ABSTRACT
The broad strokes of economic and political globalisation in Central Europe and the concomitant flows of people in the current fin-de-siècle manifest themselves as shifts in the practice of ‘classical’ music in Vienna, a practice itself the legacy of analogous processes during the previous fin-de-siècle. Music in the Mozart Year 2006 reveals emergent multivalent possibilities in the transformation of classical music as cultural practice and is viewed through the rubrics of tradition, tourism, branding and the popular. This article argues that ultimately, the practice of classical music in Vienna continues to serve as a site for experiments in cosmopolitanism.
As from the pages of an old chronicle, from its buildings one can read the history which shaped Vienna into a great musical city. Although it was since the beginning of the second half of the 19th century that Vienna developed into a modern city, there are still parts of it which either have not changed at all, or changed only unessentially … Many of the streets, where houses dating from the middle ages still stand, are very crooked. The old houses have low doors, and small, lightless courtyards. There are palaces whose pillars support balconies and mythological figures …
Through these same dim alleys went Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, and at night when all is still, one imagines he can still hear their echoing steps. Thus the past is vividly alive in Vienna. Its musical history is bound to the present and does not lie in dead books. (Graf 1945:10)
