VIENNA – Travel guide for opera, classical music and culture
VIENNA: a travel guide for music fans
Visit destinations for classical music and opera art with a historical connection. Get to know exciting ideas and background information.
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Ludwig van Beethoven
Beethoven, who was born in Bonn, visited Vienna for the first time in 1786 to see Mozart. Even today, however, it is not certain whether he actually met Mozart. Six years later, he returned to Vienna for good after having met with Joseph Haydn in Bonn, who accepted him as a pupil. Because the Rhineland was occupied by the French, Beethoven was forced to stay in Vienna, and after the death of his father, his two brothers also came to Vienna.
Fortunately, 200 years later, one can still discover Beethoven’s traces in Vienna. First of all, we should mention Beethoven’s apartments. He often changed his quarters, 58 apartments are documented, some of which he lived in several times. His death house, the so-called “Schwarzspanierhaus” on Schwarzspanierstraße, however, has not been preserved.
Early years as a piano virtuoso
Beethoven quickly made a name for himself as a piano virtuoso. He played in the salons of his patrons; the Palais Lobkowitz or the Hradec Castle are still witnesses of this time. At the age of thirty his deafness made itself felt, the apartment where he wrote his Heiligstadt Testament can be visited. His performances as a piano virtuoso began to decrease and important orchestral works were written. With the 3rd symphony, the Eroica, Beethoven entered a new era in 1803 and the middle, very productive creative period with countless masterpieces began.
The napoleonic years
The Napoleonic wars and turmoil shook Vienna. Money was no longer so easy for the nobility, and Beethoven was plagued by financial worries. In addition, social contacts became more difficult due to his hearing loss. He no longer traveled, only spa stays in Baden became more frequent due to his physical ailments. There, on long walks in nature, he often found inspiration for his compositions.
The two brothers found their way to Vienna. One became a successful pharmacist, but then left Vienna again. The second brother died at an early age, leaving a nephew over whose custody Beethoven fought a bitter legal battle with his sister-in-law for many years.
Illness and death
Beethoven met and fell in love with women on several occasions. Twice, Beethoven was probably ready to marry, but differences of class stood in the way of marriage. Beethoven’s fame grew. In 1823 and later he crowned his work with the 9th Symphony and the last 3 piano sonatas. In 1827 Beethoven died at the age of 57. The cause of death is still not completely clarified, even modern methods of analysis of his hair do not provide complete clarity; there are more than a dozen different diagnoses.
Johannes Brahms
The 29-year-old Brahms visited Vienna for the first time in 1862, and when he presented his G minor piano quartet at an evening event there, the director of the conservatory and musician Joseph Hellmesberger is said to have already proclaimed Brahms the heir to Beethoven. Although Brahms struggled with these comparisons throughout his life, he felt valued in Vienna, which could not be said of his native Hamburg, where his music met with skepticism and he was passed over for appointments. So he decided to accept an offer as choir master and moved to Vienna.
But Brahms did not stay in office for long and became a freelance artist in the 1870s.
Brahms’ center of life remained Vienna until his death. However, Brahms was often on the road, every year 3-4 months took him to the summer resort and in the winter months he was often on the road as a performer and conductor of his own works.
TO THE COMPLETE BIOGRAPHY OF BRAHMS
Anton Bruckner
He came to live in Vienna as a 44-year-old Organist
Bruckner was 44 years old when he came to Vienna and took up the work of poorly paid or even unpaid jobs at the university and the conservatory. He moved to Währinger Strasse with his sister Anna (“Nani”). The latter died in 1870 and Katharina Kachelmaier became the housekeeper until the end of his life. (siehe pircture below).
At the beginning of his Viennese period, Bruckner was considered a respected church musician and organist, but the storm hit Vienna when he dedicated his 3rd Symphony to his “music god” Richard Wagner. Henceforth, castigated as a “Wagnerian,” he drew the scathing criticism of the influential critic Eduard Hanslick and found himself in the middle of the greatest cultural-historical conflict of the 19th century, the bitter dispute between the “traditionalists” around Brahms and the “new Germans” around Liszt and Wagner. In line with Hanslick, Brahms also often made negative comments about Bruckner’s music, but the latter always remained polite.
One day Bruckner and Brahms even sat together in their favorite pub Roter Igel (the red hedgehog), but no rapprochement took place.Only when ordering food did they notice that they had the same favorite dish, “Geselchtes mit Knödel” (smoked ham with dumplings).
Open hostility in Vienna
With a respectable success of the Fourth Symphony and the breakthrough of the Seventh Symphony (in Munich), Bruckner’s position in the Austrian capital improved, but the Viennese never really warmed to the music and the strange person of Bruckner. His friends (e.g. the conductors Hans Richter and Johann von Herbeck) always remained in the minority.
Bruckner suffered greatly from the many slights. When he was even wrongly suspected of an indecent approach to a female student in the “St. Anna Affair”, it almost broke his heart, he who never came close to a woman. But this did not prevent him from writing 9 marriage proposals in his life. The recipients were all young ladies, who in his opinion were still chaste (in his language “clean”). His last proposal (when he was 70 years old) even became famous. He fell in love with Ida Buhz, a parlor maid at his hotel during a stay in Berlin. An engagement had already been arranged, but at the last moment the devout Catholic learned that the bride-to-be was a Protestant. When Ida refused to convert to Catholicism, Bruckner backed out.
Honors in the last few years
In the last decade of his life, the honors began to pour down on Bruckner, especially Emperor Franz Josef honored him first with audiences and orders, then also with a life pension, and finally Franz Josef provided the composer with a free retirement apartment in the upper Belvedere for life (“the Kustodenstöckl”). The university also fulfilled one of Bruckner’s fervent wishes by awarding him an honorary doctorate. For Bruckner, this was nevertheless little consolation for the many slights he had suffered. In addition, he had serious health problems in his last ten years, which prevented him from savoring the successes and fulfilling his last wish to finish the Ninth Symphony. Bruckner died in 1896 in his Kustodenstöckl of heart trouble. He did not want to be buried in Vienna; he found his honorary grave under his beloved organ in St. Floriansstift.
TO THE COMPLETE BRUCKNER BIOGRAPHY
Gaetano Donizetti
Vienna “the Donizetti-City”
Donizetti was in Vienna several times from the 1830s, sometimes even holding official positions; his school friend Merelli was by now director of the Kärtnertor Theater. Vienna adored the Italian, and Richard Wagner enviously called Vienna “Donizetti City.” In 1842/43, Emperor Ferdinand appointed him “K.k. Kammerkapellmeister und Hofkompositeur” and Donizetti took care of the Italian program at the Kärtnertor Theater for two seasons, including staging the first Viennese Nabucco, at whose premiere in Milan he was present and deeply impressed.
Vienna later honored Donizetti’s work with a large bust in the State Opera House and in 2005 with a commemorative plaque at Wipplingerstrasse 5.
TO THE COMPLETE BIOGRAPHY OF DONIZETTI
Christoph Willibald Gluck
The foundation of the reform opera in Vienna
Gluck came to Vienna at the age of 36. There he married Maria Anna, who was half his age. After many years of traveling around, he had a permanent job, a home and could devote himself to composing. But it was to be another 12 years before he wrote “Orfeo ed Euridice”, the revolutionary work that produced a break with the baroque castrato era and exaggerated ornamentation of song. What exactly the new approach consists of, you will find summarized in the following link if you are interested:
https://opera-inside.com/orfeo-ed-euridice-by-ch-w-gluck-the-opera-guide-and-synopsis/
This so-called reform opera was not at all euphorically received by the Viennese at the beginning, but acceptance increased and with the follow-up work “Alceste” the already 50-year-old was able to establish himself as Europe’s musician of future. His new style revolutionized the opera seria, and Gluck became a beacon for all subsequent composers, Mozart included. In 1756 he received a knighthood from the Pope and henceforth called himself Knight of Gluck.
The relationsship with Maria Antonia, the later Marie Antoinette
A special feature of the Viennese years was that Gluck became the music teacher of Maria Antonia, the daughter of Emperor Franz I and Maria Theresa. Maria Antonia was not an easy person, but found her only joy in music and dance. Due to the marriage policy of the Habsburgs, she was married to the French Dauphin in 1770 at the age of 14, and four years later became Queen of France alongside Louis XVI as Marie Antoinette. One of her first official acts was to bring Gluck to Paris as a reformer of music.
Joseph Haydn
He came to Vienna as a boy
Haydn spent his youth and his old age in Vienna. He came to Vienna in 1740, already at the age of 8 (without parents), after being “discovered” by the musical director of St. Stephen’s Cathedral in his home in the rural area, who was looking for singers for chapel choir. There he was taught to sing and play the violin and sang soprano in the choir for almost 10 years. When he turned 17, the empress, hearing him sing a solo piece, complained that he sang like a crow, and Haydn was dismissed because of the onset of vocal break. He was left penniless on the street, with no help from his poor parents. Haydn made his way through life with odd jobs for many years (assignments as a musician, teaching, servant work, etc.) and lived for years in a poor apartment on Kohlmarkt. He continued his musical education autodidactically (especially with works by C.Ph.E. Bach), since he had only received a basic knowledge as a singer. After eight years his luck finally turned around and he got his first job in Pilsen, leaving Vienna for the next almost 40 years (if you don’t count the regular visits).
Back in Vienna after 40 years as a famous musician
With his two London visits, Haydn became rich at an advanced age, which allowed him to buy a stately house in Vienna-Gumperndorf, where he lived from 1795 until his death in 1809. He died of old age during the turmoil of the Napoleonic battles for Vienna and was first buried in Hundsturm Cemetery in Vienna (a tombstone still stands today) and later moved to the Bergkirche in Eisenstadt.
Haydn monumnent Mariahilfstrasse 55:
Erich Maria Korngold
The Wunderkind years
When Korngold’s ballet “der Schnemann” was performed at the Vienna State Opera (then the Court Opera) in 1910, he was probably the youngest composer to do so, at the age of 13. Korngold, who was born in 1897 in Brno in the Austrian Empire, was often described as the greatest musical child prodigy ever, greater even than Mozart. Even as a child, his compositions had the quality of a mature composer. He was encouraged but also protected by his father, the respected (and sharp-tongued) Viennese music critic Julius Korngold. At the age of 19, Erich wrote “der Ring des Polykrates,” his first one-act opera, which delighted audiences.
His began his greatest work when he was 20-years old
He began composing “The Dead City” at the age of 19, but the First World War put a stop to the plans. “Die tote Stadt” then became his greatest success and audiences clamored for seats. In Hamburg, the work was given 26 times in the first season alone. Shortly thereafter, the work was also staged in Vienna, New York, Prague and Zurich and became a perennial hit for 10 years. This phase was abruptly halted by the Nazi seizure of power, when the works of Jewish composers were banned from performance. Korngold then emigrated to the United States, where he died in the 1950s.
His most famous piece is probably “Glück, das mir verblieb” from “Dead City,” which shines in the purest Korngold style. Already at the beginning the orchestra glitters, with glockenspiel, celesta and harp, a typical late romantic coloration. The bells of the celesta conjure a romantic, almost childlike naive mood.
Glück, das mir verblieb:
https://opera-inside.com/the-dead-city-by-erich-korngold-the-opera-guide-and-synopsis/#Gl%C3%BCck
Gustav Mahler
Director of the Vienna State Opera
When Mahler came to the State Opera as court opera director in 1897, it was customary for opera singers to stand at the ramp and sing with pathetic arm movements in front of painted backdrops. Mahler, who was steeped in Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk of theatrical art, stage design, literature and music, set about fundamentally reforming the art of opera scenically.
As opera director and first Kapellmeister in personal union, he decided to take the liberty of simultaneously directing as musical director. This reform work, which was decisively strengthened in 1903 with the appointment of the stage designer Alfred Roller, brought the Court Opera to the artistic top, but also earned Mahler many enemies. The latter was probably due even more to the rampant anti-Semitism.
Antisemitism
Mahler fought against the conservatism of the Viennese authorities. When Strauss premiered his Salome in Dresden, Mahler wanted to bring the opera to Vienna, but the censorship authorities refused to allow a performance of the scandalous opera. For more than ten years, the Viennese quarelled with the Jew (who was baptised earlier in Hamburg), until Mahler, exhausted by his duties and the many concert tours, left the court opera for New York.
Mahler remained in the United States for three years, with interruptions, and returned to Vienna in 1911, terminally ill, where he died in the same year.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
The prodigy metts the emperor and the emperess
Mozart visited Vienna for the first time when he was six years old, on the occasion of his visit to Empress Maria Theresa and her husband Franz Joseph.
Triumph and tragedy in Vienna
Later, Mozart spent 10 years in the Danube metropolis with interruptions. He arrived there in 1781 from Salzburg. His fate was changeable, the middle period was the happiest with artistic success and marriage to Konstanze, the last period was marked by personal crises (child deaths, illness) and economic depression, with the death of the art-loving Joseph II his fate had turned.
He wrote a considerable part of his works in his Viennese period and made music in and composed for various theaters. On December 5, 1791, shortly after midnight, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died in the “Kleines Kaiserhaus” in Rauhensteingasse in Vienna.
TO THE COMPLETE MOZART BIOGRAPHY
Gioachino Rossini
The Rossini Frenzy in Vienna
Rossini visited Vienna in 1822 and triggered a huge “Rossini frenzy” in the imperial city. Schubert wrote two overtures and even Beethoven composed a small canon in honor of the Italian. Within a few weeks, 8 different operas by Rossini were given in about 60 performances, mainly in the Theater am Kärtnertor, whose director had shortly before been nominated the Italian Barbaja, Rossini’s impresario in Naples. The Kärtnertortheater has not existed since 1870.
During this visit of Rossini to Vienna, there was also the legendary meeting with Beethoven (see below).
TO THE FULL ROSSINI BIOGRAPHY
Franz Schubert
Childhood years in poverty
Schubert spent most of his short life in Vienna. His adult life was marked by the composition of music (it is estimated that he composed 30,000 hours), complete destitution (publishers and concert promoters largely spurned his works), socializing with Schubertiads and visits to inns, and his terrible syphilis disease.
Franz was the thirteenth of his father’s 20 children, was very musical, had a beautiful voice, and for this reason was accepted in 1808 as a choirboy at the Hofmusikkapelle (court chapel) and in the imperial convict at St. Stephen’s Cathedral.
After attending the Court Music Chapel and briefly training as a teacher, Schubert took up his position as his father’s school assistant in 1814. Schubert was unhappy because he lacked time for composing, and in 1816 he applied in vain for a musician’s position in Ljubljana. Also, all publishers rejected submissions of his compositions. His friend Franz von Schober offered Schubert to live with his family (then at Landskrongasse 5) and so the penniless Schubert decided to give up the job and devote himself fully to life as a composer.
Schubtertiades
Schubert stayed several times with his friend Franz von Schober, the poet and actor of the same age. In 1821 the first Schubertiade, evenings to promote Schubert’s music, took place in the apartment on Spiegelgasse. Schubert sat at the piano and his most authoritative interpreter of his songs, Johann Michael Vogl sang along. These Schubertiades became an important literary-musical salon and were often held in Sonnleithner’s house (Haus am Bauernmarkt was demolished). Important works by Schubert, such as Erlkönig, were heard for the first time at the Schubertiades.
Illness and early death
After the diagnosis of syphilis, Schubert began to drink more and more. Night-long visits to inns were not uncommon, Schubert became more corpulent, and attacks of syphilis caused him more and more trouble. Schubert was never inhibited in his joy of composition by the many defeats, even in his darkest hours when he lay in hospital in 1823, in a room with 90 rash patients with open wounds, he composed on the “schöne Müllerin”.
The last months before his death, Schubert lived in the apartment of his brother Ferdinand. This was somewhat outside of Vienna, the doctors recommended that he stay outside of the city because of the better air. Schubert’s cause of death was not syphilis, but it is assumed that he died of the rampant typhoid fever (due to the typical phantasizing (“nervous fever”) which became noticeable earlier).
Johan Strauss (Son)
The waltz king
Johann Strauss’s father was Vienna’s first waltz king, battling his rival Lanner’s band for waltz supremacy. When Lanner suddenly died, Strauss’ wife urged her son to take Lanner’s place and compete with his father. The reason was vindictiveness, since Strauss’ father by now had as many children with his mistress as with his wife. The rest is history, Johann made his successful debut as a 19 year old at the Dommayer and over the next 30 years became the waltz king with his band. He was greatly assisted by his brothers Eduard and Joseph. Strauss’s life was marked by music making, composing, womanizing, Entrepreneurship, a lot of work and changing places of residence.
Strauss also became famous in the second part of his career for operettas, to which he initially turned only out of economic necessity.
Richard Strauss
Along with Dresden, Vienna was Strauss’s most important artistic station, two of his operas were premiered (“Ariande” and the 2nd Version of “Frau ohne Schatten”) in the State Opera.
He held the office of State Opera Director for five years (1919-1924) and Hoffmansthal, his most important librettist was Viennese.
In addition, many of his Viennese operas were performed in Viennese settings (e.g. “Rosenkavalier” and “Arabella”). In 1924 the city of Vienna awarded him the honorary citizenship.
Strauss and Schalk, the co-directors of the State Opera:
TO THE FULL BIOGRAPHY OF RICHARD STRAUSS
Richard Wagner
Richard Wagner was a frequent visitor to Vienna. Already at the age of 19 his first long journey took him to the city on the Danube. Later his opera performances often took him to the Viennese venues, where he celebrated great triumphs (Lohengrin and Tannhäuser) but also experienced one of his greatest ignominies (Tristan):
Wagner hoped to solve his money problems with the performances of the just finished “Tristan”. But one theater after another refused to stage it. The last hope of the heavily indebted Wagner was Vienna. But after many months, 77 rehearsals and further bill debts, the end came: the work was unperformable, the singers hopelessly overtaxed, was the verdict of those involved. Without the income from a performance, he was threatened with prison because of his debts. Before he was thrown into the Vienna debtors’ prison to force payments to his creditors, he fled the city (allegedly in drag), which, next to the Tannhäuser fiasco in Paris, was Wagner’s greatest life ignominy and led to his greatest life crisis. After his departure, he wrote to a Viennese friend: “A good, truly helpful miracle must come my way now, otherwise it’s all over!” The miracle did indeed occur in the form of Ludwig II.
In addition, his most bitter critic, Eduard Hanslick, was Viennese and from there made his life difficult with his sharp pen. Wagner took his revenge with the famous Viennese reading of the “Meistersinger von Nürnberg” (see section “works with a reference to Vienna” further below).
LINK TO THE COMPLETE WAGNER BIOGRAPHY
Ludwig van Beethoven
Beethoven, who was born in Bonn, visited Vienna for the first time in 1786 to see Mozart. Even today, however, it is not certain whether he actually met Mozart. Six years later, he returned to Vienna for good after having met with Joseph Haydn in Bonn, who accepted him as a pupil. Because the Rhineland was occupied by the French, Beethoven was forced to stay in Vienna, and after the death of his father, his two brothers also came to Vienna.
Fortunately, 200 years later, one can still discover Beethoven’s traces in Vienna. First of all, we should mention Beethoven’s apartments. He often changed his quarters, 58 apartments are documented, some of which he lived in several times. His death house, the so-called “Schwarzspanierhaus” on Schwarzspanierstraße, however, has not been preserved.
Early years as a piano virtuoso
Beethoven quickly made a name for himself as a piano virtuoso. He played in the salons of his patrons; the Palais Lobkowitz or the Hradec Castle are still witnesses of this time. At the age of thirty his deafness made itself felt, the apartment where he wrote his Heiligstadt Testament can be visited. His performances as a piano virtuoso began to decrease and important orchestral works were written. With the 3rd symphony, the Eroica, Beethoven entered a new era in 1803 and the middle, very productive creative period with countless masterpieces began.
The napoleonic years
The Napoleonic wars and turmoil shook Vienna. Money was no longer so easy for the nobility, and Beethoven was plagued by financial worries. In addition, social contacts became more difficult due to his hearing loss. He no longer traveled, only spa stays in Baden became more frequent due to his physical ailments. There, on long walks in nature, he often found inspiration for his compositions.
The two brothers found their way to Vienna. One became a successful pharmacist, but then left Vienna again. The second brother died at an early age, leaving a nephew over whose custody Beethoven fought a bitter legal battle with his sister-in-law for many years.
Illness and death
Beethoven met and fell in love with women on several occasions. Twice, Beethoven was probably ready to marry, but differences of class stood in the way of marriage. Beethoven’s fame grew. In 1823 and later he crowned his work with the 9th Symphony and the last 3 piano sonatas. In 1827 Beethoven died at the age of 57. The cause of death is still not completely clarified, even modern methods of analysis of his hair do not provide complete clarity; there are more than a dozen different diagnoses.
Johannes Brahms
The 29-year-old Brahms visited Vienna for the first time in 1862, and when he presented his G minor piano quartet at an evening event there, the director of the conservatory and musician Joseph Hellmesberger is said to have already proclaimed Brahms the heir to Beethoven. Although Brahms struggled with these comparisons throughout his life, he felt valued in Vienna, which could not be said of his native Hamburg, where his music met with skepticism and he was passed over for appointments. So he decided to accept an offer as choir master and moved to Vienna.
But Brahms did not stay in office for long and became a freelance artist in the 1870s.
Brahms’ center of life remained Vienna until his death. However, Brahms was often on the road, every year 3-4 months took him to the summer resort and in the winter months he was often on the road as a performer and conductor of his own works.
TO THE COMPLETE BIOGRAPHY OF BRAHMS
Anton Bruckner
He came to live in Vienna as a 44-year-old Organist
Bruckner was 44 years old when he came to Vienna and took up the work of poorly paid or even unpaid jobs at the university and the conservatory. He moved to Währinger Strasse with his sister Anna (“Nani”). The latter died in 1870 and Katharina Kachelmaier became the housekeeper until the end of his life. (siehe pircture below).
At the beginning of his Viennese period, Bruckner was considered a respected church musician and organist, but the storm hit Vienna when he dedicated his 3rd Symphony to his “music god” Richard Wagner. Henceforth, castigated as a “Wagnerian,” he drew the scathing criticism of the influential critic Eduard Hanslick and found himself in the middle of the greatest cultural-historical conflict of the 19th century, the bitter dispute between the “traditionalists” around Brahms and the “new Germans” around Liszt and Wagner. In line with Hanslick, Brahms also often made negative comments about Bruckner’s music, but the latter always remained polite.
One day Bruckner and Brahms even sat together in their favorite pub Roter Igel (the red hedgehog), but no rapprochement took place.Only when ordering food did they notice that they had the same favorite dish, “Geselchtes mit Knödel” (smoked ham with dumplings).
Open hostility in Vienna
With a respectable success of the Fourth Symphony and the breakthrough of the Seventh Symphony (in Munich), Bruckner’s position in the Austrian capital improved, but the Viennese never really warmed to the music and the strange person of Bruckner. His friends (e.g. the conductors Hans Richter and Johann von Herbeck) always remained in the minority.
Bruckner suffered greatly from the many slights. When he was even wrongly suspected of an indecent approach to a female student in the “St. Anna Affair”, it almost broke his heart, he who never came close to a woman. But this did not prevent him from writing 9 marriage proposals in his life. The recipients were all young ladies, who in his opinion were still chaste (in his language “clean”). His last proposal (when he was 70 years old) even became famous. He fell in love with Ida Buhz, a parlor maid at his hotel during a stay in Berlin. An engagement had already been arranged, but at the last moment the devout Catholic learned that the bride-to-be was a Protestant. When Ida refused to convert to Catholicism, Bruckner backed out.
Honors in the last few years
In the last decade of his life, the honors began to pour down on Bruckner, especially Emperor Franz Josef honored him first with audiences and orders, then also with a life pension, and finally Franz Josef provided the composer with a free retirement apartment in the upper Belvedere for life (“the Kustodenstöckl”). The university also fulfilled one of Bruckner’s fervent wishes by awarding him an honorary doctorate. For Bruckner, this was nevertheless little consolation for the many slights he had suffered. In addition, he had serious health problems in his last ten years, which prevented him from savoring the successes and fulfilling his last wish to finish the Ninth Symphony. Bruckner died in 1896 in his Kustodenstöckl of heart trouble. He did not want to be buried in Vienna; he found his honorary grave under his beloved organ in St. Floriansstift.
TO THE COMPLETE BRUCKNER BIOGRAPHY
Gaetano Donizetti
Vienna “the Donizetti-City”
Donizetti was in Vienna several times from the 1830s, sometimes even holding official positions; his school friend Merelli was by now director of the Kärtnertor Theater. Vienna adored the Italian, and Richard Wagner enviously called Vienna “Donizetti City.” In 1842/43, Emperor Ferdinand appointed him “K.k. Kammerkapellmeister und Hofkompositeur” and Donizetti took care of the Italian program at the Kärtnertor Theater for two seasons, including staging the first Viennese Nabucco, at whose premiere in Milan he was present and deeply impressed.
Vienna later honored Donizetti’s work with a large bust in the State Opera House and in 2005 with a commemorative plaque at Wipplingerstrasse 5.
