At the turn of the twentieth century, commentators from Vienna rarely hesitated when it came to ranking the Vienna Philharmonic: “We have here in Vienna the premier orchestra in the world,” wrote the Vienna correspondent of the Hungary-based Neues Pester Journal in 1884. Similarly, in 1904, violinist Stefan Wahl told his colleagues in the Philharmonic: “We often hear from traveling foreigners and when abroad of the famous Vienna Philharmonic … being the best orchestra in the world.” And nor were foreign commentators short on superlatives: “With their sublime artistic performance, the Vienna Philharmonic fully justified their world reputation,” Théodore Dubois, director of the Paris Conservatoire, declared in 1900.Footnote 1
What catches the historian’s eye here are the connections these observers make between Vienna and the “world,” which can be seen as a manifestation of what Harry Liebersohn has called a “new global culture” with “vastly expanded horizons.”Footnote 2 These statements evoke a major turning point in international musical life around 1900, when large symphony orchestras, being themselves a late nineteenth-century innovation, crossed political and cultural borders. The new encounters resulting from mobility provoked competition. In 1884, the Meiningen Court Orchestra, the first foreign symphony orchestra to perform in Vienna, challenged the Vienna Philharmonic’s preeminence for symphonic concerts in the Habsburg capital, which relied on its subscription concerts from 1860 onward. In 1900, the Philharmonic itself started performing internationally at the Paris World Exhibition.Footnote 3 In 1904, violinist Wahl acknowledged the impact of increasing mobility and competition on his orchestra. The conclusion he drew was that, if the Philharmonic wanted to maintain its status as the “best orchestra in the world,” it would have to brand itself as a recognizably “Viennese Orchestra.”Footnote 4
Whenever Vienna as a “city of music” is evoked, the Vienna Philharmonic is never far away. Indeed, Martina Nußbaumer has demonstrated how, starting in the late nineteenth century, the trope of the “city of music” combined nostalgia with modern commercial culture and event-oriented branding.Footnote 5 Over the course of the twentieth century, reflecting the post-imperial trauma of World War I and Austrofascist demarcations from hegemonic ideas of “German” culture, the trope of Austria being the “country of music” promoted the local brand to the national level. Both tropes continued well into the Second Republic as an Austrian and international lieu de mémoire.Footnote 6
To be sure, this Austrian-Viennese musical exceptionalism became meaningful to many Austrians and international music lovers, but it was by no means exclusive, varying from other exceptionalisms by nuance rather than by substance.Footnote 7 On a first level, ideas of “Austrianness” or “Vienneseness” compare to and were partly entangled with ideas of musical “Germanness.” Building on the pioneer work of Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter on German music as a powerful and often hegemonic “invented tradition,” Neil Gregor and Thomas Irvine have recently shifted the discussion toward different musical genres, aesthetics, and communities, and problematized the underlying assumptions of musical “Germanness” with regard to a delimited German nation-state.Footnote 8 Ideas of belonging also underpinned an imaginary Catholic German South as an autonomous musical sphere. At least until 1871, between 1918 and 1945, and partly beyond, the debate on “German music” also involved Austrian–German relations. It is no coincidence that Johann Strauss composed his grand “patriotic” waltzes like The Blue Danube, Tales from the Vienna Woods, or Viennese Blood in the aftermath of the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, and the Vienna Philharmonic became its own kind of a “Reich Orchestra” after Austria’s annexation by Nazi Germany in 1938.Footnote 9 On a second level, Philipp Ther and others have highlighted how musical nationalism and its genres and styles such as “national operas” or “national schools” were a transnational phenomenon embedded in cultural transfers and entrepreneurial and commercial networks. Constructions of musical exceptionalism were therefore constantly in motion.Footnote 10
The Vienna Philharmonic highlights the extent to which local and national discourses, on the one hand, and the international circulation of music and musicians, on the other, have become inextricably intertwined since the late nineteenth century. When the orchestra toured Switzerland in support of Austria’s war propaganda in 1917, its task consisted in “demonstrating abroad Austria’s position as a great power also in the field of music.”Footnote 11 In the interwar period, this idea continued to resonate with Austria’s former enemies. After the Philharmonic’s performances in Paris in 1928, the newspaper Le Temps argued that defeat in war had helped “Felix Austria” to realize its core mission as one of cultural radiance: “Freed of its artificial additions, [Austria] retains its true body and its true limbs. … Relieved, rejuvenated, it only depends on itself to set out again toward its new, true destiny.”Footnote 12 From the 1950s, the link between the “world famous” orchestra from Vienna and Austria’s status as an international musical center acquired a global resonance, one that was facilitated by intercontinental tours to North Africa, East Asia, and the Americas and reliant on direct encounters between the largely Austrian musicians and their increasingly global audiences. In 1956, the Philharmonic’s business manager, trumpeter Helmut Wobisch, explained the praxeological dimension of this internationalization to his colleagues as follows: “You only exist in the world if you are in the world.”Footnote 13
This article offers a transnational take on Austria’s best-known musical ensemble as a global player in twentieth-century musical life. It demonstrates how the transition from a local orchestra from Vienna to one of the most active ensembles in the world relied on artistic, economic, political, and cultural driving forces. Writing a global history of the Vienna Philharmonic connects with many related histories: the history of Vienna as the city, and Austria as the country, “of music”; the twentieth-century history of Austrianness;Footnote 14 the institutional history of a self-governing concert orchestra which served, at the same time, as the public orchestra of the Vienna Court Opera and, later, the Vienna State Opera; and the history of Austria’s political regimes, in particular Austria’s active involvement in National Socialism.Footnote 15 What is rarely found in existing contributions to Austrian and Viennese cultural history are transnational and praxeological approaches that broaden the dominant focus on the local and the national toward global connections without conceiving these levels as mutually exclusive. In the course of the twentieth century, the Vienna Philharmonic played more than a thousand concerts in over forty countries. The musicians earned an ever-larger portion of their income from international performances and from recordings sold throughout the world and relied heavily on and contributed to the globalization of a canonized repertoire.Footnote 16 The Vienna Philharmonic promoted its Vienneseness and Austrianness both as an economic brand and in support of Austrian cultural diplomacy, and constantly shifted between local, national, and global scales, in particular when it came to recruiting new musicians. Discussing major junctions of a global history of the Vienna Philharmonic, this article also proposes this history as an entry point for the still largely unwritten project of a global history of twentieth-century Austria and, in particular, of Austrian culture, its institutions, and brokers.
