It is almost a truism that Vienna is the music capital of the world or, at any rate, one of the oldest and most important centers of Western classical music.

But how did this consensus view of the city arise? When, in the long tradition of music-making, did such a notion become an integral part of Viennese identity? Few cities can boast several “schools of music,” which incorporate the city name as a defining adjective marking quality, period, or genre. Yet Vienna can boast Viennese Classicism (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven), the Viennese Waltz, and the Second Viennese School. Recently there have been efforts to establish and define the “Third Vienna School.” There is, moreover, an identifiable Viennese style of playing string instruments, exemplified in the performances of the Vienna Philharmonic. One could say that the music life of Vienna has boomed uninterruptedly for some three hundred years, and innumerable books have been written about it. So what new perspectives can be offered by yet another book on a familiar theme? Surprisingly, quite a lot.

Nußbaumer has deconstructed the sources of Viennese musicality in a way that is both original and illuminating. One might be tempted to think that the city's musical life developed spontaneously and more or less effortlessly. However, modern cultural historians would never entertain such a naive view, and the present work is surely vindicated in its demonstration that such a sophisticated focus of creativity did not just “happen,” but had to be constructed. Creating the image of musical Vienna was (and is) a highly political and conscious process in which many different types of actors (lobbies, patrons, and social groups, as well as musicians themselves) have had a part to play.

Nußbaumer's research covers an impressively large amount of previous literature, but she also offers the fruits of diligent and intelligently used new research from the archives. She focuses on the period between 1861 and the outbreak of the World War I in 1914, during which time the liberal bourgeoisie of Vienna managed to forge the image of the Musikstadt, an image that indeed became a sort of secondary identity for the city. Her remarkable study analyses primarily the political aspects of the process. It highlights the differing motivations of the liberal bourgeoisie's political, economic, and cultural elites, as well as the way the city's Christian Social leadership (from 1896 onwards ) worked on image-making. The emphasis is on what lay behind the rhetoric, every aspect of which, from speeches to newspaper articles, is painstakingly analyzed from the present standpoint of a politically correct liberal academe. Hence, Nußbaumer is concerned to ferret out any latent demonstration of German-nationalist feeling, examining whether it contributed to the shaping of a particular “Austrian-ness” or whether indeed it contained a hidden critique of other nationalities. She also looks at the issues in terms of gender politics.

Beginning with a summary of the various representations of Vienna as a music city in earlier sources such as the first influential guidebooks and cultural–historical surveys, Nußbaumer goes on to analyze the development of architectural or sculptural “visual signs” in the landscape of the city. The building boom of the “Ringstraße” period afforded an opportunity for the state and the city to build new, representative palaces for their already existing music institutions and societies, demonstrating thereby the importance of music in Viennese society. Nußbaumer underpins her narrative by mapping the public spaces of the city, offering inter alia a potted history of the institutionalization of music and of the establishment of later iconic music venues, including the Oper, the Musikverein, and the Konzerthaus.

This chapter is followed by a detailed chronological account of the erection of the seven public monuments for composers (Schubert 1872, Beethoven 1888, Haydn 1887, Mozart 1896, Bruckner 1899, Lanner with Strauss Senior 1905, and Brahms 1908), together with an enumeration of musical memorial rooms (Musikergedenkstätten) and the naming of Viennese streets after musicians. Through their agency and with the help of the propaganda provided by the press, Vienna became—not only in the eyes of the rest of the world, but also in those of the Viennese themselves—a repository of authenticity in music and even music's “world capital.”

Nußbaumer then moves on to examine the important events that promoted the music image, such as jubilees celebrating great composers and music festivals. An important leitmotif highlights the construction of specifically Austrian aspects of the Vienna music project, which thereby resisted German cultural hegemony. New topics in the field include an analysis of the “Vierte Deutsche Sängerbunderfest” of 1890, whereas forty pages of text are dedicated to the International Exhibition of Music and Theatre in 1892, which served as a kind of universal celebration of excellence in musical culture. The last great musical event before World War I was the “Wiener Musikfestwoche” in June 1912, which not only fixed the image of Vienna as the leading musical capital of Europe (therefore, in the eyes of contemporaries, de facto the music capital of the world), but also strengthened the notion of a specifically Austrian identity in the context of music and was the forerunner of today's Wiener Festwochen. After 1955, the latter festival helped to consolidate Vienna's permanent appeal in the context of international metropolitan rivalry for cultural tourism.

Many books have been published on the culture of Vienna, most of them repeating the usual clichés or at best recycling different versions of classic pioneering books on the city such as those by Carl Schorske or Ilse Barea. It is, therefore, a real pleasure to discover in Nussbaumer's work a new approach to describing the genesis of Vienna as Musikstadt. Gracefully written and comprehensively researched, Nußbaumer's book deserves to become a classic in its field.