ABSTRACT
The Center of Europe as Musical Marketplace St. Stephen’s Square in Vienna and Potsdamer Place in Berlin: both are viable candidates for the center of Central Europe. So, too, might be St. Wenceslas Square in Prague or Déak Square in Budapest. Each lies at the center of a capital city in a nation that has employed, in the past and more recently since the Velvet Revolutions of 1989, the “rhetoric of Central Europe.” In this chapter we investigate this rhetoric as a political and cultural discourse of claiming authority at the center of Europe. The fact that all four capital cities use the rhetoric of Central Europe to mean something different is, moreover, characteristic of the shifting borders and changing culture in the middle of Europe. On one hand, the rhetoric of Central Europe is an assertion of power; on the other, it is a recognition that the exact dimensions of the center are illusive, even ephemeral. In some historical moments, the center may result from forces of centripetal change, the concentration of power and culture in the center. At other moments, the center unravels centrifugally, as change redistributes power and culture from the center. Central Europe, as we examine it historically and musically in this chapter, has most often formed from the counterpoint between centripetal and centrifugal forces.