This global history of the Vienna Philharmonic takes its inspiration from the categories of a “world semantics” of art music proposed by global historian Jürgen Osterhammel, who distinguishes between world practice, world reception, world radiance, world reputation, and world rank.Footnote 17 In Osterhammel’s typology, “world practice” relates to the global scope of action of musicians and musical institutions, encompassing mobility and media communication. For the Vienna Philharmonic, these world practices centered around its global tours, which became an integral part of the orchestra’s activities. “World reception,” for Osterhammel, refers to non-European elements in European artistic production. For an Austrian orchestra, this dimension raises questions about repertoire and the admission of non-European musicians that came with tightening global connections. “World radiance” points to the resonance and topography of artistic fame and prestige. For the Vienna Philharmonic, it encompasses the spread of recordings and media coverage linked to touring. It also includes the orchestra’s (invented) traditions in terms of the classical-romantic repertoire, and musical branding, such as the Philharmonic’s “Viennese sound” transmitted over generations of musicians. “World rank,” finally, touches on practices of comparison, relating the orchestra’s performances to the musicians’ professional ambitions and to international expectations. What makes this typology useful for an exploration of musical mobility is that it problematizes, complexifies, and historicizes vernacular ideas of music being a “world language” easily transcending geographical and political boundaries and connecting people across the globe. Osterhammel grounds these assumptions by stressing “the horizon of the possible and probable,” allowing for both the spatializing and anchoring of international activities of musical ensembles such as the Vienna Philharmonic.Footnote 18 This typology is flexible enough to move beyond a conflation of “global” with “all-encompassing” and to link global connections with occurrences of disconnectivity, to consider the possibilities and gains of musical mobility in light of its limits and costs, and to broaden the perspective from global spheres of activity to blatant gaps and exclusions.Footnote 19
This article uses Osterhammel’s categories as a heuristic to discuss five constitutive fields for a global history of the Vienna Philharmonic with a special emphasis on the praxeological dimension of music-making as world practice: global touring, the politicization of musical mobility, migration and diversity, a globalizing music market, and a globally performed repertoire. It argues that, in these fields, political, economic, artistic, and mediatic interests in musical mobility intersected. It is the market side of musical mobility together with musicians’ own agency which is often underestimated in accounts primarily focusing on cultural politics or musical diplomacy. This exploration substantially relies on the Vienna Philharmonic’s own archival collections which, since the controversies over the orchestra’s attempts to come to terms with its Nazi past in the 2000s and 2010s, have been made accessible to external researchers. While scholars have worked with parts of the material mainly from a Viennese and Austrian perspective, the collections also constitute an archive of musical globalization.Footnote 20 The documents cover the musicians’ decision-making processes regarding international activities as they are preserved in minutes and recordings of the musicians’ general assemblies and executive committee meetings. They include their correspondence with musical partners, music agents, record companies, and political authorities, but also with program notes, musicians’ private papers, as well as collections of global press coverage.
Intercontinental Touring
For decades, touring was far from being a matter of course for the Vienna Philharmonic due to timetable restrictions. As the musicians, in their main occupation, had to play in the opera pit every night, international concerts, before the 1920s, were only possible when the opera season paused over the summer. During the late Habsburg monarchy, the Philharmonic’s rare guest performances were limited to Western Europe’s musical metropolises Paris (1900), London (1906), and Munich (1910), followed by a tour through Switzerland (1917) and a concert series in Berlin (1918), the latter two tours being part of Austria’s cultural propaganda during World War I.Footnote 21 The step toward establishing the orchestra’s global presence was largely catalyzed by postwar constellations, as is illustrated by the Philharmonic’s debuts in Latin America (1922), Egypt (1950), and Japan and North America (1956). As this section shows, these debuts were embedded in specific constellations of international relations. As an enabling factor for musical mobility, these constellations were never exclusive, though, as they were part of larger choices of destinations and touring patterns. Usually, the specific circumstances leading to a debut in a particular country or world region paved the way for return visits which took place at different scales and intervals. Altogether, intercontinental touring became an integral part of the interplay between world radiance, world rank, and world practices.
With the demise of the Habsburg monarchy, the transformation of the Vienna Court Opera into the State Opera, and Austria’s inflation crisis of the early 1920s, the musicians saw their material situation deteriorate.Footnote 22 Looking for lucrative postwar music markets, the self-governing orchestra decided to take a major step toward world practices, a decision at odds with the prevailing view of the 1920s as a period of deglobalization.Footnote 23 While, after the Central Powers’ defeat and the Paris peace treaties, performances among the Western European war enemies were out of the question, the members of the Vienna Philharmonic directed their attention to South America. In Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, mass migration since the late nineteenth century had led to a boom in performances of European classical music. Italian migrants had generated a rapidly growing demand for opera provided by touring Italian troupes. With an ever-greater number of German-speaking immigrants, this demand extended to German-language opera and symphonic concerts.Footnote 24 The potential of new audiences, together with the challenge of keeping the transatlantic opera business profitable, led Italian impresarios such as Walter Mocchi to include German-speaking singers, conductors, and ultimately a symphony orchestra into their tour programs.Footnote 25 In 1922 and 1923, through the mediation of conductor Felix von Weingartner, Mocchi invited the Vienna Philharmonic as the first full overseas orchestra to perform more than eighty concerts and operas in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Montevideo, and Buenos Aires.Footnote 26
These lucrative postwar tours were the longest in the orchestra’s history. The long leave of absence the Philharmonic received from the Vienna State Opera was made possible by a combination of geographical and economic considerations. As the South American metropolises were located in the Southern Hemisphere, the Philharmonic used its Austrian summer break to perform during the Brazilian, Uruguayan, and Argentinian winter seasons. The musicians were then able to extend their absence of leave even further, as the Austrian authorities agreed to start the new Vienna operatic season with a replacement orchestra of retired musicians, extra players, and orchestral members who had preferred to stay at home.Footnote 27 By facilitating the Philharmonic’s tour, the Austrian government hoped to create an awareness for Austria’s national existence and postwar situation overseas. Richard Strauss, director of the State Opera and conductor of the Philharmonic’s 1923 South American tour, planned to compensate for inflation and cuts in public subsidies by earning an additional income through international touring.Footnote 28 Though the Italian impresarios were no longer able to finance the large-scale South American endeavors after the economic crisis spread beyond the South Atlantic, these experiences lastingly impacted the Vienna Philharmonic’s touring frequency within Europe over the following decades.
