Sounding Habsburg: Sonic Circulations in Central Europe

Abstracts

// Friday, April 22 // DAY 1

Panel 1: Identity at a Distance, Chronologically and Geographically

// MARIE SUMNER-LOTT, “The Presence of the Past, the Pastness of the Present: Nationalism and Medievalism in 19th-Century Histories of Music”

In the long 19th century, history writing took off as both artistic creators— musicians, painters, poets, novelists— and scholarly investigators reimagined the past in ways that would explain the present and, they hoped, point to a bright future. Modern scholars have long recognized the important role that historicism played in the artistic and literary aesthetic of the nineteenth century, but the dynamic back- and-forth that ensued between history writing and creative composition has received less attention. This paper examines 19th-century histories of Medieval music to demonstrate how the presentation of distant musical cultures in scholarly volumes both informed and was informed by the creative Medievalist works presented on stages and in songbooks across central Europe at the time. 

Viennese music writer Raphael Georg Kiesewetter (1773-1850) was one of the earliest musicologists to investigate Medieval music using primary sources drawn from Austria’s Imperial Library and to host performances of “historical concerts” that presented music from Europe’s distant past. Kiesewetter’s Geschichte europäische-abendländischen...Musik (History of European-Occidental Music,1837) tells a different story than the histories by his contemporaries, such as his greatest rival, the feisty Belgian librarian and polemicist François-Joseph Fétis (1784-1871). Though they used the same primary sources and consulted the same authorities, they came to starkly different conclusions about what Medieval music sounded like, as a comparison of their transcriptions of Medieval song shows. They also crafted the narrative of history in response to their unique political circumstances, sometimes holding European polyphony up as a unique development in human history (Kiesewetter, 1834), and sometimes situating European works alongside similar examples from other cultures (Fétis, 1837 and 1876). An examination of Kiesewetter’s and Fétis’s approaches in the context of rival empires and opposing aesthetic philosophies illuminates the many ways that history and creative composition intertwined during the long nineteenth century and demonstrates how musicians and writers manipulated documents and musical works to bring together disparate groups with contradictory interests and to create a sense of shared identity among them. 

// SARAH SABOL, “Was Isaac an Austrian?: The Construction of National Musical Identity in the Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich”

After years spent pondering the “German question” in the wake of the 1848 revolutions, German-speaking Austrians found themselves excluded from the 1871 unification of the German Empire. While many still dreamed of a Großdeutschland, others constructed an Austrian national identity that differentiated them from Germany and from territories of the Austro-Hungarian Empire while yet privileging the German language and culture. Guido Adler (1855–1941), founder of the Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich (DTÖ), limited this series of critical editions by focusing solely on Austrian early music. In doing so, he compiled a corpus of music, redrawing political and cultural boundaries of what music was considered “Austrian” by the intelligentsia and by the Habsburg sponsors of the project. 

As a case study, I concentrate on Austrian accounts of Heinrich Isaac (1450/55–1517) and the music he composed while serving the Habsburg court of Maximilian I. My paper focuses on the rhetoric first used by Romantic antiquarians and later adopted by Adler and his editors to establish Isaac’s Choralis Constantinusas a quintessentially Austrian work of the highest quality and one that bespeaks the deep spirituality of the Germanic peoples, despite Isaac’s Netherlandish birth and Florentine employment. Through a historiographical lens, I examine the narratives of Johann Ambros, Anton von Webern, Emil Bezency, and Walter Rabl in their constructions of Isaac as an emblem of Austria’s illustrious musical past, and I trace how nineteenth-century music historians’ approaches evolved as more information regarding Isaac’s origins was uncovered. In addition to Romantic depictions of Isaac as “deutsche,” I also consider the impetus for the formation of DTÖ’s formation, the aims of the project’s sponsors, the rhetoric used in the introductions to the DTÖ’s editions of Isaac’s Choralis Constantinus, and the importance of Isaac as a nationalistic icon to Austrian musicologists and intellectuals.  

// CATHERINE MAYES, “Staging Hungary at the Habsburg Court: A Snapshot from 1781”

As early as 1673, the English physician and traveler Edward Brown observed that upon journeying only a short distance into Hungary, one “seems to enter upon a new Stage of the world, quite different from that of these Western Countrys: for [one] then bids adieu to hair on the Head, Bands, Cuffes, Hats, Gloves, Beds, Beer: and enters upon Habits, Manners, and course of life: which with no great variety, but under some conformity, extend unto China, and the utmost parts of Asia.”[1] Such observations inform historian Larry Wolff’s seminal work on Western Europe’s “invention” of Eastern Europe as its backward, uncivilized complement during the Enlightenment.[2] Social, cultural, economic, and political considerations were the primary bases of negative assessment.

