sachs was able to wield the works of Martin Luther, Philipp Melanchton, the Protestant reformer Ulrich von Hutten, and the Catholic theologian Johannes Reuchlin as handily as the tools of his trade. His erudition even led to social and political revolution: the song he composed at the request of Nuremberg's elders caused his personal conversion to Protestantism and fomented religious upheaval in the city. The character of Hans Sachs proved that a worker could be “a man and a poet as well.” Civic mindedness and social involvement did not necessarily restrict the cultivation of the mind.Footnote ⁹⁰

Creating a Repertory

The creation of a cultivated audience required an artistic as well as an ideological blueprint. The program of the Schiller dedicatory concert in May 1905 had provided such a model with pieces that operated “immediately and powerfully” on the audience. While Mozart and Haydn were entitled to their rightful place in the repertory, a proper understanding of these works required listeners to have a more developed musical understanding. The German masters Beethoven and Wagner thus took their places in the pantheon of the association's canon as early as 1909.Footnote ⁹¹

In twenty-five concerts performed in the first ten years after 1905, the association performed ten pieces by Beethoven, with an additional evening dedicated to the composer. There were four pieces by Brahms; four Wolf Lieder; and three songs by Mozart, as well as a performance of the Jupiter Symphony during a concert dedicated to Mozart's music. The association played one piece each by Haydn, Schubert, Schumann, von Weber, Bruckner, Liszt, Mahler, Smetana, Richard Strauss, and Frederick Delius.Footnote ⁹² Wagner, however, assumed a particularly prominent role in the association's repertory. The association performed pieces by Wagner fifteen times, including two “Richard Wagner Celebrations” that were dedicated exclusively to his music. When the association dedicated its commemorative concert on 24 March 1912 to the Wagner of the 1848 Revolution, excerpts from the Meistersinger formed the exclusive repertory for the concert program. Other excerpts were performed with even greater frequency: Hans Sachs's closing dialog, the Prize Song, and the “Dance of the Apprentices.”

If Bach promoted Wagner's music as an ideal model for workers' self-improvement, that was much less true for two other bastions of contemporary German culture. Although the association did perform the works of Joseph Lanner and Johann Strauss, Bach proudly proclaimed after the first concert that the association was the only popular concert series that ventured to perform an entire symphony without immediately “offering a pleasing waltz as recompense.”Footnote ⁹³ With the exception of Lanner's “Schönbrünner” waltz, both Lanner and Strauss were noticeably absent from the majority of the association's concert programs, even on the two Sunday evening concerts dedicated to Viennese music.Footnote ⁹⁴ During the first Wiener Abend on 11 November 1911, the association performed Schubert's operetta Der häusliche Krieg. During the second Wiener Abend the following year, a workers' chorus sang several arias, and the principal flautist from the Hofoper played selections by Beethoven and Mozart. The nearly three-hour performance concluded with an unnamed “old Viennese waltz.”

Although Bach did not explicitly state it, the infrequent performance of contemporary waltz music suggests that he viewed these staples of Viennese Gemütlichkeit as the orchestral equivalents of the Gassenhauer, or “riff-raff songs.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Pieces such as “Tales from the Vienna Woods” and the “Blue Danube Waltz” were examples of the commercial mass culture that Bach abhorred. Only in March 1911 did Bach reluctantly concede that the association would demonstrate “at the proper time and place” the “artistic merit of the so-called lightweight music.”Footnote ⁹⁶

While Bach included Viennese waltzes only with great reluctance, he was just as cautious about introducing the association's working-class audience to the musical avant-garde. Both Bach and Adler had desired to include Mahler's music in the association's repertory from the beginning. Bach recalled that after the 1905 rehearsal of Mahler's Third, Adler was “deeply stirred, enraptured, and enthusiastic.” Adler even reportedly commented “after some deep words” that Mahler's music represented the ideal of a volkstümlich concert. Still, they agreed in 1905 that the working classes were not yet ready. “It would have been a mistake,” Bach wrote, “to immediately place a Mahler before workers who were hardly accustomed to the great classics.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Rather, Bach and Ferdinand Löwe were careful to ensure that the pieces they selected for the association “progressed systematically to more difficult works.”Footnote ⁹⁸

