1 - The Public Ball in Viennese Musical Life, 1770–1830

Summary

This chapter examines the political, social and economic factors that shaped the early development of Vienna’s public ball culture from the time Joseph II opened the imperial ballrooms to the public in 1772. The number of public dancing venues in the city expanded rapidly in the decades around 1800, resulting in an increased influence of the middle classes over Viennese dance culture, and the rise of a new area of professional musical life. These developments gave dance orchestras a prominent position in Vienna’s musical landscape, and contributed to the emergence of new listening practices associated with dance music.

Viennese musical life in the decades around 1800 was shaped by significant social, economic and political changes which transformed the way music was produced and consumed. By far the most celebrated manifestation of these changes is the career trajectory of Ludwig van Beethoven. From his initial employment as a salaried member of a court orchestra, Beethoven moved to Vienna, where he learned to navigate new forms of aristocratic patronage, concert-giving and the burgeoning commercial music publishing market in order to forge a career as an independent artist. Much has been written about the developments in culture and society that had a direct impact on Beethoven’s compositional activities, particularly in the areas of aristocratic patronage and developments in concert life.¹

The early growth of the Viennese ballroom dance industry at the turn of the nineteenth century has received limited attention in music scholarship, perhaps due in part to the fact that dance music played a relatively marginal role in Beethoven’s compositional output. Nevertheless, Viennese dance music represented a rapidly increasing portion of the city’s professional music scene in this period, and the role of the professional dance musician first became possible during Beethoven’s lifetime. These developments shaped wider Viennese musical culture in significant ways, not least in leading to the emergence of popular dance music as an independent category with its own performing and listening practices, culminating in the extraordinary commercial success of Lanner and Strauss. This chapter traces the birth and early growth of Vienna’s public dance hall industry, and the parallel developments in the Viennese music profession and musical life more generally, from the opening of the first public dance halls at the end of the eighteenth century.

Dancing Venues

The birth of Vienna’s public ball culture can be traced to two imperial decrees from the reign of Joseph II in the second half of the eighteenth century. The first of these, issued in November 1766, permitted balls in Vienna that were open to a ticket-paying public.² The second, from 1772, opened the imperial ballrooms (the large and small Redoutensäle) to the public for masquerade balls during the carnival season, the period between Epiphany (6 January) and the beginning of Lent.³ This decree specified that there would be two to three masked balls (Redouten) per week throughout carnival, lasting from nine until three o’clock in the morning, extending to five o’clock after 7 February. Any person could attend, regardless of station, with the exception of servants wearing livery. Masquerade balls were only permitted in the imperial ballrooms; the wearing of masks in any other dance hall or public place was forbidden.

These decrees enabled members of the nobility and those of the middle classes to rub shoulders in the city’s ballrooms for the first time. As Joonas Korhonen has demonstrated, however, Viennese dance venues remained socially segregated in other ways.⁴ As more tradesmen, bureaucrats, artisans and other members of the city’s middle classes began to attend venues that had previously catered only for the nobility, these venues became less fashionable amongst the elite, who instead began to favour private balls. Furthermore, even where the nobility did attend public ballrooms, they rarely danced with people outside their own social class. At the masked balls in the imperial ballrooms, the nobility mostly did not participate in the dancing at all, except in the special case of the performance contredanse (discussed in Chapter 4).⁵ Just as class distinctions were maintained in the theatre, where the different layers of society occupied different galleries in the auditorium, the nobility similarly maintained a distance from the middle classes in the ballroom by choosing not to dance.⁶

The imperial decrees of 1766 and 1772 had a transformative effect on social dance culture not because they led to a breakdown of class hierarchies, but because they allowed Vienna’s middle classes to access the ballroom. This paved the way for the city’s dance culture to develop along commercial lines in the coming decades, where ballroom owners, composers and other individuals involved in the dance business increasingly responded to consumer demand rather than aristocratic taste.⁷ The transformation occurred gradually, paralleling broader changes in the demographic make-up of Viennese society. At the end of the eighteenth century, Vienna was the third most populous city in Europe after London and Paris, with a population of around two hundred and thirty thousand. According to John Rice’s estimate, in 1789 the nobility numbered around eight thousand, or just over 3 per cent of the population, and what might be defined as an ‘upper middle class’ that included civil servants, bankers, merchants, and lawyers constituted around 4 per cent of the population.⁸ Whereas these wealthier citizens mostly lived within the city walls, a much larger class of artisans (around a third of the population, according to one estimate) lived in the suburbs.⁹ Servants, labourers and journeymen formed the lower orders of Viennese society.¹⁰