Festivities at the Habsburg court in honor of a visit from members of the Russian imperial family in late 1781, however, complicate this picture. In divertissements performed as part of the events celebrating this grand occasion, Hungary’s elite—upon whose political support the Habsburgs depended—as well as their music, dance, and dress were displayed as noble and refined. One newspaper report noted, furthermore, that their exquisite attire was “truly Hungarian.” In this talk, I examine the divertissements in the context of the geopolitics of the time and I interpret Hungary’s staging in particular in light of the concept of “nation,” especially as it was applied in eighteenth-century Hungary. More broadly, I argue that the 1781 court festivities suggest how attention to local circumstances, politics, and class affinities can help us refine our understanding of representations of Eastern Europe in the eighteenth century.

———

[1] Edward Brown, A Brief Account of some Travels in Hungaria, Servia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Thessaly, Austria, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, and Friuli. As also Some Observations on the Gold, Silver, Copper, Quick-silver Mines, Baths, and Mineral Waters in those parts: With the Figures of some Habits and Remarkable places (London: Printed by T. R. for Benj. Tooke, 1673), 69. The emphasis is original.

[1] Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).

Panel 2: Definitions and Complications of “Habsburg Austria”

// MICHAEL HAAS, “Greater-Austria vs. German-Austria”

The question of German and Austrian identity is made clearer when looking at Jewish composers who hailed from the two very distinct regions of Habsburg Europe. Karol Rathaus from Ternopol considered himself Austrian and kept his citizenship until Austria’s annexation in 1938. Erich Wolfgang Korngold, born in Brno also considered himself to be Austrian and in contrast to Viennese composers Arnold Schönberg and Franz Schreker, never claimed to be a German composer.  Hans Gál, Ernst Toch and Erich Zeisl, all born in Vienna, identified as “German”. Hans Winterberg was born Austrian in Prague, but immigrated to Bavaria by passing himself off as a “Sudeten German”. He brought distinctly Czech musical attributes with him that unmistakably claimed a Janáčkian provenance. Rathaus and Korngold both avoided Berlin New Objectivity and Viennese serialism. For composers born in Greater Austria, German was a linguistic utility, not a cultural identity. Their cultural identity was that of supranational Austria. For Gál and Zeisl, German was both cultural and linguistic. Franz Schreker even went so far as to complete his most successful opera, Der Schatzgräberon November 12th 1918 scribbling on the bottom of the page that “the Republic of German- Austria could now be annexed by the German Reich”. Yet looking at the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein, paradoxically founded by the German speaking Hungarian Franz Liszt, we see three very diverse Austrian composers in its executive committee: The Brahmsian “continuity composer” Hans Gál; the New Objectivist: Ernst Toch and the Schoenbergian: Alban Berg. Yet Winterberg, Rathaus and Korngold brought totally different aesthetic developments to the Austro-German musical arena. The variance in concepts between “German” and “Austrian” created a musical plurality that has largely been lost by the post-war search for new musical developments. After 1938, it was clear that “German” was understood as a “race” that excluded all Jewish composers.

// LEAH BATSTONE, “‘Vienna of the East’: Musical Pluralism in Lemberg”

Following the end of his tenure as conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic in 1901, Gustav Mahler conducted more concerts than ever outside of the imperial capital and in increasingly diverse locations, from Rome to St. Petersburg. Among these performances were the final two concerts of the Philharmonic Society of Lemberg’s first season in 1903. The two programs performed in Lviv, Ukraine, then Lemberg in the Galicia region of the Habsburg lands, consisted almost entirely of works by Beethoven and Wagner. The first concert also included Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, a performance met with such enthusiasm that not only was it performed in place of his Fourth Symphony the second night, but was included in the Philharmonic Society’s tour later the same year. Contrary to the canonical orientation of not only Mahler’s programs but the Philharmonic’s first season generally, Philipp Ther has noted that early twentieth-century Lemberg was home to a number of institutions devoted to the promotion and performance of Polish music (Ther, 2014). To complicate the city’s musical identity further, the Ukrainian composer and ethnographer Filaret Kolessa was also a significant presence, assembling an immense collection of Ukrainian folk music after completing his university education in Lviv and prior to his doctoral studies in Vienna. The enthusiastic reception of Mahler’s music in Lemberg places Ukraine in an interesting position vis-à-vis Austrian, indeed Habsburgian, musical life. Mahler has himself been discussed in terms of Austria’s rich transnationalism; a characteristic of Vienna mirrored in Lviv. Using the multiethnic influences of Mahler’s music as a prism, this paper compares the cultural life of the two cities. Like its namesake, the “Vienna of the East” was filled with a plurality of musical cultures, creating another Habsburgian space where various artistic currents met. 