Although Bach was careful not to equate the difficulty of a piece with its relative modernity, he did highlight the association's 18 February 1911 performance of Frederick Delius's Mass of Life (1905) as a notable accomplishment for both the performers and the audience.Footnote ⁹⁹ The text of the piece, like Mahler's Third, was composed around excerpts from Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. However, the Mass, according to Bach, “asserted its own rights” apart from Nietzsche's text; it resurrected “forest, meadow and mountains” through its tones and endowed its listener with the “mysterious fortune” of being able to experience nature.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In this piece Delius attempted to emulate the “endless flow and harmonic aura” of Wagner, as well as Edvard Grieg's “airy texture and non-developing use of chromaticism.” According to the music critic Anthony Payne, this resulted in a syntax that was “entirely individual.” Delius's use of simple melodies worked to support the underlying harmony, but at the same time he made use of a “rate of harmonic change that was extremely flexible, sometimes so fast as to border on atonality, and at other times hypnotically slow.” These techniques, in combination with Nietzsche's text, resulted in a “sensuous evocation of natural beauty” underpinned by an “ecstatic though resolutely secular spirituality.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Even the decidedly aristocratic Sir Thomas Beecham, who conducted its London premier in 1909, described the piece as an “affirmation of life ... a hymn to the power of the all-conquering will to overcome obstacles which lie across the path of achieving spiritual success and triumph.”Footnote ¹⁰² The Mass of Life thus embodied many qualities of Bach's ideal of an artwork of the future: its music encompassed the demands of the heart, while its text liberated the workers from the drudgery of their daily existence.Footnote ¹⁰³

In writing earlier on Mahler's Third Symphony, Bach had commented that if the progression to new genres at times “did not proceed so smoothly” and sometimes became “stuck like a new curtain whose apparatus had not been tested sufficiently,” it was merely a reflection of the difficulty that both performers and listeners experienced in adjusting to a new artistic form.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Still, Bach believed that the receptivity of the audience had made the performance of Delius's Mass an unqualified success. Even more accomplished ensembles such as the Wiener Philharmoniker had, along with their socially exclusive audiences, refused the opportunity to repeat the London premiere of the piece.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In the future, music such as Delius's Mass would be, even more than Beethoven and Wagner, essential to the association's efforts to help man realize the “wonders of his soul.”

Despite its performances of Delius and short works by Mahler and Smetana, the repertory of the Worker's Symphony Concert Association during its first ten years (1905–15) showed little differentiation from that of Austria's foremost orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic. During this period the association performed many of the same symphonic works that the Philharmonic performed with the greatest frequency: Beethoven's Third, Fifth, and Seventh symphonies; Brahms's Second; Bruckner's Fourth; and Mozart's Jupiter Symphony. Works by other composers, including Mendelssohn, Schumann, Schubert, Liszt, and Berlioz never commanded more than 5 percent of either orchestra's repertory.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

While more than one-third of the pieces performed by the Workers' Symphony Concert Association were composed by Wagner, the arias and opera excerpts that the association performed most often were heard only infrequently outside of the Philharmonic's operatic repertory. Indeed, Gustav Mahler's direction of the Hofoper (1898–1907) certainly afforded the Philharmonic's well-heeled audiences an equal opportunity to listen to Wagner's “revolutionary” music.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ With more than half of its repertory dominated by the German masters Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, and Mozart, the Philharmonic's claim to be a “thoroughly classical orchestra” would have had little trouble finding its own defenders among the members of the Workers' Symphony Concert Association.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

The Workers' Symphony Concert Association, however, confronted a difficulty not faced by the Hofoper, the Volkstheater, or even Stefan Grossmann's Freie Volksbühne. Unlike these larger cultural associations and institutions, the Workers' Symphony Concert Association did not receive a government subsidy. Instead, it relied exclusively on the popular appeal of its concert repertory to draw audience members. The simplicity of such characters as Hans Sachs perhaps offers one explanation for the frequency of Wagner performance. Yet it also helps to explain why the party's conception of a volkstümlich art clung to the conservative aspects of Wagnerian ideology, rather than embracing the Wagnerian avant-garde. The party's attempt to redefine the relationship between politics and high culture still remained, even in this ideologically driven association, subject to the expectations of its audience.

