![]() While successful in artistic terms and reviewed favourably by the critics, it created a political stir spurred on by certain media, such as the Deutsche Volksblatt, the Deutsche Zeitung and the Reichswehr, the latter considering the performance as representing a “subjugation of the Court Opera”. Dalibor features a protagonist who revolts against king, nobility and Poland and supports the peasants. Mahler decides to put Friedrich Smetana’s Dalibor on the programme on 4 October 1897, the Emperor’s name day, as the first premiere under his direction. ![]() Pivotal year of 1897Ī great deal is happening in 1897: Karl Lueger is elected mayor of Vienna again, and along with him arrive mass political parties and pure populism “old Vienna” is pitched against “new Vienna” the indigenous local culture of the city is promoted as the antithesis to elitist high culture the Minister-President of Cisleithania, Kasimir Felix Badeni, submits his language ordinances for Bohemia and Moravia to the Imperial Council, which provokes street fighting and a state crisis, and – Gustav Mahler is appointed director of the Court Opera. So densely packed, in fact, that this phase ultimately focuses on one single performance and a single year: 1897. A time that was densely packed with events. “Originally, the second phase was supposed to cover the period between 1892, the year of the International Exhibition of Music and Theatre, and the year 1907, when universal male suffrage was introduced”, explains Glanz. – Carefully selected examples illustrate the interaction between life in Austria and performances at the opera. The project subdivided the opera’s history into five phases: the Ringstraße culture of the 1870s, the year 1897, the opera during the First Republic, the period of dictatorship, denazification and reconstruction. The Vienna State Opera was opened on with the performance of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni”. The most striking example was the illegal Nazi organisation cell group set up at the opera in the 1930s. Changes in opera lyrics in order to permit a work to be performed, for instance, or attempts at exerting influence from behind the scenes. Much more frequently one finds changes in mindset, developments heralding the advent of political events. Not every political event had an immediate impact on the Vienna Opera. “But we have to state quite clearly that there is no push-and-pull situation in this context”, adds Glanz. “It was our tenet”, notes Glanz, “that the institution reflects social and political events and developments.” The opera as a seismograph, as it were. Above all, it was in 1869 that the Court Opera opened its doors. ![]() Three years earlier Austria had left the German Confederation, two years earlier it had adopted the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, and four years later came the stock exchange crash and the cholera epidemic”, is how Glanz describes the situation at the time. ![]() “1869 is one of the last years that saw the liberals as the dominant political force in Vienna. “A political history of opera in Vienna between 18” is the title of the FWF-funded project under the lead of principal investigator Christian Glanz from the Department of Musicology and Performance Studies at the University of Music and the Performing Arts, Vienna. And the Emperor only loved the Radetzky March in any case. The Court Opera, as it was called then, was alive but content merely to tap the repertoire of Mozart, Gluck and the Italian composers. “It is interesting to note”, says Christian Glanz, “that in 19 th- century Austria opera was not used as a vehicle of political communication in Vienna.” At a time when Verdi in Italy and Wagner in Germany were conjuring up powerful sonic visions, Vienna experienced a strange creative lull.
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