// TIMUR SIJARIC, “Audiovisual Representation of Habsburgs in Wien-Film and its Afterlife”

In one of the most telling scenes in E.W. Emo’s propagandistic biopic WIEN 1910, the controversial Viennese mayor and protagonist of the movie Karl Lueger explains to the children the significance of his ceremonial Chain of Office. As every link in the chain symbolizes a historic district in Vienna, so does the film music cue, a collage of Viennese composers, mirror the city’s rich history. The chain dramatically falls to the ground and breaks between the first and the second link in the chain, symbolizing the break between the First – the heart of the city and of the Empire – and the Second – the “Jewish” – districts, prompting Lueger to utter the words quoted in the title of the proposal. While the anti-Semitic narrative is obvious, this scene also exemplifies an ambivalent depiction and representation of Habsburgs and their historical seat in the context of Wien-Film, a film studio founded following the “Anschluss” of Austria. The Wien-Film acted as one of the largest production companies in the National-Socialist film industry with a focus on historical and ‘light’ films, in which several features dealt with the (mostly immaterial or alluded) presence of the Habsburgs, often ‘seen’ only through their subjects and their significance, topics highly contested in the “Third Reich”. These relations are particularly illuminated on the audiovisual layer in the filmic works, which is the main aim of this paper. Film composers’ strategies encoded into the audiovisual narrative regarding Habsburgs in Wien-Film features can be identified in movies produced following the end of the World War (for instance, already in Karl Hartl’s 1948 feature DER ENGEL MIT DER POSAUNE) and even to the present day. 

// DAVID BRODBECK, “Ruminations on the Social Identities and Self-Perceptions of Some Late Habsburg Composers”

“The éminence grise of Austrian music.” “A real Hungarian artist.” “A poor German composer.” “A great Jewish composer.” “The true musical representative of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy in the last third of the 19th century.” Each of these descriptive phrases has been used to characterize one and the same composer, Carl Goldmark (1830–1915). Taken together they are indicative of the challenges of writing about the social identities and self-perceptions of Late Habsburg composers, particularly, although not exclusively, those who, like Goldmark, were immigrants to Vienna from Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, Styria, Galicia, and other multi-national regions of the far-flung multi-national Habsburg Monarchy. Consider the terms used in Grove Music Online to characterize several such figures: Berté (né Bettelheim) (Austro-Hungarian), Brüll (Austrian), Dvořák (Czech), Goldmark (Austro-Hungarian), Kálmán (né Koppstein) (Hungarian), Kuhe (German), Lehár (Austro-Hungarian), Mahler (Austrian), Schoenberg (Austro-Hungarian), Smetana (Czech), and Wolf (Austrian). There is no consistent logic that can account for all these denominations—not place of birth or residence or native language or borders as they were drawn before 1918 or after. Some denominations are obvious and uncontroversial (e.g., “Dvořák the Czech”); others (e.g., “Schoenberg the Austro-Hungarian”) are less so. My concern in this paper is primarily with composers in the latter group. I suggest that by making use of concepts such as national indifference (Zahra), Jewish cosmopolitanism (Hacohen), and cosmopolitan patriotism (Appiah), along with the older idea of a German cultural sphere that knows no state borders, we can come to a far more refined understanding of the self-perception and social identity of Late Habsburg composers than what is implied by the problematic terms “Austrian,” “Hungarian,” and “Austro-Hungarian.”