Indeed, from this perspective there was nothing particularly revolutionary about the overwhelming proportion of Beethoven and Wagner in the repertory of the Worker's Symphony Concert Association. The performance of Wagner, as suggested by Bach and Schönberg's encounter with the military bandmaster in the Prater, did not in itself carry revolutionary undertones. Bach's commitment to this repertory did, however, signal an allegiance to the ideology of individual transformation that underlay the association. The predominance of Wagner and Beethoven, as well as the inclusion of new music by Mahler, Smetana, Delius, and Richard Strauss, suggests that Bach and the association's other leaders truly believed in the revolutionary potential of this music.

Audience Reception

In a memoir from 1928, Karl Seitz recalled that Bach's attempt to place the party's theory of cultural transformation into practice frequently faced resistance from critics who doubted the workers' ability to respond to this orchestral repertory. If, Seitz questioned, failed childhood instruction had driven the appreciation and love for music from him, how were workers who had experienced a more difficult childhood and had a less adequate training to cope with the great demands of musical enjoyment? To his surprise, however, workers rallied to Victor Adler's call to attend the first association concert in December 1905. Seitz recalled that a throng of a thousand workers arrived at the Musikvereinsaal, “willing to surrender themselves to the music,” and within minutes were “enraptured, excited, elevated—all doubt was swept away.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹

As the workers responded to his prompting to become critical listeners, the modest goals that Bach had set for the association began to yield tremendous dividends. According to reminiscences left by Bach and Löwe, the association's membership nearly always expressed its appreciation of the performance with a comparable level of enthusiasm. One performer even recalled that the auditorium of the Grosser Musikvereinsaal was entirely sold out on every occasion.Footnote ¹¹⁰ This was particularly true at the first association concert. Workers, as the Arbeiter-Zeitung reported the following day, showered the conclusion of each piece and indeed each movement, with rapturous applause. The volume of their acclaim after the Scherzo of Beethoven's Eroica was loud enough to pierce the ears of their neighbors. The newspaper reported that “renewed and increasing applause” compelled the soloist to repeat her performance of Hugo Wolf's Lied “Auf einer Wanderung” before she could leave the stage.Footnote ¹¹¹ Even at the fortieth anniversary of the concert, Bach was able to recall that the conclusion was followed by an almost half hour of applause.Footnote ¹¹²

Yet the working-class audience member was not a tabula rasa. “One could neither prescribe,” as Bach acknowledged, “which works must please him, nor which may please him.” The leadership of the association could only attempt to keep the worker away from those pieces they were convinced were worthless, whether “composed in the old, or in the newest style.”Footnote ¹¹³ According to the transport worker August Forstner, workers paid the “greatest attention to the performance.” At many points they became so agitated that one was able to notice “how very much the music affected them.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ As the members' taste evolved, the association's working-class audience learned to express its approval in increasingly refined ways. “The workers,” Bach wrote, “are polite enough almost always (but in no way every time) to give their applause. Still whoever has attended two, three concerts will be able to ascertain that the degrees of applause are very different, and that the audience expresses very well through its acclaim whether a work fills them only with regard, or with love and elation.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Bach pointed to the workers' response at the Delius performance as an example of their increasing nobility of spirit. The audience, as Bach recalled, “received the performance with understanding and rapturous applause … they willingly accepted the work, sensed its greatness, allowed it to work within them, and gratefully apprehended the elevated feeling of life” contained within.Footnote ¹¹⁶