TO THE COMPLETE BIOGRAPHY OF DONIZETTI
Christoph Willibald Gluck
The foundation of the reform opera in Vienna
Gluck came to Vienna at the age of 36. There he married Maria Anna, who was half his age. After many years of traveling around, he had a permanent job, a home and could devote himself to composing. But it was to be another 12 years before he wrote “Orfeo ed Euridice”, the revolutionary work that produced a break with the baroque castrato era and exaggerated ornamentation of song. What exactly the new approach consists of, you will find summarized in the following link if you are interested:
https://opera-inside.com/orfeo-ed-euridice-by-ch-w-gluck-the-opera-guide-and-synopsis/
This so-called reform opera was not at all euphorically received by the Viennese at the beginning, but acceptance increased and with the follow-up work “Alceste” the already 50-year-old was able to establish himself as Europe’s musician of future. His new style revolutionized the opera seria, and Gluck became a beacon for all subsequent composers, Mozart included. In 1756 he received a knighthood from the Pope and henceforth called himself Knight of Gluck.
The relationsship with Maria Antonia, the later Marie Antoinette
A special feature of the Viennese years was that Gluck became the music teacher of Maria Antonia, the daughter of Emperor Franz I and Maria Theresa. Maria Antonia was not an easy person, but found her only joy in music and dance. Due to the marriage policy of the Habsburgs, she was married to the French Dauphin in 1770 at the age of 14, and four years later became Queen of France alongside Louis XVI as Marie Antoinette. One of her first official acts was to bring Gluck to Paris as a reformer of music.
Joseph Haydn
He came to Vienna as a boy
Haydn spent his youth and his old age in Vienna. He came to Vienna in 1740, already at the age of 8 (without parents), after being “discovered” by the musical director of St. Stephen’s Cathedral in his home in the rural area, who was looking for singers for chapel choir. There he was taught to sing and play the violin and sang soprano in the choir for almost 10 years. When he turned 17, the empress, hearing him sing a solo piece, complained that he sang like a crow, and Haydn was dismissed because of the onset of vocal break. He was left penniless on the street, with no help from his poor parents. Haydn made his way through life with odd jobs for many years (assignments as a musician, teaching, servant work, etc.) and lived for years in a poor apartment on Kohlmarkt. He continued his musical education autodidactically (especially with works by C.Ph.E. Bach), since he had only received a basic knowledge as a singer. After eight years his luck finally turned around and he got his first job in Pilsen, leaving Vienna for the next almost 40 years (if you don’t count the regular visits).
Back in Vienna after 40 years as a famous musician
With his two London visits, Haydn became rich at an advanced age, which allowed him to buy a stately house in Vienna-Gumperndorf, where he lived from 1795 until his death in 1809. He died of old age during the turmoil of the Napoleonic battles for Vienna and was first buried in Hundsturm Cemetery in Vienna (a tombstone still stands today) and later moved to the Bergkirche in Eisenstadt.
Haydn monumnent Mariahilfstrasse 55:
Erich Maria Korngold
The Wunderkind years
When Korngold’s ballet “der Schnemann” was performed at the Vienna State Opera (then the Court Opera) in 1910, he was probably the youngest composer to do so, at the age of 13. Korngold, who was born in 1897 in Brno in the Austrian Empire, was often described as the greatest musical child prodigy ever, greater even than Mozart. Even as a child, his compositions had the quality of a mature composer. He was encouraged but also protected by his father, the respected (and sharp-tongued) Viennese music critic Julius Korngold. At the age of 19, Erich wrote “der Ring des Polykrates,” his first one-act opera, which delighted audiences.
His began his greatest work when he was 20-years old
He began composing “The Dead City” at the age of 19, but the First World War put a stop to the plans. “Die tote Stadt” then became his greatest success and audiences clamored for seats. In Hamburg, the work was given 26 times in the first season alone. Shortly thereafter, the work was also staged in Vienna, New York, Prague and Zurich and became a perennial hit for 10 years. This phase was abruptly halted by the Nazi seizure of power, when the works of Jewish composers were banned from performance. Korngold then emigrated to the United States, where he died in the 1950s.
His most famous piece is probably “Glück, das mir verblieb” from “Dead City,” which shines in the purest Korngold style. Already at the beginning the orchestra glitters, with glockenspiel, celesta and harp, a typical late romantic coloration. The bells of the celesta conjure a romantic, almost childlike naive mood.
Glück, das mir verblieb:
https://opera-inside.com/the-dead-city-by-erich-korngold-the-opera-guide-and-synopsis/#Gl%C3%BCck
Gustav Mahler
Director of the Vienna State Opera
When Mahler came to the State Opera as court opera director in 1897, it was customary for opera singers to stand at the ramp and sing with pathetic arm movements in front of painted backdrops. Mahler, who was steeped in Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk of theatrical art, stage design, literature and music, set about fundamentally reforming the art of opera scenically.
As opera director and first Kapellmeister in personal union, he decided to take the liberty of simultaneously directing as musical director. This reform work, which was decisively strengthened in 1903 with the appointment of the stage designer Alfred Roller, brought the Court Opera to the artistic top, but also earned Mahler many enemies. The latter was probably due even more to the rampant anti-Semitism.
Antisemitism
Mahler fought against the conservatism of the Viennese authorities. When Strauss premiered his Salome in Dresden, Mahler wanted to bring the opera to Vienna, but the censorship authorities refused to allow a performance of the scandalous opera. For more than ten years, the Viennese quarelled with the Jew (who was baptised earlier in Hamburg), until Mahler, exhausted by his duties and the many concert tours, left the court opera for New York.
Mahler remained in the United States for three years, with interruptions, and returned to Vienna in 1911, terminally ill, where he died in the same year.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
The prodigy metts the emperor and the emperess
Mozart visited Vienna for the first time when he was six years old, on the occasion of his visit to Empress Maria Theresa and her husband Franz Joseph.
Triumph and tragedy in Vienna
Later, Mozart spent 10 years in the Danube metropolis with interruptions. He arrived there in 1781 from Salzburg. His fate was changeable, the middle period was the happiest with artistic success and marriage to Konstanze, the last period was marked by personal crises (child deaths, illness) and economic depression, with the death of the art-loving Joseph II his fate had turned.
He wrote a considerable part of his works in his Viennese period and made music in and composed for various theaters. On December 5, 1791, shortly after midnight, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died in the “Kleines Kaiserhaus” in Rauhensteingasse in Vienna.
TO THE COMPLETE MOZART BIOGRAPHY
Gioachino Rossini
The Rossini Frenzy in Vienna
Rossini visited Vienna in 1822 and triggered a huge “Rossini frenzy” in the imperial city. Schubert wrote two overtures and even Beethoven composed a small canon in honor of the Italian. Within a few weeks, 8 different operas by Rossini were given in about 60 performances, mainly in the Theater am Kärtnertor, whose director had shortly before been nominated the Italian Barbaja, Rossini’s impresario in Naples. The Kärtnertortheater has not existed since 1870.
During this visit of Rossini to Vienna, there was also the legendary meeting with Beethoven (see below).
TO THE FULL ROSSINI BIOGRAPHY
Franz Schubert
Childhood years in poverty
Schubert spent most of his short life in Vienna. His adult life was marked by the composition of music (it is estimated that he composed 30,000 hours), complete destitution (publishers and concert promoters largely spurned his works), socializing with Schubertiads and visits to inns, and his terrible syphilis disease.
Franz was the thirteenth of his father’s 20 children, was very musical, had a beautiful voice, and for this reason was accepted in 1808 as a choirboy at the Hofmusikkapelle (court chapel) and in the imperial convict at St. Stephen’s Cathedral.
After attending the Court Music Chapel and briefly training as a teacher, Schubert took up his position as his father’s school assistant in 1814. Schubert was unhappy because he lacked time for composing, and in 1816 he applied in vain for a musician’s position in Ljubljana. Also, all publishers rejected submissions of his compositions. His friend Franz von Schober offered Schubert to live with his family (then at Landskrongasse 5) and so the penniless Schubert decided to give up the job and devote himself fully to life as a composer.
Schubtertiades
Schubert stayed several times with his friend Franz von Schober, the poet and actor of the same age. In 1821 the first Schubertiade, evenings to promote Schubert’s music, took place in the apartment on Spiegelgasse. Schubert sat at the piano and his most authoritative interpreter of his songs, Johann Michael Vogl sang along. These Schubertiades became an important literary-musical salon and were often held in Sonnleithner’s house (Haus am Bauernmarkt was demolished). Important works by Schubert, such as Erlkönig, were heard for the first time at the Schubertiades.
Illness and early death
After the diagnosis of syphilis, Schubert began to drink more and more. Night-long visits to inns were not uncommon, Schubert became more corpulent, and attacks of syphilis caused him more and more trouble. Schubert was never inhibited in his joy of composition by the many defeats, even in his darkest hours when he lay in hospital in 1823, in a room with 90 rash patients with open wounds, he composed on the “schöne Müllerin”.
The last months before his death, Schubert lived in the apartment of his brother Ferdinand. This was somewhat outside of Vienna, the doctors recommended that he stay outside of the city because of the better air. Schubert’s cause of death was not syphilis, but it is assumed that he died of the rampant typhoid fever (due to the typical phantasizing (“nervous fever”) which became noticeable earlier).
Johan Strauss (Son)
The waltz king
Johann Strauss’s father was Vienna’s first waltz king, battling his rival Lanner’s band for waltz supremacy. When Lanner suddenly died, Strauss’ wife urged her son to take Lanner’s place and compete with his father. The reason was vindictiveness, since Strauss’ father by now had as many children with his mistress as with his wife. The rest is history, Johann made his successful debut as a 19 year old at the Dommayer and over the next 30 years became the waltz king with his band. He was greatly assisted by his brothers Eduard and Joseph. Strauss’s life was marked by music making, composing, womanizing, Entrepreneurship, a lot of work and changing places of residence.
Strauss also became famous in the second part of his career for operettas, to which he initially turned only out of economic necessity.
Richard Strauss
Along with Dresden, Vienna was Strauss’s most important artistic station, two of his operas were premiered (“Ariande” and the 2nd Version of “Frau ohne Schatten”) in the State Opera.
He held the office of State Opera Director for five years (1919-1924) and Hoffmansthal, his most important librettist was Viennese.
In addition, many of his Viennese operas were performed in Viennese settings (e.g. “Rosenkavalier” and “Arabella”). In 1924 the city of Vienna awarded him the honorary citizenship.
Strauss and Schalk, the co-directors of the State Opera:
TO THE FULL BIOGRAPHY OF RICHARD STRAUSS
Richard Wagner
Richard Wagner was a frequent visitor to Vienna. Already at the age of 19 his first long journey took him to the city on the Danube. Later his opera performances often took him to the Viennese venues, where he celebrated great triumphs (Lohengrin and Tannhäuser) but also experienced one of his greatest ignominies (Tristan):
Wagner hoped to solve his money problems with the performances of the just finished “Tristan”. But one theater after another refused to stage it. The last hope of the heavily indebted Wagner was Vienna. But after many months, 77 rehearsals and further bill debts, the end came: the work was unperformable, the singers hopelessly overtaxed, was the verdict of those involved. Without the income from a performance, he was threatened with prison because of his debts. Before he was thrown into the Vienna debtors’ prison to force payments to his creditors, he fled the city (allegedly in drag), which, next to the Tannhäuser fiasco in Paris, was Wagner’s greatest life ignominy and led to his greatest life crisis. After his departure, he wrote to a Viennese friend: “A good, truly helpful miracle must come my way now, otherwise it’s all over!” The miracle did indeed occur in the form of Ludwig II.
In addition, his most bitter critic, Eduard Hanslick, was Viennese and from there made his life difficult with his sharp pen. Wagner took his revenge with the famous Viennese reading of the “Meistersinger von Nürnberg” (see section “works with a reference to Vienna” further below).
LINK TO THE COMPLETE WAGNER BIOGRAPHY
MUSEUM
Ludwig van Beethoven
Beethoven, who was born in Bonn, visited Vienna for the first time in 1786 to see Mozart. Even today, however, it is not certain whether he actually met Mozart. Six years later, he returned to Vienna for good after having met with Joseph Haydn in Bonn, who accepted him as a pupil. Because the Rhineland was occupied by the French, Beethoven was forced to stay in Vienna, and after the death of his father, his two brothers also came to Vienna.
Fortunately, 200 years later, one can still discover Beethoven’s traces in Vienna. First of all, we should mention Beethoven’s apartments. He often changed his quarters, 58 apartments are documented, some of which he lived in several times. His death house, the so-called “Schwarzspanierhaus” on Schwarzspanierstraße, however, has not been preserved.
Early years as a piano virtuoso
Beethoven quickly made a name for himself as a piano virtuoso. He played in the salons of his patrons; the Palais Lobkowitz or the Hradec Castle are still witnesses of this time. At the age of thirty his deafness made itself felt, the apartment where he wrote his Heiligstadt Testament can be visited. His performances as a piano virtuoso began to decrease and important orchestral works were written. With the 3rd symphony, the Eroica, Beethoven entered a new era in 1803 and the middle, very productive creative period with countless masterpieces began.
The napoleonic years
The Napoleonic wars and turmoil shook Vienna. Money was no longer so easy for the nobility, and Beethoven was plagued by financial worries. In addition, social contacts became more difficult due to his hearing loss. He no longer traveled, only spa stays in Baden became more frequent due to his physical ailments. There, on long walks in nature, he often found inspiration for his compositions.
The two brothers found their way to Vienna. One became a successful pharmacist, but then left Vienna again. The second brother died at an early age, leaving a nephew over whose custody Beethoven fought a bitter legal battle with his sister-in-law for many years.
Illness and death
Beethoven met and fell in love with women on several occasions. Twice, Beethoven was probably ready to marry, but differences of class stood in the way of marriage. Beethoven’s fame grew. In 1823 and later he crowned his work with the 9th Symphony and the last 3 piano sonatas. In 1827 Beethoven died at the age of 57. The cause of death is still not completely clarified, even modern methods of analysis of his hair do not provide complete clarity; there are more than a dozen different diagnoses.
Johannes Brahms
The 29-year-old Brahms visited Vienna for the first time in 1862, and when he presented his G minor piano quartet at an evening event there, the director of the conservatory and musician Joseph Hellmesberger is said to have already proclaimed Brahms the heir to Beethoven. Although Brahms struggled with these comparisons throughout his life, he felt valued in Vienna, which could not be said of his native Hamburg, where his music met with skepticism and he was passed over for appointments. So he decided to accept an offer as choir master and moved to Vienna.
But Brahms did not stay in office for long and became a freelance artist in the 1870s.
Brahms’ center of life remained Vienna until his death. However, Brahms was often on the road, every year 3-4 months took him to the summer resort and in the winter months he was often on the road as a performer and conductor of his own works.
TO THE COMPLETE BIOGRAPHY OF BRAHMS
Anton Bruckner
He came to live in Vienna as a 44-year-old Organist
Bruckner was 44 years old when he came to Vienna and took up the work of poorly paid or even unpaid jobs at the university and the conservatory. He moved to Währinger Strasse with his sister Anna (“Nani”). The latter died in 1870 and Katharina Kachelmaier became the housekeeper until the end of his life. (siehe pircture below).
At the beginning of his Viennese period, Bruckner was considered a respected church musician and organist, but the storm hit Vienna when he dedicated his 3rd Symphony to his “music god” Richard Wagner. Henceforth, castigated as a “Wagnerian,” he drew the scathing criticism of the influential critic Eduard Hanslick and found himself in the middle of the greatest cultural-historical conflict of the 19th century, the bitter dispute between the “traditionalists” around Brahms and the “new Germans” around Liszt and Wagner. In line with Hanslick, Brahms also often made negative comments about Bruckner’s music, but the latter always remained polite.
One day Bruckner and Brahms even sat together in their favorite pub Roter Igel (the red hedgehog), but no rapprochement took place.Only when ordering food did they notice that they had the same favorite dish, “Geselchtes mit Knödel” (smoked ham with dumplings).
Open hostility in Vienna
With a respectable success of the Fourth Symphony and the breakthrough of the Seventh Symphony (in Munich), Bruckner’s position in the Austrian capital improved, but the Viennese never really warmed to the music and the strange person of Bruckner. His friends (e.g. the conductors Hans Richter and Johann von Herbeck) always remained in the minority.
Bruckner suffered greatly from the many slights. When he was even wrongly suspected of an indecent approach to a female student in the “St. Anna Affair”, it almost broke his heart, he who never came close to a woman. But this did not prevent him from writing 9 marriage proposals in his life. The recipients were all young ladies, who in his opinion were still chaste (in his language “clean”). His last proposal (when he was 70 years old) even became famous. He fell in love with Ida Buhz, a parlor maid at his hotel during a stay in Berlin. An engagement had already been arranged, but at the last moment the devout Catholic learned that the bride-to-be was a Protestant. When Ida refused to convert to Catholicism, Bruckner backed out.
Honors in the last few years
In the last decade of his life, the honors began to pour down on Bruckner, especially Emperor Franz Josef honored him first with audiences and orders, then also with a life pension, and finally Franz Josef provided the composer with a free retirement apartment in the upper Belvedere for life (“the Kustodenstöckl”). The university also fulfilled one of Bruckner’s fervent wishes by awarding him an honorary doctorate. For Bruckner, this was nevertheless little consolation for the many slights he had suffered. In addition, he had serious health problems in his last ten years, which prevented him from savoring the successes and fulfilling his last wish to finish the Ninth Symphony. Bruckner died in 1896 in his Kustodenstöckl of heart trouble. He did not want to be buried in Vienna; he found his honorary grave under his beloved organ in St. Floriansstift.
TO THE COMPLETE BRUCKNER BIOGRAPHY
Gaetano Donizetti
Vienna “the Donizetti-City”
Donizetti was in Vienna several times from the 1830s, sometimes even holding official positions; his school friend Merelli was by now director of the Kärtnertor Theater. Vienna adored the Italian, and Richard Wagner enviously called Vienna “Donizetti City.” In 1842/43, Emperor Ferdinand appointed him “K.k. Kammerkapellmeister und Hofkompositeur” and Donizetti took care of the Italian program at the Kärtnertor Theater for two seasons, including staging the first Viennese Nabucco, at whose premiere in Milan he was present and deeply impressed.
Vienna later honored Donizetti’s work with a large bust in the State Opera House and in 2005 with a commemorative plaque at Wipplingerstrasse 5.
TO THE COMPLETE BIOGRAPHY OF DONIZETTI
Christoph Willibald Gluck
The foundation of the reform opera in Vienna
Gluck came to Vienna at the age of 36. There he married Maria Anna, who was half his age. After many years of traveling around, he had a permanent job, a home and could devote himself to composing. But it was to be another 12 years before he wrote “Orfeo ed Euridice”, the revolutionary work that produced a break with the baroque castrato era and exaggerated ornamentation of song. What exactly the new approach consists of, you will find summarized in the following link if you are interested:
https://opera-inside.com/orfeo-ed-euridice-by-ch-w-gluck-the-opera-guide-and-synopsis/
This so-called reform opera was not at all euphorically received by the Viennese at the beginning, but acceptance increased and with the follow-up work “Alceste” the already 50-year-old was able to establish himself as Europe’s musician of future. His new style revolutionized the opera seria, and Gluck became a beacon for all subsequent composers, Mozart included. In 1756 he received a knighthood from the Pope and henceforth called himself Knight of Gluck.
The relationsship with Maria Antonia, the later Marie Antoinette
A special feature of the Viennese years was that Gluck became the music teacher of Maria Antonia, the daughter of Emperor Franz I and Maria Theresa. Maria Antonia was not an easy person, but found her only joy in music and dance. Due to the marriage policy of the Habsburgs, she was married to the French Dauphin in 1770 at the age of 14, and four years later became Queen of France alongside Louis XVI as Marie Antoinette. One of her first official acts was to bring Gluck to Paris as a reformer of music.
Joseph Haydn
He came to Vienna as a boy
Haydn spent his youth and his old age in Vienna. He came to Vienna in 1740, already at the age of 8 (without parents), after being “discovered” by the musical director of St. Stephen’s Cathedral in his home in the rural area, who was looking for singers for chapel choir. There he was taught to sing and play the violin and sang soprano in the choir for almost 10 years. When he turned 17, the empress, hearing him sing a solo piece, complained that he sang like a crow, and Haydn was dismissed because of the onset of vocal break. He was left penniless on the street, with no help from his poor parents. Haydn made his way through life with odd jobs for many years (assignments as a musician, teaching, servant work, etc.) and lived for years in a poor apartment on Kohlmarkt. He continued his musical education autodidactically (especially with works by C.Ph.E. Bach), since he had only received a basic knowledge as a singer. After eight years his luck finally turned around and he got his first job in Pilsen, leaving Vienna for the next almost 40 years (if you don’t count the regular visits).
Back in Vienna after 40 years as a famous musician
With his two London visits, Haydn became rich at an advanced age, which allowed him to buy a stately house in Vienna-Gumperndorf, where he lived from 1795 until his death in 1809. He died of old age during the turmoil of the Napoleonic battles for Vienna and was first buried in Hundsturm Cemetery in Vienna (a tombstone still stands today) and later moved to the Bergkirche in Eisenstadt.
Haydn monumnent Mariahilfstrasse 55:
Erich Maria Korngold
The Wunderkind years
When Korngold’s ballet “der Schnemann” was performed at the Vienna State Opera (then the Court Opera) in 1910, he was probably the youngest composer to do so, at the age of 13. Korngold, who was born in 1897 in Brno in the Austrian Empire, was often described as the greatest musical child prodigy ever, greater even than Mozart. Even as a child, his compositions had the quality of a mature composer. He was encouraged but also protected by his father, the respected (and sharp-tongued) Viennese music critic Julius Korngold. At the age of 19, Erich wrote “der Ring des Polykrates,” his first one-act opera, which delighted audiences.
His began his greatest work when he was 20-years old
He began composing “The Dead City” at the age of 19, but the First World War put a stop to the plans. “Die tote Stadt” then became his greatest success and audiences clamored for seats. In Hamburg, the work was given 26 times in the first season alone. Shortly thereafter, the work was also staged in Vienna, New York, Prague and Zurich and became a perennial hit for 10 years. This phase was abruptly halted by the Nazi seizure of power, when the works of Jewish composers were banned from performance. Korngold then emigrated to the United States, where he died in the 1950s.
His most famous piece is probably “Glück, das mir verblieb” from “Dead City,” which shines in the purest Korngold style. Already at the beginning the orchestra glitters, with glockenspiel, celesta and harp, a typical late romantic coloration. The bells of the celesta conjure a romantic, almost childlike naive mood.
Glück, das mir verblieb:
https://opera-inside.com/the-dead-city-by-erich-korngold-the-opera-guide-and-synopsis/#Gl%C3%BCck
Gustav Mahler
Director of the Vienna State Opera
When Mahler came to the State Opera as court opera director in 1897, it was customary for opera singers to stand at the ramp and sing with pathetic arm movements in front of painted backdrops. Mahler, who was steeped in Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk of theatrical art, stage design, literature and music, set about fundamentally reforming the art of opera scenically.
As opera director and first Kapellmeister in personal union, he decided to take the liberty of simultaneously directing as musical director. This reform work, which was decisively strengthened in 1903 with the appointment of the stage designer Alfred Roller, brought the Court Opera to the artistic top, but also earned Mahler many enemies. The latter was probably due even more to the rampant anti-Semitism.
Antisemitism
Mahler fought against the conservatism of the Viennese authorities. When Strauss premiered his Salome in Dresden, Mahler wanted to bring the opera to Vienna, but the censorship authorities refused to allow a performance of the scandalous opera. For more than ten years, the Viennese quarelled with the Jew (who was baptised earlier in Hamburg), until Mahler, exhausted by his duties and the many concert tours, left the court opera for New York.
Mahler remained in the United States for three years, with interruptions, and returned to Vienna in 1911, terminally ill, where he died in the same year.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
The prodigy metts the emperor and the emperess
Mozart visited Vienna for the first time when he was six years old, on the occasion of his visit to Empress Maria Theresa and her husband Franz Joseph.
Triumph and tragedy in Vienna
Later, Mozart spent 10 years in the Danube metropolis with interruptions. He arrived there in 1781 from Salzburg. His fate was changeable, the middle period was the happiest with artistic success and marriage to Konstanze, the last period was marked by personal crises (child deaths, illness) and economic depression, with the death of the art-loving Joseph II his fate had turned.
He wrote a considerable part of his works in his Viennese period and made music in and composed for various theaters. On December 5, 1791, shortly after midnight, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died in the “Kleines Kaiserhaus” in Rauhensteingasse in Vienna.
TO THE COMPLETE MOZART BIOGRAPHY
Gioachino Rossini
The Rossini Frenzy in Vienna
Rossini visited Vienna in 1822 and triggered a huge “Rossini frenzy” in the imperial city. Schubert wrote two overtures and even Beethoven composed a small canon in honor of the Italian. Within a few weeks, 8 different operas by Rossini were given in about 60 performances, mainly in the Theater am Kärtnertor, whose director had shortly before been nominated the Italian Barbaja, Rossini’s impresario in Naples. The Kärtnertortheater has not existed since 1870.
During this visit of Rossini to Vienna, there was also the legendary meeting with Beethoven (see below).
TO THE FULL ROSSINI BIOGRAPHY
Franz Schubert
Childhood years in poverty
Schubert spent most of his short life in Vienna. His adult life was marked by the composition of music (it is estimated that he composed 30,000 hours), complete destitution (publishers and concert promoters largely spurned his works), socializing with Schubertiads and visits to inns, and his terrible syphilis disease.