Keynote lecture

// ERIKA SUPRIA HONISCH, “Celebrating Habsburgs and Misplacing Manuscripts in Guido Adler’s Musical Empire” 

One of the musical rarities Guido Adler selected for display at the 1892 International Exhibition for Music and Theater in Vienna was a manuscript containing a “music drama” by Habsburg Emperor Ferdinand III (r. 1637–1657). Sent by the Emperor in 1649 to the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher in Rome—after which it disappeared for some 230 years— the manuscript had recently been acquired by the eminent Hungarian collector Alexander Posonyi. For Adler, angling for official support for the Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich, it couldn’t have surfaced at a better time. Proof positive that the earliest surviving opera composed in Central Europe had been penned by a Habsburg, it bolstered his case that the dynasty was uniquely musical because it counted among its ranks not only enthusiastic patrons but skilled composers too. After Posonyi’s death in 1899, the manuscript disappeared once more, its whereabouts unknown until 2017, when it was discovered in the Library of Congress. 

Lost once in the seventeenth century and again in the twentieth, Ferdinand III’s drama musicum was misplaced in the nineteenth century too, when it entered the history books as a landmark of “German” theater. No one—not even Adler, with his Moravian roots—guessed that it had first been staged in Prague in the closing days of the Thirty Years War. This music—many times misplaced—takes center stage in my talk, its seventeenth-century Prague performance sounding the limits of late nineteenth-century national imaginaries. 

// SATURDAY, April 23 // DAY 2

Panel 3: Habsburg Devotional Practices, Aural and Material

// ANDREW WEAVER, “Defining the Empire in a Music Print: The Novus thesaurus musicus (1568) between Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism” 

The Novus thesaurus musicus, a motet anthology printed in Venice in 1568, has long been known as one of the largest music prints of the sixteenth century (five volumes in six partbooks of 468 pages each) and as an important source of music by composers active at the Habsburg court. The print clearly served as Habsburg propaganda, apparent in both the paratexts (dedication to Emperor Maximilian II, woodcuts of members of the imperial family, laudatory Latin poems) and the text itself; in particular, the fifth volume consists almost entirely of settings of topical texts extolling the Habsburgs and their allies. As a luxury item, the print was widely distributed and treated with care; over twenty-five exemplars survive today, many in elaborate original bindings and/or with annotations establishing ownership by a broad range of people, from Catholic and Protestant rulers to members of the Czech nobility. The print thus served as an important means by which Habsburg court culture circulated throughout the Empire and beyond. 

Scholars disagree, however, as to the more subtle messages conveyed by the print. David Crawford, for instance, has used the contents of the first volume to argue for a Protestant orientation to the print, while Walter Pass has used the contents and organization of the fourth volume to place the print into the Catholic Counter-Reformation. This paper proposes that this ambiguity is intentional. Through close readings of the texts and paratexts, and by drawing upon evidence of the ownership and use of the book from my ongoing project of examining each exemplar, I argue that the print successfully mediated between the cosmopolitan and the national, allowing readers to construct their own definition of the Holy Roman Empire: roomy enough to include people of varying confessional and political allegiances but still clearly stamped with a Habsburg image. 

// KIMBERLY HIEB, “Regional Agency and Imperial Influence: Sacred Music in Salzburg at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century”

In 2002 Craig Monson “revisited” the Council of Trent and conveyed the rich variety of regional liturgical traditions that continued to flourish in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Evidence of these particular practices survives in sacred compositions such as many of those that survive from the late seventeenth-century court of the Archbishopric of Salzburg, which are associated with specific feasts but abandon the prescribed texts of the Tridentine liturgy to instead set creatively centonized sacred texts of distinct conception. Building on the existing scholarship regarding particular pieties in the early modern Holy Roman Empire (Ditchfield 1995, Armstrong 2004, Soergel 1993), this paper studies surviving sources of sacred music to track the simultaneous presence of local traditions and imperial influence that aurally manifest both Salzburg’s position as an individual principality and its geopolitical locus within the Holy Roman Empire.

While the majority of musical sources that survive from early modern Salzburg are the works of local composers Andreas Hofer and Heinrich Biber, nine pieces by Johann Caspar Kerll and Antonio Bertali, both composers with ties to imperial Vienna, made their way into Salzburg’s collection around the turn of the eighteenth century. Like an abundance of Salzburg’s locally composed repertoire, these pieces are associated with specific feasts yet most feature individual texts of unknown origin. Unlike the sacred repertoire composed by Salzburg locals, however, these sacred songs celebrate Catholic themes that were especially prominent in Vienna as part of the Habsburg Pietas Austriaca: the Trinity, Corpus Christi, and the Virgin Mary. These compositions reveal the influence of imperial devotional trends in the region of Salzburg, which increased substantially around the turn of the eighteenth century during the rule of Prince-Archbishop Johann Ernst von Thun (1687–1709).

