Concert Life in Vienna 1780–1830. Performances, Venues, and Repertoires

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Viennese concert life around 1800 witnessed one of the most pulsating epochs in music history, with a major part of today’s classical concert repertory originally intended for and first performed there between 1780 and 1830. This stands in stark contrast to our fairly imprecise knowledge of performances during this period: we have, in fact, very little information on who performed which repertoire at which venue with how many performers. The proposed project intends to fill this research gap with a comprehensive assessment of new sources covering the peculiar (i.e. often shifting between ‘public’ and ‘private’) character of musical performances of this epoch, with an architectural and acoustical analysis of the concert venues as material witnesses involved, and by setting up a database, meant to serve as a central hub for international research on concert life in Vienna. Source studies will include extensive private documents of mostly Viennese citizens and nobility as well as the family archives of important patrons such as the Deym or the Schwarzenberg family and administrative material not utilized so far. This newly collected data will open up an array of possibilities for fresh assessments of old research questions, especially the (changing) role of nobility for music performances in Vienna, the popularity of various repertoires and the interdependence of room acoustics and compositions or performances. A particular focus will be placed on the estimated 50 performance venues of this era, to be analysed with regard to architecture, the arrangement of musicians and audiences, and their room-acoustical conditions. The team will reconstruct the historical conditions for each of these rooms, using 3D models and developing a concept for the ‘estimation of uncertainty’ for numerical simulations related to historical research. The theoretical frame outlined in recent work of the applicant, describing a fundamental change in the relationship between music and acoustics at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, will be further elaborated by analyzing all utterances made in the analyzed sources on the character and suitability of spaces for musical performance. The database developed and hosted in cooperation with the SLUB Dresden will form a central platform for diverse fields of interest such as biographical research, historical music sociology, as well as reception studies on composers, performers and musical works. In the innovative combination of historical, architectural and acoustic dimensions the project will pave the way for a new approach to the investigation and documentation of concert history. Carried out by two teams in Vienna and Berlin with respective backgrounds in historical and systematic musicology, the project promises to deepen our knowledge of music in this important era with two complementary methodologies in a way that is both original from a scholarly standpoint and technologically cutting edge.