Habsburg Ethnographic Material in Viennese Musical Life: Imperial Dimensions of Popular Music and Classical Style

• In Event: Habsburg-Pop: Musical Markets and Multiculturalism in the Late Habsburg Empire

Abstract

This paper will consider the use of folk ethnographical materials in Habsburg classical music, beginning with Haydn and the use of Hungarian and Roma material, thus considering how popular idioms were integrated into the newly refined elite "classical style." The dimensions of high and low will be considered alongside the political framework of the imperial and the provincial within the Habsburg monarchy, with Vienna, as the metropolitan capital, considered as the focal point of musical appropriation and integration. The paper will consider Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, that is, the "Vienna School" which created classical style, but will continue to discuss Brahms in the later nineteenth-century and the use of ethnographic material in late-Habsburg operetta.

Author

• Larry Wolff, New York U