// ANNA SANDA, “Resounding like a ‘Little Vienna’?: Habsburg Ambitions at the Bonn Electoral Court 1784–1794”

With its status as a borderland of the Holy Roman Empire, the Rhineland has tended to supply episodes for historiographical narratives reiterating its significance for the constitutional and identity formation of the modern national German state. Viewing the Rhineland, however, as a distinct, albeit diverse, historical-cultural space within the empire (Rowe, 2003) immediately enables a methodological approach encompassing transnational angles. Building on this perspectival shift, my paper focuses on the last decade from 1784 to 1794 of the Electorate of Cologne (with its residence in Bonn) when a Habsburg Elector, Archduke Maximilian Franz of Austria, gained political power in the traditional domain of the Wittelsbach dynasty. 

Auditory perception is, naturally, indispensable as a constitutive component of religious rituals, whereby its effects can be subtly channeled. Within Maximilian Franz’s enlightened political agenda, it was particularly the sacred music, I suggest, that was deployed as a carefully conceived aural symbol both of his regional political power (elector-archbishop) as well as of his dynastic connections to the imperial court in Vienna. These political imperatives, ranging from the Danube to the Rhine, were mediated sonically and concrete information can be gleaned from his extensive sacred music collection (now in Modena) together with his Hofstaatsentwurf (c. 1786) which envisaged a relocation of the electoral court to Münster. 

Drawing on these findings, my contribution concentrates on the Litanies of the Virgin Mary (20 compositions), a representative genre in the religious rituals of both the Wittelsbach and the Habsburg dynasties which thus offer an ideal basis for stylistic and performative comparison. Building upon this exploration, I consider broader aspects of sacred music practices such as the transition of Viennese repertoire (e.g. Johann Georg Reutter the Younger) and Bohemian connections as well as musical links to the pietas Austriaca, a specific character of Habsburg Catholicism. 

Panel 4: Networks, (Trans)Nationalisms, and Cosmopolitanisms

// GREGOR KOKORZ, “The Lost Space: Between Graz and Trieste”

Research has started shedding light on theatres and on traveling artists and virtuosos as essential parts of the cultural web that formed a common cultural and musical space of the Habsburg Empire, but the many local institutions and artists in cities across the Habsburg Empire remain highly underrepresented, often only a subject of interest to local historians and an object of little academic notice. However, recent publications such as Peter Judson’s history of the Habsburg Empire draw our attention to the local and identify these spaces as important ground for understanding the political and cultural dynamics of the Empire. 

Following such reflections, my paper will focus on the local and draw attention to the ways musicians, in their functions as composers, performers and teachers as well as their works created for special local occasions, have shaped and connected different local spaces and thus have contributed to an overall common musical space for the Habsburg Empire. I will explore such relations by focusing on the connections among Graz, Ljubljana and Trieste in the 19th century and on the piano and piano music as essential parts of 19th century bourgeois society. Following the biographies of Carlo Ferdinando Lickl, Anna Weiss Busoni and Ferruccio Busoni, I will analyze how three generations of musicians and their personal networks contributed to the cultural musical exchange among these cities. I will address ways the local relate to the national and transnational (from today’s perspective) and how the relationships between local and trans local, between peripheries and centers, contribute to and indeed profoundly create and shape the web of culture and music. 

This paper is based on my research on the Triestine composer Carlo Ferdinando Lickl (1803-1864).  The musical material I present has been recorded as part of a pedagogical exchange project with young musicians from the two conservatories in Trieste and Graz on the theme of this paper, allowing Italian and Austrian students from today to explore their common cultural heritage.

// MARY RIGGS, “Fanny Elssler: Transnational Folkdance and Ballet in the Habsburg Empire”

Fanny Elssler (1810-1884) enjoyed an international ballet career promoting demi-caractère choreography influenced by the national folk dances of the Habsburg Empire and beyond. Ballet in Vienna had a long cosmopolitan tradition as evidenced by the engagement of the Swiss/French balletmaster, Jean-Georges Noverre. Although he worked under Empress Maria Theresa and taught her daughter, Marie Antoinette, he believed that dance should be performed for the people and not be restricted to the confines of the Imperial Court. 