New global possibilities came after World War II when, again, the postwar orchestra was looking for income and destinations beyond the economic and political restraints that it was subjected to on the European market as an orchestra that had belonged to the German Reich. Their debut in Egypt in 1950, which the musicians welcomed as a way to present “Austria’s position as a world power” in the field of music on another “foreign continent,” coincided with the post-imperial crisis in the Middle East.Footnote 29 As King Farouk I was facing increasing resistance from constitutional forces, the Muslim Brotherhood, and communist circles, as well as difficulties with the ongoing decolonization process, the Middle East conflict, and the Cold War unfolding in the region, the regime tried to increase its crumbling international standing through sports and cultural sponsorship.Footnote 30 Nevertheless, royal patronage for Western arts in Egypt stretched back to the opening of the Khedivial Opera House in Cairo and Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida in 1869/71.Footnote 31 As several members of the Egyptian royal family were educated in late Habsburg Vienna, inviting the Vienna Philharmonic was a logical choice.Footnote 32 Against the background of the Egyptian crisis, the decision to choose an Austrian orchestra to play Central European as well as some French music marked a gesture of cultural demarcation on the part of the crumbling monarchy against rising oppositional forces and political Islam.Footnote 33
The cultural implications of the Philharmonic’s visit lasted far beyond the downfall of the Egyptian monarchy shortly afterward. One of the visitors to the 1950 concerts was fourteen-year-old Edward Said. The impression made on him by these concerts, as well as by those given by the Berlin Philharmonic and Wilhelm Furtwängler the following year, had a crucial impact on his later thinking about cultural transitions, which ultimately led him to conceptualize “Orientalism,” “counterpoint,” and the relation between culture and imperialism.Footnote 34 As Said revealed in his later autobiographical writings, his post-colonial critique of Western projections on the “Orient” was interwoven with musical experiences connected to Central Europe.Footnote 35 As Said’s later concert reviews and his activism for the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra also make clear, this initial Occidentalist impulse coming from postwar musical mobility played an integral part in the entanglements of post-colonial critique and musical world practices.Footnote 36
Finally, the globalization of tour destinations depended on infrastructures of transportation and musical organization.Footnote 37 For a long time, the major logistic obstacle to European orchestral performances in East Asia were the months-long sea voyages. As the Latin American tours in the 1920s had made clear, intercontinental sea voyages for full orchestras were not only costly in themselves, but they also prevented an orchestra from generating income through performance. It was the spread of intercontinental civilian air traffic in the 1950s which marked the crucial step toward intercontinental touring and which turned European, American, and Japanese orchestras into global players. As the first European orchestra to perform in Japan in 1956, the Philharmonic was also only the fourth group of civilian passengers to fly to Japan.Footnote 38 As the daily Neues Österreich remarked, in the time it took to get from Vienna to Linz in the mid-nineteenth century, it was now possible to reach Tokyo.Footnote 39
In Japan, European and American orchestras could count on high audience demand, which was the long-term effect of Western classical music having been introduced as part of the nineteenth-century Meiji Restoration program to modernize Japanese society.Footnote 40 The costly tours needed strong business partners, however. The Vienna Philharmonic’s first Japanese tours were organized and promoted by private and public media companies which offered planning, organization, ticket sales, and media coverage all rolled into one.Footnote 41 When the Asahi Trust organized the 1956 tour, it was able to advertise the concerts and to guarantee numerous (positive) concert reviews in Japan’s most widely read newspaper, the Asahi Shimbun.Footnote 42 For the orchestra’s 1959 return, Japanese public broadcaster NHK transmitted its performances via its radio and TV channels to much larger audiences than in the concert halls alone.Footnote 43
These spotlights on globalizing tour destinations make clear how political, economic, cultural, and infrastructural factors provided windows of opportunity for projects in different world regions, thereby underpinning the Philharmonic’s growing global presence. The musicians, for their part, quickly adapted to performing at very different destinations. World performances became an integral part of their professional lives.
Musical Diplomacy and Nation Branding
When, in the twentieth century, large-scale institutions such as orchestras or opera companies performed internationally, state authorities became increasingly involved. In Osterhammel’s terminology, cultural diplomacy directs our attention to the interplay between ideas of world radiance and world rank. Rather than inflexible, objective, or uncontested yardsticks, radiance and world rank imply margins of political but also economic positioning through musical practices. Through all political regimes from the Habsburg monarchy to Austria’s Second Republic, the Vienna Philharmonic remained the publicly funded orchestra of the Vienna Opera. As a private association, however, the members of the Philharmonic organized their concerts on a commercial basis, sharing their profits, including those from touring, among themselves.Footnote 44 The state, then, came into play when Austria’s Foreign Ministry or Ministry of Education subsidized tours to special destinations and for special purposes—including international exhibitions or state visits—or when the state facilitated the logistics and publicity of the tours through the global network of Austrian embassies.Footnote 45 In order to support musical mobility, public authorities had to consider the Philharmonic’s performances as relevant to Austria’s international reputation—as difficult as it is to actually measure these effects. Linking success with (generally enthusiastic) audiences to sympathy for a state, a nation, or a national culture largely operated as a self-fulfilling prophecy: it was precisely because they subsidized the orchestra that Austrian politicians and diplomats led themselves to believe in the impact of the Vienna Philharmonic’s tours. They were right insofar as a link between audience appreciation and national representation could not be fully excluded either.
Already for the Philharmonic’s first international performances at the Paris World Exhibition in 1900, the Austrian imperial family, together with members of the high nobility and wealthy Viennese families, covered the financial deficit because they regarded the performances, as the musicians did themselves, as an “artistic-patriotic mission.”Footnote 46 During World War I, the decision to subsidize a Swiss tour in 1917 was driven by the desire to showcase Austria’s stellar level of high culture even in times of war and thereby to demonstrate its superiority in a neutral country that was likewise being targeted by French propaganda.Footnote 47 In the interwar period, Austria’s ambassador to London, Georg Franckenstein, praised the Vienna Philharmonic for demonstrating “that Austria is a small country but a leading power in the fields of arts and music.”Footnote 48 A closer look behind this rhetoric, however, suggests that musical diplomacy relied less on its alleged impact as political soft power. Rather, it resulted from Austria’s leading orchestra agreeing to perform abroad in times of war and postwar reconstruction, of economic depression and recovery, of international isolation or integration.
Musical mobility and cultural diplomacy were most closely aligned in the long 1950s, when state support became a major driving force for the rapid globalization of tour destinations. The Philharmonic’s debuts in the United States and Japan (1956), and a world tour that also took in India, Hong Kong, and the Philippines (1959), a visit to the Soviet Union (1962), and a return to South America (1965), all depended on state financial support. While music agents and local concert promoters tended to calculate their budgets—and thus also the orchestra’s fees—on the basis of concert ticket sales, the major challenge remained the high transportation costs. As a return flight from Vienna to Tokyo cost 1,000 US dollars per person in 1956, without subsidies, the Asahi Trust, as the tour’s promoter, would have had to sell more than 10,000 tickets in the highest category to cover the musicians’ travel alone.Footnote 49 Hence, musical diplomacy paid off mainly as a financial investment: on the American and East Asian markets, initial state funding served as a gate opener, increasing the local demand and market value of the orchestra. From the 1970s onward, skyrocketing ticket prices and private sponsorship in Japan allowed the Vienna Philharmonic to organize its tours solely on a commercial basis.