The city’s population grew rapidly in the early decades of the nineteenth century, with the rising middle class accounting for a significant proportion of this growth. The middle class is difficult to identify in this period since there was no uniform concept of what this constituted. The rise of industrialisation and mass production evidently led to an expansion in the number of wealthy professionals who belonged to the ‘upper middle class’, but also led to a growth in consumerism that extended to the artisan classes. All sectors of society participated in the city’s dance culture: as one travel writer noted in 1796, ‘[the Viennese] dance no less happily in the middle of summer as in winter, and the waiter no less indefatigably than the young prince’.¹¹ Even servants attended dancing schools, as one Viennese writer noted in 1794.¹²

Although balls formed part of Viennese public life from the late eighteenth century onwards, all aspects of the city’s dance culture were strictly regulated by the imperial government. Reingard Witzmann’s Der Ländler in Wien lists sixty-five separate regulations relating to dance that date between 1748 and 1827.¹³ The regulations set clear parameters for the days, times and places in which dancing was permitted. In general, balls were allowed on Sundays and feast days throughout the year, though they were forbidden during Lent, on certain holy days, for two days at the anniversary of the most recently deceased Habsburg emperor and on 22–24 December as the last days of Advent.¹⁴ Carnival was the official dancing season, when the imperial ballrooms hosted their renowned masquerade balls, and venues throughout the city hosted dancing on a nightly basis.

The number of dancing venues in Vienna more grew rapidly in the early decades of the city’s public dance culture. In 1780 there were around fifteen venues, which increased to around fifty by 1810.¹⁵ Whereas in the early period the dancing venues were mostly concentrated in the inner city (the main ones were the imperial ballrooms, the Mehlgrube in the Neuer Markt, Philipp Otto’s casino in the Spiegelgasse and Jahn’s restaurant in the Himmelpfortgasse), newer venues increasingly opened in the suburbs. The expansion of the dance hall industry corresponded with a similar growth in the number of restaurants, coffee houses and taverns in the same period, since the right to host dancing was initially connected with the right to run any commercial establishment that served food and drink. An imperial decree of 17 January 1787 stipulated that any such establishment could host dancing on Sundays and feast days until midnight, but that the owners could apply for an annual permit that entitled them to host dance music until three o’clock in the morning.¹⁶ Since later opening hours allowed a potential increase in revenue, it was in the interests of such establishments to obtain the permit and operate as a dance hall. The permit cost the owners a fee whether or not they had a separate ballroom, so in order to compete with other venues many establishments converted existing space into purpose-built dance floors.¹⁷ Venue owners typically announced their calendar of balls in the Wiener Zeitung (WZ) at the start of the carnival season, seeking to entice dancers by boasting of brightly illuminated rooms, large orchestras, refreshments at a good price and gaming tables for those who wished to play cards.

The number of dancing venues had grown to such an extent by the early nineteenth century that the imperial police administration (k. k. Polizeidirektion) passed a decree in 1820 that granted a new kind of permit, the ‘Tanzsaalprivilegium’, to establishments that operated as dance halls throughout the year. The decree thereby separated the right to run dance halls from the right to run a restaurant or tavern. The justification for this was that over the previous forty years the number of dance halls, and therefore the opportunities for ‘disorder and excesses to the detriment of nightly rest and safety’, had inordinately increased.¹⁸ Venues had to meet certain conditions to qualify for the Tanzsaalprivilegium: there must be ample space, good lighting and music, balls must be publicly advertised, entrance was only permitted on purchase of a ticket, and venues must have dress codes that required respectable attire. Dance halls were also required to post a military watch in the interests of maintaining public order.¹⁹ The Tanzsaalprivilegium could be revoked if a venue did not meet these conditions.²⁰

