AMADEUS and Vienna

This trend continued throughout the 19^th Century, with great composers from all over Europe coming to live in Vienna. These included Johannes Brahms, Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, Hugo Wolf, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner, Luigi Boccherini, Muzio Clementi, Antonio Salieri, Johann Stamitz, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Christoph Willibald Gluck, as well as Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Luigi Cherubini, and Carl Maria von Weber.

Vienna is steeped in musical history

On a stroll through the city of Vienna, a visitor will discover numerous plaques on the walls of houses and gateways, commemorating of famous musicians and composers, artists and poets, singers and writers who worked and composed in Vienna, using the unique spirit of the city as their artistic inspiration.

It was Vienna’s lightness and friendliness that gave classical music a sunnier, clearer texture than that of its baroque predecessor. It became less complex, mainly homophonic, putting melody above chordal accompaniment. In First Viennese School, the contrast within a piece became more pronounced, and melodies were shorter than those of baroque music, with clear-cut phrases and clearly marked cadences. The variety of keys, melodies, rhythms and dynamics along with frequent changes of mood and timbre created a lightness, even a ‘swing’, marking a distinct change in style and capturing popular imagination.

Inspiring composers for hundreds of years

To attract bigger audiences, orchestras increased in size and range; the harpsichord continuo fell out of use, and the woodwind instruments became a self-contained section. As a solo instrument, the harpsichord was replaced by the piano (or fortepiano). Prominence was mainly given to instrumental music. Over the course of the classical period, symphonies and concertos developed and were presented independently of vocal music. The ‘normal’ ensemble, a body of strings supplemented by wind instruments and movements of particular rhythmic character was established by the late 1750s in Vienna.

The first great master of the style was the composer Joseph Haydn. While some suggest that he was overshadowed by Mozart and Beethoven, it would be difficult to overstate Haydn’s centrality to the new style, and therefore to the future of Western art music as a whole. He took existing ideas and radically altered how they functioned– earning him the titles ‘Father of the Symphony’ and ‘Father of the String Quartet’.

But it was the arrival of the world’s most famous classical composer that really put Vienna on the map. In 1781, at just 25 years old, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart made Vienna his home, bringing unprecedented acceleration to the development of the classical style. Mozart absorbed the fusion of Italianate brilliance and Germanic cohesiveness, which had been brewing for the previous 20 years. His rhythmically-complex melodies and figures, long cantilena phrases and virtuoso flourishes merged with his appreciation of formal coherence and internal connectedness. Over a decade, Mozart composed his most famous operas and six late symphonies, which redefined the genre. He also produced a string of piano concerti, which still stand at the very pinnacle of these forms.

Wolfgang AMADEUS Mozart’s unbound brilliance

Driving this momentum was the stirring of romanticism in the arts; a short period where emotionalism was a stylistic preference. Haydn, accordingly, opted for dramatic contrast and emotionally-appealing melodies with sharpened character and individuality. Although this period faded away in music and literature, it had a lasting influence and eventually became a component of aesthetic tastes in later decades.

The most prominent candidate of this new generation was Ludwig van Beethoven, who launched his numbered works in 1794 with a set of three piano trios. The force of these shifts towards a new aesthetic direction became apparent with Beethoven’s 3^rd Symphony, Eroica. In length, ambition and harmonic resources, it was pronounced in its use of every classical style.

The shift towards a romantic style continued with the use of an ever- broader variety of instruments, an increasing number of concert societies, and the unstoppable domination of the piano, creating a huge audience for sophisticated music. It is not clear exactly where one phase ended and another began: taken alone, sections of Mozart’s work are indistinguishable in harmony and orchestration from music written 80 years later, and composers continue to write in normative classical styles into the 20^thcentury. Franz Liszt and Frédéric Chopin visited Vienna and were very heavily influenced by its music.

Renewed interest in the formal balance and restraint of 18^th century classical music led in the early 20^th century to the development of the so-called ‘neoclassical style’. Igor Fjodorowitsch Stravinsky and Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev were among its proponents, at least at certain points in their careers.

The ‘Second Viennese School’ (German: Zweite Wiener Schule or Neue Wiener Schule) is a group of composers that comprised Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) and his close associates in early 20^th century Vienna. Their music was initially characterised by late romantic expanded tonality and, later, following Schoenberg’s own evolution, a totally chromatic expressionism without firm tonal centre (referred to as atonality), evolved in Schoenberg’s serial twelve-tone technique. Schoenberg’s library documents his heritage, music manuscripts, text manuscripts and historical photos; it was first held in the Arnold Schoenberg Institute at the University of Southern California, where he spent his later years after having fled from the Nazis in Europe. In 1998 these materials were transferred to Vienna’s Arnold Schoenberg Centre, where they can accessed by archive users.

The immortal Johann Strauss, the “King Waltz”

A brief stroll through Vienna’s musical history would be incomplete without mentioning one of its most famous sons, Johann Strauss Jr. (1825-1899), the ‘King of the Waltz’ and the most significant composer of operettas in the German language. His first operetta was Indigo und die vierzig Räuber (1871). His third operetta, Die Fledermaus (1874), became the most performed operetta in the world, and remains his most popular stage work. In all, Strauss wrote 16 operettas and one opera, most of them with great success when first premiered. His operettas, waltzes, polkas, and marches often have a strongly Viennese style, and his popularity prompts many to think of him as the national composer of Austria. When his stage works were first performed, the Theater an der Wien consistently drew large crowds and the audience would noisily demand an encore.

The Viennese tradition was carried on by Franz Lehár, Oscar Straus, Carl Zeller, Karl Millöcker, Leo Fall, Richard Heuberger, Edmund Eysler, Ralph Benatzky, Robert Stolz, Emmerich Kálmán and Nico Dostal in the 20^thcentury and…

… is waiting to be revitalised by students of AMADEUS Music Academy in the years to come.