Franz was the thirteenth of his father’s 20 children, was very musical, had a beautiful voice, and for this reason was accepted in 1808 as a choirboy at the Hofmusikkapelle (court chapel) and in the imperial convict at St. Stephen’s Cathedral.
After attending the Court Music Chapel and briefly training as a teacher, Schubert took up his position as his father’s school assistant in 1814. Schubert was unhappy because he lacked time for composing, and in 1816 he applied in vain for a musician’s position in Ljubljana. Also, all publishers rejected submissions of his compositions. His friend Franz von Schober offered Schubert to live with his family (then at Landskrongasse 5) and so the penniless Schubert decided to give up the job and devote himself fully to life as a composer.
Schubtertiades
Schubert stayed several times with his friend Franz von Schober, the poet and actor of the same age. In 1821 the first Schubertiade, evenings to promote Schubert’s music, took place in the apartment on Spiegelgasse. Schubert sat at the piano and his most authoritative interpreter of his songs, Johann Michael Vogl sang along. These Schubertiades became an important literary-musical salon and were often held in Sonnleithner’s house (Haus am Bauernmarkt was demolished). Important works by Schubert, such as Erlkönig, were heard for the first time at the Schubertiades.
Illness and early death
After the diagnosis of syphilis, Schubert began to drink more and more. Night-long visits to inns were not uncommon, Schubert became more corpulent, and attacks of syphilis caused him more and more trouble. Schubert was never inhibited in his joy of composition by the many defeats, even in his darkest hours when he lay in hospital in 1823, in a room with 90 rash patients with open wounds, he composed on the “schöne Müllerin”.
The last months before his death, Schubert lived in the apartment of his brother Ferdinand. This was somewhat outside of Vienna, the doctors recommended that he stay outside of the city because of the better air. Schubert’s cause of death was not syphilis, but it is assumed that he died of the rampant typhoid fever (due to the typical phantasizing (“nervous fever”) which became noticeable earlier).
Johan Strauss (Son)
The waltz king
Johann Strauss’s father was Vienna’s first waltz king, battling his rival Lanner’s band for waltz supremacy. When Lanner suddenly died, Strauss’ wife urged her son to take Lanner’s place and compete with his father. The reason was vindictiveness, since Strauss’ father by now had as many children with his mistress as with his wife. The rest is history, Johann made his successful debut as a 19 year old at the Dommayer and over the next 30 years became the waltz king with his band. He was greatly assisted by his brothers Eduard and Joseph. Strauss’s life was marked by music making, composing, womanizing, Entrepreneurship, a lot of work and changing places of residence.
Strauss also became famous in the second part of his career for operettas, to which he initially turned only out of economic necessity.
Richard Strauss
Along with Dresden, Vienna was Strauss’s most important artistic station, two of his operas were premiered (“Ariande” and the 2nd Version of “Frau ohne Schatten”) in the State Opera.
He held the office of State Opera Director for five years (1919-1924) and Hoffmansthal, his most important librettist was Viennese.
In addition, many of his Viennese operas were performed in Viennese settings (e.g. “Rosenkavalier” and “Arabella”). In 1924 the city of Vienna awarded him the honorary citizenship.
Strauss and Schalk, the co-directors of the State Opera:
TO THE FULL BIOGRAPHY OF RICHARD STRAUSS
Richard Wagner
Richard Wagner was a frequent visitor to Vienna. Already at the age of 19 his first long journey took him to the city on the Danube. Later his opera performances often took him to the Viennese venues, where he celebrated great triumphs (Lohengrin and Tannhäuser) but also experienced one of his greatest ignominies (Tristan):
Wagner hoped to solve his money problems with the performances of the just finished “Tristan”. But one theater after another refused to stage it. The last hope of the heavily indebted Wagner was Vienna. But after many months, 77 rehearsals and further bill debts, the end came: the work was unperformable, the singers hopelessly overtaxed, was the verdict of those involved. Without the income from a performance, he was threatened with prison because of his debts. Before he was thrown into the Vienna debtors’ prison to force payments to his creditors, he fled the city (allegedly in drag), which, next to the Tannhäuser fiasco in Paris, was Wagner’s greatest life ignominy and led to his greatest life crisis. After his departure, he wrote to a Viennese friend: “A good, truly helpful miracle must come my way now, otherwise it’s all over!” The miracle did indeed occur in the form of Ludwig II.
In addition, his most bitter critic, Eduard Hanslick, was Viennese and from there made his life difficult with his sharp pen. Wagner took his revenge with the famous Viennese reading of the “Meistersinger von Nürnberg” (see section “works with a reference to Vienna” further below).
LINK TO THE COMPLETE WAGNER BIOGRAPHY
HOUSES AND APARTMENTS OF ARTISTS
Ludwig van Beethoven
Beethoven, who was born in Bonn, visited Vienna for the first time in 1786 to see Mozart. Even today, however, it is not certain whether he actually met Mozart. Six years later, he returned to Vienna for good after having met with Joseph Haydn in Bonn, who accepted him as a pupil. Because the Rhineland was occupied by the French, Beethoven was forced to stay in Vienna, and after the death of his father, his two brothers also came to Vienna.
Fortunately, 200 years later, one can still discover Beethoven’s traces in Vienna. First of all, we should mention Beethoven’s apartments. He often changed his quarters, 58 apartments are documented, some of which he lived in several times. His death house, the so-called “Schwarzspanierhaus” on Schwarzspanierstraße, however, has not been preserved.
Early years as a piano virtuoso
Beethoven quickly made a name for himself as a piano virtuoso. He played in the salons of his patrons; the Palais Lobkowitz or the Hradec Castle are still witnesses of this time. At the age of thirty his deafness made itself felt, the apartment where he wrote his Heiligstadt Testament can be visited. His performances as a piano virtuoso began to decrease and important orchestral works were written. With the 3rd symphony, the Eroica, Beethoven entered a new era in 1803 and the middle, very productive creative period with countless masterpieces began.
The napoleonic years
The Napoleonic wars and turmoil shook Vienna. Money was no longer so easy for the nobility, and Beethoven was plagued by financial worries. In addition, social contacts became more difficult due to his hearing loss. He no longer traveled, only spa stays in Baden became more frequent due to his physical ailments. There, on long walks in nature, he often found inspiration for his compositions.
The two brothers found their way to Vienna. One became a successful pharmacist, but then left Vienna again. The second brother died at an early age, leaving a nephew over whose custody Beethoven fought a bitter legal battle with his sister-in-law for many years.
Illness and death
Beethoven met and fell in love with women on several occasions. Twice, Beethoven was probably ready to marry, but differences of class stood in the way of marriage. Beethoven’s fame grew. In 1823 and later he crowned his work with the 9th Symphony and the last 3 piano sonatas. In 1827 Beethoven died at the age of 57. The cause of death is still not completely clarified, even modern methods of analysis of his hair do not provide complete clarity; there are more than a dozen different diagnoses.
Johannes Brahms
The 29-year-old Brahms visited Vienna for the first time in 1862, and when he presented his G minor piano quartet at an evening event there, the director of the conservatory and musician Joseph Hellmesberger is said to have already proclaimed Brahms the heir to Beethoven. Although Brahms struggled with these comparisons throughout his life, he felt valued in Vienna, which could not be said of his native Hamburg, where his music met with skepticism and he was passed over for appointments. So he decided to accept an offer as choir master and moved to Vienna.
But Brahms did not stay in office for long and became a freelance artist in the 1870s.
Brahms’ center of life remained Vienna until his death. However, Brahms was often on the road, every year 3-4 months took him to the summer resort and in the winter months he was often on the road as a performer and conductor of his own works.
TO THE COMPLETE BIOGRAPHY OF BRAHMS
Anton Bruckner
He came to live in Vienna as a 44-year-old Organist
Bruckner was 44 years old when he came to Vienna and took up the work of poorly paid or even unpaid jobs at the university and the conservatory. He moved to Währinger Strasse with his sister Anna (“Nani”). The latter died in 1870 and Katharina Kachelmaier became the housekeeper until the end of his life. (siehe pircture below).
At the beginning of his Viennese period, Bruckner was considered a respected church musician and organist, but the storm hit Vienna when he dedicated his 3rd Symphony to his “music god” Richard Wagner. Henceforth, castigated as a “Wagnerian,” he drew the scathing criticism of the influential critic Eduard Hanslick and found himself in the middle of the greatest cultural-historical conflict of the 19th century, the bitter dispute between the “traditionalists” around Brahms and the “new Germans” around Liszt and Wagner. In line with Hanslick, Brahms also often made negative comments about Bruckner’s music, but the latter always remained polite.
One day Bruckner and Brahms even sat together in their favorite pub Roter Igel (the red hedgehog), but no rapprochement took place.Only when ordering food did they notice that they had the same favorite dish, “Geselchtes mit Knödel” (smoked ham with dumplings).
Open hostility in Vienna
With a respectable success of the Fourth Symphony and the breakthrough of the Seventh Symphony (in Munich), Bruckner’s position in the Austrian capital improved, but the Viennese never really warmed to the music and the strange person of Bruckner. His friends (e.g. the conductors Hans Richter and Johann von Herbeck) always remained in the minority.
Bruckner suffered greatly from the many slights. When he was even wrongly suspected of an indecent approach to a female student in the “St. Anna Affair”, it almost broke his heart, he who never came close to a woman. But this did not prevent him from writing 9 marriage proposals in his life. The recipients were all young ladies, who in his opinion were still chaste (in his language “clean”). His last proposal (when he was 70 years old) even became famous. He fell in love with Ida Buhz, a parlor maid at his hotel during a stay in Berlin. An engagement had already been arranged, but at the last moment the devout Catholic learned that the bride-to-be was a Protestant. When Ida refused to convert to Catholicism, Bruckner backed out.
Honors in the last few years
In the last decade of his life, the honors began to pour down on Bruckner, especially Emperor Franz Josef honored him first with audiences and orders, then also with a life pension, and finally Franz Josef provided the composer with a free retirement apartment in the upper Belvedere for life (“the Kustodenstöckl”). The university also fulfilled one of Bruckner’s fervent wishes by awarding him an honorary doctorate. For Bruckner, this was nevertheless little consolation for the many slights he had suffered. In addition, he had serious health problems in his last ten years, which prevented him from savoring the successes and fulfilling his last wish to finish the Ninth Symphony. Bruckner died in 1896 in his Kustodenstöckl of heart trouble. He did not want to be buried in Vienna; he found his honorary grave under his beloved organ in St. Floriansstift.
TO THE COMPLETE BRUCKNER BIOGRAPHY
Gaetano Donizetti
Vienna “the Donizetti-City”
Donizetti was in Vienna several times from the 1830s, sometimes even holding official positions; his school friend Merelli was by now director of the Kärtnertor Theater. Vienna adored the Italian, and Richard Wagner enviously called Vienna “Donizetti City.” In 1842/43, Emperor Ferdinand appointed him “K.k. Kammerkapellmeister und Hofkompositeur” and Donizetti took care of the Italian program at the Kärtnertor Theater for two seasons, including staging the first Viennese Nabucco, at whose premiere in Milan he was present and deeply impressed.
Vienna later honored Donizetti’s work with a large bust in the State Opera House and in 2005 with a commemorative plaque at Wipplingerstrasse 5.
TO THE COMPLETE BIOGRAPHY OF DONIZETTI
Christoph Willibald Gluck
The foundation of the reform opera in Vienna
Gluck came to Vienna at the age of 36. There he married Maria Anna, who was half his age. After many years of traveling around, he had a permanent job, a home and could devote himself to composing. But it was to be another 12 years before he wrote “Orfeo ed Euridice”, the revolutionary work that produced a break with the baroque castrato era and exaggerated ornamentation of song. What exactly the new approach consists of, you will find summarized in the following link if you are interested:
https://opera-inside.com/orfeo-ed-euridice-by-ch-w-gluck-the-opera-guide-and-synopsis/
This so-called reform opera was not at all euphorically received by the Viennese at the beginning, but acceptance increased and with the follow-up work “Alceste” the already 50-year-old was able to establish himself as Europe’s musician of future. His new style revolutionized the opera seria, and Gluck became a beacon for all subsequent composers, Mozart included. In 1756 he received a knighthood from the Pope and henceforth called himself Knight of Gluck.
The relationsship with Maria Antonia, the later Marie Antoinette
A special feature of the Viennese years was that Gluck became the music teacher of Maria Antonia, the daughter of Emperor Franz I and Maria Theresa. Maria Antonia was not an easy person, but found her only joy in music and dance. Due to the marriage policy of the Habsburgs, she was married to the French Dauphin in 1770 at the age of 14, and four years later became Queen of France alongside Louis XVI as Marie Antoinette. One of her first official acts was to bring Gluck to Paris as a reformer of music.
Joseph Haydn
He came to Vienna as a boy
Haydn spent his youth and his old age in Vienna. He came to Vienna in 1740, already at the age of 8 (without parents), after being “discovered” by the musical director of St. Stephen’s Cathedral in his home in the rural area, who was looking for singers for chapel choir. There he was taught to sing and play the violin and sang soprano in the choir for almost 10 years. When he turned 17, the empress, hearing him sing a solo piece, complained that he sang like a crow, and Haydn was dismissed because of the onset of vocal break. He was left penniless on the street, with no help from his poor parents. Haydn made his way through life with odd jobs for many years (assignments as a musician, teaching, servant work, etc.) and lived for years in a poor apartment on Kohlmarkt. He continued his musical education autodidactically (especially with works by C.Ph.E. Bach), since he had only received a basic knowledge as a singer. After eight years his luck finally turned around and he got his first job in Pilsen, leaving Vienna for the next almost 40 years (if you don’t count the regular visits).
Back in Vienna after 40 years as a famous musician
With his two London visits, Haydn became rich at an advanced age, which allowed him to buy a stately house in Vienna-Gumperndorf, where he lived from 1795 until his death in 1809. He died of old age during the turmoil of the Napoleonic battles for Vienna and was first buried in Hundsturm Cemetery in Vienna (a tombstone still stands today) and later moved to the Bergkirche in Eisenstadt.
Haydn monumnent Mariahilfstrasse 55:
Erich Maria Korngold
The Wunderkind years
When Korngold’s ballet “der Schnemann” was performed at the Vienna State Opera (then the Court Opera) in 1910, he was probably the youngest composer to do so, at the age of 13. Korngold, who was born in 1897 in Brno in the Austrian Empire, was often described as the greatest musical child prodigy ever, greater even than Mozart. Even as a child, his compositions had the quality of a mature composer. He was encouraged but also protected by his father, the respected (and sharp-tongued) Viennese music critic Julius Korngold. At the age of 19, Erich wrote “der Ring des Polykrates,” his first one-act opera, which delighted audiences.
His began his greatest work when he was 20-years old
He began composing “The Dead City” at the age of 19, but the First World War put a stop to the plans. “Die tote Stadt” then became his greatest success and audiences clamored for seats. In Hamburg, the work was given 26 times in the first season alone. Shortly thereafter, the work was also staged in Vienna, New York, Prague and Zurich and became a perennial hit for 10 years. This phase was abruptly halted by the Nazi seizure of power, when the works of Jewish composers were banned from performance. Korngold then emigrated to the United States, where he died in the 1950s.
His most famous piece is probably “Glück, das mir verblieb” from “Dead City,” which shines in the purest Korngold style. Already at the beginning the orchestra glitters, with glockenspiel, celesta and harp, a typical late romantic coloration. The bells of the celesta conjure a romantic, almost childlike naive mood.
Glück, das mir verblieb:
https://opera-inside.com/the-dead-city-by-erich-korngold-the-opera-guide-and-synopsis/#Gl%C3%BCck
Gustav Mahler
Director of the Vienna State Opera
When Mahler came to the State Opera as court opera director in 1897, it was customary for opera singers to stand at the ramp and sing with pathetic arm movements in front of painted backdrops. Mahler, who was steeped in Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk of theatrical art, stage design, literature and music, set about fundamentally reforming the art of opera scenically.
As opera director and first Kapellmeister in personal union, he decided to take the liberty of simultaneously directing as musical director. This reform work, which was decisively strengthened in 1903 with the appointment of the stage designer Alfred Roller, brought the Court Opera to the artistic top, but also earned Mahler many enemies. The latter was probably due even more to the rampant anti-Semitism.
Antisemitism
Mahler fought against the conservatism of the Viennese authorities. When Strauss premiered his Salome in Dresden, Mahler wanted to bring the opera to Vienna, but the censorship authorities refused to allow a performance of the scandalous opera. For more than ten years, the Viennese quarelled with the Jew (who was baptised earlier in Hamburg), until Mahler, exhausted by his duties and the many concert tours, left the court opera for New York.
Mahler remained in the United States for three years, with interruptions, and returned to Vienna in 1911, terminally ill, where he died in the same year.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
The prodigy metts the emperor and the emperess
Mozart visited Vienna for the first time when he was six years old, on the occasion of his visit to Empress Maria Theresa and her husband Franz Joseph.
Triumph and tragedy in Vienna
Later, Mozart spent 10 years in the Danube metropolis with interruptions. He arrived there in 1781 from Salzburg. His fate was changeable, the middle period was the happiest with artistic success and marriage to Konstanze, the last period was marked by personal crises (child deaths, illness) and economic depression, with the death of the art-loving Joseph II his fate had turned.
He wrote a considerable part of his works in his Viennese period and made music in and composed for various theaters. On December 5, 1791, shortly after midnight, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died in the “Kleines Kaiserhaus” in Rauhensteingasse in Vienna.
TO THE COMPLETE MOZART BIOGRAPHY
Gioachino Rossini
The Rossini Frenzy in Vienna
Rossini visited Vienna in 1822 and triggered a huge “Rossini frenzy” in the imperial city. Schubert wrote two overtures and even Beethoven composed a small canon in honor of the Italian. Within a few weeks, 8 different operas by Rossini were given in about 60 performances, mainly in the Theater am Kärtnertor, whose director had shortly before been nominated the Italian Barbaja, Rossini’s impresario in Naples. The Kärtnertortheater has not existed since 1870.
During this visit of Rossini to Vienna, there was also the legendary meeting with Beethoven (see below).
TO THE FULL ROSSINI BIOGRAPHY
Franz Schubert
Childhood years in poverty
Schubert spent most of his short life in Vienna. His adult life was marked by the composition of music (it is estimated that he composed 30,000 hours), complete destitution (publishers and concert promoters largely spurned his works), socializing with Schubertiads and visits to inns, and his terrible syphilis disease.
Franz was the thirteenth of his father’s 20 children, was very musical, had a beautiful voice, and for this reason was accepted in 1808 as a choirboy at the Hofmusikkapelle (court chapel) and in the imperial convict at St. Stephen’s Cathedral.
After attending the Court Music Chapel and briefly training as a teacher, Schubert took up his position as his father’s school assistant in 1814. Schubert was unhappy because he lacked time for composing, and in 1816 he applied in vain for a musician’s position in Ljubljana. Also, all publishers rejected submissions of his compositions. His friend Franz von Schober offered Schubert to live with his family (then at Landskrongasse 5) and so the penniless Schubert decided to give up the job and devote himself fully to life as a composer.
Schubtertiades
Schubert stayed several times with his friend Franz von Schober, the poet and actor of the same age. In 1821 the first Schubertiade, evenings to promote Schubert’s music, took place in the apartment on Spiegelgasse. Schubert sat at the piano and his most authoritative interpreter of his songs, Johann Michael Vogl sang along. These Schubertiades became an important literary-musical salon and were often held in Sonnleithner’s house (Haus am Bauernmarkt was demolished). Important works by Schubert, such as Erlkönig, were heard for the first time at the Schubertiades.
Illness and early death
After the diagnosis of syphilis, Schubert began to drink more and more. Night-long visits to inns were not uncommon, Schubert became more corpulent, and attacks of syphilis caused him more and more trouble. Schubert was never inhibited in his joy of composition by the many defeats, even in his darkest hours when he lay in hospital in 1823, in a room with 90 rash patients with open wounds, he composed on the “schöne Müllerin”.
The last months before his death, Schubert lived in the apartment of his brother Ferdinand. This was somewhat outside of Vienna, the doctors recommended that he stay outside of the city because of the better air. Schubert’s cause of death was not syphilis, but it is assumed that he died of the rampant typhoid fever (due to the typical phantasizing (“nervous fever”) which became noticeable earlier).
Johan Strauss (Son)
The waltz king
Johann Strauss’s father was Vienna’s first waltz king, battling his rival Lanner’s band for waltz supremacy. When Lanner suddenly died, Strauss’ wife urged her son to take Lanner’s place and compete with his father. The reason was vindictiveness, since Strauss’ father by now had as many children with his mistress as with his wife. The rest is history, Johann made his successful debut as a 19 year old at the Dommayer and over the next 30 years became the waltz king with his band. He was greatly assisted by his brothers Eduard and Joseph. Strauss’s life was marked by music making, composing, womanizing, Entrepreneurship, a lot of work and changing places of residence.
Strauss also became famous in the second part of his career for operettas, to which he initially turned only out of economic necessity.
Richard Strauss
Along with Dresden, Vienna was Strauss’s most important artistic station, two of his operas were premiered (“Ariande” and the 2nd Version of “Frau ohne Schatten”) in the State Opera.
He held the office of State Opera Director for five years (1919-1924) and Hoffmansthal, his most important librettist was Viennese.
In addition, many of his Viennese operas were performed in Viennese settings (e.g. “Rosenkavalier” and “Arabella”). In 1924 the city of Vienna awarded him the honorary citizenship.
Strauss and Schalk, the co-directors of the State Opera:
TO THE FULL BIOGRAPHY OF RICHARD STRAUSS
Richard Wagner
Richard Wagner was a frequent visitor to Vienna. Already at the age of 19 his first long journey took him to the city on the Danube. Later his opera performances often took him to the Viennese venues, where he celebrated great triumphs (Lohengrin and Tannhäuser) but also experienced one of his greatest ignominies (Tristan):
Wagner hoped to solve his money problems with the performances of the just finished “Tristan”. But one theater after another refused to stage it. The last hope of the heavily indebted Wagner was Vienna. But after many months, 77 rehearsals and further bill debts, the end came: the work was unperformable, the singers hopelessly overtaxed, was the verdict of those involved. Without the income from a performance, he was threatened with prison because of his debts. Before he was thrown into the Vienna debtors’ prison to force payments to his creditors, he fled the city (allegedly in drag), which, next to the Tannhäuser fiasco in Paris, was Wagner’s greatest life ignominy and led to his greatest life crisis. After his departure, he wrote to a Viennese friend: “A good, truly helpful miracle must come my way now, otherwise it’s all over!” The miracle did indeed occur in the form of Ludwig II.
In addition, his most bitter critic, Eduard Hanslick, was Viennese and from there made his life difficult with his sharp pen. Wagner took his revenge with the famous Viennese reading of the “Meistersinger von Nürnberg” (see section “works with a reference to Vienna” further below).
LINK TO THE COMPLETE WAGNER BIOGRAPHY
CHURCHES
Ludwig van Beethoven
Beethoven, who was born in Bonn, visited Vienna for the first time in 1786 to see Mozart. Even today, however, it is not certain whether he actually met Mozart. Six years later, he returned to Vienna for good after having met with Joseph Haydn in Bonn, who accepted him as a pupil. Because the Rhineland was occupied by the French, Beethoven was forced to stay in Vienna, and after the death of his father, his two brothers also came to Vienna.
Fortunately, 200 years later, one can still discover Beethoven’s traces in Vienna. First of all, we should mention Beethoven’s apartments. He often changed his quarters, 58 apartments are documented, some of which he lived in several times. His death house, the so-called “Schwarzspanierhaus” on Schwarzspanierstraße, however, has not been preserved.
Early years as a piano virtuoso
Beethoven quickly made a name for himself as a piano virtuoso. He played in the salons of his patrons; the Palais Lobkowitz or the Hradec Castle are still witnesses of this time. At the age of thirty his deafness made itself felt, the apartment where he wrote his Heiligstadt Testament can be visited. His performances as a piano virtuoso began to decrease and important orchestral works were written. With the 3rd symphony, the Eroica, Beethoven entered a new era in 1803 and the middle, very productive creative period with countless masterpieces began.
The napoleonic years
The Napoleonic wars and turmoil shook Vienna. Money was no longer so easy for the nobility, and Beethoven was plagued by financial worries. In addition, social contacts became more difficult due to his hearing loss. He no longer traveled, only spa stays in Baden became more frequent due to his physical ailments. There, on long walks in nature, he often found inspiration for his compositions.
The two brothers found their way to Vienna. One became a successful pharmacist, but then left Vienna again. The second brother died at an early age, leaving a nephew over whose custody Beethoven fought a bitter legal battle with his sister-in-law for many years.
Illness and death
Beethoven met and fell in love with women on several occasions. Twice, Beethoven was probably ready to marry, but differences of class stood in the way of marriage. Beethoven’s fame grew. In 1823 and later he crowned his work with the 9th Symphony and the last 3 piano sonatas. In 1827 Beethoven died at the age of 57. The cause of death is still not completely clarified, even modern methods of analysis of his hair do not provide complete clarity; there are more than a dozen different diagnoses.