As the number of Viennese ballrooms expanded in the decades around 1800, suburban venues came to replace the inner city as the heart of the city’s dance culture. In the early period of the city’s public dance culture, glamorous inner-city venues such as the imperial ballrooms and the Mehlgrube catered mainly for the nobility and the upper middle class. As the ever-expanding lower middle classes also began to attend these venues, the elite abandoned them. At the same time, new suburban dancing venues came to rival the inner-city ballrooms as the most prestigious venues. By the 1810s dance halls such as Zum schwarzen Bock and Zur goldene Birne in the Landstrasse, and the Sperl in the Leopoldstadt, came to be seen as the best venues for dancing, and it was in these venues that many popular band leaders, including Michael Pamer, Joseph Lanner and Johann Strauss Sr, launched their careers. The Apollosaal, built in the suburb of Schottenfeld in 1808, surpassed even the imperial ballrooms in size and opulence. With living trees and shrubs, statues, waterfalls and grottos, the Apollosaal was essentially a vast indoor pleasure garden. The orchestra was positioned underneath an artificial mound at the end of the dance hall, above which stood a vast statue of Apollo in a chariot against the backdrop of a rising sun (see Figure 1.1).²¹

Figure 1.1 View of the Orchestra in the Apollo-Saal, from Ansichten-Sammlung der Berühmtesten Palläste Gebäude und der Schönsten Gegenden von und um Wien (Vienna: Maria Geissler, 1812). Collection of the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies

The Apollosaal ensured a higher class of clientele by charging high ticket prices, particularly on special occasions.²² At its grand opening in January 1808 and a ball in honour of the allied sovereigns at the Congress of Vienna in October 1814, the Apollosaal charged an astronomical twenty-five gulden for entrance (two gulden was the normal price of admittance to the imperial ballrooms at the end of the eighteenth century).²³ By the 1820s, however, the middle classes dominated Vienna’s public dance culture, and the nobility and upper middle classes largely retreated from public balls. Korhonen describes a situation in which the nobility played cat and mouse with the lower classes in turn-of-the-century Vienna: ‘When the lower classes found their way to the ballrooms of the elite in the late eighteenth century, the latter no longer went dancing there, and correspondingly, when the bourgeois dance halls matched those of the nobility in the early nineteenth century, the nobility began to favour private dancing parties.’²⁴

Dance Musicians

While the vast expansion of Vienna’s ballroom dance industry from the late eighteenth century onwards is well documented, surprisingly little is known about the musicians who populated the orchestras and ensembles in the city’s dozens of dancing venues before the age of Lanner and Strauss. By 1830, these two rival band leaders had achieved a popular following, and their music was a major draw to the ballrooms in which their orchestras were resident. The Wiener Theater-Zeitung noted that Strauss’s popularity was such that ‘wherever his violin sounds, there the pleasure-loving residents of the capital assemble’, and that Lanner’’s orchestra similarly attracted large crowds to the weekly dances at the Römische Kaiser.²⁵ In the same year one writer noted that even Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, all of whom achieved fame and renown in their own lifetimes, never reached the heights of veneration enjoyed by the new generation of Viennese dance composers.²⁶ In the decades around 1800, by contrast, professional dance musicians were largely absent from the public eye, despite the fact that the city’s social dance culture was already thriving by the end of the eighteenth century. Dance music remains one of the least documented aspects of the city’s music scene around the turn of the nineteenth century, despite representing the fastest-growing area of the music profession at that time.

In the early period of Vienna’s public ball culture, dance music was still controlled by a guild called the St Nicolaistift whose existence dated back to 1658.²⁷ Guild members were essentially Stadtmusikanten (town musicians) who could be hired to perform for weddings, banquets or dance music in taverns. Any non-member of the guild who performed at these occasions would be subject to a hefty fine. The topic of the guild’s control over dance music features in an anonymous satirical short story, ‘Der Hausball’ (‘The House Ball’), published in Vienna in 1781.²⁸ The story concerns a Viennese gentleman attempting to organise a house ball, who hires musicians from a local military regiment in order to avoid the extra costs associated with hiring members of the guild. The guild members complain when they learn of this misdemeanour, demanding that the military musicians be placed under house arrest, and the ball organiser ends up recruiting four shabby musicians from the street (a blind harpist, two horn players and a bassist), whose performance at the ball is predictably cacophonous.

