Features
City of Composers
Viennese Flavors
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City of Composers
Many 17th- and 18th-century Habsburg rulers were music lovers and musicians: Leopold I was a composer, Charles VI was a violinist,
and Maria Theresa played the double bass. Royal patronage drew some of the world's greatest composers to Vienna, including
Beethoven and Brahms; Mozart gave his first public concert at age six in Schönbrunn's Hall of Mirrors.
The waltz is inextricably linked to Vienna thanks to Johann Strauss, the “Waltz King,” and every New Year's Day the Vienna
Philharmonic Orchestra plays his waltzes to a billion television viewers around the world. A gilded statue of Strauss, affectionately
known as “Schoni,” with jaunty moustache and playing his violin, stands in City Park (Stadtpark).
In 1498 Emperor Maximilian I engaged 12 young male choristers to sing with the court orchestra. Over the following centuries
some of Austria's greatest composers served their apprenticeships with the choir, including Franz Schubert and Joseph Haydn.
Schubert and Haydn would have been dressed in full imperial military uniforms, like the rest of the choir. The current naval-style
dress wasn't implemented until 1919.
The elaborate and gilded Musikverein was built in the 19th century as a concert venue for the city's Society of the
Friends of Music. (It's here that the Vienna Philharmonic performs its New Year concert.) In 1913 the hall was the scene of
a brawl between conservatives and radicals of musical taste, at a concert performed by Arnold Schönberg.
Schönberg changed the face of modern musical composition by abandoning the standard eight-tone scale familiar to the Western
ear and devising a complex 12-tone system. Together with his former pupils Alban Berg and Anton von Webern, he formed the
Second Viennese School of Music and continued to compose according to his new scale, despite the hostile response of the Vienna
audience.
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