Introduction

As the early twentieth-century writer Karl Kraus playfully observed, the ‘streets [of Vienna] are surfaced with culture as the streets of other cities are surfaced with asphalt’. 1 Long-time centre of the Habsburg Empire and now capital of Austria, Vienna has always lived and breathed music in particular, from the troubadours at the early thirteenth-century Babenberg court, the founding of the Hofmusikkapelle in 1498 and Leopold I’s lavish investment in music in the seventeenth century to the unbroken sequence of masters of the last 250 years from Haydn and Mozart onwards. Beyond the apparently inescapable and regularly self-promotional clichés of Vienna as the musical capital of the world and the most musical city in the world, Vienna has embraced often simultaneously musical continuity and change, conservatism and progressivism, and aesthetic, stylistic and cultural uniformity and diversity. If Vienna is, as Charles Sealsfield explained in 1828, ‘a city of contrasts; here you may find the most abject dissoluteness and undeviating steadiness, a high degree of learning and the grossest ignorance, the most contemptible servility and a noble independent spirit’, 2 then music will reflect the contrast-fuelled environment at least to a certain extent.