Walter Salmen draws attention to the immense rise in the social prestige of the dance musician in the decades between the era of the guild, when such musicians occupied a very low status, and the age of Lanner and Strauss.²⁹ It would be wrong, however, to consider the celebrity band leaders of the 1830s as following in a direct lineage from the town musicians of the eighteenth century. Surviving payment records connected with the imperial ballroom orchestras in the late eighteenth century do not include detailed personnel lists, but evidence suggests that at least some of the musicians also held salaried posts at the court or other establishments. The imperial ballrooms usually hosted twelve Redoute balls during each carnival season, and occasional one-off balls at other times in the year. The Hoftheater (court theatre) administration was responsible for organising the balls, though it subcontracted musicians for the ballroom orchestras rather than employing the orchestras of the two court theatres, the Burgtheater and the Kärntnertortheater. The surviving payment records for Redoute balls from the 1770s until 1799 indicate that the orchestras in the large and small ballrooms consisted of forty-three and twenty-seven players, respectively.³⁰ The records do not include personnel lists, but they name the ‘music director’ (the concertmaster) of each orchestra. A payment receipt connected with a Redoute ball from November 1773 names the directors as ‘Mölckel’ (large ballroom) and ‘Hoffer Michael’ (small ballroom).³¹ The latter was likely the same person as the ‘Michael Hofer’ listed as a violinist with the Burgtheater orchestra in 1774, and as one of its directors from January 1777.³² Hofer and other theatre musicians may well have performed in the ballroom orchestras as extra gig work alongside their salaried positions.

Since the court theatre organised the Redoutensaal balls, it would not be surprising if theatre musicians took extra work in the ballroom orchestras during carnival. The balls effectively formed an extension of the court theatre’s programming during carnival, and theatre playbills advertised balls as well as daily theatrical productions.³³ Plays and operas generally began at 6:30 or 7:00 p.m., and balls began at 9:00 p.m. Viennese audiences could therefore proceed directly from the theatre to the Redoutensaal, which was practically adjacent to the Burgtheater and a short walk or carriage ride from the Kärntnertortheater. At the ball they could dine in various rooms adjacent to the ballrooms, where supper and light refreshments were served all night.³⁴ It would be technically possible for theatre musicians also to proceed directly from the theatre to the imperial ballrooms and perform in both venues, though this would lead to an extremely long working day, since the dance orchestras usually performed from 9:00 p.m. until 5:00 a.m., with two breaks over the course of the ball.³⁵ More likely, perhaps, is that musicians who performed with both orchestras would provide a substitute for the theatre orchestras on nights when there was also a ball.

The ballroom orchestras also provided potential extra work for musicians from other establishments. Significantly, Vienna’s dance hall industry emerged just as other aspects of the city’s professional musical life were undergoing major transformations. Joseph II had reorganised the court’s music ensemble (Hofkapelle) in 1772, employing the musicians on lower salaries than before, but allowing them to take on additional employment elsewhere. Dorothea Link points out that many of them took up employment in churches, but it is likely that the emerging public ball industry provided similar employment opportunities, especially during the busy carnival season.³⁶ Joseph’s religious reforms from 1782 reduced the role of instrumental music in church services, and many church orchestras were disbanded. Otto Biba notes that the church musicians who suddenly found themselves unemployed must have had to seek other work in order to avoid being reduced to beggars, but nothing is known of their plight.³⁷ At the same time, many aristocratic households were also disbanding their Kapellen at the end of the eighteenth century, so while many palaces maintained their own orchestras in the 1770s, very few still did so by 1800.³⁸ Vienna’s growing number of dance halls probably provided welcome employment opportunities for musicians who now found themselves out of work.