Fanny’s father was employed as a copyist by Joseph Haydn, who paid for Fanny to study ballet with Jean Aumer, the French balletmaster of the Kärntnertortheater. When Fanny was twelve, she joined the corps de ballet of the Hoftheater under the direction of Filippo Taglioni, whose daughter, Marie Taglioni, would be her early colleague and later rival. Fanny continued Noverre’s mission by incorporating national folk dances in her appearances in Vienna, Pest, Milan, Rome, London, Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Moscow, and on tours in the United States.  

A daughter of the Habsburg empire, she danced waltzes, polkas, mazurkas, boleros, smolenskas, tarantellas, czardases, the pas styrien, et al. Her performances of the Spanish Cachucha with castanets in the ballet Le Diable boiteux (Vienna, 1836) and the Polish Cracovienne in the ballet La Gypsy (Paris, 1839) won her international acclaim and inspired compositions by Johann Strauss II and Josef Lanner. Her emanations also live on in the operetta, Die Tänzerin Fanny Elssler, libretto by Hans Adler and music by Johann Strauss II. 

Together with her audiences, Elssler strove to co-create a cosmopolitan dance culture with choreography that fostered an appreciation of the characteristic folkdance and associated musical traditions in the diverse regions of the Habsburg Empire. Her success and popularity with both the aristocracy and the general population attest to her significant presence and impact.

// PAVEL KODÝTEK, “A Habsburg Drama Around Mahler and Smetana: Nationality As a Flaw”

While Mahler expressed various reservations about composers such as Brahms and Bruckner, his views on Smetana’s music call for special consideration. Despite his efforts to program such works as Bartered Bride and Dalibor at the VCO and his successful production of the former at the Met, Mahler’s relationship to his countryman was in no way straightforward. He praised Smetana’s talent but found numerous imperfections in his music that “needed” to be fixed so that the pieces could be performed. As related by his confidant, Natalie Bauer Lechner, he attributed these flaws to Smetana’s “lack of technique and his Czech nationality [that] deprived him of the culture of the rest of Europe.” This, surely, is a surprising statement, coming from a Jewish, German-speaking composer born at the border of Bohemia and Moravia about a fellow citizen who was educated fully in German and who studied with Liszt. What could account for such harsh condemnations?

To find out, we must compare Mahler's criticism of Smetana with that of other composers. Although there were many "improvements" of the music of others, their justifications differed. For example, Beethoven, representative of the highest aesthetics of German musical culture, needed help because in writing his Ninth Symphony he had “lost his indispensable and intimate contact with reality.” In his case, as in the case of Brahms and Bruckner, there was, of course, no mention of nationality or periphery. I will argue, therefore, that although a different musical aesthetic is at the heart of Mahler's criticism of other composers, the elite culture he embraced, or we may say cultural hegemony, speaks through his statements about Smetana. He is no longer a Jew born in the Czech lands, but a representative of the 'centre' who expresses contempt for the 'periphery'.

// ROBERT RIGGS, “Joseph Joachim: Nationalist or Cosmopolitan?”

Joseph Joachim (1831–1907)—virtuoso violinist, quartet leader, composer, conductor, and educator—embodied multiple overlapping identities, both nationalist and cosmopolitan. Born in the Hungarian region of the Habsburg Empire to a German speaking Jewish family, Joachim spent his youth in Pest and Vienna, completed his education in Leipzig, and held positions in Weimar, Hanover, and Berlin. He blended and reconciled his Jewish heritage with his conversion to Lutheranism. And he divided his energies between composing and performing, ultimately focusing more on the latter. His early immersion in Roma music was a seminal compositional influence, especially on his Violin Concerto “in hungarischer Weise,” which employs Beethovenian structures permeated with Roma characteristics.

As a result of his long residence in the German states, Joachim increasingly identified with them, and, with nationalistic fervor, he welcomed Prussia’s unification of Germany. In 1869 he became founding director of the “Königliche Hochschule für Musik” in Berlin largely because of the city’s long-established traditions regarding the importance of music. Moses Mendelssohn and Wilhelm von Humboldt had argued that music, especially instrumental music because it is free from texts, was a universally understood language that could transcend racial and cultural differences, and thus that “if music is incorporated into a collective educational system common ground is established on which men and women, Jews and non-Jews, aristocrats and citizens can meet.”