Johannes Brahms
The 29-year-old Brahms visited Vienna for the first time in 1862, and when he presented his G minor piano quartet at an evening event there, the director of the conservatory and musician Joseph Hellmesberger is said to have already proclaimed Brahms the heir to Beethoven. Although Brahms struggled with these comparisons throughout his life, he felt valued in Vienna, which could not be said of his native Hamburg, where his music met with skepticism and he was passed over for appointments. So he decided to accept an offer as choir master and moved to Vienna.
But Brahms did not stay in office for long and became a freelance artist in the 1870s.
Brahms’ center of life remained Vienna until his death. However, Brahms was often on the road, every year 3-4 months took him to the summer resort and in the winter months he was often on the road as a performer and conductor of his own works.
TO THE COMPLETE BIOGRAPHY OF BRAHMS
Anton Bruckner
He came to live in Vienna as a 44-year-old Organist
Bruckner was 44 years old when he came to Vienna and took up the work of poorly paid or even unpaid jobs at the university and the conservatory. He moved to Währinger Strasse with his sister Anna (“Nani”). The latter died in 1870 and Katharina Kachelmaier became the housekeeper until the end of his life. (siehe pircture below).
At the beginning of his Viennese period, Bruckner was considered a respected church musician and organist, but the storm hit Vienna when he dedicated his 3rd Symphony to his “music god” Richard Wagner. Henceforth, castigated as a “Wagnerian,” he drew the scathing criticism of the influential critic Eduard Hanslick and found himself in the middle of the greatest cultural-historical conflict of the 19th century, the bitter dispute between the “traditionalists” around Brahms and the “new Germans” around Liszt and Wagner. In line with Hanslick, Brahms also often made negative comments about Bruckner’s music, but the latter always remained polite.
One day Bruckner and Brahms even sat together in their favorite pub Roter Igel (the red hedgehog), but no rapprochement took place.Only when ordering food did they notice that they had the same favorite dish, “Geselchtes mit Knödel” (smoked ham with dumplings).
Open hostility in Vienna
With a respectable success of the Fourth Symphony and the breakthrough of the Seventh Symphony (in Munich), Bruckner’s position in the Austrian capital improved, but the Viennese never really warmed to the music and the strange person of Bruckner. His friends (e.g. the conductors Hans Richter and Johann von Herbeck) always remained in the minority.
Bruckner suffered greatly from the many slights. When he was even wrongly suspected of an indecent approach to a female student in the “St. Anna Affair”, it almost broke his heart, he who never came close to a woman. But this did not prevent him from writing 9 marriage proposals in his life. The recipients were all young ladies, who in his opinion were still chaste (in his language “clean”). His last proposal (when he was 70 years old) even became famous. He fell in love with Ida Buhz, a parlor maid at his hotel during a stay in Berlin. An engagement had already been arranged, but at the last moment the devout Catholic learned that the bride-to-be was a Protestant. When Ida refused to convert to Catholicism, Bruckner backed out.
Honors in the last few years
In the last decade of his life, the honors began to pour down on Bruckner, especially Emperor Franz Josef honored him first with audiences and orders, then also with a life pension, and finally Franz Josef provided the composer with a free retirement apartment in the upper Belvedere for life (“the Kustodenstöckl”). The university also fulfilled one of Bruckner’s fervent wishes by awarding him an honorary doctorate. For Bruckner, this was nevertheless little consolation for the many slights he had suffered. In addition, he had serious health problems in his last ten years, which prevented him from savoring the successes and fulfilling his last wish to finish the Ninth Symphony. Bruckner died in 1896 in his Kustodenstöckl of heart trouble. He did not want to be buried in Vienna; he found his honorary grave under his beloved organ in St. Floriansstift.
TO THE COMPLETE BRUCKNER BIOGRAPHY
Gaetano Donizetti
Vienna “the Donizetti-City”
Donizetti was in Vienna several times from the 1830s, sometimes even holding official positions; his school friend Merelli was by now director of the Kärtnertor Theater. Vienna adored the Italian, and Richard Wagner enviously called Vienna “Donizetti City.” In 1842/43, Emperor Ferdinand appointed him “K.k. Kammerkapellmeister und Hofkompositeur” and Donizetti took care of the Italian program at the Kärtnertor Theater for two seasons, including staging the first Viennese Nabucco, at whose premiere in Milan he was present and deeply impressed.
Vienna later honored Donizetti’s work with a large bust in the State Opera House and in 2005 with a commemorative plaque at Wipplingerstrasse 5.
TO THE COMPLETE BIOGRAPHY OF DONIZETTI
Christoph Willibald Gluck
The foundation of the reform opera in Vienna
Gluck came to Vienna at the age of 36. There he married Maria Anna, who was half his age. After many years of traveling around, he had a permanent job, a home and could devote himself to composing. But it was to be another 12 years before he wrote “Orfeo ed Euridice”, the revolutionary work that produced a break with the baroque castrato era and exaggerated ornamentation of song. What exactly the new approach consists of, you will find summarized in the following link if you are interested:
https://opera-inside.com/orfeo-ed-euridice-by-ch-w-gluck-the-opera-guide-and-synopsis/
This so-called reform opera was not at all euphorically received by the Viennese at the beginning, but acceptance increased and with the follow-up work “Alceste” the already 50-year-old was able to establish himself as Europe’s musician of future. His new style revolutionized the opera seria, and Gluck became a beacon for all subsequent composers, Mozart included. In 1756 he received a knighthood from the Pope and henceforth called himself Knight of Gluck.
The relationsship with Maria Antonia, the later Marie Antoinette
A special feature of the Viennese years was that Gluck became the music teacher of Maria Antonia, the daughter of Emperor Franz I and Maria Theresa. Maria Antonia was not an easy person, but found her only joy in music and dance. Due to the marriage policy of the Habsburgs, she was married to the French Dauphin in 1770 at the age of 14, and four years later became Queen of France alongside Louis XVI as Marie Antoinette. One of her first official acts was to bring Gluck to Paris as a reformer of music.
Joseph Haydn
He came to Vienna as a boy
Haydn spent his youth and his old age in Vienna. He came to Vienna in 1740, already at the age of 8 (without parents), after being “discovered” by the musical director of St. Stephen’s Cathedral in his home in the rural area, who was looking for singers for chapel choir. There he was taught to sing and play the violin and sang soprano in the choir for almost 10 years. When he turned 17, the empress, hearing him sing a solo piece, complained that he sang like a crow, and Haydn was dismissed because of the onset of vocal break. He was left penniless on the street, with no help from his poor parents. Haydn made his way through life with odd jobs for many years (assignments as a musician, teaching, servant work, etc.) and lived for years in a poor apartment on Kohlmarkt. He continued his musical education autodidactically (especially with works by C.Ph.E. Bach), since he had only received a basic knowledge as a singer. After eight years his luck finally turned around and he got his first job in Pilsen, leaving Vienna for the next almost 40 years (if you don’t count the regular visits).
Back in Vienna after 40 years as a famous musician
With his two London visits, Haydn became rich at an advanced age, which allowed him to buy a stately house in Vienna-Gumperndorf, where he lived from 1795 until his death in 1809. He died of old age during the turmoil of the Napoleonic battles for Vienna and was first buried in Hundsturm Cemetery in Vienna (a tombstone still stands today) and later moved to the Bergkirche in Eisenstadt.
Haydn monumnent Mariahilfstrasse 55:
Erich Maria Korngold
The Wunderkind years
When Korngold’s ballet “der Schnemann” was performed at the Vienna State Opera (then the Court Opera) in 1910, he was probably the youngest composer to do so, at the age of 13. Korngold, who was born in 1897 in Brno in the Austrian Empire, was often described as the greatest musical child prodigy ever, greater even than Mozart. Even as a child, his compositions had the quality of a mature composer. He was encouraged but also protected by his father, the respected (and sharp-tongued) Viennese music critic Julius Korngold. At the age of 19, Erich wrote “der Ring des Polykrates,” his first one-act opera, which delighted audiences.
His began his greatest work when he was 20-years old
He began composing “The Dead City” at the age of 19, but the First World War put a stop to the plans. “Die tote Stadt” then became his greatest success and audiences clamored for seats. In Hamburg, the work was given 26 times in the first season alone. Shortly thereafter, the work was also staged in Vienna, New York, Prague and Zurich and became a perennial hit for 10 years. This phase was abruptly halted by the Nazi seizure of power, when the works of Jewish composers were banned from performance. Korngold then emigrated to the United States, where he died in the 1950s.
His most famous piece is probably “Glück, das mir verblieb” from “Dead City,” which shines in the purest Korngold style. Already at the beginning the orchestra glitters, with glockenspiel, celesta and harp, a typical late romantic coloration. The bells of the celesta conjure a romantic, almost childlike naive mood.
Glück, das mir verblieb:
https://opera-inside.com/the-dead-city-by-erich-korngold-the-opera-guide-and-synopsis/#Gl%C3%BCck
Gustav Mahler
Director of the Vienna State Opera
When Mahler came to the State Opera as court opera director in 1897, it was customary for opera singers to stand at the ramp and sing with pathetic arm movements in front of painted backdrops. Mahler, who was steeped in Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk of theatrical art, stage design, literature and music, set about fundamentally reforming the art of opera scenically.
As opera director and first Kapellmeister in personal union, he decided to take the liberty of simultaneously directing as musical director. This reform work, which was decisively strengthened in 1903 with the appointment of the stage designer Alfred Roller, brought the Court Opera to the artistic top, but also earned Mahler many enemies. The latter was probably due even more to the rampant anti-Semitism.
Antisemitism
Mahler fought against the conservatism of the Viennese authorities. When Strauss premiered his Salome in Dresden, Mahler wanted to bring the opera to Vienna, but the censorship authorities refused to allow a performance of the scandalous opera. For more than ten years, the Viennese quarelled with the Jew (who was baptised earlier in Hamburg), until Mahler, exhausted by his duties and the many concert tours, left the court opera for New York.
Mahler remained in the United States for three years, with interruptions, and returned to Vienna in 1911, terminally ill, where he died in the same year.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
The prodigy metts the emperor and the emperess
Mozart visited Vienna for the first time when he was six years old, on the occasion of his visit to Empress Maria Theresa and her husband Franz Joseph.
Triumph and tragedy in Vienna
Later, Mozart spent 10 years in the Danube metropolis with interruptions. He arrived there in 1781 from Salzburg. His fate was changeable, the middle period was the happiest with artistic success and marriage to Konstanze, the last period was marked by personal crises (child deaths, illness) and economic depression, with the death of the art-loving Joseph II his fate had turned.
He wrote a considerable part of his works in his Viennese period and made music in and composed for various theaters. On December 5, 1791, shortly after midnight, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died in the “Kleines Kaiserhaus” in Rauhensteingasse in Vienna.
TO THE COMPLETE MOZART BIOGRAPHY
Gioachino Rossini
The Rossini Frenzy in Vienna
Rossini visited Vienna in 1822 and triggered a huge “Rossini frenzy” in the imperial city. Schubert wrote two overtures and even Beethoven composed a small canon in honor of the Italian. Within a few weeks, 8 different operas by Rossini were given in about 60 performances, mainly in the Theater am Kärtnertor, whose director had shortly before been nominated the Italian Barbaja, Rossini’s impresario in Naples. The Kärtnertortheater has not existed since 1870.
During this visit of Rossini to Vienna, there was also the legendary meeting with Beethoven (see below).
TO THE FULL ROSSINI BIOGRAPHY
Franz Schubert
Childhood years in poverty
Schubert spent most of his short life in Vienna. His adult life was marked by the composition of music (it is estimated that he composed 30,000 hours), complete destitution (publishers and concert promoters largely spurned his works), socializing with Schubertiads and visits to inns, and his terrible syphilis disease.
Franz was the thirteenth of his father’s 20 children, was very musical, had a beautiful voice, and for this reason was accepted in 1808 as a choirboy at the Hofmusikkapelle (court chapel) and in the imperial convict at St. Stephen’s Cathedral.
After attending the Court Music Chapel and briefly training as a teacher, Schubert took up his position as his father’s school assistant in 1814. Schubert was unhappy because he lacked time for composing, and in 1816 he applied in vain for a musician’s position in Ljubljana. Also, all publishers rejected submissions of his compositions. His friend Franz von Schober offered Schubert to live with his family (then at Landskrongasse 5) and so the penniless Schubert decided to give up the job and devote himself fully to life as a composer.
Schubtertiades
Schubert stayed several times with his friend Franz von Schober, the poet and actor of the same age. In 1821 the first Schubertiade, evenings to promote Schubert’s music, took place in the apartment on Spiegelgasse. Schubert sat at the piano and his most authoritative interpreter of his songs, Johann Michael Vogl sang along. These Schubertiades became an important literary-musical salon and were often held in Sonnleithner’s house (Haus am Bauernmarkt was demolished). Important works by Schubert, such as Erlkönig, were heard for the first time at the Schubertiades.
Illness and early death
After the diagnosis of syphilis, Schubert began to drink more and more. Night-long visits to inns were not uncommon, Schubert became more corpulent, and attacks of syphilis caused him more and more trouble. Schubert was never inhibited in his joy of composition by the many defeats, even in his darkest hours when he lay in hospital in 1823, in a room with 90 rash patients with open wounds, he composed on the “schöne Müllerin”.
The last months before his death, Schubert lived in the apartment of his brother Ferdinand. This was somewhat outside of Vienna, the doctors recommended that he stay outside of the city because of the better air. Schubert’s cause of death was not syphilis, but it is assumed that he died of the rampant typhoid fever (due to the typical phantasizing (“nervous fever”) which became noticeable earlier).
Johan Strauss (Son)
The waltz king
Johann Strauss’s father was Vienna’s first waltz king, battling his rival Lanner’s band for waltz supremacy. When Lanner suddenly died, Strauss’ wife urged her son to take Lanner’s place and compete with his father. The reason was vindictiveness, since Strauss’ father by now had as many children with his mistress as with his wife. The rest is history, Johann made his successful debut as a 19 year old at the Dommayer and over the next 30 years became the waltz king with his band. He was greatly assisted by his brothers Eduard and Joseph. Strauss’s life was marked by music making, composing, womanizing, Entrepreneurship, a lot of work and changing places of residence.
Strauss also became famous in the second part of his career for operettas, to which he initially turned only out of economic necessity.
Richard Strauss
Along with Dresden, Vienna was Strauss’s most important artistic station, two of his operas were premiered (“Ariande” and the 2nd Version of “Frau ohne Schatten”) in the State Opera.
He held the office of State Opera Director for five years (1919-1924) and Hoffmansthal, his most important librettist was Viennese.
In addition, many of his Viennese operas were performed in Viennese settings (e.g. “Rosenkavalier” and “Arabella”). In 1924 the city of Vienna awarded him the honorary citizenship.
Strauss and Schalk, the co-directors of the State Opera:
TO THE FULL BIOGRAPHY OF RICHARD STRAUSS
Richard Wagner
Richard Wagner was a frequent visitor to Vienna. Already at the age of 19 his first long journey took him to the city on the Danube. Later his opera performances often took him to the Viennese venues, where he celebrated great triumphs (Lohengrin and Tannhäuser) but also experienced one of his greatest ignominies (Tristan):
Wagner hoped to solve his money problems with the performances of the just finished “Tristan”. But one theater after another refused to stage it. The last hope of the heavily indebted Wagner was Vienna. But after many months, 77 rehearsals and further bill debts, the end came: the work was unperformable, the singers hopelessly overtaxed, was the verdict of those involved. Without the income from a performance, he was threatened with prison because of his debts. Before he was thrown into the Vienna debtors’ prison to force payments to his creditors, he fled the city (allegedly in drag), which, next to the Tannhäuser fiasco in Paris, was Wagner’s greatest life ignominy and led to his greatest life crisis. After his departure, he wrote to a Viennese friend: “A good, truly helpful miracle must come my way now, otherwise it’s all over!” The miracle did indeed occur in the form of Ludwig II.
In addition, his most bitter critic, Eduard Hanslick, was Viennese and from there made his life difficult with his sharp pen. Wagner took his revenge with the famous Viennese reading of the “Meistersinger von Nürnberg” (see section “works with a reference to Vienna” further below).
LINK TO THE COMPLETE WAGNER BIOGRAPHY
MONUMENTS
Ludwig van Beethoven
Beethoven, who was born in Bonn, visited Vienna for the first time in 1786 to see Mozart. Even today, however, it is not certain whether he actually met Mozart. Six years later, he returned to Vienna for good after having met with Joseph Haydn in Bonn, who accepted him as a pupil. Because the Rhineland was occupied by the French, Beethoven was forced to stay in Vienna, and after the death of his father, his two brothers also came to Vienna.
Fortunately, 200 years later, one can still discover Beethoven’s traces in Vienna. First of all, we should mention Beethoven’s apartments. He often changed his quarters, 58 apartments are documented, some of which he lived in several times. His death house, the so-called “Schwarzspanierhaus” on Schwarzspanierstraße, however, has not been preserved.
Early years as a piano virtuoso
Beethoven quickly made a name for himself as a piano virtuoso. He played in the salons of his patrons; the Palais Lobkowitz or the Hradec Castle are still witnesses of this time. At the age of thirty his deafness made itself felt, the apartment where he wrote his Heiligstadt Testament can be visited. His performances as a piano virtuoso began to decrease and important orchestral works were written. With the 3rd symphony, the Eroica, Beethoven entered a new era in 1803 and the middle, very productive creative period with countless masterpieces began.
The napoleonic years
The Napoleonic wars and turmoil shook Vienna. Money was no longer so easy for the nobility, and Beethoven was plagued by financial worries. In addition, social contacts became more difficult due to his hearing loss. He no longer traveled, only spa stays in Baden became more frequent due to his physical ailments. There, on long walks in nature, he often found inspiration for his compositions.
The two brothers found their way to Vienna. One became a successful pharmacist, but then left Vienna again. The second brother died at an early age, leaving a nephew over whose custody Beethoven fought a bitter legal battle with his sister-in-law for many years.
Illness and death
Beethoven met and fell in love with women on several occasions. Twice, Beethoven was probably ready to marry, but differences of class stood in the way of marriage. Beethoven’s fame grew. In 1823 and later he crowned his work with the 9th Symphony and the last 3 piano sonatas. In 1827 Beethoven died at the age of 57. The cause of death is still not completely clarified, even modern methods of analysis of his hair do not provide complete clarity; there are more than a dozen different diagnoses.
Johannes Brahms
The 29-year-old Brahms visited Vienna for the first time in 1862, and when he presented his G minor piano quartet at an evening event there, the director of the conservatory and musician Joseph Hellmesberger is said to have already proclaimed Brahms the heir to Beethoven. Although Brahms struggled with these comparisons throughout his life, he felt valued in Vienna, which could not be said of his native Hamburg, where his music met with skepticism and he was passed over for appointments. So he decided to accept an offer as choir master and moved to Vienna.
But Brahms did not stay in office for long and became a freelance artist in the 1870s.
Brahms’ center of life remained Vienna until his death. However, Brahms was often on the road, every year 3-4 months took him to the summer resort and in the winter months he was often on the road as a performer and conductor of his own works.
TO THE COMPLETE BIOGRAPHY OF BRAHMS
Anton Bruckner
He came to live in Vienna as a 44-year-old Organist
Bruckner was 44 years old when he came to Vienna and took up the work of poorly paid or even unpaid jobs at the university and the conservatory. He moved to Währinger Strasse with his sister Anna (“Nani”). The latter died in 1870 and Katharina Kachelmaier became the housekeeper until the end of his life. (siehe pircture below).
At the beginning of his Viennese period, Bruckner was considered a respected church musician and organist, but the storm hit Vienna when he dedicated his 3rd Symphony to his “music god” Richard Wagner. Henceforth, castigated as a “Wagnerian,” he drew the scathing criticism of the influential critic Eduard Hanslick and found himself in the middle of the greatest cultural-historical conflict of the 19th century, the bitter dispute between the “traditionalists” around Brahms and the “new Germans” around Liszt and Wagner. In line with Hanslick, Brahms also often made negative comments about Bruckner’s music, but the latter always remained polite.
One day Bruckner and Brahms even sat together in their favorite pub Roter Igel (the red hedgehog), but no rapprochement took place.Only when ordering food did they notice that they had the same favorite dish, “Geselchtes mit Knödel” (smoked ham with dumplings).
Open hostility in Vienna
With a respectable success of the Fourth Symphony and the breakthrough of the Seventh Symphony (in Munich), Bruckner’s position in the Austrian capital improved, but the Viennese never really warmed to the music and the strange person of Bruckner. His friends (e.g. the conductors Hans Richter and Johann von Herbeck) always remained in the minority.
Bruckner suffered greatly from the many slights. When he was even wrongly suspected of an indecent approach to a female student in the “St. Anna Affair”, it almost broke his heart, he who never came close to a woman. But this did not prevent him from writing 9 marriage proposals in his life. The recipients were all young ladies, who in his opinion were still chaste (in his language “clean”). His last proposal (when he was 70 years old) even became famous. He fell in love with Ida Buhz, a parlor maid at his hotel during a stay in Berlin. An engagement had already been arranged, but at the last moment the devout Catholic learned that the bride-to-be was a Protestant. When Ida refused to convert to Catholicism, Bruckner backed out.
Honors in the last few years
In the last decade of his life, the honors began to pour down on Bruckner, especially Emperor Franz Josef honored him first with audiences and orders, then also with a life pension, and finally Franz Josef provided the composer with a free retirement apartment in the upper Belvedere for life (“the Kustodenstöckl”). The university also fulfilled one of Bruckner’s fervent wishes by awarding him an honorary doctorate. For Bruckner, this was nevertheless little consolation for the many slights he had suffered. In addition, he had serious health problems in his last ten years, which prevented him from savoring the successes and fulfilling his last wish to finish the Ninth Symphony. Bruckner died in 1896 in his Kustodenstöckl of heart trouble. He did not want to be buried in Vienna; he found his honorary grave under his beloved organ in St. Floriansstift.
TO THE COMPLETE BRUCKNER BIOGRAPHY
Gaetano Donizetti
Vienna “the Donizetti-City”
Donizetti was in Vienna several times from the 1830s, sometimes even holding official positions; his school friend Merelli was by now director of the Kärtnertor Theater. Vienna adored the Italian, and Richard Wagner enviously called Vienna “Donizetti City.” In 1842/43, Emperor Ferdinand appointed him “K.k. Kammerkapellmeister und Hofkompositeur” and Donizetti took care of the Italian program at the Kärtnertor Theater for two seasons, including staging the first Viennese Nabucco, at whose premiere in Milan he was present and deeply impressed.
Vienna later honored Donizetti’s work with a large bust in the State Opera House and in 2005 with a commemorative plaque at Wipplingerstrasse 5.
TO THE COMPLETE BIOGRAPHY OF DONIZETTI
Christoph Willibald Gluck
The foundation of the reform opera in Vienna
Gluck came to Vienna at the age of 36. There he married Maria Anna, who was half his age. After many years of traveling around, he had a permanent job, a home and could devote himself to composing. But it was to be another 12 years before he wrote “Orfeo ed Euridice”, the revolutionary work that produced a break with the baroque castrato era and exaggerated ornamentation of song. What exactly the new approach consists of, you will find summarized in the following link if you are interested:
https://opera-inside.com/orfeo-ed-euridice-by-ch-w-gluck-the-opera-guide-and-synopsis/
This so-called reform opera was not at all euphorically received by the Viennese at the beginning, but acceptance increased and with the follow-up work “Alceste” the already 50-year-old was able to establish himself as Europe’s musician of future. His new style revolutionized the opera seria, and Gluck became a beacon for all subsequent composers, Mozart included. In 1756 he received a knighthood from the Pope and henceforth called himself Knight of Gluck.
The relationsship with Maria Antonia, the later Marie Antoinette
A special feature of the Viennese years was that Gluck became the music teacher of Maria Antonia, the daughter of Emperor Franz I and Maria Theresa. Maria Antonia was not an easy person, but found her only joy in music and dance. Due to the marriage policy of the Habsburgs, she was married to the French Dauphin in 1770 at the age of 14, and four years later became Queen of France alongside Louis XVI as Marie Antoinette. One of her first official acts was to bring Gluck to Paris as a reformer of music.
Joseph Haydn
He came to Vienna as a boy
Haydn spent his youth and his old age in Vienna. He came to Vienna in 1740, already at the age of 8 (without parents), after being “discovered” by the musical director of St. Stephen’s Cathedral in his home in the rural area, who was looking for singers for chapel choir. There he was taught to sing and play the violin and sang soprano in the choir for almost 10 years. When he turned 17, the empress, hearing him sing a solo piece, complained that he sang like a crow, and Haydn was dismissed because of the onset of vocal break. He was left penniless on the street, with no help from his poor parents. Haydn made his way through life with odd jobs for many years (assignments as a musician, teaching, servant work, etc.) and lived for years in a poor apartment on Kohlmarkt. He continued his musical education autodidactically (especially with works by C.Ph.E. Bach), since he had only received a basic knowledge as a singer. After eight years his luck finally turned around and he got his first job in Pilsen, leaving Vienna for the next almost 40 years (if you don’t count the regular visits).
Back in Vienna after 40 years as a famous musician
With his two London visits, Haydn became rich at an advanced age, which allowed him to buy a stately house in Vienna-Gumperndorf, where he lived from 1795 until his death in 1809. He died of old age during the turmoil of the Napoleonic battles for Vienna and was first buried in Hundsturm Cemetery in Vienna (a tombstone still stands today) and later moved to the Bergkirche in Eisenstadt.
