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

David Wyn Jones’s stupendous study manages to have the reader learn anew many facets of the seemingly standard musical fare of classical music in Vienna, albeit now through the lens of history, politics, and sociology. After all, when interpreting compositions by Mozart and the likes, one detaches them from their cultural and political contexts, which, more often than not, determine a great part of a composition’s aesthetic conception and confinements. While being familiar with the biographies of these composers is undoubtedly an integral part of the study of music, Jones could not have presented the convincing historical arc that is the subject of this work without his emphasis on the imperial city’s significance as a space to the musical domain. Ever since Friedrich Kittler published his Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900 three decades ago, the vertical crystallization of time has proven to be a useful means for establishing a larger historical narrative that is not bound by the fallacies of an exhaustive, comprehensive approach but instead provides the advantage of showing significant shifts through limited time windows around the turn of a given century. Such is the case when Jones lays the groundwork in his brief but crucial introduction, explicating at its end the book’s structure in broad terms: “Baroque, Classical, Modern; Imperial, Aristocratic, Bourgeois, and Habsburg, Austria, Vienna” (6).

The “1700” historical mark is the most liberally applied of the sections, as it covers the successive emperors Leopold I, Joseph I, and Karl VI, who “reigned as Holy Roman Emperor for a period of eighty-two years, from 1658 to 1740” (27). During this time period one can trace a continuous growth of the corps of musical personnel at court, and thereby document the main thesis of this first part that music “had a presence and a purpose that was inextricably linked with that of the dynasty itself” (27). As part of the aggressive Counter-Reformation, music at Leopold’s court had to serve the rituals of the Catholic Church. If there is one blind spot in Jones’s emphasis on religious politics under Leopold, it is that the anti-Judaism so intricately associated with his name is not touched on.

In addition to religious music in this time period, Jones explores the importance of Italian opera, which arguably matched that of sacred music, and that of occasion-based ceremonial music, which helped to glorify the Habsburg dynasty on such events as the birthdays and name days of the emperors’ family or the coronation of Karl VI in Prague in 1723. It was the composer and theorist Johann Joseph Fux who provided the coronation opera Costanza e Fortezza (59); reading the “thick description” of it that Jones provides, one begins to grasp the extent of the political utilization of this opera and opera in general for the sake of Habsburg unity.

The second part, “1800,” begins where the first ended, albeit almost seventy years later at another Habsburg coronation. Mozart, “who was overworked and under-appreciated” (72), wrote his late opera La clemenza di Tito (1791) for the coronation of Leopold II, again in Prague. Having earlier provided the imperial court as the primary catalyst for Viennese musical life, Jones uses this comparison to emphasize continuity on one hand and the differences to come on the other. His brother and onetime emperor Joseph II had made, for example, an impact on the musical domain by decreasing the interest in ceremonial music, which had the effect of making such music a more public affair, and by promoting German as the main language for opera (78). Likewise does Jones stress the shift from the imperial court to the aristocracy as the leaders of both private and public tastes in music, best exemplified by the obvious influences of Baron Gottfried van Swieten, Prince Nicolaus Esterhazy, and Count Joseph Lobkowitz. Whereas these prominent families of the higher aristocracy are familiar names in music history, the uncovering of the “hidden history of women in music in this...