On the political side, subsidies were largely motivated by the Cold War. After the Austrian State Treaty of 1955 in particular, Austria’s Foreign Office aimed at anchoring Austrian neutrality by increasing international visibility. Though Austrian support never reached the scale of the American Cultural Presentations Program or West German cultural foreign policy, it could still count on visibility.Footnote 50 Before the age of mass tourism, one hundred Austrian musicians traveling around the world far outnumbered the average presence of Austrian public representatives, businesspeople, or tourists. The most diplomatically important performance the Vienna Philharmonic gave, thanks to Austrian state support, took place on the 1956 Human Rights Day during the United Nations General Assembly Plenary Meeting in New York. Performing Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (in the bicentenary year of his birth) and Ludwig van Beethoven for an international organization bore witness, one year after the State Treaty, to Austria’s membership of the global community as a sovereign state.Footnote 51 This sovereignty was still far from evident, given that the United Nations, in December 1956, was not only busy responding to Soviet intervention against the Hungarian anti-communist uprising, but there was also the question of Austria’s common border with Hungary and the influx of Hungarian refugees into Austria.Footnote 52 As a political gesture, the orchestra chose Beethoven’s Egmont overture, based on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s tragedy on the struggle against foreign rule in the Spanish Netherlands. According to Vienna’s pro-American Neuer Kurier, the performance “served as a unique demonstration of support for our hard-pressed neighboring country Hungary.”Footnote 53
To what extent did the musicians themselves identify as “ambassadors” on a “mission in the service of the great musical power Austria”?Footnote 54 After the Philharmonic’s first tour to the Soviet Union in 1962, chair and violinist Otto Strasser informed his colleagues how he had assured the foreign minister Bruno Kreisky about the Philharmonic’s willingness to “perform everywhere as the representative of … the cultural great power Austria.”Footnote 55 Behind the scenes, however, the musicians’ relationship to cultural diplomacy was a more professional—and that meant also a more commercial—one. Inasmuch as state authorities relied on the Philharmonic to represent Austria on the international stage, the musicians and concert agencies counted on public support to balance tour budgets, which also secured the musicians’ income. In rather blunt language, business manager and trumpeter Helmut Wobisch informed his peers about his negotiations with the foreign office for the 1965 South American tour: “It’s not so easy to squeeze millions out of the state to convince them to give us 2½ or 3 million schillings of subsidies that ultimately end up being pumped into the air companies. The nicest thing would be if they gave us 2½ million schillings not to give concerts [in Latin America] but to play here [in Vienna].”Footnote 56
When it affected their own international standing and business practices, the musicians were also more open about their Austrian patriotism. As a tool of nation branding, Austrianness attracted industrial sponsors who sought to promote their business activities internationally.Footnote 57 These business relationships go back to 1906, when Arthur Krupp, owner of a large steel company in Lower Austria, financed the Philharmonic’s concerts at the Imperial Austrian Exhibition in London.Footnote 58 From the 1970s onward, after the Austrian state had considerably reoriented cultural diplomacy to the disadvantage of classical music, commercial sponsorship became indispensable for global touring. The Philharmonic established partnerships with Austria’s Länderbank, the paper producer Neusiedler, but also Mercedes-Benz in Germany and the international credit card company Diners Club.Footnote 59 These cooperations turned classical music into a luxury brand for specific market segments. For Austrian companies, concerts, in particular in Japan, served as an access tool to potential business partners.Footnote 60
Commercial and political agendas also overlapped. World exhibitions as well as specifically Austrian exhibitions on fashion, tourism, or sport were organized and financed by public bodies and commercial associations. These also included concerts: for example, in Scandinavia and Germany (1950), Japan (1969), or Hong Kong (1989).Footnote 61 Such public-private ventures peaked when Austrian nation branding faced international resistance. Most prominently, the election of former UN secretary-general—and former SA and Wehrmacht officer—Kurt Waldheim as Austrian president in 1986 had a considerable impact on Austria’s political, economic, and artistic reputation.Footnote 62 The global resonance of the Waldheim affair affected not only the credibility of Austrian neutrality but also the demand for products and artists from Austria. With regard to the appearances in Hong Kong in 1989, the Tiroler Tageszeitung commented on the Philharmonic improving Austria’s political reputation: “the Austrian economy and even more so the red-white-red state policy need global recovery and presence. … The Vienna Philharmonic is ideally suited as a cultural advertising medium, as a melodic political atomizer.”Footnote 63
The Waldheim affair, which resonated particularly negatively in the North American music market, also sparked controversy about the Vienna Philharmonic’s own associations with Nazism: half of the musicians had joined the Nazi Party, while seven died in the Holocaust and nine escaped into exile. In 1987, Jewish émigré journalist Martin Bernheimer, writing in the Los Angeles Times, criticized the orchestra for a lack of diversity: “one may wonder when this elite Viennese fraternity will join the 20th century and admit women to the ranks. One also cannot help but notice, in this day of creeping Waldheimism, that the roster lists few if any obviously Jewish names.”Footnote 64 In response, chairman and violinist Alfred Altenburger made a patriotic mission statement to his colleagues: “We are in a severe dilemma in Austria, also with regard to our reputation in the world, and I am convinced that our global reputation can very … effectively contribute to improve Austria’s reputation.”Footnote 65
A revealing example for such a “contribution,” one that also aligned with the orchestra’s business interests, was the Philharmonic’s close collaboration with Jewish American conductor Leonard Bernstein in the 1980s.Footnote 66 In 1988, amid Austria’s widespread isolation, Bernstein conducted the Philharmonic’s first performances in Israel, centering around Gustav Mahler’s Sixth Symphony. As part of Austria’s commemorative year to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Anschluss, the Austrian government exceptionally subsidized the tour. The political expectation was that the concerts would demonstrate Austria’s acknowledgment of its past to a Jewish audience, a demonstration that was intended also for Jewish institutions and activists outside Israel, in particular because criticism coming from the New York-based Jewish World Congress was seen as a major obstacle in the Waldheim affair.Footnote 67 Public support for the Israel tour was complemented by sponsorship from Austrian industrial companies and banks concerned that the affair would have an adverse effect on their international market position.
The long-term relationship between the Vienna Philharmonic’s international appearances and Austrian cultural diplomacy highlights that touring served to emphasize Austria’s international role as an independent, neutral, sovereign state and as a cultural great power. Yet state support was much more of a financial driving force than a political factor. Cultural diplomacy also served the musicians’ own professional agency. These interests overlapped in part with those of business actors promoting Austrianness as nation branding.
Musical Mobility, Migration, and Diversity
This section highlights the tensions if not clashes which emerged between musical world practices and the Vienna Philharmonic’s world reception when musical mobility and the migration of professional musicians intersected, in particular around intercontinental touring.Footnote 68 These constellations challenge the widespread view of the Vienna Philharmonic as primarily an Austrian, or even a Viennese, ensemble—a labeling that was largely the result of nation branding. When the Vienna Philharmonic first started touring during the late Habsburg monarchy, the orchestra was ethnically diverse. Around 1900, the Philharmonic was a truly “imperial” orchestra, with more than two dozen musicians coming from Bohemia, Hungary, Galicia, or Bukovina.Footnote 69 As new members were recruited for the Court Opera Orchestra to then also become members of the Philharmonic, opera director Gustav Mahler also hired Dutch and German players. At the London concerts in 1906, conductor Franz Schalk spoke openly of this diversity to the British public.Footnote 70 Alongside Catholics and Protestants, nearly 20 percent of the orchestra members before World War I were Jewish.
