ABSTRACT

The composer’s working life was roughly coterminous with the period of the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary. The liberal framers of the Austrian constitution were Germans, who formed a plurality but not a majority of the Austrian population; the liberal framers of the Hungarian constitution were Magyars, who likewise formed a plurality, but not a majority of the Hungarian population. Nationalist cosmopolitanism, as Steinberg notes, was based on the belief that ‘enlightenment and even more specifically cosmopolitanism are German virtues’. In Habsburg Austria, with its emerging ethnonationalist movements, this nationalist cosmopolitanism embodied a ‘civilizing’ mission. No large social group in Austria was more receptive to this ideology than the upward-striving Jews, who were eager to modernize and shed Jewish particularisms, and to embrace German culture and liberal politics along with the Habsburg dynastic loyalty they shared with their more orthodox co-religionists.