Joachim believed that his favored Germanic repertoire was universally impowered to address these goals. On extensive concert tours throughout Europe and the British Isles, he emphasized works by Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, and Dvořák. In view of his lifelong cultivation of music associated with his two “homelands” (Austria-Hungary and Germany) both within and beyond their borders, I propose that Joachim was a “nationalist cosmopolitan,” a concept that enjoyed wide currency in the nineteenth century.  

Panel 5: Envoicing Habsburg Networks

// DYLAN PRICE, “Transnationalism and Phenomenology in Dvořák’s Gypsy Songs”

This paper provides a phenomenological account of Habsburg transnationalism, prizing open questions of mobility, affect, and multicultural belonging using the concept of Stimmung. Roughly translated as ‘mood’ or ‘attunement’, Stimmung suggests an embodied obfuscation of subject-object distinctions. The concept has recently attracted attention from scholars of the environmental humanities, offering a means of breaking down the distinction between human and environment. But Stimmung finds a vibrant intellectual history in nineteenth- and twentieth-century phenomenological thought, and was popularized by artists, authors, and musicians well before the current resurgence of interest.

The paper begins by surveying expressions of Stimmung and its cognates, especially nálada in Czechia. Its case study is Antonín Dvořák’s Gypsy Songs (1880), in which Stimmung is realised through themes of tuning. Prior Stimmung research has typically concerned itself with senses of localism, landscape, and place-based belonging, and the paper uses these examples to introduce key themes in the existing scholarly literature. But it departs from prevailing research parameters to argue that Stimmung can also be used to discuss mobility. As an ideological gathering-point—distinct from real-life Romani communities—‘The Gypsy’ was bound up with movement across national borders within the Habsburg Empire and beyond, a pejorative emblem of alterity to be kept at arm’s length. But the affective, material, and phenomenological qualities of Dvořák’s Gypsy Songs (their Stimmung) bring this sense of maintained observational distance into question, establishing a powerfully proximate connection to this imagined symbol of dangerous itinerancy. The pieces hence cut across both intersubjective and national boundaries, providing the locus, basis, and impetus for re-theorizing Habsburg transnationalism along phenomenological lines. From specific issues of transnationalism, mobility, and belonging thus emerge larger epistemological and theoretical questions, of interest to scholars of Habsburg studies more widely.

// CLAUDIO VELLUTINI, “Rossini, Weber, and the ‘Entangled’ History of Opera in Vienna, Munich, Prague, and Naples”

Opera has traditionally been an art form on the move. However, the circumstances that lead political regimes to place operatic mobility at the core of their cultural agenda have been underexplored. This paper focuses on the exchange of operatic repertories between Vienna, Munich, Prague, and the main Italian operatic centers. At its core are the apparently diverging case studies of early Viennese productions of Rossini’s Tancredi from 1816-17 and an attempted performance of Weber’s Der Freischütz in Naples in 1822. 

Early performances of Rossini’s Tancredi outside Italy benefitted from the networks that bound Vienna’s Kärntnertortheater with Munich and Prague. Tancredi was first presented in Vienna by an Italian company from Munich, which followed princess Maria Ludovika of Bavaria when she became Austrian empress in late 1816. While this production aimed at revamping traditional aristocratic patronage over Italian opera, productions of Tancredi in German translation proliferated in the rest of the Austrian empire too, finally reaching the Kärntnertortheater from Prague in 1817. From the Estates Theater came not only Chistoph Grünbaum’s translation of the libretto, but also two of the opera’s leading singers: soprano Therese Grünbaum and alto Katharina Waldmüller. They were still active members of the Kärtnertortheater’s German company when the Italian impresario Domenico Barbaja became its manager in 1821. Weber’s Der Freischütz was one of the hits of the impresario’s first season in Vienna, and Barbaja arranged for its performance in Naples the following year. 

While Barbaja’s tenure has often been regarded as a form of Italian domination over Vienna’s operatic life, administrative documents reveal that, in fact, it was instrumental to the creation of a network connecting Vienna with other Italian cities. Furthermore, surviving materials offer fascinating insight on the processes of translation and adaptation of these operas, providing a window on what, following Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, I call an “entangled history” of early nineteenth-century opera. 

Conference Partners

The Sounding Habsburg conference is organized by the Dvořák American Heritage Association and supported by the Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association, Austrian Cultural Forum New York, Virginia Tech, and New York University.