Around 1900, the orchestra had a rather positive approach to musical integration: when in 1904 violinist Stefan Wahl, himself a German, spoke about non-Austrian orchestral members such as Czech clarinetist František Bartolomej or Hungarian timpanist Franz Weber, he pleaded for a plural understanding of national belonging: “You will say that [Bartolomej] is a Bohemian but also an ardent Austrian. [Weber] is a Hungarian but also an ardent Austrian. [A]nd everyone who came here was able sooner or later to become more or less assimilated or integrated into our magnificent mosaic.”Footnote 71 In this view of an orchestra as a “mosaic,” national affirmation and national indifference were not mutually exclusive.Footnote 72 Until the 1920s, we also find Viennese musicians passing in the ranks of the then largely German-speaking US orchestras in New York, Pittsburgh, or Boston.Footnote 73
In a different way, the step to intercontinental touring in the 1920s was also connected to migration. Not only did the Vienna Philharmonic cross the South Atlantic on steamers full of European postwar emigrants and remigrants, but the musicians also became seasonal migrants themselves.Footnote 74 The touring system in South America organized by Italian impresarios followed the golondrinas’ (swallows’) pattern of agricultural migration. Just as Italian field-workers, thanks to the availability of steamers, annually crossed the Atlantic to combine a first season of farmwork during the European summer with a second season during the South American summer, South Atlantic musicians performed two seasons during the respective winter months.Footnote 75 As impresario Mocchi aimed at a long-term collaboration with the Vienna Philharmonic in South America, the musicians’ months-long leaves of absence from the State Opera was based on the golondrinas system. When this seasonal migration collapsed already after the second South American tour in 1923, the orchestra shifted the profitable idea of a summer residency to the Salzburg Festival, where the Philharmonic has continually been in residence since 1925. The idea of a “German-Austrian world culture,” which Michael Steinberg has highlighted as one of the festival’s founding ideas, also had a global dimension, and the Vienna Philharmonic, thanks to the shift from South America to Salzburg, have remained golondrinas to this day.Footnote 76
In Vienna, the orchestra’s long absences sparked resistance. After the economically disastrous 1923 tour, during which three musicians also died from illnesses and by suicide, the Viennese press condemned musical world practices as detrimental to Vienna’s world ranking as the “city of music.” Journalist Elsa Bienenfeld proposed that, instead of having the Philharmonic go on intercontinental tours, “music lovers from all over the world” should come to Vienna. Referencing the social reforms of the First Republic and “Red Vienna,” she also argued for making the music profession healthier. Musicians, she felt, should rest during their summer break instead of exhausting themselves—as well as postwar Austria’s cultural resources—in other world regions; only in this way would they be able to regenerate their artistic excellence and to support Vienna’s world reputation.Footnote 77
Austria’s annexation by the German Reich in 1938 inaugurated a period of forced migration. Though the hiring of Jewish musicians had dropped during the 1920s and 1930s, Jewish members still playing in the orchestra were forced into “retirement.” Those remaining in Vienna lost their homes and were later deported. Others emigrated to the United Kingdom and Argentina, but first and foremost to the United States.Footnote 78 Six former members of the Vienna Philharmonic joined the orchestra of the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Bringing their “Viennese” style and playing techniques to their new professional environments, the professional reintegration of émigré musicians questions the older narratives of emigration as “cultural exportation” or “profit and loss.”Footnote 79 The study of exiled orchestral players allows for an embedded and decentered view of performances of the German-Austrian operatic and symphonic canon at North and South American musical institutions and of the branding of an “American” orchestral sound.
The émigrés’ relations to their former orchestra remained ambivalent. Despite being invited back to the Philharmonic in 1946, none of them returned. Instead, they claimed pensions from the Vienna Philharmonic, just as they were entitled to pensions from the Austrian state as former employees of the State Opera.Footnote 80 The current members of the Philharmonic, however, refused to pay, revealing themselves to be strong believers in Austria’s victim myth. As chairman and violinist Hermann Obermeyer informed his colleagues concerning his dealings with his former co-violinist Berthold Salander: “Incidentally, I also wrote to Salander that, apart from the horror of his relatives being gassed [during the Holocaust], he had actually had a very nice time, since they hadn’t been bombed, etc.”Footnote 81 The moment for this refusal was badly chosen, however. With the Philharmonic’s first American tour about to start in 1956, the American émigrés were able to blackmail their former colleagues by threatening to reveal shocking details about the orchestra’s collusion with the Nazi regime to the American press. Faced with this threat, the Philharmonic finally paid up.Footnote 82
The boost to intercontinental touring from the 1950s on, in particular to Japan, confronted musicians from Vienna with new challenges in which musical mobility took the form of professional migration. From the very beginning, the musicians met and taught Japanese music students. In the 1960s, violinist Wilhelm Hübner and oboist Karl Mayrhofer joined Tokyo’s NHK Symphony Orchestra for a year, acting as models and teachers for their Japanese colleagues.Footnote 83 In return, Japanese and other musicians increasingly opted to study in Vienna with the musicians they had encountered during the Philharmonic’s tours. At Vienna’s Academy of Music, the proportion of foreign students rose from 20 to almost 40 percent between the 1950s and 1980s; in the late 1970s, 8 percent of all students came from Japan alone.Footnote 84
Hence, it was only a question of time before Viennese orchestras had to decide whether they would admit East Asian musicians into their ranks. Here, the members of the Vienna Philharmonic—82 percent of whom were born in Austria or as Austrians as of 1974—acted as gatekeepers.Footnote 85 Their major argument against admitting Asian musicians was Vienneseness: believing that the visual homogeneity of the orchestral body on stage was inextricably linked to their “Viennese sound,” they feared losing their international branding as a “Viennese orchestra.” This branding was a major source of income accompanying the orchestra’s tours to Japan and, later, the global TV broadcasts of the New Year’s Day Concert. Unlike Asian American musicians joining US orchestras, East Asian instrumentalists in Central Europe were not a “model minority” to be integrated.Footnote 86 Against all likelihood, in 1972, Japanese viola player Sigeru Onuzaki, who, after playing in the NHK Symphony Orchestra, continued his studies in Vienna, won an audition to join the Philharmonic. Even though he was apparently fluent in the “Viennese style,” Onuzaki was not accepted by the orchestra, as it deemed his participation in the New Year’s Day Concert unthinkable.Footnote 87
The Vienna Philharmonic’s staunchly Eurocentric understanding of classical music and its performers contrasted with its expanding world practices. Strikingly, the globalization of performance destinations and business practices privileged homogeneity rather than a cosmopolitan spirit inside the orchestra, which at the time was exclusively male. Here, the Vienna Philharmonic was no exception to a more general pattern of Central European top-level orchestras, in particular its long-term rival, the Berlin Philharmonic, which also only reluctantly opened its ranks to non-European and female musicians.Footnote 88 As virtually the last major symphony orchestra in the world to do so, the Vienna Philharmonic admitted female members only in 1997. Since then, it has gradually diversified with regard to nationality, gender, and, to a minor extent, race. The end of the Cold War together with Austria’s admission to the European Union and its geopolitical orientation toward Central and Southeastern Europe facilitated a broader recruitment of musicians.Footnote 89 In that respect, the orchestra was an example of the “co-transformation” between the former West and East.Footnote 90 The Philharmonic’s own academy, established in 2018 to train young musicians and potential new members, shows a greater openness to musicians with non-European backgrounds.Footnote 91
On the Globalizing Music Market
In the early 1980s, the Philharmonic’s former chair Otto Strasser depicted his colleagues as driven by the global music market: “As everywhere in the free world, the law of supply and demand also applies to the concert business …. All of the world’s top orchestras are in the same position: they play in their home cities, make recordings, are hired for television, and travel. All these activities form a circle from which it is impossible to escape.”Footnote 92 In this panorama, however, Strasser has left one decisive aspect of this globalization process aside, one that musicians and music scholars only rarely address explicitly despite the inextricable link between professional music-making and the business side of musical world practices: the growing income of orchestras and their musicians. As a self-administrated ensemble, the Vienna Philharmonic stood out from its North and Latin American or Asian competitors by the fact that the market value of its world radiance immediately impacted the musicians’ economic existence. Sharing the profits of their world practices, they earned what they received on the world stage or sold to global audiences through recordings.