Haydn monumnent Mariahilfstrasse 55:
Erich Maria Korngold
The Wunderkind years
When Korngold’s ballet “der Schnemann” was performed at the Vienna State Opera (then the Court Opera) in 1910, he was probably the youngest composer to do so, at the age of 13. Korngold, who was born in 1897 in Brno in the Austrian Empire, was often described as the greatest musical child prodigy ever, greater even than Mozart. Even as a child, his compositions had the quality of a mature composer. He was encouraged but also protected by his father, the respected (and sharp-tongued) Viennese music critic Julius Korngold. At the age of 19, Erich wrote “der Ring des Polykrates,” his first one-act opera, which delighted audiences.
His began his greatest work when he was 20-years old
He began composing “The Dead City” at the age of 19, but the First World War put a stop to the plans. “Die tote Stadt” then became his greatest success and audiences clamored for seats. In Hamburg, the work was given 26 times in the first season alone. Shortly thereafter, the work was also staged in Vienna, New York, Prague and Zurich and became a perennial hit for 10 years. This phase was abruptly halted by the Nazi seizure of power, when the works of Jewish composers were banned from performance. Korngold then emigrated to the United States, where he died in the 1950s.
His most famous piece is probably “Glück, das mir verblieb” from “Dead City,” which shines in the purest Korngold style. Already at the beginning the orchestra glitters, with glockenspiel, celesta and harp, a typical late romantic coloration. The bells of the celesta conjure a romantic, almost childlike naive mood.
Glück, das mir verblieb:
https://opera-inside.com/the-dead-city-by-erich-korngold-the-opera-guide-and-synopsis/#Gl%C3%BCck
Gustav Mahler
Director of the Vienna State Opera
When Mahler came to the State Opera as court opera director in 1897, it was customary for opera singers to stand at the ramp and sing with pathetic arm movements in front of painted backdrops. Mahler, who was steeped in Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk of theatrical art, stage design, literature and music, set about fundamentally reforming the art of opera scenically.
As opera director and first Kapellmeister in personal union, he decided to take the liberty of simultaneously directing as musical director. This reform work, which was decisively strengthened in 1903 with the appointment of the stage designer Alfred Roller, brought the Court Opera to the artistic top, but also earned Mahler many enemies. The latter was probably due even more to the rampant anti-Semitism.
Antisemitism
Mahler fought against the conservatism of the Viennese authorities. When Strauss premiered his Salome in Dresden, Mahler wanted to bring the opera to Vienna, but the censorship authorities refused to allow a performance of the scandalous opera. For more than ten years, the Viennese quarelled with the Jew (who was baptised earlier in Hamburg), until Mahler, exhausted by his duties and the many concert tours, left the court opera for New York.
Mahler remained in the United States for three years, with interruptions, and returned to Vienna in 1911, terminally ill, where he died in the same year.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
The prodigy metts the emperor and the emperess
Mozart visited Vienna for the first time when he was six years old, on the occasion of his visit to Empress Maria Theresa and her husband Franz Joseph.
Triumph and tragedy in Vienna
Later, Mozart spent 10 years in the Danube metropolis with interruptions. He arrived there in 1781 from Salzburg. His fate was changeable, the middle period was the happiest with artistic success and marriage to Konstanze, the last period was marked by personal crises (child deaths, illness) and economic depression, with the death of the art-loving Joseph II his fate had turned.
He wrote a considerable part of his works in his Viennese period and made music in and composed for various theaters. On December 5, 1791, shortly after midnight, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died in the “Kleines Kaiserhaus” in Rauhensteingasse in Vienna.
TO THE COMPLETE MOZART BIOGRAPHY
Gioachino Rossini
The Rossini Frenzy in Vienna
Rossini visited Vienna in 1822 and triggered a huge “Rossini frenzy” in the imperial city. Schubert wrote two overtures and even Beethoven composed a small canon in honor of the Italian. Within a few weeks, 8 different operas by Rossini were given in about 60 performances, mainly in the Theater am Kärtnertor, whose director had shortly before been nominated the Italian Barbaja, Rossini’s impresario in Naples. The Kärtnertortheater has not existed since 1870.
During this visit of Rossini to Vienna, there was also the legendary meeting with Beethoven (see below).
TO THE FULL ROSSINI BIOGRAPHY
Franz Schubert
Childhood years in poverty
Schubert spent most of his short life in Vienna. His adult life was marked by the composition of music (it is estimated that he composed 30,000 hours), complete destitution (publishers and concert promoters largely spurned his works), socializing with Schubertiads and visits to inns, and his terrible syphilis disease.
Franz was the thirteenth of his father’s 20 children, was very musical, had a beautiful voice, and for this reason was accepted in 1808 as a choirboy at the Hofmusikkapelle (court chapel) and in the imperial convict at St. Stephen’s Cathedral.
After attending the Court Music Chapel and briefly training as a teacher, Schubert took up his position as his father’s school assistant in 1814. Schubert was unhappy because he lacked time for composing, and in 1816 he applied in vain for a musician’s position in Ljubljana. Also, all publishers rejected submissions of his compositions. His friend Franz von Schober offered Schubert to live with his family (then at Landskrongasse 5) and so the penniless Schubert decided to give up the job and devote himself fully to life as a composer.
Schubtertiades
Schubert stayed several times with his friend Franz von Schober, the poet and actor of the same age. In 1821 the first Schubertiade, evenings to promote Schubert’s music, took place in the apartment on Spiegelgasse. Schubert sat at the piano and his most authoritative interpreter of his songs, Johann Michael Vogl sang along. These Schubertiades became an important literary-musical salon and were often held in Sonnleithner’s house (Haus am Bauernmarkt was demolished). Important works by Schubert, such as Erlkönig, were heard for the first time at the Schubertiades.
Illness and early death
After the diagnosis of syphilis, Schubert began to drink more and more. Night-long visits to inns were not uncommon, Schubert became more corpulent, and attacks of syphilis caused him more and more trouble. Schubert was never inhibited in his joy of composition by the many defeats, even in his darkest hours when he lay in hospital in 1823, in a room with 90 rash patients with open wounds, he composed on the “schöne Müllerin”.
The last months before his death, Schubert lived in the apartment of his brother Ferdinand. This was somewhat outside of Vienna, the doctors recommended that he stay outside of the city because of the better air. Schubert’s cause of death was not syphilis, but it is assumed that he died of the rampant typhoid fever (due to the typical phantasizing (“nervous fever”) which became noticeable earlier).
Johan Strauss (Son)
The waltz king
Johann Strauss’s father was Vienna’s first waltz king, battling his rival Lanner’s band for waltz supremacy. When Lanner suddenly died, Strauss’ wife urged her son to take Lanner’s place and compete with his father. The reason was vindictiveness, since Strauss’ father by now had as many children with his mistress as with his wife. The rest is history, Johann made his successful debut as a 19 year old at the Dommayer and over the next 30 years became the waltz king with his band. He was greatly assisted by his brothers Eduard and Joseph. Strauss’s life was marked by music making, composing, womanizing, Entrepreneurship, a lot of work and changing places of residence.
Strauss also became famous in the second part of his career for operettas, to which he initially turned only out of economic necessity.
Richard Strauss
Along with Dresden, Vienna was Strauss’s most important artistic station, two of his operas were premiered (“Ariande” and the 2nd Version of “Frau ohne Schatten”) in the State Opera.
He held the office of State Opera Director for five years (1919-1924) and Hoffmansthal, his most important librettist was Viennese.
In addition, many of his Viennese operas were performed in Viennese settings (e.g. “Rosenkavalier” and “Arabella”). In 1924 the city of Vienna awarded him the honorary citizenship.
Strauss and Schalk, the co-directors of the State Opera:
TO THE FULL BIOGRAPHY OF RICHARD STRAUSS
Richard Wagner
Richard Wagner was a frequent visitor to Vienna. Already at the age of 19 his first long journey took him to the city on the Danube. Later his opera performances often took him to the Viennese venues, where he celebrated great triumphs (Lohengrin and Tannhäuser) but also experienced one of his greatest ignominies (Tristan):
Wagner hoped to solve his money problems with the performances of the just finished “Tristan”. But one theater after another refused to stage it. The last hope of the heavily indebted Wagner was Vienna. But after many months, 77 rehearsals and further bill debts, the end came: the work was unperformable, the singers hopelessly overtaxed, was the verdict of those involved. Without the income from a performance, he was threatened with prison because of his debts. Before he was thrown into the Vienna debtors’ prison to force payments to his creditors, he fled the city (allegedly in drag), which, next to the Tannhäuser fiasco in Paris, was Wagner’s greatest life ignominy and led to his greatest life crisis. After his departure, he wrote to a Viennese friend: “A good, truly helpful miracle must come my way now, otherwise it’s all over!” The miracle did indeed occur in the form of Ludwig II.
In addition, his most bitter critic, Eduard Hanslick, was Viennese and from there made his life difficult with his sharp pen. Wagner took his revenge with the famous Viennese reading of the “Meistersinger von Nürnberg” (see section “works with a reference to Vienna” further below).
LINK TO THE COMPLETE WAGNER BIOGRAPHY
PALAIS
Ludwig van Beethoven
Beethoven, who was born in Bonn, visited Vienna for the first time in 1786 to see Mozart. Even today, however, it is not certain whether he actually met Mozart. Six years later, he returned to Vienna for good after having met with Joseph Haydn in Bonn, who accepted him as a pupil. Because the Rhineland was occupied by the French, Beethoven was forced to stay in Vienna, and after the death of his father, his two brothers also came to Vienna.
Fortunately, 200 years later, one can still discover Beethoven’s traces in Vienna. First of all, we should mention Beethoven’s apartments. He often changed his quarters, 58 apartments are documented, some of which he lived in several times. His death house, the so-called “Schwarzspanierhaus” on Schwarzspanierstraße, however, has not been preserved.
Early years as a piano virtuoso
Beethoven quickly made a name for himself as a piano virtuoso. He played in the salons of his patrons; the Palais Lobkowitz or the Hradec Castle are still witnesses of this time. At the age of thirty his deafness made itself felt, the apartment where he wrote his Heiligstadt Testament can be visited. His performances as a piano virtuoso began to decrease and important orchestral works were written. With the 3rd symphony, the Eroica, Beethoven entered a new era in 1803 and the middle, very productive creative period with countless masterpieces began.
The napoleonic years
The Napoleonic wars and turmoil shook Vienna. Money was no longer so easy for the nobility, and Beethoven was plagued by financial worries. In addition, social contacts became more difficult due to his hearing loss. He no longer traveled, only spa stays in Baden became more frequent due to his physical ailments. There, on long walks in nature, he often found inspiration for his compositions.
The two brothers found their way to Vienna. One became a successful pharmacist, but then left Vienna again. The second brother died at an early age, leaving a nephew over whose custody Beethoven fought a bitter legal battle with his sister-in-law for many years.
Illness and death
Beethoven met and fell in love with women on several occasions. Twice, Beethoven was probably ready to marry, but differences of class stood in the way of marriage. Beethoven’s fame grew. In 1823 and later he crowned his work with the 9th Symphony and the last 3 piano sonatas. In 1827 Beethoven died at the age of 57. The cause of death is still not completely clarified, even modern methods of analysis of his hair do not provide complete clarity; there are more than a dozen different diagnoses.
Johannes Brahms
The 29-year-old Brahms visited Vienna for the first time in 1862, and when he presented his G minor piano quartet at an evening event there, the director of the conservatory and musician Joseph Hellmesberger is said to have already proclaimed Brahms the heir to Beethoven. Although Brahms struggled with these comparisons throughout his life, he felt valued in Vienna, which could not be said of his native Hamburg, where his music met with skepticism and he was passed over for appointments. So he decided to accept an offer as choir master and moved to Vienna.
But Brahms did not stay in office for long and became a freelance artist in the 1870s.
Brahms’ center of life remained Vienna until his death. However, Brahms was often on the road, every year 3-4 months took him to the summer resort and in the winter months he was often on the road as a performer and conductor of his own works.
TO THE COMPLETE BIOGRAPHY OF BRAHMS
Anton Bruckner
He came to live in Vienna as a 44-year-old Organist
Bruckner was 44 years old when he came to Vienna and took up the work of poorly paid or even unpaid jobs at the university and the conservatory. He moved to Währinger Strasse with his sister Anna (“Nani”). The latter died in 1870 and Katharina Kachelmaier became the housekeeper until the end of his life. (siehe pircture below).
At the beginning of his Viennese period, Bruckner was considered a respected church musician and organist, but the storm hit Vienna when he dedicated his 3rd Symphony to his “music god” Richard Wagner. Henceforth, castigated as a “Wagnerian,” he drew the scathing criticism of the influential critic Eduard Hanslick and found himself in the middle of the greatest cultural-historical conflict of the 19th century, the bitter dispute between the “traditionalists” around Brahms and the “new Germans” around Liszt and Wagner. In line with Hanslick, Brahms also often made negative comments about Bruckner’s music, but the latter always remained polite.
One day Bruckner and Brahms even sat together in their favorite pub Roter Igel (the red hedgehog), but no rapprochement took place.Only when ordering food did they notice that they had the same favorite dish, “Geselchtes mit Knödel” (smoked ham with dumplings).
Open hostility in Vienna
With a respectable success of the Fourth Symphony and the breakthrough of the Seventh Symphony (in Munich), Bruckner’s position in the Austrian capital improved, but the Viennese never really warmed to the music and the strange person of Bruckner. His friends (e.g. the conductors Hans Richter and Johann von Herbeck) always remained in the minority.
Bruckner suffered greatly from the many slights. When he was even wrongly suspected of an indecent approach to a female student in the “St. Anna Affair”, it almost broke his heart, he who never came close to a woman. But this did not prevent him from writing 9 marriage proposals in his life. The recipients were all young ladies, who in his opinion were still chaste (in his language “clean”). His last proposal (when he was 70 years old) even became famous. He fell in love with Ida Buhz, a parlor maid at his hotel during a stay in Berlin. An engagement had already been arranged, but at the last moment the devout Catholic learned that the bride-to-be was a Protestant. When Ida refused to convert to Catholicism, Bruckner backed out.
Honors in the last few years
In the last decade of his life, the honors began to pour down on Bruckner, especially Emperor Franz Josef honored him first with audiences and orders, then also with a life pension, and finally Franz Josef provided the composer with a free retirement apartment in the upper Belvedere for life (“the Kustodenstöckl”). The university also fulfilled one of Bruckner’s fervent wishes by awarding him an honorary doctorate. For Bruckner, this was nevertheless little consolation for the many slights he had suffered. In addition, he had serious health problems in his last ten years, which prevented him from savoring the successes and fulfilling his last wish to finish the Ninth Symphony. Bruckner died in 1896 in his Kustodenstöckl of heart trouble. He did not want to be buried in Vienna; he found his honorary grave under his beloved organ in St. Floriansstift.
TO THE COMPLETE BRUCKNER BIOGRAPHY
Gaetano Donizetti
Vienna “the Donizetti-City”
Donizetti was in Vienna several times from the 1830s, sometimes even holding official positions; his school friend Merelli was by now director of the Kärtnertor Theater. Vienna adored the Italian, and Richard Wagner enviously called Vienna “Donizetti City.” In 1842/43, Emperor Ferdinand appointed him “K.k. Kammerkapellmeister und Hofkompositeur” and Donizetti took care of the Italian program at the Kärtnertor Theater for two seasons, including staging the first Viennese Nabucco, at whose premiere in Milan he was present and deeply impressed.
Vienna later honored Donizetti’s work with a large bust in the State Opera House and in 2005 with a commemorative plaque at Wipplingerstrasse 5.
TO THE COMPLETE BIOGRAPHY OF DONIZETTI
Christoph Willibald Gluck
The foundation of the reform opera in Vienna
Gluck came to Vienna at the age of 36. There he married Maria Anna, who was half his age. After many years of traveling around, he had a permanent job, a home and could devote himself to composing. But it was to be another 12 years before he wrote “Orfeo ed Euridice”, the revolutionary work that produced a break with the baroque castrato era and exaggerated ornamentation of song. What exactly the new approach consists of, you will find summarized in the following link if you are interested:
https://opera-inside.com/orfeo-ed-euridice-by-ch-w-gluck-the-opera-guide-and-synopsis/
This so-called reform opera was not at all euphorically received by the Viennese at the beginning, but acceptance increased and with the follow-up work “Alceste” the already 50-year-old was able to establish himself as Europe’s musician of future. His new style revolutionized the opera seria, and Gluck became a beacon for all subsequent composers, Mozart included. In 1756 he received a knighthood from the Pope and henceforth called himself Knight of Gluck.
The relationsship with Maria Antonia, the later Marie Antoinette
A special feature of the Viennese years was that Gluck became the music teacher of Maria Antonia, the daughter of Emperor Franz I and Maria Theresa. Maria Antonia was not an easy person, but found her only joy in music and dance. Due to the marriage policy of the Habsburgs, she was married to the French Dauphin in 1770 at the age of 14, and four years later became Queen of France alongside Louis XVI as Marie Antoinette. One of her first official acts was to bring Gluck to Paris as a reformer of music.
Joseph Haydn
He came to Vienna as a boy
Haydn spent his youth and his old age in Vienna. He came to Vienna in 1740, already at the age of 8 (without parents), after being “discovered” by the musical director of St. Stephen’s Cathedral in his home in the rural area, who was looking for singers for chapel choir. There he was taught to sing and play the violin and sang soprano in the choir for almost 10 years. When he turned 17, the empress, hearing him sing a solo piece, complained that he sang like a crow, and Haydn was dismissed because of the onset of vocal break. He was left penniless on the street, with no help from his poor parents. Haydn made his way through life with odd jobs for many years (assignments as a musician, teaching, servant work, etc.) and lived for years in a poor apartment on Kohlmarkt. He continued his musical education autodidactically (especially with works by C.Ph.E. Bach), since he had only received a basic knowledge as a singer. After eight years his luck finally turned around and he got his first job in Pilsen, leaving Vienna for the next almost 40 years (if you don’t count the regular visits).
Back in Vienna after 40 years as a famous musician
With his two London visits, Haydn became rich at an advanced age, which allowed him to buy a stately house in Vienna-Gumperndorf, where he lived from 1795 until his death in 1809. He died of old age during the turmoil of the Napoleonic battles for Vienna and was first buried in Hundsturm Cemetery in Vienna (a tombstone still stands today) and later moved to the Bergkirche in Eisenstadt.
Haydn monumnent Mariahilfstrasse 55:
Erich Maria Korngold
The Wunderkind years
When Korngold’s ballet “der Schnemann” was performed at the Vienna State Opera (then the Court Opera) in 1910, he was probably the youngest composer to do so, at the age of 13. Korngold, who was born in 1897 in Brno in the Austrian Empire, was often described as the greatest musical child prodigy ever, greater even than Mozart. Even as a child, his compositions had the quality of a mature composer. He was encouraged but also protected by his father, the respected (and sharp-tongued) Viennese music critic Julius Korngold. At the age of 19, Erich wrote “der Ring des Polykrates,” his first one-act opera, which delighted audiences.
His began his greatest work when he was 20-years old
He began composing “The Dead City” at the age of 19, but the First World War put a stop to the plans. “Die tote Stadt” then became his greatest success and audiences clamored for seats. In Hamburg, the work was given 26 times in the first season alone. Shortly thereafter, the work was also staged in Vienna, New York, Prague and Zurich and became a perennial hit for 10 years. This phase was abruptly halted by the Nazi seizure of power, when the works of Jewish composers were banned from performance. Korngold then emigrated to the United States, where he died in the 1950s.
His most famous piece is probably “Glück, das mir verblieb” from “Dead City,” which shines in the purest Korngold style. Already at the beginning the orchestra glitters, with glockenspiel, celesta and harp, a typical late romantic coloration. The bells of the celesta conjure a romantic, almost childlike naive mood.
Glück, das mir verblieb:
https://opera-inside.com/the-dead-city-by-erich-korngold-the-opera-guide-and-synopsis/#Gl%C3%BCck
Gustav Mahler
Director of the Vienna State Opera
When Mahler came to the State Opera as court opera director in 1897, it was customary for opera singers to stand at the ramp and sing with pathetic arm movements in front of painted backdrops. Mahler, who was steeped in Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk of theatrical art, stage design, literature and music, set about fundamentally reforming the art of opera scenically.
As opera director and first Kapellmeister in personal union, he decided to take the liberty of simultaneously directing as musical director. This reform work, which was decisively strengthened in 1903 with the appointment of the stage designer Alfred Roller, brought the Court Opera to the artistic top, but also earned Mahler many enemies. The latter was probably due even more to the rampant anti-Semitism.
Antisemitism
Mahler fought against the conservatism of the Viennese authorities. When Strauss premiered his Salome in Dresden, Mahler wanted to bring the opera to Vienna, but the censorship authorities refused to allow a performance of the scandalous opera. For more than ten years, the Viennese quarelled with the Jew (who was baptised earlier in Hamburg), until Mahler, exhausted by his duties and the many concert tours, left the court opera for New York.
Mahler remained in the United States for three years, with interruptions, and returned to Vienna in 1911, terminally ill, where he died in the same year.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
The prodigy metts the emperor and the emperess
Mozart visited Vienna for the first time when he was six years old, on the occasion of his visit to Empress Maria Theresa and her husband Franz Joseph.
Triumph and tragedy in Vienna
Later, Mozart spent 10 years in the Danube metropolis with interruptions. He arrived there in 1781 from Salzburg. His fate was changeable, the middle period was the happiest with artistic success and marriage to Konstanze, the last period was marked by personal crises (child deaths, illness) and economic depression, with the death of the art-loving Joseph II his fate had turned.
He wrote a considerable part of his works in his Viennese period and made music in and composed for various theaters. On December 5, 1791, shortly after midnight, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died in the “Kleines Kaiserhaus” in Rauhensteingasse in Vienna.
TO THE COMPLETE MOZART BIOGRAPHY
Gioachino Rossini
The Rossini Frenzy in Vienna
Rossini visited Vienna in 1822 and triggered a huge “Rossini frenzy” in the imperial city. Schubert wrote two overtures and even Beethoven composed a small canon in honor of the Italian. Within a few weeks, 8 different operas by Rossini were given in about 60 performances, mainly in the Theater am Kärtnertor, whose director had shortly before been nominated the Italian Barbaja, Rossini’s impresario in Naples. The Kärtnertortheater has not existed since 1870.
During this visit of Rossini to Vienna, there was also the legendary meeting with Beethoven (see below).
TO THE FULL ROSSINI BIOGRAPHY
Franz Schubert
Childhood years in poverty
Schubert spent most of his short life in Vienna. His adult life was marked by the composition of music (it is estimated that he composed 30,000 hours), complete destitution (publishers and concert promoters largely spurned his works), socializing with Schubertiads and visits to inns, and his terrible syphilis disease.
Franz was the thirteenth of his father’s 20 children, was very musical, had a beautiful voice, and for this reason was accepted in 1808 as a choirboy at the Hofmusikkapelle (court chapel) and in the imperial convict at St. Stephen’s Cathedral.
After attending the Court Music Chapel and briefly training as a teacher, Schubert took up his position as his father’s school assistant in 1814. Schubert was unhappy because he lacked time for composing, and in 1816 he applied in vain for a musician’s position in Ljubljana. Also, all publishers rejected submissions of his compositions. His friend Franz von Schober offered Schubert to live with his family (then at Landskrongasse 5) and so the penniless Schubert decided to give up the job and devote himself fully to life as a composer.
Schubtertiades
Schubert stayed several times with his friend Franz von Schober, the poet and actor of the same age. In 1821 the first Schubertiade, evenings to promote Schubert’s music, took place in the apartment on Spiegelgasse. Schubert sat at the piano and his most authoritative interpreter of his songs, Johann Michael Vogl sang along. These Schubertiades became an important literary-musical salon and were often held in Sonnleithner’s house (Haus am Bauernmarkt was demolished). Important works by Schubert, such as Erlkönig, were heard for the first time at the Schubertiades.
Illness and early death
After the diagnosis of syphilis, Schubert began to drink more and more. Night-long visits to inns were not uncommon, Schubert became more corpulent, and attacks of syphilis caused him more and more trouble. Schubert was never inhibited in his joy of composition by the many defeats, even in his darkest hours when he lay in hospital in 1823, in a room with 90 rash patients with open wounds, he composed on the “schöne Müllerin”.
The last months before his death, Schubert lived in the apartment of his brother Ferdinand. This was somewhat outside of Vienna, the doctors recommended that he stay outside of the city because of the better air. Schubert’s cause of death was not syphilis, but it is assumed that he died of the rampant typhoid fever (due to the typical phantasizing (“nervous fever”) which became noticeable earlier).
Johan Strauss (Son)
The waltz king
Johann Strauss’s father was Vienna’s first waltz king, battling his rival Lanner’s band for waltz supremacy. When Lanner suddenly died, Strauss’ wife urged her son to take Lanner’s place and compete with his father. The reason was vindictiveness, since Strauss’ father by now had as many children with his mistress as with his wife. The rest is history, Johann made his successful debut as a 19 year old at the Dommayer and over the next 30 years became the waltz king with his band. He was greatly assisted by his brothers Eduard and Joseph. Strauss’s life was marked by music making, composing, womanizing, Entrepreneurship, a lot of work and changing places of residence.