To be sure, Viennese workers did not always agree with the party's high musical standards and aesthetic preferences. Although Bach never expressed dissatisfaction with the workers' reception of the performances, it is clear from the experience of Stefan Grossmann, the director of the party's theater association, that workers held a preference for light entertainment. One of Grossmann's first contributions to Der Strom drew attention to continuing problems among working-class theater audiences at the Wiener Freie Volksbühne.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Their unrefined behavior was commonly expressed in the “favorite phrases” of the spectators when they were enlisted for “intellectual collaboration.” Audience members were often heard to shout such phrases as “I say! I go to the theater for a good time!”; “I want the theater to make me laugh!”; or “That's way over my head!” Grossmann chided others for demonstrating their philistinism through prudery, laughing or squirming when they heard the word “bottom” (Popo).Footnote ¹¹⁸

Grossmann was not the only critic of the workers' supposed inclination toward philistinism, yet others who had less motive for applauding the workers were considerably less disapproving. After visiting a Volksbühne performance one “sultry” Sunday afternoon in August 1907, one theater critic from the Neue Freie Presse praised the circumspect behavior of the “peculiar audience” that filled Vienna's Burgtheater to capacity.

The Presse had undoubtedly expected the workers' behavior to more closely resemble that of spectators at a vaudeville show. The Volksbühne's low admissions prices had created an audience that the critic described as an “interesting spectacle” rivaling even the performance taking place on the stage. But rather than drawing undue attention to themselves, the workers' orderly conduct instead highlighted the existence of a unique relationship between performer and spectator.

This reciprocal relationship seemed to confirm Bach's and Pernerstorfer's hope that art, in particular symphonic music, could empower workers to become the agents of their own transformation. More than a decade after his first visit to a workers' symphony concert, the tailor's apprentice Julius Toldi recalled how the association's concerts provided him with an experience of music that allowed him to escape the dreaded prospect of living within the “intellectually narrow confines” of an artisanal life.

After hearing about the association from an upholsterer's apprentice, Toldi attended his first concert and soon after found a new desire to compose “something like what [he] had heard.” As new melodies began to flood his mind, absorbing his attention and contributing to his rapid dismissal from his next apprenticeship, he resolved to become a musician. He first resumed his study of the violin—he recalled that as a youth he had played the instrument “rather badly”—and began to take lessons at the conservatory. After several months he had completed his first composition, an “enormous long piece for violin” that he patterned after “some fantasy.” Toldi's study of music theory began with an insatiable desire to hear the “simplest harmonic combinations,” which he fed by secretly learning to play a keyboard his uncle had bought for him. It was not until he passed the state examination in violin that his father was finally satisfied with his chosen profession. Soon after he became a student at the Musikhochschule where he studied theory with Franz Schrecker and composition with Arnold Schönberg. The crowning achievement of Toldi's transformation from artisan to musician, as he proudly recalled, was the premiere of his Wanderskizzen by the Workers' Symphony Concert Association on 14 April 1925.Footnote ¹²⁰

Toldi's testimonial suggests that both members and leaders of the association had a vested interest in promoting the workers' positive response. Yet even if Viennese workers left few other accounts that point to their internalization of the association's values, their enthusiastic testimony highlights Bach's attempts to mold the Workers' Symphony Concert Association into a conduit for shaping working-class identity.Footnote ¹²¹ More than two decades after the first concert, Bach continued to remember the association's membership as a “thirsting audience,” which even after several seasons remained “quite untouched, still fully receptive to the joys of art…. It is the service of the concert organizers,” Bach continued, “to have introduced to the masses, who have until now been excluded from the most noble artistic enjoyment, their tireless, purposeful work.”Footnote ¹²² For Bach, who insisted that workers “proclaimed their will” with their presence in the theater, such responses affirmed the vision that he, Adler, and Pernerstorfer held for the Social Democratic Party's cultural associations.Footnote ¹²³