Vienna: Bastion of Conservatism

Abstract

Johann Friedrich Reichardt’s enthusiastic characterization of Vienna’s brilliant musical life during the first decade of the nineteenth century confirmed the impressions of many a visitor at a time when not only Ludwig van Beethoven but musicians from all parts of Europe made their home at least temporarily in the booming capital of the Austrian Empire. The city’s culture depended primarily on two classes that formed the upper ranks of society in the wake of the reforms introduced by Joseph II before the turn of the century: the old aristocracy and the new officialdom that had arisen from the urban bourgeoisie and petty nobility. The aristocracy was traditionally cosmopolitan in background and outlook; it spoke and wrote French or Italian and favoured music and architecture in the representative Baroque manifestations which survived in Austria far longer than elsewhere. The new bureaucracy, on the other hand, charged with the centralization of the multi-national state, used German as its official language and among the arts looked above all to German literature. Virtually all important writers of the period, Heinrich Joseph von Collin (for whose Coriolan Beethoven wrote a famous overture) no less than Franz Grillparzer and Adalbert Stifter, were state officials. By contrast, the poeti caesarei (court poets) were all Italians — Apostolo Zeno and Pietro Metastasio as well as Giovanni Brambilla. In the field of spoken drama they saw themselves primarily as classical tragedians, but their principal activity as librettists tied them closely to music, the chief domain of the high aristocracy.

For everyone, surely, who can enjoy the good things of life, especially for the artist, perhaps quite especially for the musical artist, Vienna is the richest, happiest, and most agreeable residence in Europe. Vienna has everything that marks a great capital in a quite unusually high degree. It has a great, wealthy, cultivated, art-loving, hospitable, well-mannered, elegant nobility; it has a wealthy, sociable, hospitable middle class and bourgeoisie, as little lacking in cultivated and well-informed gentlemen and gracious families; it has a well-to-do, good-natured, jovial populace. All classes love amusement and good living, and things are so arranged that all classes may find well provided and may enjoy in all convenience and security every amusement that modern society knows and loves.¹