Strauss also became famous in the second part of his career for operettas, to which he initially turned only out of economic necessity.
Richard Strauss
Along with Dresden, Vienna was Strauss’s most important artistic station, two of his operas were premiered (“Ariande” and the 2nd Version of “Frau ohne Schatten”) in the State Opera.
He held the office of State Opera Director for five years (1919-1924) and Hoffmansthal, his most important librettist was Viennese.
In addition, many of his Viennese operas were performed in Viennese settings (e.g. “Rosenkavalier” and “Arabella”). In 1924 the city of Vienna awarded him the honorary citizenship.
Strauss and Schalk, the co-directors of the State Opera:
TO THE FULL BIOGRAPHY OF RICHARD STRAUSS
Richard Wagner
Richard Wagner was a frequent visitor to Vienna. Already at the age of 19 his first long journey took him to the city on the Danube. Later his opera performances often took him to the Viennese venues, where he celebrated great triumphs (Lohengrin and Tannhäuser) but also experienced one of his greatest ignominies (Tristan):
Wagner hoped to solve his money problems with the performances of the just finished “Tristan”. But one theater after another refused to stage it. The last hope of the heavily indebted Wagner was Vienna. But after many months, 77 rehearsals and further bill debts, the end came: the work was unperformable, the singers hopelessly overtaxed, was the verdict of those involved. Without the income from a performance, he was threatened with prison because of his debts. Before he was thrown into the Vienna debtors’ prison to force payments to his creditors, he fled the city (allegedly in drag), which, next to the Tannhäuser fiasco in Paris, was Wagner’s greatest life ignominy and led to his greatest life crisis. After his departure, he wrote to a Viennese friend: “A good, truly helpful miracle must come my way now, otherwise it’s all over!” The miracle did indeed occur in the form of Ludwig II.
In addition, his most bitter critic, Eduard Hanslick, was Viennese and from there made his life difficult with his sharp pen. Wagner took his revenge with the famous Viennese reading of the “Meistersinger von Nürnberg” (see section “works with a reference to Vienna” further below).
LINK TO THE COMPLETE WAGNER BIOGRAPHY
CEMETERIES AND TOMBS OF FAMOUS MUSICIANS
At the beginning of this article you will find a map from google maps. Zoom in on the Central Cemetery, where you can find the exact location of the graves of famous musicians.
Ludwig van Beethoven
Beethoven, who was born in Bonn, visited Vienna for the first time in 1786 to see Mozart. Even today, however, it is not certain whether he actually met Mozart. Six years later, he returned to Vienna for good after having met with Joseph Haydn in Bonn, who accepted him as a pupil. Because the Rhineland was occupied by the French, Beethoven was forced to stay in Vienna, and after the death of his father, his two brothers also came to Vienna.
Fortunately, 200 years later, one can still discover Beethoven’s traces in Vienna. First of all, we should mention Beethoven’s apartments. He often changed his quarters, 58 apartments are documented, some of which he lived in several times. His death house, the so-called “Schwarzspanierhaus” on Schwarzspanierstraße, however, has not been preserved.
Early years as a piano virtuoso
Beethoven quickly made a name for himself as a piano virtuoso. He played in the salons of his patrons; the Palais Lobkowitz or the Hradec Castle are still witnesses of this time. At the age of thirty his deafness made itself felt, the apartment where he wrote his Heiligstadt Testament can be visited. His performances as a piano virtuoso began to decrease and important orchestral works were written. With the 3rd symphony, the Eroica, Beethoven entered a new era in 1803 and the middle, very productive creative period with countless masterpieces began.
The napoleonic years
The Napoleonic wars and turmoil shook Vienna. Money was no longer so easy for the nobility, and Beethoven was plagued by financial worries. In addition, social contacts became more difficult due to his hearing loss. He no longer traveled, only spa stays in Baden became more frequent due to his physical ailments. There, on long walks in nature, he often found inspiration for his compositions.
The two brothers found their way to Vienna. One became a successful pharmacist, but then left Vienna again. The second brother died at an early age, leaving a nephew over whose custody Beethoven fought a bitter legal battle with his sister-in-law for many years.
Illness and death
Beethoven met and fell in love with women on several occasions. Twice, Beethoven was probably ready to marry, but differences of class stood in the way of marriage. Beethoven’s fame grew. In 1823 and later he crowned his work with the 9th Symphony and the last 3 piano sonatas. In 1827 Beethoven died at the age of 57. The cause of death is still not completely clarified, even modern methods of analysis of his hair do not provide complete clarity; there are more than a dozen different diagnoses.
Johannes Brahms
The 29-year-old Brahms visited Vienna for the first time in 1862, and when he presented his G minor piano quartet at an evening event there, the director of the conservatory and musician Joseph Hellmesberger is said to have already proclaimed Brahms the heir to Beethoven. Although Brahms struggled with these comparisons throughout his life, he felt valued in Vienna, which could not be said of his native Hamburg, where his music met with skepticism and he was passed over for appointments. So he decided to accept an offer as choir master and moved to Vienna.
But Brahms did not stay in office for long and became a freelance artist in the 1870s.
Brahms’ center of life remained Vienna until his death. However, Brahms was often on the road, every year 3-4 months took him to the summer resort and in the winter months he was often on the road as a performer and conductor of his own works.
TO THE COMPLETE BIOGRAPHY OF BRAHMS
Anton Bruckner
He came to live in Vienna as a 44-year-old Organist
Bruckner was 44 years old when he came to Vienna and took up the work of poorly paid or even unpaid jobs at the university and the conservatory. He moved to Währinger Strasse with his sister Anna (“Nani”). The latter died in 1870 and Katharina Kachelmaier became the housekeeper until the end of his life. (siehe pircture below).
At the beginning of his Viennese period, Bruckner was considered a respected church musician and organist, but the storm hit Vienna when he dedicated his 3rd Symphony to his “music god” Richard Wagner. Henceforth, castigated as a “Wagnerian,” he drew the scathing criticism of the influential critic Eduard Hanslick and found himself in the middle of the greatest cultural-historical conflict of the 19th century, the bitter dispute between the “traditionalists” around Brahms and the “new Germans” around Liszt and Wagner. In line with Hanslick, Brahms also often made negative comments about Bruckner’s music, but the latter always remained polite.
One day Bruckner and Brahms even sat together in their favorite pub Roter Igel (the red hedgehog), but no rapprochement took place.Only when ordering food did they notice that they had the same favorite dish, “Geselchtes mit Knödel” (smoked ham with dumplings).
Open hostility in Vienna
With a respectable success of the Fourth Symphony and the breakthrough of the Seventh Symphony (in Munich), Bruckner’s position in the Austrian capital improved, but the Viennese never really warmed to the music and the strange person of Bruckner. His friends (e.g. the conductors Hans Richter and Johann von Herbeck) always remained in the minority.
Bruckner suffered greatly from the many slights. When he was even wrongly suspected of an indecent approach to a female student in the “St. Anna Affair”, it almost broke his heart, he who never came close to a woman. But this did not prevent him from writing 9 marriage proposals in his life. The recipients were all young ladies, who in his opinion were still chaste (in his language “clean”). His last proposal (when he was 70 years old) even became famous. He fell in love with Ida Buhz, a parlor maid at his hotel during a stay in Berlin. An engagement had already been arranged, but at the last moment the devout Catholic learned that the bride-to-be was a Protestant. When Ida refused to convert to Catholicism, Bruckner backed out.
Honors in the last few years
In the last decade of his life, the honors began to pour down on Bruckner, especially Emperor Franz Josef honored him first with audiences and orders, then also with a life pension, and finally Franz Josef provided the composer with a free retirement apartment in the upper Belvedere for life (“the Kustodenstöckl”). The university also fulfilled one of Bruckner’s fervent wishes by awarding him an honorary doctorate. For Bruckner, this was nevertheless little consolation for the many slights he had suffered. In addition, he had serious health problems in his last ten years, which prevented him from savoring the successes and fulfilling his last wish to finish the Ninth Symphony. Bruckner died in 1896 in his Kustodenstöckl of heart trouble. He did not want to be buried in Vienna; he found his honorary grave under his beloved organ in St. Floriansstift.
TO THE COMPLETE BRUCKNER BIOGRAPHY
Gaetano Donizetti
Vienna “the Donizetti-City”
Donizetti was in Vienna several times from the 1830s, sometimes even holding official positions; his school friend Merelli was by now director of the Kärtnertor Theater. Vienna adored the Italian, and Richard Wagner enviously called Vienna “Donizetti City.” In 1842/43, Emperor Ferdinand appointed him “K.k. Kammerkapellmeister und Hofkompositeur” and Donizetti took care of the Italian program at the Kärtnertor Theater for two seasons, including staging the first Viennese Nabucco, at whose premiere in Milan he was present and deeply impressed.
Vienna later honored Donizetti’s work with a large bust in the State Opera House and in 2005 with a commemorative plaque at Wipplingerstrasse 5.
TO THE COMPLETE BIOGRAPHY OF DONIZETTI
Christoph Willibald Gluck
The foundation of the reform opera in Vienna
Gluck came to Vienna at the age of 36. There he married Maria Anna, who was half his age. After many years of traveling around, he had a permanent job, a home and could devote himself to composing. But it was to be another 12 years before he wrote “Orfeo ed Euridice”, the revolutionary work that produced a break with the baroque castrato era and exaggerated ornamentation of song. What exactly the new approach consists of, you will find summarized in the following link if you are interested:
https://opera-inside.com/orfeo-ed-euridice-by-ch-w-gluck-the-opera-guide-and-synopsis/
This so-called reform opera was not at all euphorically received by the Viennese at the beginning, but acceptance increased and with the follow-up work “Alceste” the already 50-year-old was able to establish himself as Europe’s musician of future. His new style revolutionized the opera seria, and Gluck became a beacon for all subsequent composers, Mozart included. In 1756 he received a knighthood from the Pope and henceforth called himself Knight of Gluck.
The relationsship with Maria Antonia, the later Marie Antoinette
A special feature of the Viennese years was that Gluck became the music teacher of Maria Antonia, the daughter of Emperor Franz I and Maria Theresa. Maria Antonia was not an easy person, but found her only joy in music and dance. Due to the marriage policy of the Habsburgs, she was married to the French Dauphin in 1770 at the age of 14, and four years later became Queen of France alongside Louis XVI as Marie Antoinette. One of her first official acts was to bring Gluck to Paris as a reformer of music.
Joseph Haydn
He came to Vienna as a boy
Haydn spent his youth and his old age in Vienna. He came to Vienna in 1740, already at the age of 8 (without parents), after being “discovered” by the musical director of St. Stephen’s Cathedral in his home in the rural area, who was looking for singers for chapel choir. There he was taught to sing and play the violin and sang soprano in the choir for almost 10 years. When he turned 17, the empress, hearing him sing a solo piece, complained that he sang like a crow, and Haydn was dismissed because of the onset of vocal break. He was left penniless on the street, with no help from his poor parents. Haydn made his way through life with odd jobs for many years (assignments as a musician, teaching, servant work, etc.) and lived for years in a poor apartment on Kohlmarkt. He continued his musical education autodidactically (especially with works by C.Ph.E. Bach), since he had only received a basic knowledge as a singer. After eight years his luck finally turned around and he got his first job in Pilsen, leaving Vienna for the next almost 40 years (if you don’t count the regular visits).
Back in Vienna after 40 years as a famous musician
With his two London visits, Haydn became rich at an advanced age, which allowed him to buy a stately house in Vienna-Gumperndorf, where he lived from 1795 until his death in 1809. He died of old age during the turmoil of the Napoleonic battles for Vienna and was first buried in Hundsturm Cemetery in Vienna (a tombstone still stands today) and later moved to the Bergkirche in Eisenstadt.
Haydn monumnent Mariahilfstrasse 55:
Erich Maria Korngold
The Wunderkind years
When Korngold’s ballet “der Schnemann” was performed at the Vienna State Opera (then the Court Opera) in 1910, he was probably the youngest composer to do so, at the age of 13. Korngold, who was born in 1897 in Brno in the Austrian Empire, was often described as the greatest musical child prodigy ever, greater even than Mozart. Even as a child, his compositions had the quality of a mature composer. He was encouraged but also protected by his father, the respected (and sharp-tongued) Viennese music critic Julius Korngold. At the age of 19, Erich wrote “der Ring des Polykrates,” his first one-act opera, which delighted audiences.
His began his greatest work when he was 20-years old
He began composing “The Dead City” at the age of 19, but the First World War put a stop to the plans. “Die tote Stadt” then became his greatest success and audiences clamored for seats. In Hamburg, the work was given 26 times in the first season alone. Shortly thereafter, the work was also staged in Vienna, New York, Prague and Zurich and became a perennial hit for 10 years. This phase was abruptly halted by the Nazi seizure of power, when the works of Jewish composers were banned from performance. Korngold then emigrated to the United States, where he died in the 1950s.
His most famous piece is probably “Glück, das mir verblieb” from “Dead City,” which shines in the purest Korngold style. Already at the beginning the orchestra glitters, with glockenspiel, celesta and harp, a typical late romantic coloration. The bells of the celesta conjure a romantic, almost childlike naive mood.
Glück, das mir verblieb:
https://opera-inside.com/the-dead-city-by-erich-korngold-the-opera-guide-and-synopsis/#Gl%C3%BCck
Gustav Mahler
Director of the Vienna State Opera
When Mahler came to the State Opera as court opera director in 1897, it was customary for opera singers to stand at the ramp and sing with pathetic arm movements in front of painted backdrops. Mahler, who was steeped in Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk of theatrical art, stage design, literature and music, set about fundamentally reforming the art of opera scenically.
As opera director and first Kapellmeister in personal union, he decided to take the liberty of simultaneously directing as musical director. This reform work, which was decisively strengthened in 1903 with the appointment of the stage designer Alfred Roller, brought the Court Opera to the artistic top, but also earned Mahler many enemies. The latter was probably due even more to the rampant anti-Semitism.
Antisemitism
Mahler fought against the conservatism of the Viennese authorities. When Strauss premiered his Salome in Dresden, Mahler wanted to bring the opera to Vienna, but the censorship authorities refused to allow a performance of the scandalous opera. For more than ten years, the Viennese quarelled with the Jew (who was baptised earlier in Hamburg), until Mahler, exhausted by his duties and the many concert tours, left the court opera for New York.
Mahler remained in the United States for three years, with interruptions, and returned to Vienna in 1911, terminally ill, where he died in the same year.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
The prodigy metts the emperor and the emperess
Mozart visited Vienna for the first time when he was six years old, on the occasion of his visit to Empress Maria Theresa and her husband Franz Joseph.
Triumph and tragedy in Vienna
Later, Mozart spent 10 years in the Danube metropolis with interruptions. He arrived there in 1781 from Salzburg. His fate was changeable, the middle period was the happiest with artistic success and marriage to Konstanze, the last period was marked by personal crises (child deaths, illness) and economic depression, with the death of the art-loving Joseph II his fate had turned.
He wrote a considerable part of his works in his Viennese period and made music in and composed for various theaters. On December 5, 1791, shortly after midnight, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died in the “Kleines Kaiserhaus” in Rauhensteingasse in Vienna.
TO THE COMPLETE MOZART BIOGRAPHY
Gioachino Rossini
The Rossini Frenzy in Vienna
Rossini visited Vienna in 1822 and triggered a huge “Rossini frenzy” in the imperial city. Schubert wrote two overtures and even Beethoven composed a small canon in honor of the Italian. Within a few weeks, 8 different operas by Rossini were given in about 60 performances, mainly in the Theater am Kärtnertor, whose director had shortly before been nominated the Italian Barbaja, Rossini’s impresario in Naples. The Kärtnertortheater has not existed since 1870.
During this visit of Rossini to Vienna, there was also the legendary meeting with Beethoven (see below).
TO THE FULL ROSSINI BIOGRAPHY
Franz Schubert
Childhood years in poverty
Schubert spent most of his short life in Vienna. His adult life was marked by the composition of music (it is estimated that he composed 30,000 hours), complete destitution (publishers and concert promoters largely spurned his works), socializing with Schubertiads and visits to inns, and his terrible syphilis disease.
Franz was the thirteenth of his father’s 20 children, was very musical, had a beautiful voice, and for this reason was accepted in 1808 as a choirboy at the Hofmusikkapelle (court chapel) and in the imperial convict at St. Stephen’s Cathedral.
After attending the Court Music Chapel and briefly training as a teacher, Schubert took up his position as his father’s school assistant in 1814. Schubert was unhappy because he lacked time for composing, and in 1816 he applied in vain for a musician’s position in Ljubljana. Also, all publishers rejected submissions of his compositions. His friend Franz von Schober offered Schubert to live with his family (then at Landskrongasse 5) and so the penniless Schubert decided to give up the job and devote himself fully to life as a composer.
Schubtertiades
Schubert stayed several times with his friend Franz von Schober, the poet and actor of the same age. In 1821 the first Schubertiade, evenings to promote Schubert’s music, took place in the apartment on Spiegelgasse. Schubert sat at the piano and his most authoritative interpreter of his songs, Johann Michael Vogl sang along. These Schubertiades became an important literary-musical salon and were often held in Sonnleithner’s house (Haus am Bauernmarkt was demolished). Important works by Schubert, such as Erlkönig, were heard for the first time at the Schubertiades.
Illness and early death
After the diagnosis of syphilis, Schubert began to drink more and more. Night-long visits to inns were not uncommon, Schubert became more corpulent, and attacks of syphilis caused him more and more trouble. Schubert was never inhibited in his joy of composition by the many defeats, even in his darkest hours when he lay in hospital in 1823, in a room with 90 rash patients with open wounds, he composed on the “schöne Müllerin”.
The last months before his death, Schubert lived in the apartment of his brother Ferdinand. This was somewhat outside of Vienna, the doctors recommended that he stay outside of the city because of the better air. Schubert’s cause of death was not syphilis, but it is assumed that he died of the rampant typhoid fever (due to the typical phantasizing (“nervous fever”) which became noticeable earlier).
Johan Strauss (Son)
The waltz king
Johann Strauss’s father was Vienna’s first waltz king, battling his rival Lanner’s band for waltz supremacy. When Lanner suddenly died, Strauss’ wife urged her son to take Lanner’s place and compete with his father. The reason was vindictiveness, since Strauss’ father by now had as many children with his mistress as with his wife. The rest is history, Johann made his successful debut as a 19 year old at the Dommayer and over the next 30 years became the waltz king with his band. He was greatly assisted by his brothers Eduard and Joseph. Strauss’s life was marked by music making, composing, womanizing, Entrepreneurship, a lot of work and changing places of residence.
Strauss also became famous in the second part of his career for operettas, to which he initially turned only out of economic necessity.
Richard Strauss
Along with Dresden, Vienna was Strauss’s most important artistic station, two of his operas were premiered (“Ariande” and the 2nd Version of “Frau ohne Schatten”) in the State Opera.
He held the office of State Opera Director for five years (1919-1924) and Hoffmansthal, his most important librettist was Viennese.
In addition, many of his Viennese operas were performed in Viennese settings (e.g. “Rosenkavalier” and “Arabella”). In 1924 the city of Vienna awarded him the honorary citizenship.
Strauss and Schalk, the co-directors of the State Opera:
TO THE FULL BIOGRAPHY OF RICHARD STRAUSS
Richard Wagner
Richard Wagner was a frequent visitor to Vienna. Already at the age of 19 his first long journey took him to the city on the Danube. Later his opera performances often took him to the Viennese venues, where he celebrated great triumphs (Lohengrin and Tannhäuser) but also experienced one of his greatest ignominies (Tristan):
Wagner hoped to solve his money problems with the performances of the just finished “Tristan”. But one theater after another refused to stage it. The last hope of the heavily indebted Wagner was Vienna. But after many months, 77 rehearsals and further bill debts, the end came: the work was unperformable, the singers hopelessly overtaxed, was the verdict of those involved. Without the income from a performance, he was threatened with prison because of his debts. Before he was thrown into the Vienna debtors’ prison to force payments to his creditors, he fled the city (allegedly in drag), which, next to the Tannhäuser fiasco in Paris, was Wagner’s greatest life ignominy and led to his greatest life crisis. After his departure, he wrote to a Viennese friend: “A good, truly helpful miracle must come my way now, otherwise it’s all over!” The miracle did indeed occur in the form of Ludwig II.
In addition, his most bitter critic, Eduard Hanslick, was Viennese and from there made his life difficult with his sharp pen. Wagner took his revenge with the famous Viennese reading of the “Meistersinger von Nürnberg” (see section “works with a reference to Vienna” further below).
LINK TO THE COMPLETE WAGNER BIOGRAPHY
RESTAURANTS AND HOTELS
Ludwig van Beethoven
Beethoven, who was born in Bonn, visited Vienna for the first time in 1786 to see Mozart. Even today, however, it is not certain whether he actually met Mozart. Six years later, he returned to Vienna for good after having met with Joseph Haydn in Bonn, who accepted him as a pupil. Because the Rhineland was occupied by the French, Beethoven was forced to stay in Vienna, and after the death of his father, his two brothers also came to Vienna.
Fortunately, 200 years later, one can still discover Beethoven’s traces in Vienna. First of all, we should mention Beethoven’s apartments. He often changed his quarters, 58 apartments are documented, some of which he lived in several times. His death house, the so-called “Schwarzspanierhaus” on Schwarzspanierstraße, however, has not been preserved.
Early years as a piano virtuoso
Beethoven quickly made a name for himself as a piano virtuoso. He played in the salons of his patrons; the Palais Lobkowitz or the Hradec Castle are still witnesses of this time. At the age of thirty his deafness made itself felt, the apartment where he wrote his Heiligstadt Testament can be visited. His performances as a piano virtuoso began to decrease and important orchestral works were written. With the 3rd symphony, the Eroica, Beethoven entered a new era in 1803 and the middle, very productive creative period with countless masterpieces began.
The napoleonic years
The Napoleonic wars and turmoil shook Vienna. Money was no longer so easy for the nobility, and Beethoven was plagued by financial worries. In addition, social contacts became more difficult due to his hearing loss. He no longer traveled, only spa stays in Baden became more frequent due to his physical ailments. There, on long walks in nature, he often found inspiration for his compositions.
The two brothers found their way to Vienna. One became a successful pharmacist, but then left Vienna again. The second brother died at an early age, leaving a nephew over whose custody Beethoven fought a bitter legal battle with his sister-in-law for many years.
Illness and death
Beethoven met and fell in love with women on several occasions. Twice, Beethoven was probably ready to marry, but differences of class stood in the way of marriage. Beethoven’s fame grew. In 1823 and later he crowned his work with the 9th Symphony and the last 3 piano sonatas. In 1827 Beethoven died at the age of 57. The cause of death is still not completely clarified, even modern methods of analysis of his hair do not provide complete clarity; there are more than a dozen different diagnoses.
Johannes Brahms
The 29-year-old Brahms visited Vienna for the first time in 1862, and when he presented his G minor piano quartet at an evening event there, the director of the conservatory and musician Joseph Hellmesberger is said to have already proclaimed Brahms the heir to Beethoven. Although Brahms struggled with these comparisons throughout his life, he felt valued in Vienna, which could not be said of his native Hamburg, where his music met with skepticism and he was passed over for appointments. So he decided to accept an offer as choir master and moved to Vienna.
But Brahms did not stay in office for long and became a freelance artist in the 1870s.
Brahms’ center of life remained Vienna until his death. However, Brahms was often on the road, every year 3-4 months took him to the summer resort and in the winter months he was often on the road as a performer and conductor of his own works.
TO THE COMPLETE BIOGRAPHY OF BRAHMS
Anton Bruckner
He came to live in Vienna as a 44-year-old Organist
Bruckner was 44 years old when he came to Vienna and took up the work of poorly paid or even unpaid jobs at the university and the conservatory. He moved to Währinger Strasse with his sister Anna (“Nani”). The latter died in 1870 and Katharina Kachelmaier became the housekeeper until the end of his life. (siehe pircture below).
At the beginning of his Viennese period, Bruckner was considered a respected church musician and organist, but the storm hit Vienna when he dedicated his 3rd Symphony to his “music god” Richard Wagner. Henceforth, castigated as a “Wagnerian,” he drew the scathing criticism of the influential critic Eduard Hanslick and found himself in the middle of the greatest cultural-historical conflict of the 19th century, the bitter dispute between the “traditionalists” around Brahms and the “new Germans” around Liszt and Wagner. In line with Hanslick, Brahms also often made negative comments about Bruckner’s music, but the latter always remained polite.
One day Bruckner and Brahms even sat together in their favorite pub Roter Igel (the red hedgehog), but no rapprochement took place.Only when ordering food did they notice that they had the same favorite dish, “Geselchtes mit Knödel” (smoked ham with dumplings).
Open hostility in Vienna
With a respectable success of the Fourth Symphony and the breakthrough of the Seventh Symphony (in Munich), Bruckner’s position in the Austrian capital improved, but the Viennese never really warmed to the music and the strange person of Bruckner. His friends (e.g. the conductors Hans Richter and Johann von Herbeck) always remained in the minority.