Between 1969 and 1980, despite the end of the postwar boom years, the Philharmonic’s overall sales volume rose from 13 to 49 million Austrian schillings, three times more than the accumulated inflation rate.Footnote 93 In the early 1990s, the average individual annual income of the almost 150 members, from Philharmonic activities and the State Opera, reportedly exceeded 1 million schillings per year—revenues from chamber music, solo playing, or teaching not included.Footnote 94 This development is all the more remarkable as the orchestra had been founded in 1842 to ameliorate the precarious living conditions of professional musicians who wanted to top up their meager income from the opera by occasionally playing symphonic concerts. Over the course of the twentieth century, this “second” job by far outmatched their official employment.
A major development was the mutually enhancing relationship between international concerts and recording since the 1920s. Record companies such as Decca or Deutsche Grammophon were eager to sell Vienna Philharmonic recordings in emerging markets, taking advantage of the heightened media attention given to the orchestra during its tours.Footnote 95 The Beethoven symphony cycle the Philharmonic recorded with Claudio Abbado for Deutsche Grammophon in the late 1980s was scheduled to coincide with performances in Tokyo, New York, and Paris, and promoted accordingly.Footnote 96 In return, the Philharmonic’s reputation based on its recordings paved the way for touring projects. At its North American debut in 1956, the orchestra already sounded to the Washington press like an “old friend” thanks to its recordings and the growing number of American visitors at the Salzburg Summer Festival.Footnote 97 Through its recordings, the Philharmonic already had a presence in the Japanese market in the 1920s.Footnote 98 When it made its East Asian debut in the 1950s, recordings had predefined audience expectations, which in turn impacted the orchestra’s market value and ticket sales. For orchestral musicians and conductors, as well as for music agents or paying audiences, the prestige of a world rank therefore had a material side.Footnote 99 In the following period, record companies contributed to maintaining the connection between audiences and orchestra between tours. To motivate his colleagues before their second visit to Japan in 1959, chairman Strasser observed: “They know all the orchestras and only listen to good performances.”Footnote 100
Recordings, sales profits, and royalties were closely linked to the life cycles of particular products, in particular stereo LPs starting in the 1950s and CDs starting in the 1980s.Footnote 101 What made technical innovation attractive to the musicians was not only the aesthetic standard of sound reproduction but also the opportunity of generating income from repetition. Just as the Vienna Philharmonic performed a canon of core works in Vienna and globally and promoted these performances with recordings, the same works could be rerecorded on new media. As one skeptical colleague asked when business manager Wobisch announced an ambitious recording schedule in the mid-1950s: “Will the repertoire not eventually run out?” The manager’s answer was a reassuring no: “Because of technical progress.”Footnote 102 When sales profits from LP recordings declined in the late 1970s, chair Altenburger optimistically asked his colleagues to wait for the “little disc with the laser beam”: “When this … is adopted in five or six years, the whole business will start anew …, and the next ten years will be saved.”Footnote 103
While its competitors benefited from their collaborations with their renowned chief conductors for lucrative recordings, the musicians of the Vienna Philharmonic profited from their unique decision, made in the 1930s, to do without a music director. Collaborating with leading European and, from the 1960s, also North American and Asian conductors, they capitalized on artistic diversity. They alternated exclusive contracts with Decca with sessions with other companies, or they concluded non-exclusive contracts with different companies for audio recordings and video productions.Footnote 104 Benefiting from rising sales and strategic contract negotiations, session fees more than quadrupled between the late 1950s and the mid-1980s, serving as a mark of distinction for the self-governing orchestra.Footnote 105
The lucrative combination of touring and recording proved important in times of crisis, scheduling problems, and reduced mobility. When a touring project was canceled for financial reasons, the Philharmonic could replace it by “tours in Vienna” (i.e., recording sessions), which would likewise enhance the orchestra’s world reputation.Footnote 106 Inversely, when, starting in the 1990s, recording opportunities declined, the Philharmonic was able to compensate for lost income from recording by increasing the number of tours.Footnote 107
Finally, the recordings and concert broadcasts, together with decreasing cultural diplomacy budgets, contributed to a geographical reorientation of global touring. As the demand for the Philharmonic in the later twentieth century was higher than the number of concerts it was able to play, the orchestra was in a good position to select tour destinations and conditions according to priorities and profitability. While, in the 1950s and 1960s, a North American or Japanese tour consisted of up to twenty-five concerts, including provincial cities and less prestigious concert halls, the orchestra, from the 1970s, concentrated on musical centers with well-off audiences. Musical hinterlands beyond New York, Rio de Janeiro, or Tokyo were then to be reached by radio broadcasts, the selling of TV and video productions, or records.Footnote 108 While world practices connected some global audiences, they disconnected others, establishing global hierarchies that reflected different positions in a globalizing music market.
Sound Branding and Repertoire
Like probably no other orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic is associated with a specific sound and repertoire. This profile, which is often described as unique, encapsulates the performative dimension of the music actually being made, night after night, in international concert halls. Even among other Central European orchestras perceived as embodying a dark and weighty late romantic sonic culture, the Vienna Philharmonic is usually attributed a particular status by conductors, music lovers, journalists, and sound engineers alike. Originally, the idea of a homogeneous sound profile linked Vienna’s world radiance to the brand name “city of music.” Subsequently, the breakup of the empire, together with innovations in touring, broadcasting, and recording lastingly impacted the orchestra’s own branding. From the 1920s, “Vienneseness” became part of a discourse intended to cement Austria’s post-imperial reputation as a great cultural power.Footnote 109 It was in South America in 1922 that the Philharmonic first included waltzes by Johann Strauss in its tour program. Thanks to The Blue Danube or Tales from the Vienna Woods, the orchestra became instantly recognizable to international audiences and left its mark on the global performance and reception history of the Strauss family. In South America, the waltzes played with “enthusiasm” and “patriotism” immediately appealed to Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking listeners as well as to German-speaking migrant audiences.Footnote 110 The Argentinisches Tageblatt, representing the liberal wing of German-speaking immigration to Argentina, took the waltzes as symbols of Austria’s post-imperial crisis, a crisis that had motivated the Philharmonic also to explore the Latin American market: “Whose heart did not grow heavy with those exuberant, wine-filled sounds? Here the God-favored artists depict a piece of home as we know it from happier days—but over there in the homeland now: desolate misery and bitter hardship!”Footnote 111
Between World War II and the 1980s, the orchestra—in places as different as German-occupied Kraków and Amsterdam, London, Lisbon, Brussels, Cairo, Bombay, Manila, Tokyo, Moscow, Athens, Beijing, Seoul, or New York—played concerts of Viennese light music, often for large audiences in big halls. Since then, with the global TV broadcast of the New Year’s Day Concert to ninety countries, the orchestra has preferred to globally brand the Strauss repertoire in a package with the splendor of Vienna’s Musikverein and the New Year’s Day holiday atmosphere, while waltzes and polkas are still hardly lacking from any tour as encore pieces.