In the absence of personnel lists for Vienna’s large dance orchestras it is not possible to know how far these different areas of the city’s professional musical life overlapped, though several prominent early bandleaders did also work in court or theatre orchestras. The director of the orchestra at the Apollosaal from its opening in 1808 was Johannes Hummel (father of the famous composer Johann Nepomuk Hummel), who had first come to Vienna in 1786 to serve as music director of the Theater auf der Wieden.³⁹ The dance composer and bandleader Johann Faistenberger (1797–1867) straddled several areas of the music profession: besides directing the dance orchestra in the ballroom Zum Schaf, he also worked as second orchestral director at the Theater an der Wien, and as orchestral director at the Margareten parish church.⁴⁰ These examples serve to demonstrate that Vienna’s ballroom orchestras belonged to the wider network of music-making, rather than representing an entirely new area of the music profession. Viennese dance musicians of a later era, beginning with Strauss Sr, specialised in dance music and developed performance practices specific to the style.⁴¹ The first generations of ballroom musicians, however, included many who were also active in other areas of the city’s musical life. The increasing number of dance halls provided extra employment opportunities, particularly during carnival, to the same musicians who performed operas, symphonies and church music elsewhere in the city.

Music Directors and Composers

Besides providing additional employment for the city’s existing musicians, the growth of Vienna’s dance hall industry enabled a new generation of musicians to specialise in dance music. While Lanner and Strauss were the first dance musicians to achieve international fame, they followed in a long line of dance composer-bandleaders who had been active since at least the 1780s. The music directors of the imperial ballroom orchestras in the decades around 1800 worked not only as orchestra conductors, but also as contractors who engaged the orchestral musicians (‘fixers’ in modern parlance), and composers. Essentially, they were businessmen as well as musicians. The court theatre’s account book for the 1799 carnival balls shows the range of activities performed by the music directors (Table 1.1).

Table 1.1 Expenses for music and [music] copying in the imperial and royal ballrooms for the carnival balls of 1799 (HHStA, Generalintendanz der Hoftheater, Sonderreihe, SR 48b)

		fl[orin]	kr[eutzer]
N°	To Anton Höllmayer, music director of the large Redoutensaal, for the music personnel comprising 43 players for 12 masked balls in that hall, including the minuets and German dances composed for this purpose together with the copying expenses see [receipt] no. 21 (Dem Höllmayer Anton, Musikdirektor des grossen redouten Saales, für das in selben zu 43 Köpfe zu 12 maskirten Bällen gestellte Musikpersonale mit Imbegrif der hiezu komponirten Menuet und deutschen Tänze samt Kopiatursspesen ut N° 21)
21	To Zimmermann, music director of the small Redoutensaal, for the music personnel comprising 27 players for 12 masked balls in that hall, including the minuets and German dances composed for this purpose together with the copying expenses see receipt no. 22	1,608
22	(Dem Zimmermann Musik-Direktor des kleinen redouten Saals für das daselbst zu 27 Köpfe zu 12 maskirten Bällen gestellte Musikpersonale mit Imbegrif der hiezu komponirten Menuet und deutschen Tänze samt Kopiaturen ut Quittungen N° 22)	1,032
		2,640

The court theatre’s dealings with these music directors was different from its dealings with the regular theatre orchestras, where musicians, composers, copyists and even the instrument porters (Instrumentendiener) were paid directly by the theatre’s administration.⁴² The music directors Anton Höllmayer and Zimmermann received a lump sum for all of these duties combined, so they in turn employed the necessary personnel. The court theatre thereby outsourced not only the music, but also the necessary administration to the music directors.

The opportunity to compose dance music for the carnival balls also allowed music directors to earn additional income from publishing. Amongst the vast quantities of dance music available on the sheet music market, dances from the imperial ballrooms had added commercial appeal from their association with the splendour of the carnival balls, which many thousands of guests attended throughout the ball season. Joseph Haydn, for instance, composed minuets and German dances (Hob. IX:11–12) for the inaugural charity ball for the Artists’ Pension Society in the imperial ballrooms on 25 November 1792, which he was able to sell in keyboard transcription to the publisher Artaria for the substantial sum of twenty-four ducats.⁴³ By comparison, in 1801 Beethoven offered his First Symphony, the Septet op. 20 and the Piano Sonata op. 22 to the Leipzig publisher Bureau de Musique for only twenty ducats each.⁴⁴