Bruckner suffered greatly from the many slights. When he was even wrongly suspected of an indecent approach to a female student in the “St. Anna Affair”, it almost broke his heart, he who never came close to a woman. But this did not prevent him from writing 9 marriage proposals in his life. The recipients were all young ladies, who in his opinion were still chaste (in his language “clean”). His last proposal (when he was 70 years old) even became famous. He fell in love with Ida Buhz, a parlor maid at his hotel during a stay in Berlin. An engagement had already been arranged, but at the last moment the devout Catholic learned that the bride-to-be was a Protestant. When Ida refused to convert to Catholicism, Bruckner backed out.
Honors in the last few years
In the last decade of his life, the honors began to pour down on Bruckner, especially Emperor Franz Josef honored him first with audiences and orders, then also with a life pension, and finally Franz Josef provided the composer with a free retirement apartment in the upper Belvedere for life (“the Kustodenstöckl”). The university also fulfilled one of Bruckner’s fervent wishes by awarding him an honorary doctorate. For Bruckner, this was nevertheless little consolation for the many slights he had suffered. In addition, he had serious health problems in his last ten years, which prevented him from savoring the successes and fulfilling his last wish to finish the Ninth Symphony. Bruckner died in 1896 in his Kustodenstöckl of heart trouble. He did not want to be buried in Vienna; he found his honorary grave under his beloved organ in St. Floriansstift.
TO THE COMPLETE BRUCKNER BIOGRAPHY
Gaetano Donizetti
Vienna “the Donizetti-City”
Donizetti was in Vienna several times from the 1830s, sometimes even holding official positions; his school friend Merelli was by now director of the Kärtnertor Theater. Vienna adored the Italian, and Richard Wagner enviously called Vienna “Donizetti City.” In 1842/43, Emperor Ferdinand appointed him “K.k. Kammerkapellmeister und Hofkompositeur” and Donizetti took care of the Italian program at the Kärtnertor Theater for two seasons, including staging the first Viennese Nabucco, at whose premiere in Milan he was present and deeply impressed.
Vienna later honored Donizetti’s work with a large bust in the State Opera House and in 2005 with a commemorative plaque at Wipplingerstrasse 5.
TO THE COMPLETE BIOGRAPHY OF DONIZETTI
Christoph Willibald Gluck
The foundation of the reform opera in Vienna
Gluck came to Vienna at the age of 36. There he married Maria Anna, who was half his age. After many years of traveling around, he had a permanent job, a home and could devote himself to composing. But it was to be another 12 years before he wrote “Orfeo ed Euridice”, the revolutionary work that produced a break with the baroque castrato era and exaggerated ornamentation of song. What exactly the new approach consists of, you will find summarized in the following link if you are interested:
https://opera-inside.com/orfeo-ed-euridice-by-ch-w-gluck-the-opera-guide-and-synopsis/
This so-called reform opera was not at all euphorically received by the Viennese at the beginning, but acceptance increased and with the follow-up work “Alceste” the already 50-year-old was able to establish himself as Europe’s musician of future. His new style revolutionized the opera seria, and Gluck became a beacon for all subsequent composers, Mozart included. In 1756 he received a knighthood from the Pope and henceforth called himself Knight of Gluck.
The relationsship with Maria Antonia, the later Marie Antoinette
A special feature of the Viennese years was that Gluck became the music teacher of Maria Antonia, the daughter of Emperor Franz I and Maria Theresa. Maria Antonia was not an easy person, but found her only joy in music and dance. Due to the marriage policy of the Habsburgs, she was married to the French Dauphin in 1770 at the age of 14, and four years later became Queen of France alongside Louis XVI as Marie Antoinette. One of her first official acts was to bring Gluck to Paris as a reformer of music.
Joseph Haydn
He came to Vienna as a boy
Haydn spent his youth and his old age in Vienna. He came to Vienna in 1740, already at the age of 8 (without parents), after being “discovered” by the musical director of St. Stephen’s Cathedral in his home in the rural area, who was looking for singers for chapel choir. There he was taught to sing and play the violin and sang soprano in the choir for almost 10 years. When he turned 17, the empress, hearing him sing a solo piece, complained that he sang like a crow, and Haydn was dismissed because of the onset of vocal break. He was left penniless on the street, with no help from his poor parents. Haydn made his way through life with odd jobs for many years (assignments as a musician, teaching, servant work, etc.) and lived for years in a poor apartment on Kohlmarkt. He continued his musical education autodidactically (especially with works by C.Ph.E. Bach), since he had only received a basic knowledge as a singer. After eight years his luck finally turned around and he got his first job in Pilsen, leaving Vienna for the next almost 40 years (if you don’t count the regular visits).
Back in Vienna after 40 years as a famous musician
With his two London visits, Haydn became rich at an advanced age, which allowed him to buy a stately house in Vienna-Gumperndorf, where he lived from 1795 until his death in 1809. He died of old age during the turmoil of the Napoleonic battles for Vienna and was first buried in Hundsturm Cemetery in Vienna (a tombstone still stands today) and later moved to the Bergkirche in Eisenstadt.
Haydn monumnent Mariahilfstrasse 55:
Erich Maria Korngold
The Wunderkind years
When Korngold’s ballet “der Schnemann” was performed at the Vienna State Opera (then the Court Opera) in 1910, he was probably the youngest composer to do so, at the age of 13. Korngold, who was born in 1897 in Brno in the Austrian Empire, was often described as the greatest musical child prodigy ever, greater even than Mozart. Even as a child, his compositions had the quality of a mature composer. He was encouraged but also protected by his father, the respected (and sharp-tongued) Viennese music critic Julius Korngold. At the age of 19, Erich wrote “der Ring des Polykrates,” his first one-act opera, which delighted audiences.
His began his greatest work when he was 20-years old
He began composing “The Dead City” at the age of 19, but the First World War put a stop to the plans. “Die tote Stadt” then became his greatest success and audiences clamored for seats. In Hamburg, the work was given 26 times in the first season alone. Shortly thereafter, the work was also staged in Vienna, New York, Prague and Zurich and became a perennial hit for 10 years. This phase was abruptly halted by the Nazi seizure of power, when the works of Jewish composers were banned from performance. Korngold then emigrated to the United States, where he died in the 1950s.
His most famous piece is probably “Glück, das mir verblieb” from “Dead City,” which shines in the purest Korngold style. Already at the beginning the orchestra glitters, with glockenspiel, celesta and harp, a typical late romantic coloration. The bells of the celesta conjure a romantic, almost childlike naive mood.
Glück, das mir verblieb:
https://opera-inside.com/the-dead-city-by-erich-korngold-the-opera-guide-and-synopsis/#Gl%C3%BCck
Gustav Mahler
Director of the Vienna State Opera
When Mahler came to the State Opera as court opera director in 1897, it was customary for opera singers to stand at the ramp and sing with pathetic arm movements in front of painted backdrops. Mahler, who was steeped in Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk of theatrical art, stage design, literature and music, set about fundamentally reforming the art of opera scenically.
As opera director and first Kapellmeister in personal union, he decided to take the liberty of simultaneously directing as musical director. This reform work, which was decisively strengthened in 1903 with the appointment of the stage designer Alfred Roller, brought the Court Opera to the artistic top, but also earned Mahler many enemies. The latter was probably due even more to the rampant anti-Semitism.
Antisemitism
Mahler fought against the conservatism of the Viennese authorities. When Strauss premiered his Salome in Dresden, Mahler wanted to bring the opera to Vienna, but the censorship authorities refused to allow a performance of the scandalous opera. For more than ten years, the Viennese quarelled with the Jew (who was baptised earlier in Hamburg), until Mahler, exhausted by his duties and the many concert tours, left the court opera for New York.
Mahler remained in the United States for three years, with interruptions, and returned to Vienna in 1911, terminally ill, where he died in the same year.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
The prodigy metts the emperor and the emperess
Mozart visited Vienna for the first time when he was six years old, on the occasion of his visit to Empress Maria Theresa and her husband Franz Joseph.
Triumph and tragedy in Vienna
Later, Mozart spent 10 years in the Danube metropolis with interruptions. He arrived there in 1781 from Salzburg. His fate was changeable, the middle period was the happiest with artistic success and marriage to Konstanze, the last period was marked by personal crises (child deaths, illness) and economic depression, with the death of the art-loving Joseph II his fate had turned.
He wrote a considerable part of his works in his Viennese period and made music in and composed for various theaters. On December 5, 1791, shortly after midnight, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died in the “Kleines Kaiserhaus” in Rauhensteingasse in Vienna.
TO THE COMPLETE MOZART BIOGRAPHY
Gioachino Rossini
The Rossini Frenzy in Vienna
Rossini visited Vienna in 1822 and triggered a huge “Rossini frenzy” in the imperial city. Schubert wrote two overtures and even Beethoven composed a small canon in honor of the Italian. Within a few weeks, 8 different operas by Rossini were given in about 60 performances, mainly in the Theater am Kärtnertor, whose director had shortly before been nominated the Italian Barbaja, Rossini’s impresario in Naples. The Kärtnertortheater has not existed since 1870.
During this visit of Rossini to Vienna, there was also the legendary meeting with Beethoven (see below).
TO THE FULL ROSSINI BIOGRAPHY
Franz Schubert
Childhood years in poverty
Schubert spent most of his short life in Vienna. His adult life was marked by the composition of music (it is estimated that he composed 30,000 hours), complete destitution (publishers and concert promoters largely spurned his works), socializing with Schubertiads and visits to inns, and his terrible syphilis disease.
Franz was the thirteenth of his father’s 20 children, was very musical, had a beautiful voice, and for this reason was accepted in 1808 as a choirboy at the Hofmusikkapelle (court chapel) and in the imperial convict at St. Stephen’s Cathedral.
After attending the Court Music Chapel and briefly training as a teacher, Schubert took up his position as his father’s school assistant in 1814. Schubert was unhappy because he lacked time for composing, and in 1816 he applied in vain for a musician’s position in Ljubljana. Also, all publishers rejected submissions of his compositions. His friend Franz von Schober offered Schubert to live with his family (then at Landskrongasse 5) and so the penniless Schubert decided to give up the job and devote himself fully to life as a composer.
Schubtertiades
Schubert stayed several times with his friend Franz von Schober, the poet and actor of the same age. In 1821 the first Schubertiade, evenings to promote Schubert’s music, took place in the apartment on Spiegelgasse. Schubert sat at the piano and his most authoritative interpreter of his songs, Johann Michael Vogl sang along. These Schubertiades became an important literary-musical salon and were often held in Sonnleithner’s house (Haus am Bauernmarkt was demolished). Important works by Schubert, such as Erlkönig, were heard for the first time at the Schubertiades.
Illness and early death
After the diagnosis of syphilis, Schubert began to drink more and more. Night-long visits to inns were not uncommon, Schubert became more corpulent, and attacks of syphilis caused him more and more trouble. Schubert was never inhibited in his joy of composition by the many defeats, even in his darkest hours when he lay in hospital in 1823, in a room with 90 rash patients with open wounds, he composed on the “schöne Müllerin”.
The last months before his death, Schubert lived in the apartment of his brother Ferdinand. This was somewhat outside of Vienna, the doctors recommended that he stay outside of the city because of the better air. Schubert’s cause of death was not syphilis, but it is assumed that he died of the rampant typhoid fever (due to the typical phantasizing (“nervous fever”) which became noticeable earlier).
Johan Strauss (Son)
The waltz king
Johann Strauss’s father was Vienna’s first waltz king, battling his rival Lanner’s band for waltz supremacy. When Lanner suddenly died, Strauss’ wife urged her son to take Lanner’s place and compete with his father. The reason was vindictiveness, since Strauss’ father by now had as many children with his mistress as with his wife. The rest is history, Johann made his successful debut as a 19 year old at the Dommayer and over the next 30 years became the waltz king with his band. He was greatly assisted by his brothers Eduard and Joseph. Strauss’s life was marked by music making, composing, womanizing, Entrepreneurship, a lot of work and changing places of residence.
Strauss also became famous in the second part of his career for operettas, to which he initially turned only out of economic necessity.
Richard Strauss
Along with Dresden, Vienna was Strauss’s most important artistic station, two of his operas were premiered (“Ariande” and the 2nd Version of “Frau ohne Schatten”) in the State Opera.
He held the office of State Opera Director for five years (1919-1924) and Hoffmansthal, his most important librettist was Viennese.
In addition, many of his Viennese operas were performed in Viennese settings (e.g. “Rosenkavalier” and “Arabella”). In 1924 the city of Vienna awarded him the honorary citizenship.
Strauss and Schalk, the co-directors of the State Opera:
TO THE FULL BIOGRAPHY OF RICHARD STRAUSS
Richard Wagner
Richard Wagner was a frequent visitor to Vienna. Already at the age of 19 his first long journey took him to the city on the Danube. Later his opera performances often took him to the Viennese venues, where he celebrated great triumphs (Lohengrin and Tannhäuser) but also experienced one of his greatest ignominies (Tristan):
Wagner hoped to solve his money problems with the performances of the just finished “Tristan”. But one theater after another refused to stage it. The last hope of the heavily indebted Wagner was Vienna. But after many months, 77 rehearsals and further bill debts, the end came: the work was unperformable, the singers hopelessly overtaxed, was the verdict of those involved. Without the income from a performance, he was threatened with prison because of his debts. Before he was thrown into the Vienna debtors’ prison to force payments to his creditors, he fled the city (allegedly in drag), which, next to the Tannhäuser fiasco in Paris, was Wagner’s greatest life ignominy and led to his greatest life crisis. After his departure, he wrote to a Viennese friend: “A good, truly helpful miracle must come my way now, otherwise it’s all over!” The miracle did indeed occur in the form of Ludwig II.
In addition, his most bitter critic, Eduard Hanslick, was Viennese and from there made his life difficult with his sharp pen. Wagner took his revenge with the famous Viennese reading of the “Meistersinger von Nürnberg” (see section “works with a reference to Vienna” further below).
LINK TO THE COMPLETE WAGNER BIOGRAPHY
VARIOUS
Ludwig van Beethoven
Beethoven, who was born in Bonn, visited Vienna for the first time in 1786 to see Mozart. Even today, however, it is not certain whether he actually met Mozart. Six years later, he returned to Vienna for good after having met with Joseph Haydn in Bonn, who accepted him as a pupil. Because the Rhineland was occupied by the French, Beethoven was forced to stay in Vienna, and after the death of his father, his two brothers also came to Vienna.
Fortunately, 200 years later, one can still discover Beethoven’s traces in Vienna. First of all, we should mention Beethoven’s apartments. He often changed his quarters, 58 apartments are documented, some of which he lived in several times. His death house, the so-called “Schwarzspanierhaus” on Schwarzspanierstraße, however, has not been preserved.
Early years as a piano virtuoso
Beethoven quickly made a name for himself as a piano virtuoso. He played in the salons of his patrons; the Palais Lobkowitz or the Hradec Castle are still witnesses of this time. At the age of thirty his deafness made itself felt, the apartment where he wrote his Heiligstadt Testament can be visited. His performances as a piano virtuoso began to decrease and important orchestral works were written. With the 3rd symphony, the Eroica, Beethoven entered a new era in 1803 and the middle, very productive creative period with countless masterpieces began.
The napoleonic years
The Napoleonic wars and turmoil shook Vienna. Money was no longer so easy for the nobility, and Beethoven was plagued by financial worries. In addition, social contacts became more difficult due to his hearing loss. He no longer traveled, only spa stays in Baden became more frequent due to his physical ailments. There, on long walks in nature, he often found inspiration for his compositions.
The two brothers found their way to Vienna. One became a successful pharmacist, but then left Vienna again. The second brother died at an early age, leaving a nephew over whose custody Beethoven fought a bitter legal battle with his sister-in-law for many years.
Illness and death
Beethoven met and fell in love with women on several occasions. Twice, Beethoven was probably ready to marry, but differences of class stood in the way of marriage. Beethoven’s fame grew. In 1823 and later he crowned his work with the 9th Symphony and the last 3 piano sonatas. In 1827 Beethoven died at the age of 57. The cause of death is still not completely clarified, even modern methods of analysis of his hair do not provide complete clarity; there are more than a dozen different diagnoses.
Johannes Brahms
The 29-year-old Brahms visited Vienna for the first time in 1862, and when he presented his G minor piano quartet at an evening event there, the director of the conservatory and musician Joseph Hellmesberger is said to have already proclaimed Brahms the heir to Beethoven. Although Brahms struggled with these comparisons throughout his life, he felt valued in Vienna, which could not be said of his native Hamburg, where his music met with skepticism and he was passed over for appointments. So he decided to accept an offer as choir master and moved to Vienna.
But Brahms did not stay in office for long and became a freelance artist in the 1870s.
Brahms’ center of life remained Vienna until his death. However, Brahms was often on the road, every year 3-4 months took him to the summer resort and in the winter months he was often on the road as a performer and conductor of his own works.
TO THE COMPLETE BIOGRAPHY OF BRAHMS
Anton Bruckner
He came to live in Vienna as a 44-year-old Organist
Bruckner was 44 years old when he came to Vienna and took up the work of poorly paid or even unpaid jobs at the university and the conservatory. He moved to Währinger Strasse with his sister Anna (“Nani”). The latter died in 1870 and Katharina Kachelmaier became the housekeeper until the end of his life. (siehe pircture below).
At the beginning of his Viennese period, Bruckner was considered a respected church musician and organist, but the storm hit Vienna when he dedicated his 3rd Symphony to his “music god” Richard Wagner. Henceforth, castigated as a “Wagnerian,” he drew the scathing criticism of the influential critic Eduard Hanslick and found himself in the middle of the greatest cultural-historical conflict of the 19th century, the bitter dispute between the “traditionalists” around Brahms and the “new Germans” around Liszt and Wagner. In line with Hanslick, Brahms also often made negative comments about Bruckner’s music, but the latter always remained polite.
One day Bruckner and Brahms even sat together in their favorite pub Roter Igel (the red hedgehog), but no rapprochement took place.Only when ordering food did they notice that they had the same favorite dish, “Geselchtes mit Knödel” (smoked ham with dumplings).
Open hostility in Vienna
With a respectable success of the Fourth Symphony and the breakthrough of the Seventh Symphony (in Munich), Bruckner’s position in the Austrian capital improved, but the Viennese never really warmed to the music and the strange person of Bruckner. His friends (e.g. the conductors Hans Richter and Johann von Herbeck) always remained in the minority.
Bruckner suffered greatly from the many slights. When he was even wrongly suspected of an indecent approach to a female student in the “St. Anna Affair”, it almost broke his heart, he who never came close to a woman. But this did not prevent him from writing 9 marriage proposals in his life. The recipients were all young ladies, who in his opinion were still chaste (in his language “clean”). His last proposal (when he was 70 years old) even became famous. He fell in love with Ida Buhz, a parlor maid at his hotel during a stay in Berlin. An engagement had already been arranged, but at the last moment the devout Catholic learned that the bride-to-be was a Protestant. When Ida refused to convert to Catholicism, Bruckner backed out.
Honors in the last few years
In the last decade of his life, the honors began to pour down on Bruckner, especially Emperor Franz Josef honored him first with audiences and orders, then also with a life pension, and finally Franz Josef provided the composer with a free retirement apartment in the upper Belvedere for life (“the Kustodenstöckl”). The university also fulfilled one of Bruckner’s fervent wishes by awarding him an honorary doctorate. For Bruckner, this was nevertheless little consolation for the many slights he had suffered. In addition, he had serious health problems in his last ten years, which prevented him from savoring the successes and fulfilling his last wish to finish the Ninth Symphony. Bruckner died in 1896 in his Kustodenstöckl of heart trouble. He did not want to be buried in Vienna; he found his honorary grave under his beloved organ in St. Floriansstift.
TO THE COMPLETE BRUCKNER BIOGRAPHY
Gaetano Donizetti
Vienna “the Donizetti-City”
Donizetti was in Vienna several times from the 1830s, sometimes even holding official positions; his school friend Merelli was by now director of the Kärtnertor Theater. Vienna adored the Italian, and Richard Wagner enviously called Vienna “Donizetti City.” In 1842/43, Emperor Ferdinand appointed him “K.k. Kammerkapellmeister und Hofkompositeur” and Donizetti took care of the Italian program at the Kärtnertor Theater for two seasons, including staging the first Viennese Nabucco, at whose premiere in Milan he was present and deeply impressed.
Vienna later honored Donizetti’s work with a large bust in the State Opera House and in 2005 with a commemorative plaque at Wipplingerstrasse 5.
TO THE COMPLETE BIOGRAPHY OF DONIZETTI
Christoph Willibald Gluck
The foundation of the reform opera in Vienna
Gluck came to Vienna at the age of 36. There he married Maria Anna, who was half his age. After many years of traveling around, he had a permanent job, a home and could devote himself to composing. But it was to be another 12 years before he wrote “Orfeo ed Euridice”, the revolutionary work that produced a break with the baroque castrato era and exaggerated ornamentation of song. What exactly the new approach consists of, you will find summarized in the following link if you are interested:
https://opera-inside.com/orfeo-ed-euridice-by-ch-w-gluck-the-opera-guide-and-synopsis/
This so-called reform opera was not at all euphorically received by the Viennese at the beginning, but acceptance increased and with the follow-up work “Alceste” the already 50-year-old was able to establish himself as Europe’s musician of future. His new style revolutionized the opera seria, and Gluck became a beacon for all subsequent composers, Mozart included. In 1756 he received a knighthood from the Pope and henceforth called himself Knight of Gluck.
The relationsship with Maria Antonia, the later Marie Antoinette
A special feature of the Viennese years was that Gluck became the music teacher of Maria Antonia, the daughter of Emperor Franz I and Maria Theresa. Maria Antonia was not an easy person, but found her only joy in music and dance. Due to the marriage policy of the Habsburgs, she was married to the French Dauphin in 1770 at the age of 14, and four years later became Queen of France alongside Louis XVI as Marie Antoinette. One of her first official acts was to bring Gluck to Paris as a reformer of music.
Joseph Haydn
He came to Vienna as a boy
Haydn spent his youth and his old age in Vienna. He came to Vienna in 1740, already at the age of 8 (without parents), after being “discovered” by the musical director of St. Stephen’s Cathedral in his home in the rural area, who was looking for singers for chapel choir. There he was taught to sing and play the violin and sang soprano in the choir for almost 10 years. When he turned 17, the empress, hearing him sing a solo piece, complained that he sang like a crow, and Haydn was dismissed because of the onset of vocal break. He was left penniless on the street, with no help from his poor parents. Haydn made his way through life with odd jobs for many years (assignments as a musician, teaching, servant work, etc.) and lived for years in a poor apartment on Kohlmarkt. He continued his musical education autodidactically (especially with works by C.Ph.E. Bach), since he had only received a basic knowledge as a singer. After eight years his luck finally turned around and he got his first job in Pilsen, leaving Vienna for the next almost 40 years (if you don’t count the regular visits).
Back in Vienna after 40 years as a famous musician
With his two London visits, Haydn became rich at an advanced age, which allowed him to buy a stately house in Vienna-Gumperndorf, where he lived from 1795 until his death in 1809. He died of old age during the turmoil of the Napoleonic battles for Vienna and was first buried in Hundsturm Cemetery in Vienna (a tombstone still stands today) and later moved to the Bergkirche in Eisenstadt.
Haydn monumnent Mariahilfstrasse 55:
Erich Maria Korngold
The Wunderkind years
When Korngold’s ballet “der Schnemann” was performed at the Vienna State Opera (then the Court Opera) in 1910, he was probably the youngest composer to do so, at the age of 13. Korngold, who was born in 1897 in Brno in the Austrian Empire, was often described as the greatest musical child prodigy ever, greater even than Mozart. Even as a child, his compositions had the quality of a mature composer. He was encouraged but also protected by his father, the respected (and sharp-tongued) Viennese music critic Julius Korngold. At the age of 19, Erich wrote “der Ring des Polykrates,” his first one-act opera, which delighted audiences.
His began his greatest work when he was 20-years old
He began composing “The Dead City” at the age of 19, but the First World War put a stop to the plans. “Die tote Stadt” then became his greatest success and audiences clamored for seats. In Hamburg, the work was given 26 times in the first season alone. Shortly thereafter, the work was also staged in Vienna, New York, Prague and Zurich and became a perennial hit for 10 years. This phase was abruptly halted by the Nazi seizure of power, when the works of Jewish composers were banned from performance. Korngold then emigrated to the United States, where he died in the 1950s.
His most famous piece is probably “Glück, das mir verblieb” from “Dead City,” which shines in the purest Korngold style. Already at the beginning the orchestra glitters, with glockenspiel, celesta and harp, a typical late romantic coloration. The bells of the celesta conjure a romantic, almost childlike naive mood.
Glück, das mir verblieb:
https://opera-inside.com/the-dead-city-by-erich-korngold-the-opera-guide-and-synopsis/#Gl%C3%BCck
Gustav Mahler
Director of the Vienna State Opera
When Mahler came to the State Opera as court opera director in 1897, it was customary for opera singers to stand at the ramp and sing with pathetic arm movements in front of painted backdrops. Mahler, who was steeped in Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk of theatrical art, stage design, literature and music, set about fundamentally reforming the art of opera scenically.
