Music in Vienna, 1700, 1800, 1900 by David Wyn Jones (review)

In a musicological climate in which contextual and cultural studies are the rule, rather than the exception, David Wyn Jones’s new book Music in Vienna, 1700, 1800, 1900 stands out. Music in Vienna is exceptional not in departing from this rule, but in demonstrating how a thoroughly contextual and broadly cultural exploration of music and place can illuminate both. The book is divided into three sections, each comprising three chapters, preceded by an introductory chapter, “Telling Tales of Music in Vienna.” This introductory chapter sets up the three frames of reference within which Jones has confined what might otherwise have been the subject of at least three volumes. His frames of reference—which comprise historiographical narratives and paradigms described below—provide the book with an excellently balanced discussion of social, political and musical matters. Chapters within section 1 cover “Music at the Imperial and Royal Court,” “Catholicism, Ritual and Ceremony,” and “Italian Opera and the Preservation of the Habsburg Dynasty.” The section on 1800 includes “Court, Aristocrats and Connoisseurs,” “Demand, Aspiration and the Ennobling of the Spirit,” and “Music, War and Peace.” And the final section, on 1900, encompasses “Vienna, City of Music,” “ ‘Seid umschlungen, Millionen’ ” (focusing on Beethoven reception), and “From Johann Strauss to Richard Strauss.”

Regarding the overall framing of the book, Jones has chosen not to rely on the traditional parsing of music into historical periods (baroque, classical, romantic, etc.), or on the traditional emphasis on composers’ biographies. These, he finds, lead to a narrowness of vision and tend to overemphasize change. Instead, he focuses on manifold human agents, operating in capacious “epochs” around 1700, 1800, and 1900. In this way he sets out to create “a portrait of each period that allows contrasts to emerge and continuities to be articulated” (p. 2). Extending his painterly metaphor, one might consider the three sections as three panoramas, painted from an impressively wide palette of evidence about Vienna and its music. His palette includes, but is by no means restricted to: eyewitness accounts, portraits, title pages, stage designs, city planning information, patrons’ biographical information, memoirs, programs, publishing catalogs, and of course music—works in diverse genres by manifold composers. In sum, Jones offers what anthropologist Clifford Geertz might have called a “thick” history of Vienna at the turns of each of three centuries, a history that fully takes account of human agency and recognizes that it “was not the prerogative of composers only, but routinely involved emperors, princes, publishers, institutions, administrators, scholars, and others” (p. 2). The result is path-breaking in its contextual depth.

Indeed, such is the wealth of detail on social and especially political matters in each chapter that one might think that the discussion of music would suffer. Music is, in fact, nowhere in sight in this book, in that there are no music examples. This is unfortunate for the musically literate reader, who might well like to refer to scores during Jones’s numerous detailed references to works by lesser-known composers (for example, Johann Baptist Wanhal and Franz Xaver Süssmayr). Much of the music to which he refers is not readily available in modern editions. Overall, though, there is no question that music remains at the fore-front with detailed description and interpretation of music figures throughout, beautifully woven into the narrative. On the largest scale (that of the entire book), his narrative focuses on music in relation to place: he traces the increasingly strong identification of Vienna as a “city of music.” By 1900, he argues, the conception of “Musikstadt Wien” was so strong that music had tended to gain the upper hand, rather than becoming subservient to any overarching civic identity (p. 154). He is able to demonstrate the emergence of this cultural identity by tracing the development of key institutions, such as the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, and through the writings of influential spokespeople such as Theodor Helm and other editors of Carl Fromme’s Musikbuch...