On a more general level, the appearance of commercial recording in the 1920s, the improvements brought by the LP and stereo recording in the 1950s, and the simultaneous boost to intercontinental touring put sound profiles at the core of stylistic and cultural comparisons between different orchestras. The results of this global spread of live performances and media transmissions were nevertheless ambivalent. Audiences were clearly conditioned to hear “Vienna” when listening to the Philharmonic through the idea of the “Viennese sound,” often associated with mellowness, swing, and imaginative (rather than flawless) playing and with specific instruments such as the Viennese horn and oboe.Footnote 112 Also the musicians themselves believed in the distinctiveness of their sound, which, as they noted, “makes us famous all over the world.”Footnote 113 With technological advances, empirical research projects attempted to prove the uniqueness of the Viennese sound by submitting it to acoustic analysis.Footnote 114 The resulting “proofs” of the orchestra’s specific sonic identity served to legitimize its strategy of having prospective members trained by its own players.Footnote 115 These sound- and style-based networks largely excluded foreign applicants, while, at the same time, the stylistic homogeneity was promoted as a global brand.
By contrast, ample evidence shows that such beliefs relied on invented traditions and became self-fulfilling prophecies. Audiences and music critics could appreciate the Philharmonic’s qualities without having recourse to local or national branding. Hearing the Philharmonic for the first time in 1956, the Washington Post’s critic was convinced that “the Vienna Philharmonic is more like a great American symphony orchestra than any other European ensemble we have heard.”Footnote 116 At the end of the century, as the ideal shifted toward historically informed interpretations of Vienna’s canonical composers Joseph Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, the orchestra came under criticism.Footnote 117 For Western European and North American critics, the lush Viennese sound was also politically, socially, and morally anachronistic in the wake of the Waldheim affair and the rise of the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), but also due to the Philharmonic’s stubborn preference for playing the classical-romantic canon as an all-male and all-white ensemble.Footnote 118 In return, Austrian defenders of the orchestra’s musical traditionalism and social conservatism presented themselves as anti-globalist and anti-American defenders of the notion of Austria as a cultural great power.Footnote 119
Indeed, the Philharmonic’s touring repertoire remained extremely stable, the top five composers performed globally between 1900 and 1990 being Beethoven, Mozart, Johann Strauss, Richard Strauss, and Johannes Brahms. The twentieth-century globalization of classical music and global musical mobility heavily relied on transforming the nineteenth-century Austro-German canon into “world music.” In general, touring was averse to diverse programming due both to ideas of national representation and to economic constraints. Tight tour budgets, high ticket prices, little rehearsal time, and audience demand privileged the well known rather than experiments.
Yet, given the hegemony of the globally performed Central European repertoire, its performance and reception history was diverse. This is particularly the case in places that Elaine Kelly has called musical “pericenters,” that is, destinations distant from the alleged European and North American centers of the Western classical music world, but which nevertheless provided infrastructures and audiences for large visiting ensembles.Footnote 120 On occasion, concert promoters targeted specific groups with special offers. During the 1922 South American tour, impresario Mocchi and conductor Weingartner presented core pieces of the German canon: Beethoven’s symphonies and Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung were played in Buenos Aires’s Teatro Colón, then the world’s largest opera house. The repertoire also included Czech, Hungarian, French, Italian, and British composers next to Brazilian and Argentinian works, with different pieces being targeted at different communities. Never was the Philharmonic’s tour repertoire so international. On the 1923 South American tour, conductor Richard Strauss focused on a Germanic repertoire, particularly works by contemporary composers, while also presenting himself to South American audiences as the leading living composer—thus making the tour’s repertoire the most contemporary in the Philharmonic’s history.
At other instances, programs that might look Eurocentric at first sight were the result of political and cultural demands made by the host countries. At its debut in Communist China in 1973, the Vienna Philharmonic was only the second international ensemble to be invited after the Cultural Revolution had banned Western classical music for being bourgeois and decadent.Footnote 121 With China’s gradual opening toward the West, the question arose as to how this “counterrevolutionary” music could legitimately be performed again for Chinese audiences. One approach acceptable to Sino-Marxist doctrine was to consider European classical composers as precursors of communism. Hence, Mozart and Beethoven could be performed as champions of “bourgeois revolution” and enemies of “feudalism.” A second approach mobilized cultural diplomacy, promoting the idea of an “understanding between peoples.” In that sense, the Vienna Philharmonic could play Beethoven’s Eroica symphony—which was still forbidden to Chinese orchestras—as Austrian national music.Footnote 122 Moreover, from the Chinese viewpoint, music had to be accessible to working-class audiences by being close to life, and one indicator of a work being close to life was having a title.Footnote 123 As Communist officials supposed that Mozart’s Little Night Music and Jupiter symphony, and, even more so, Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus, Perpetuum Mobile, and The Blue Danube carried clear messages, the Philharmonic was allowed to play what it would have played anyway as ideologically adequate music.