As opera director and first Kapellmeister in personal union, he decided to take the liberty of simultaneously directing as musical director. This reform work, which was decisively strengthened in 1903 with the appointment of the stage designer Alfred Roller, brought the Court Opera to the artistic top, but also earned Mahler many enemies. The latter was probably due even more to the rampant anti-Semitism.
Antisemitism
Mahler fought against the conservatism of the Viennese authorities. When Strauss premiered his Salome in Dresden, Mahler wanted to bring the opera to Vienna, but the censorship authorities refused to allow a performance of the scandalous opera. For more than ten years, the Viennese quarelled with the Jew (who was baptised earlier in Hamburg), until Mahler, exhausted by his duties and the many concert tours, left the court opera for New York.
Mahler remained in the United States for three years, with interruptions, and returned to Vienna in 1911, terminally ill, where he died in the same year.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
The prodigy metts the emperor and the emperess
Mozart visited Vienna for the first time when he was six years old, on the occasion of his visit to Empress Maria Theresa and her husband Franz Joseph.
Triumph and tragedy in Vienna
Later, Mozart spent 10 years in the Danube metropolis with interruptions. He arrived there in 1781 from Salzburg. His fate was changeable, the middle period was the happiest with artistic success and marriage to Konstanze, the last period was marked by personal crises (child deaths, illness) and economic depression, with the death of the art-loving Joseph II his fate had turned.
He wrote a considerable part of his works in his Viennese period and made music in and composed for various theaters. On December 5, 1791, shortly after midnight, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died in the “Kleines Kaiserhaus” in Rauhensteingasse in Vienna.
TO THE COMPLETE MOZART BIOGRAPHY
Gioachino Rossini
The Rossini Frenzy in Vienna
Rossini visited Vienna in 1822 and triggered a huge “Rossini frenzy” in the imperial city. Schubert wrote two overtures and even Beethoven composed a small canon in honor of the Italian. Within a few weeks, 8 different operas by Rossini were given in about 60 performances, mainly in the Theater am Kärtnertor, whose director had shortly before been nominated the Italian Barbaja, Rossini’s impresario in Naples. The Kärtnertortheater has not existed since 1870.
During this visit of Rossini to Vienna, there was also the legendary meeting with Beethoven (see below).
TO THE FULL ROSSINI BIOGRAPHY
Franz Schubert
Childhood years in poverty
Schubert spent most of his short life in Vienna. His adult life was marked by the composition of music (it is estimated that he composed 30,000 hours), complete destitution (publishers and concert promoters largely spurned his works), socializing with Schubertiads and visits to inns, and his terrible syphilis disease.
Franz was the thirteenth of his father’s 20 children, was very musical, had a beautiful voice, and for this reason was accepted in 1808 as a choirboy at the Hofmusikkapelle (court chapel) and in the imperial convict at St. Stephen’s Cathedral.
After attending the Court Music Chapel and briefly training as a teacher, Schubert took up his position as his father’s school assistant in 1814. Schubert was unhappy because he lacked time for composing, and in 1816 he applied in vain for a musician’s position in Ljubljana. Also, all publishers rejected submissions of his compositions. His friend Franz von Schober offered Schubert to live with his family (then at Landskrongasse 5) and so the penniless Schubert decided to give up the job and devote himself fully to life as a composer.
Schubtertiades
Schubert stayed several times with his friend Franz von Schober, the poet and actor of the same age. In 1821 the first Schubertiade, evenings to promote Schubert’s music, took place in the apartment on Spiegelgasse. Schubert sat at the piano and his most authoritative interpreter of his songs, Johann Michael Vogl sang along. These Schubertiades became an important literary-musical salon and were often held in Sonnleithner’s house (Haus am Bauernmarkt was demolished). Important works by Schubert, such as Erlkönig, were heard for the first time at the Schubertiades.
Illness and early death
After the diagnosis of syphilis, Schubert began to drink more and more. Night-long visits to inns were not uncommon, Schubert became more corpulent, and attacks of syphilis caused him more and more trouble. Schubert was never inhibited in his joy of composition by the many defeats, even in his darkest hours when he lay in hospital in 1823, in a room with 90 rash patients with open wounds, he composed on the “schöne Müllerin”.
The last months before his death, Schubert lived in the apartment of his brother Ferdinand. This was somewhat outside of Vienna, the doctors recommended that he stay outside of the city because of the better air. Schubert’s cause of death was not syphilis, but it is assumed that he died of the rampant typhoid fever (due to the typical phantasizing (“nervous fever”) which became noticeable earlier).
Johan Strauss (Son)
The waltz king
Johann Strauss’s father was Vienna’s first waltz king, battling his rival Lanner’s band for waltz supremacy. When Lanner suddenly died, Strauss’ wife urged her son to take Lanner’s place and compete with his father. The reason was vindictiveness, since Strauss’ father by now had as many children with his mistress as with his wife. The rest is history, Johann made his successful debut as a 19 year old at the Dommayer and over the next 30 years became the waltz king with his band. He was greatly assisted by his brothers Eduard and Joseph. Strauss’s life was marked by music making, composing, womanizing, Entrepreneurship, a lot of work and changing places of residence.
Strauss also became famous in the second part of his career for operettas, to which he initially turned only out of economic necessity.
Richard Strauss
Along with Dresden, Vienna was Strauss’s most important artistic station, two of his operas were premiered (“Ariande” and the 2nd Version of “Frau ohne Schatten”) in the State Opera.
He held the office of State Opera Director for five years (1919-1924) and Hoffmansthal, his most important librettist was Viennese.
In addition, many of his Viennese operas were performed in Viennese settings (e.g. “Rosenkavalier” and “Arabella”). In 1924 the city of Vienna awarded him the honorary citizenship.
Strauss and Schalk, the co-directors of the State Opera:
TO THE FULL BIOGRAPHY OF RICHARD STRAUSS
Richard Wagner
Richard Wagner was a frequent visitor to Vienna. Already at the age of 19 his first long journey took him to the city on the Danube. Later his opera performances often took him to the Viennese venues, where he celebrated great triumphs (Lohengrin and Tannhäuser) but also experienced one of his greatest ignominies (Tristan):
Wagner hoped to solve his money problems with the performances of the just finished “Tristan”. But one theater after another refused to stage it. The last hope of the heavily indebted Wagner was Vienna. But after many months, 77 rehearsals and further bill debts, the end came: the work was unperformable, the singers hopelessly overtaxed, was the verdict of those involved. Without the income from a performance, he was threatened with prison because of his debts. Before he was thrown into the Vienna debtors’ prison to force payments to his creditors, he fled the city (allegedly in drag), which, next to the Tannhäuser fiasco in Paris, was Wagner’s greatest life ignominy and led to his greatest life crisis. After his departure, he wrote to a Viennese friend: “A good, truly helpful miracle must come my way now, otherwise it’s all over!” The miracle did indeed occur in the form of Ludwig II.
In addition, his most bitter critic, Eduard Hanslick, was Viennese and from there made his life difficult with his sharp pen. Wagner took his revenge with the famous Viennese reading of the “Meistersinger von Nürnberg” (see section “works with a reference to Vienna” further below).
LINK TO THE COMPLETE WAGNER BIOGRAPHY
WORKS WITH A RELATION TO VIENNA
Ludwig van Beethoven
Beethoven, who was born in Bonn, visited Vienna for the first time in 1786 to see Mozart. Even today, however, it is not certain whether he actually met Mozart. Six years later, he returned to Vienna for good after having met with Joseph Haydn in Bonn, who accepted him as a pupil. Because the Rhineland was occupied by the French, Beethoven was forced to stay in Vienna, and after the death of his father, his two brothers also came to Vienna.
Fortunately, 200 years later, one can still discover Beethoven’s traces in Vienna. First of all, we should mention Beethoven’s apartments. He often changed his quarters, 58 apartments are documented, some of which he lived in several times. His death house, the so-called “Schwarzspanierhaus” on Schwarzspanierstraße, however, has not been preserved.
Early years as a piano virtuoso
Beethoven quickly made a name for himself as a piano virtuoso. He played in the salons of his patrons; the Palais Lobkowitz or the Hradec Castle are still witnesses of this time. At the age of thirty his deafness made itself felt, the apartment where he wrote his Heiligstadt Testament can be visited. His performances as a piano virtuoso began to decrease and important orchestral works were written. With the 3rd symphony, the Eroica, Beethoven entered a new era in 1803 and the middle, very productive creative period with countless masterpieces began.
The napoleonic years
The Napoleonic wars and turmoil shook Vienna. Money was no longer so easy for the nobility, and Beethoven was plagued by financial worries. In addition, social contacts became more difficult due to his hearing loss. He no longer traveled, only spa stays in Baden became more frequent due to his physical ailments. There, on long walks in nature, he often found inspiration for his compositions.
The two brothers found their way to Vienna. One became a successful pharmacist, but then left Vienna again. The second brother died at an early age, leaving a nephew over whose custody Beethoven fought a bitter legal battle with his sister-in-law for many years.
Illness and death
Beethoven met and fell in love with women on several occasions. Twice, Beethoven was probably ready to marry, but differences of class stood in the way of marriage. Beethoven’s fame grew. In 1823 and later he crowned his work with the 9th Symphony and the last 3 piano sonatas. In 1827 Beethoven died at the age of 57. The cause of death is still not completely clarified, even modern methods of analysis of his hair do not provide complete clarity; there are more than a dozen different diagnoses.
Johannes Brahms
The 29-year-old Brahms visited Vienna for the first time in 1862, and when he presented his G minor piano quartet at an evening event there, the director of the conservatory and musician Joseph Hellmesberger is said to have already proclaimed Brahms the heir to Beethoven. Although Brahms struggled with these comparisons throughout his life, he felt valued in Vienna, which could not be said of his native Hamburg, where his music met with skepticism and he was passed over for appointments. So he decided to accept an offer as choir master and moved to Vienna.
But Brahms did not stay in office for long and became a freelance artist in the 1870s.
Brahms’ center of life remained Vienna until his death. However, Brahms was often on the road, every year 3-4 months took him to the summer resort and in the winter months he was often on the road as a performer and conductor of his own works.
TO THE COMPLETE BIOGRAPHY OF BRAHMS
Anton Bruckner
He came to live in Vienna as a 44-year-old Organist
Bruckner was 44 years old when he came to Vienna and took up the work of poorly paid or even unpaid jobs at the university and the conservatory. He moved to Währinger Strasse with his sister Anna (“Nani”). The latter died in 1870 and Katharina Kachelmaier became the housekeeper until the end of his life. (siehe pircture below).
At the beginning of his Viennese period, Bruckner was considered a respected church musician and organist, but the storm hit Vienna when he dedicated his 3rd Symphony to his “music god” Richard Wagner. Henceforth, castigated as a “Wagnerian,” he drew the scathing criticism of the influential critic Eduard Hanslick and found himself in the middle of the greatest cultural-historical conflict of the 19th century, the bitter dispute between the “traditionalists” around Brahms and the “new Germans” around Liszt and Wagner. In line with Hanslick, Brahms also often made negative comments about Bruckner’s music, but the latter always remained polite.
One day Bruckner and Brahms even sat together in their favorite pub Roter Igel (the red hedgehog), but no rapprochement took place.Only when ordering food did they notice that they had the same favorite dish, “Geselchtes mit Knödel” (smoked ham with dumplings).
Open hostility in Vienna
With a respectable success of the Fourth Symphony and the breakthrough of the Seventh Symphony (in Munich), Bruckner’s position in the Austrian capital improved, but the Viennese never really warmed to the music and the strange person of Bruckner. His friends (e.g. the conductors Hans Richter and Johann von Herbeck) always remained in the minority.
Bruckner suffered greatly from the many slights. When he was even wrongly suspected of an indecent approach to a female student in the “St. Anna Affair”, it almost broke his heart, he who never came close to a woman. But this did not prevent him from writing 9 marriage proposals in his life. The recipients were all young ladies, who in his opinion were still chaste (in his language “clean”). His last proposal (when he was 70 years old) even became famous. He fell in love with Ida Buhz, a parlor maid at his hotel during a stay in Berlin. An engagement had already been arranged, but at the last moment the devout Catholic learned that the bride-to-be was a Protestant. When Ida refused to convert to Catholicism, Bruckner backed out.
Honors in the last few years
In the last decade of his life, the honors began to pour down on Bruckner, especially Emperor Franz Josef honored him first with audiences and orders, then also with a life pension, and finally Franz Josef provided the composer with a free retirement apartment in the upper Belvedere for life (“the Kustodenstöckl”). The university also fulfilled one of Bruckner’s fervent wishes by awarding him an honorary doctorate. For Bruckner, this was nevertheless little consolation for the many slights he had suffered. In addition, he had serious health problems in his last ten years, which prevented him from savoring the successes and fulfilling his last wish to finish the Ninth Symphony. Bruckner died in 1896 in his Kustodenstöckl of heart trouble. He did not want to be buried in Vienna; he found his honorary grave under his beloved organ in St. Floriansstift.
TO THE COMPLETE BRUCKNER BIOGRAPHY
Gaetano Donizetti
Vienna “the Donizetti-City”
Donizetti was in Vienna several times from the 1830s, sometimes even holding official positions; his school friend Merelli was by now director of the Kärtnertor Theater. Vienna adored the Italian, and Richard Wagner enviously called Vienna “Donizetti City.” In 1842/43, Emperor Ferdinand appointed him “K.k. Kammerkapellmeister und Hofkompositeur” and Donizetti took care of the Italian program at the Kärtnertor Theater for two seasons, including staging the first Viennese Nabucco, at whose premiere in Milan he was present and deeply impressed.
Vienna later honored Donizetti’s work with a large bust in the State Opera House and in 2005 with a commemorative plaque at Wipplingerstrasse 5.
TO THE COMPLETE BIOGRAPHY OF DONIZETTI
Christoph Willibald Gluck
The foundation of the reform opera in Vienna
Gluck came to Vienna at the age of 36. There he married Maria Anna, who was half his age. After many years of traveling around, he had a permanent job, a home and could devote himself to composing. But it was to be another 12 years before he wrote “Orfeo ed Euridice”, the revolutionary work that produced a break with the baroque castrato era and exaggerated ornamentation of song. What exactly the new approach consists of, you will find summarized in the following link if you are interested:
https://opera-inside.com/orfeo-ed-euridice-by-ch-w-gluck-the-opera-guide-and-synopsis/
This so-called reform opera was not at all euphorically received by the Viennese at the beginning, but acceptance increased and with the follow-up work “Alceste” the already 50-year-old was able to establish himself as Europe’s musician of future. His new style revolutionized the opera seria, and Gluck became a beacon for all subsequent composers, Mozart included. In 1756 he received a knighthood from the Pope and henceforth called himself Knight of Gluck.
The relationsship with Maria Antonia, the later Marie Antoinette
A special feature of the Viennese years was that Gluck became the music teacher of Maria Antonia, the daughter of Emperor Franz I and Maria Theresa. Maria Antonia was not an easy person, but found her only joy in music and dance. Due to the marriage policy of the Habsburgs, she was married to the French Dauphin in 1770 at the age of 14, and four years later became Queen of France alongside Louis XVI as Marie Antoinette. One of her first official acts was to bring Gluck to Paris as a reformer of music.
Joseph Haydn
He came to Vienna as a boy
Haydn spent his youth and his old age in Vienna. He came to Vienna in 1740, already at the age of 8 (without parents), after being “discovered” by the musical director of St. Stephen’s Cathedral in his home in the rural area, who was looking for singers for chapel choir. There he was taught to sing and play the violin and sang soprano in the choir for almost 10 years. When he turned 17, the empress, hearing him sing a solo piece, complained that he sang like a crow, and Haydn was dismissed because of the onset of vocal break. He was left penniless on the street, with no help from his poor parents. Haydn made his way through life with odd jobs for many years (assignments as a musician, teaching, servant work, etc.) and lived for years in a poor apartment on Kohlmarkt. He continued his musical education autodidactically (especially with works by C.Ph.E. Bach), since he had only received a basic knowledge as a singer. After eight years his luck finally turned around and he got his first job in Pilsen, leaving Vienna for the next almost 40 years (if you don’t count the regular visits).
Back in Vienna after 40 years as a famous musician
With his two London visits, Haydn became rich at an advanced age, which allowed him to buy a stately house in Vienna-Gumperndorf, where he lived from 1795 until his death in 1809. He died of old age during the turmoil of the Napoleonic battles for Vienna and was first buried in Hundsturm Cemetery in Vienna (a tombstone still stands today) and later moved to the Bergkirche in Eisenstadt.
Haydn monumnent Mariahilfstrasse 55:
Erich Maria Korngold
The Wunderkind years
When Korngold’s ballet “der Schnemann” was performed at the Vienna State Opera (then the Court Opera) in 1910, he was probably the youngest composer to do so, at the age of 13. Korngold, who was born in 1897 in Brno in the Austrian Empire, was often described as the greatest musical child prodigy ever, greater even than Mozart. Even as a child, his compositions had the quality of a mature composer. He was encouraged but also protected by his father, the respected (and sharp-tongued) Viennese music critic Julius Korngold. At the age of 19, Erich wrote “der Ring des Polykrates,” his first one-act opera, which delighted audiences.
His began his greatest work when he was 20-years old
He began composing “The Dead City” at the age of 19, but the First World War put a stop to the plans. “Die tote Stadt” then became his greatest success and audiences clamored for seats. In Hamburg, the work was given 26 times in the first season alone. Shortly thereafter, the work was also staged in Vienna, New York, Prague and Zurich and became a perennial hit for 10 years. This phase was abruptly halted by the Nazi seizure of power, when the works of Jewish composers were banned from performance. Korngold then emigrated to the United States, where he died in the 1950s.
His most famous piece is probably “Glück, das mir verblieb” from “Dead City,” which shines in the purest Korngold style. Already at the beginning the orchestra glitters, with glockenspiel, celesta and harp, a typical late romantic coloration. The bells of the celesta conjure a romantic, almost childlike naive mood.
Glück, das mir verblieb:
https://opera-inside.com/the-dead-city-by-erich-korngold-the-opera-guide-and-synopsis/#Gl%C3%BCck
Gustav Mahler
Director of the Vienna State Opera
When Mahler came to the State Opera as court opera director in 1897, it was customary for opera singers to stand at the ramp and sing with pathetic arm movements in front of painted backdrops. Mahler, who was steeped in Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk of theatrical art, stage design, literature and music, set about fundamentally reforming the art of opera scenically.
As opera director and first Kapellmeister in personal union, he decided to take the liberty of simultaneously directing as musical director. This reform work, which was decisively strengthened in 1903 with the appointment of the stage designer Alfred Roller, brought the Court Opera to the artistic top, but also earned Mahler many enemies. The latter was probably due even more to the rampant anti-Semitism.
Antisemitism
Mahler fought against the conservatism of the Viennese authorities. When Strauss premiered his Salome in Dresden, Mahler wanted to bring the opera to Vienna, but the censorship authorities refused to allow a performance of the scandalous opera. For more than ten years, the Viennese quarelled with the Jew (who was baptised earlier in Hamburg), until Mahler, exhausted by his duties and the many concert tours, left the court opera for New York.
Mahler remained in the United States for three years, with interruptions, and returned to Vienna in 1911, terminally ill, where he died in the same year.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
The prodigy metts the emperor and the emperess
Mozart visited Vienna for the first time when he was six years old, on the occasion of his visit to Empress Maria Theresa and her husband Franz Joseph.
Triumph and tragedy in Vienna
Later, Mozart spent 10 years in the Danube metropolis with interruptions. He arrived there in 1781 from Salzburg. His fate was changeable, the middle period was the happiest with artistic success and marriage to Konstanze, the last period was marked by personal crises (child deaths, illness) and economic depression, with the death of the art-loving Joseph II his fate had turned.
He wrote a considerable part of his works in his Viennese period and made music in and composed for various theaters. On December 5, 1791, shortly after midnight, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died in the “Kleines Kaiserhaus” in Rauhensteingasse in Vienna.
TO THE COMPLETE MOZART BIOGRAPHY
Gioachino Rossini
The Rossini Frenzy in Vienna
Rossini visited Vienna in 1822 and triggered a huge “Rossini frenzy” in the imperial city. Schubert wrote two overtures and even Beethoven composed a small canon in honor of the Italian. Within a few weeks, 8 different operas by Rossini were given in about 60 performances, mainly in the Theater am Kärtnertor, whose director had shortly before been nominated the Italian Barbaja, Rossini’s impresario in Naples. The Kärtnertortheater has not existed since 1870.
During this visit of Rossini to Vienna, there was also the legendary meeting with Beethoven (see below).
TO THE FULL ROSSINI BIOGRAPHY
Franz Schubert
Childhood years in poverty
Schubert spent most of his short life in Vienna. His adult life was marked by the composition of music (it is estimated that he composed 30,000 hours), complete destitution (publishers and concert promoters largely spurned his works), socializing with Schubertiads and visits to inns, and his terrible syphilis disease.
Franz was the thirteenth of his father’s 20 children, was very musical, had a beautiful voice, and for this reason was accepted in 1808 as a choirboy at the Hofmusikkapelle (court chapel) and in the imperial convict at St. Stephen’s Cathedral.
After attending the Court Music Chapel and briefly training as a teacher, Schubert took up his position as his father’s school assistant in 1814. Schubert was unhappy because he lacked time for composing, and in 1816 he applied in vain for a musician’s position in Ljubljana. Also, all publishers rejected submissions of his compositions. His friend Franz von Schober offered Schubert to live with his family (then at Landskrongasse 5) and so the penniless Schubert decided to give up the job and devote himself fully to life as a composer.
Schubtertiades
Schubert stayed several times with his friend Franz von Schober, the poet and actor of the same age. In 1821 the first Schubertiade, evenings to promote Schubert’s music, took place in the apartment on Spiegelgasse. Schubert sat at the piano and his most authoritative interpreter of his songs, Johann Michael Vogl sang along. These Schubertiades became an important literary-musical salon and were often held in Sonnleithner’s house (Haus am Bauernmarkt was demolished). Important works by Schubert, such as Erlkönig, were heard for the first time at the Schubertiades.
Illness and early death
After the diagnosis of syphilis, Schubert began to drink more and more. Night-long visits to inns were not uncommon, Schubert became more corpulent, and attacks of syphilis caused him more and more trouble. Schubert was never inhibited in his joy of composition by the many defeats, even in his darkest hours when he lay in hospital in 1823, in a room with 90 rash patients with open wounds, he composed on the “schöne Müllerin”.
The last months before his death, Schubert lived in the apartment of his brother Ferdinand. This was somewhat outside of Vienna, the doctors recommended that he stay outside of the city because of the better air. Schubert’s cause of death was not syphilis, but it is assumed that he died of the rampant typhoid fever (due to the typical phantasizing (“nervous fever”) which became noticeable earlier).
Johan Strauss (Son)
The waltz king
Johann Strauss’s father was Vienna’s first waltz king, battling his rival Lanner’s band for waltz supremacy. When Lanner suddenly died, Strauss’ wife urged her son to take Lanner’s place and compete with his father. The reason was vindictiveness, since Strauss’ father by now had as many children with his mistress as with his wife. The rest is history, Johann made his successful debut as a 19 year old at the Dommayer and over the next 30 years became the waltz king with his band. He was greatly assisted by his brothers Eduard and Joseph. Strauss’s life was marked by music making, composing, womanizing, Entrepreneurship, a lot of work and changing places of residence.
Strauss also became famous in the second part of his career for operettas, to which he initially turned only out of economic necessity.
Richard Strauss
Along with Dresden, Vienna was Strauss’s most important artistic station, two of his operas were premiered (“Ariande” and the 2nd Version of “Frau ohne Schatten”) in the State Opera.
He held the office of State Opera Director for five years (1919-1924) and Hoffmansthal, his most important librettist was Viennese.
In addition, many of his Viennese operas were performed in Viennese settings (e.g. “Rosenkavalier” and “Arabella”). In 1924 the city of Vienna awarded him the honorary citizenship.
Strauss and Schalk, the co-directors of the State Opera:
TO THE FULL BIOGRAPHY OF RICHARD STRAUSS
Richard Wagner
Richard Wagner was a frequent visitor to Vienna. Already at the age of 19 his first long journey took him to the city on the Danube. Later his opera performances often took him to the Viennese venues, where he celebrated great triumphs (Lohengrin and Tannhäuser) but also experienced one of his greatest ignominies (Tristan):
Wagner hoped to solve his money problems with the performances of the just finished “Tristan”. But one theater after another refused to stage it. The last hope of the heavily indebted Wagner was Vienna. But after many months, 77 rehearsals and further bill debts, the end came: the work was unperformable, the singers hopelessly overtaxed, was the verdict of those involved. Without the income from a performance, he was threatened with prison because of his debts. Before he was thrown into the Vienna debtors’ prison to force payments to his creditors, he fled the city (allegedly in drag), which, next to the Tannhäuser fiasco in Paris, was Wagner’s greatest life ignominy and led to his greatest life crisis. After his departure, he wrote to a Viennese friend: “A good, truly helpful miracle must come my way now, otherwise it’s all over!” The miracle did indeed occur in the form of Ludwig II.
In addition, his most bitter critic, Eduard Hanslick, was Viennese and from there made his life difficult with his sharp pen. Wagner took his revenge with the famous Viennese reading of the “Meistersinger von Nürnberg” (see section “works with a reference to Vienna” further below).
LINK TO THE COMPLETE WAGNER BIOGRAPHY
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