The music director Joseph Wilde, who was music director in the small Redoutensaal at the time of the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15, profited greatly from the exposure his dance music received at the balls that formed part of the official court-sponsored activities in the opening months, further explored in Chapter 7. Capitalising on the great popularity of Tsar Alexander of Russia, guest of honour at the Congress, Wilde opportunistically published a set of dances composed for Congress balls in keyboard transcription under the title ‘Alexanders Favorit Tänze’ (‘Alexander’s Favourite Dances’).⁴⁵ In acknowledgement, the tsar presented Wilde with a diamond ring, a rare and significant gesture from a sovereign towards any musician.⁴⁶ Beethoven had previously dedicated his Violin Sonatas op. 30 (1802) to the tsar, and although Tsarina Elizabeth Alexievna rewarded Beethoven with one hundred ducats at the Congress in belated recognition of the dedication, he never received personal acknowledgement from the tsar himself.⁴⁷ Wilde’s role of music director in the imperial ballrooms, both as a performer and as a composer, placed him in the public eye at the Congress of Vienna in a way that would be the envy of most musicians.

While much of the early dance repertoire performed in Viennese dance halls stemmed from the pens of the music directors, plenty more was also supplied by other composers. Dance music quickly became a profitable business for both composers and music publishers. The ever-increasing number of dance halls ensured a constant demand for new dances, and dance music was highly marketable as sheet music. Until the 1790s it was common for dance music to circulate on the sheet music market in full orchestral scoring alongside transcriptions for solo keyboard or string trio, as evidenced by numerous publishers’ advertisements in the WZ during the carnival season. The orchestral parts were presumably marketed mainly at dance orchestras performing in the city’s many dance halls, whereas the transcriptions were suitable for house balls, or for performance as music in its own right. Empress Marie Therese, the second wife of Emperor Franz II/I from 1790 until her death in 1807, owned hundreds of dances from the Viennese ballroom in orchestral parts as well as keyboard transcription, suggesting that she enjoying playing this music for her own pleasure as well as dancing in the formal setting of the court ball.⁴⁸ After 1800, full orchestral parts largely disappeared from the sheet music market, indicating that dance orchestras increasingly performed their own repertoire rather than music originally composed for another venue.

The carnival balls in the imperial ballrooms provided especially lucrative business for Viennese composers in the eighteenth century. The standard repertoire at these occasions was minuets and German dances, which usually formed sets of six or twelve dances, occasionally including a coda. This remained the standard format of Viennese dance music until the 1830s, when Lanner and Strauss began to favour a five-part waltz form with introduction and coda. The Redoutensaal orchestras needed a plentiful supply of dance music for carnival balls since, according to a Viennese guidebook published in 1816, the orchestra in each ballroom ‘alternately plays an hour of minuets and an hour of German dances’.⁴⁹ The court theatre’s account books reveal that the music directors usually composed new minuets and German dances for the carnival balls, and that other composers were sometimes commissioned to provide additional dance music. In 1780, for instance, Franz Aspelmeier received forty-eight gulden for composing twenty-four German dances and Joseph Haydn received fifty gulden for composing eighteen minuets.⁵⁰

Many more composers provided music for Redoutensaal balls than those who appear in the court theatre’s account books, however. The Austrian National Library preserves dance music from the imperial ballrooms by dozens of different composers from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Repertoire from the 1780s until 1800 is particularly well represented in the so-called Kaisersammlung, the private music collection of Emperor Franz II/I, much of which was originally compiled by Franz’s second wife, Marie Therese, before her death in 1807.⁵¹ For the 1790s alone, the Kaisersammlung includes music for the imperial ballrooms by more than twenty different composers. Amongst them were Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Johann Baptist Vanhal and Adalbert Gyrowetz. Also represented are Joseph Wölfl (the keyboard virtuoso best known for his ‘piano duel’ with Beethoven in 1799) and Joseph Triebensee (the oboist and prolific composer and arranger of Harmoniemusik (music for wind ensemble)). Minuets and German dances by ‘Haselbeck’ survive for most years between 1786 and 1796. Haselbeck appears to have specialised in dance music as he is not known to have composed in any other genre, though it is possible that he is the ‘von Haßelbeck’ listed as a prominent amateur violinist in Schönfeld’s 1796 Yearbook of Music in Vienna and Prague.⁵² These other composers may have received commissions directly from the music directors, or else composed them in the hope of securing a fee by selling them to publishers.

