Music in Vienna: 1700, 1800, 1900 by David Wyn Jones

Abstract

Reviews 286 rendition of Kraus’s drama or of Michael Russell’s roughly simultaneous translation of Die letzten Tage would be a fruitful endeavour. But this reviewer cannot find any major faults in this first complete English translation. If there are moments where the drama seems almost too contemporary — where the parodies of journalistic spin or bureaucratic newspeak feel all too imitative of our own epoch — this cannot be solely attributed to the translators’ intentions, but rather to the prescience of the drama itself. Ari Linden University of Kansas Music in Vienna: 1700, 1800, 1900. By David Wyn Jones. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer. 2017. x + 277 pp. £25. ISBN 978–1-78327–107–8. David Wyn Jones’s new book enters a crowded market. Notwithstanding periodic attempts at revisionism, Vienna remains musicologically pivotal. The secondary literature is predictably vast, and the impulse to augment it shows no signs of dissipating. Music in Vienna’s novelty resides in its underlying idea: it comprises three case studies, each centred on the turn of a century, which reconstruct Vienna’s musical economy. The first concerns the relationship between the Habsburg monarchy and its musical infrastructure in the decades around 1700; the second tracks this infrastructure’s migration into aristocratic hands 100 years later; the third explores the influence of the bourgeoisie around 1900. In this respect, the book is really a narrative of what economists might call modernization: Vienna’s musical history reflects feudalism’s decline and the rise of a market economy propelled by industrialization and liberalization. Two further tripartitions support this narrative. Wyn Jones’s chronology reflects a division into Baroque, Classical and Modern style periods, in which respect its task is more complex for 1700 than it is for 1800 and 1900, since, unlike Viennese Classicism and Modernism, the Austrian Baroque still lives in the shadows of its Italian, German, English and French counterparts. Simultaneously, he narrates the contraction of Viennese political identity: in 1700, music is indentured to Habsburg authority; after 1800, it mirrors the politics of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, provoking the emergence of a more specifically Austrian identity; and for 1900, Wyn Jones posits a more highly developed Viennese identity, presaging the Empire’s ultimate collapse after the First World War. The book’s impressive resource of documentary evidence — including records detailing the changing composition of the imperial Hofkapelle, the copying and publishing industries, the structure of musical institutions and the repertoire they helped to maintain — allows an historical picture to grow out of the documentary traces of Vienna’s cultural economy. Although the resulting narrative is occasionally dry (what the account of the Hofkapelle’s personnel and structure gains in thoroughness it arguably loses in vitality), there is no contesting the weight of scholarship that underpins it. Reviews 287 The methodology’s drawback is that historical detail often obscures larger debates. Although Wyn Jones erects his conceptual scheme very clearly, its application is practical rather than theoretical, serving more as a framework for historical information than a platform for historiographical speculation, which means that opportunities for critical speculation are missed. Comparison of 1700 and 1800 for example affords a chance to critique Tim Blanning’s idea, expounded in The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe 1660–1789 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), that eighteenth-century history charts the demise of representational culture and the emergence of the public sphere. Although Wyn Jones distances himself from Blanning’s French paradigm, he nevertheless implicitly confirms the perception that the Hofkapelle’s liturgical and ceremonial music was above all an expression of imperial authority (for example, p. 27). The Empire’s disparate character did not diffuse artistic expressions of political authority, but shifted their locus towards the projection of religious identity, engendered in the concept of pietas austriaca, the Habsburg affiliation with counter-reformation Catholicism. This notion also informed secular music: the cycle of courtly operas, composed for the fixed events of Fasching, the imperial name days and birthdays of the Emperor and Empress, invariably expressed the virtues of pietas austriaca in secular form, funnelled symbolically through the personality of the Emperor, about whom all operas were ultimately composed (p...