Non-European audiences had their own agency in the performances by visiting orchestras that counteracted Eurocentric expectations. As part of its 1959 “world tour,” the Vienna Philharmonic, at the suggestion of Austrian diplomats and local concert promoters, had chosen supposedly lightweight programs for its first-time encounters with Indian and Philippine audiences.Footnote 124 Instead of Brahms or Bruckner symphonies, which were thought to be too difficult for these allegedly inexperienced audiences, the orchestra played Richard Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, and, again, Strauss waltzes. The concert programs in the different destinations point to other possible meanings that go beyond issues of entertainment or initiation: advertisements for steel and food companies and the chemical industry in India linked the concerts with global emancipation, industrial development, and national consciousness; concerts in Manila were aligned with the national fight against tuberculosis, residential building programs, and the national sugar industry as an anticolonial project.Footnote 125 In line with this progressive symbolism, reactions to the lightweight programs were critical in ways that were unexpected for the European musicians. The Indian press dismissed the waltzes as a “waste of resources” suitable only for “kindergarten children” and demanded the big symphonies that Indian audiences were already familiar with from the radio and LPs as an incentive for cultural education in India.Footnote 126 Filipino critics, meanwhile, claimed that they could already hear waltzes performed by local orchestras and that the “cosmopolitan wind” brought by the Vienna Philharmonic had to fulfill higher ambitions.Footnote 127
Despite the Orientalist gaze of the orchestra and its organization partners, post-colonial Asian critics did not reject the performance of classical music as imperial music. Rather, they raised their voice to make clear that, in a globalizing music world, musical universalism could no longer imply a Eurocentric approach to the canon. Only days later, programming Mozart, Schubert, and Johann Strauss in Japan did not spark any controversy. Here, the Philharmonic again represented Vienna as the “city of music” and a model for non-European audiences and performers.Footnote 128
Conclusion
This article has presented the Vienna Philharmonic’s twentieth-century history as an exemplary case for Austrian world practices spanning all of Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, and East Asia. This coverage clearly is not equivalent to a holistic world discourse that is often found in sources claiming the “world reputation” or “world rank” of musical institutions or repertoires, mostly from a local or national viewpoint. To tackle this divergence, this article has made a case for studying musical “world practices” that highlight the actual mobility of musical actors such as the Vienna Philharmonic. Once they have been precisely mapped, as suggested by Osterhammel, world practices help us to see how and where Western classical music intersected with broader globalization processes, and in which areas and fields it did not.Footnote 129 As an interpretive lens, world practices also allow us to center the study of musical mobility on the musical actors themselves, as well as on their professional interests, and then to embed these in their political, social, economic, and mediatic environments.
On a political level, global touring was closely related to cultural diplomacy and has often been studied from that angle. Nevertheless, musical mobility never fully depended on a politically motivated representation of Austria’s political regimes between the Habsburg monarchy and the Second Republic. Rather, cultural diplomacy overlapping with nation branding, was only one driving force in the globalization of classical music. State actors were only one factor among music agents, record companies, and, above all, musicians exploring their professional opportunities across the world. This article therefore argues for paying particular attention to those actors actually present on the musical world stage. Orchestral musicians and conductors touring intercontinentally pursued their own professional agendas, anticipating and experiencing audience demand and reception.
In light of ongoing discussions about the hegemonic or exclusivist aspects of classical music performances, the global history of musical mobility from Austria also helps us to see inconsistencies between the representation of Austrian and Viennese culture on the one hand and global connectivity on the other. The globalization of tour destinations and recording media established the Vienna Philharmonic as a global brand with a recognizable—and for many listeners audible—local anchor. As a result, the orchestra’s global presence relied on an idea of homogeneity that extended far beyond the musical performances themselves. For long stretches of the twentieth century, the Vienna Philharmonic was a largely Austrian-Viennese orchestral body, one that was oriented toward international musical life while showing a long-lasting resistance to racial, cultural, and gender diversity. Both the orchestra’s more diverse late Habsburg history and recent steps toward more openness, however, have revealed this Vienna-centered exclusivism largely as a self-fulfilling prophecy.
As a global player, the Vienna Philharmonic set standards of musical mobility and interacted with very different world regions through shared cultural practices, making the orchestra a rare exception when it toured Japan even during the Covid-19 pandemic.Footnote 130 Yet the ongoing discussion about disconnectivity in global history also helps us to see the limits of musical world practices, as Africa, Central Asia, or Australasia were largely excluded from touring routes for financial, logistical, political, or cultural reasons.Footnote 131 Musical world practices did span the globe, but to different degrees, in uneven density, and with unequal access. Though these constellations complicate ideas of a global East-West, North-South, or center-periphery divide, they also call for pondering the historical possibilities and probabilities of large-scale mobility projects such as orchestral tours.
Despite the popularity of microhistories among global historians,Footnote 132 the Vienna Philharmonic’s global activities also invite some concluding considerations on the meso level regarding the global history of Austrian music and culture, and on the macro level of a global history of Austria. The orchestra certainly was a forerunner of Austrian world practices, but it was not alone. Other cultural institutions in Austria have both comparable and different global histories. Next to orchestras such as the Vienna Symphony or the Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg, the country’s major opera houses—the Vienna State Opera and the Vienna Volksoper—undertook intercontinental tours for their part while collaborating with international and non-European artists (in particular singers) to a far greater extent than orchestras.Footnote 133 While the Salzburg Festival attracted international audiences early on and served as a model for the economic impact of cultural tourism, so far it has not been looked at as a global brand. The Vienna Boys Choir, for economic as well as political reasons, was probably the most globally active Austrian ensemble—a history that is still hidden behind clichéd commonplaces such as “A choir conquers the world.”Footnote 134 Without even mentioning the global careers of singers or soloists, it becomes clear that thousands of Austrian musicians spent large parts of their careers touring the world year by year as few other professionals did in the twentieth century. Although rich source material is available on these actors and institutions, the history of Austrian culture has so far mostly been written as a national history, often with hagiographic and Austrocentric stereotypes of Austria as a “cultural great power.” The lens of world practices allows us to expand and decenter these histories.
One reason for the still lacking global turn in Austrian cultural history is the rather weak resonance global history has so far had in Austrian history and Austrian studies more generally. While writing the global history of a nation has recently turned into a popular exercise in Switzerland, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, or Hungary, no such project has been undertaken in and for Austria.Footnote 135 A recent survey on contemporary historiography in Austria subsumes global history under the label “international history” and refers to research done in Austria on other world regions.Footnote 136 Likewise, journals and edited volume series in the field of Austrian studies have only rarely published contributions on Austria’s global history.Footnote 137 A volume and a special issue both titled Global Austria only marginally cover non-European spaces and perspectives.Footnote 138 Pieter Judson’s invitation to acknowledge how Austrians in the world played “a decisive and systemic role … when we write the contemporary history of Austria” largely waits to be taken up.Footnote 139 Explaining this glaring gap would be a different project to the one carried out in this article. The emphasis on the Aufarbeitung of National Socialism and, partly, Austrofascism in Austrian contemporary history might have come, to some extent, at the cost of studying transnational connections.Footnote 140 Approaching the global history of Austria as a history of Austrian world practices makes the global intersections between cultural, political, economic, and social history visible. Music and culture open paths for much-needed, empirically rich accounts of Austria and the “world” in the twentieth century.
Acknowledgements
An early version of this article was presented at the Annual Conference of the Österreichische Gesellschaft für Musikwissenschaft in Innsbruck in December 2019, and I would like to thank the participants for their stimulating comments. I am also grateful for the anonymous reviewers’ valuable feedback and Benjamin Marschke’s editorial guidance. For their support of archival research, I am particularly indebted to Wolfgang Plank and Silvia Kargl at the Historical Archives of the Vienna Philharmonic. Research for this article was generously funded by the Baden-Württemberg Stiftung.
Friedemann Pestel is a Senior Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Freiburg. His research interests and publications cover the French and Haitian Revolutions, political migration, the history of international classical musical life and musical mobility, as well as memory studies and ideas of Europe. His book Global Players: Orchestertourneen und internationaler Musikbetrieb, 1880-2000 is forthcoming with De Gruyter.
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