Mozart’s Viennese dance compositions mostly stem from the period of his appointment as court Kammermusicus to Joseph II (1787–91), and it is widely assumed that he was obliged to compose dance music for the imperial ballrooms as part of his contractual duties. There is no direct evidence to support this assumption, however, since his letter of employment did not specify the duties associated with the post.⁵³ Furthermore, Mozart’s post belonged to the court Kammermusik (chamber music), which was separate from the Hoftheater and therefore had no connection to the public balls organised for the carnival season each year. The handful of contredanses that Mozart composed between 1788 and 1791, however, may have been destined for private balls at the court of Joseph II, since the contredanse was not part of the normal repertoire at public Redoutensaal balls (further discussed in Chapter 4).⁵⁴ While he may have composed the contredanses in fulfilment of his duties as Kammermusicus, it is more probable that he composed the minuets and German dances for the public carnival balls, like so many other musicians, as a means of securing additional income.

Audiences for Dance Music

The growth of the Viennese dance hall business from the late eighteenth century gave the dance orchestra a prominent position in the city’s musical landscape. While instrumentalists and singers routinely provided entertainment music in restaurants and taverns, dance orchestras in the larger dance halls brought a more formal type of entertainment music into everyday social life. The orchestra in the large Redoutensaal, with forty-three players, was Vienna’s largest regular professional orchestra until the opening of the Apollosaal in 1808, which boasted an orchestra of fifty players.⁵⁵ By comparison, the court theatre orchestras each employed around thirty-five players.⁵⁶ The only occasions at which Viennese audiences could hear larger orchestras than these were at the charity concerts of the Tonkünstler Society at Easter and just before Christmas, or at one-off benefit concerts, though their orchestras came together only for these specific performances. The opportunity to hear a large, well-disciplined orchestra formed part of the attraction of balls in the larger dancing venues.

With the city’s dancing venues seeking to outdo each other in glamour and opulence, the orchestra also contributed to the visual spectacle of the carnival ball. Ball announcements at the start of each carnival season frequently boasted of refurbished, candlelit rooms and well-populated orchestras. When the owner of the Kreuzsaal in the Schottenfeld district announced his carnival seasons of 1801 and 1802 in the WZ, he stated that wax candles would illuminate the orchestra as well as the room itself.⁵⁷ Sigmund Wolfsohn’s monumental Apollosaal even incorporated the orchestra into the building’s architecture in the form of the large artificial mound, topped with a statue of Apollo, depicted in Figure 1.1.

The dance music in Vienna’s most opulent ballrooms also did more than merely provide accompaniment for dancing. This was especially true in the imperial ballrooms, where dancing actually played a relatively minor role during a typical carnival ball. A visit to the Redoute generally involved socialising, wandering between the large and small ballrooms, and taking supper in one of the side chambers. The imperial ballrooms were notorious for overcrowding, particularly in the final days of carnival, often leaving little space on the dance floor for actual dancing. Furthermore, as has already been mentioned, members of the higher classes generally avoided participating in any dancing in the mixed-class setting of the public ball. According to one writer in 1801, ‘it is even considered fashionable [zum Ton] never to dance at the Redoute.’⁵⁸

A famous engraving by Josef Schütz of the large Redoutensaal depicts a scene in which most guests are not dancing, even though the orchestra (seated in the left gallery) is clearly in mid-performance (see Figure 1.2). A throng of people in various costumes stand and converse on the dance floor, and several people also sit on benches along the side. It is not clear that any of the couples on the dance floor are actually dancing, though some towards the centre of the dance floor face each other in what might be a closed waltz hold. In the scene depicted by Schütz, the dance orchestra provides background music to general socialising, and could just as easily be performing Tafelmusik (literally ‘table music’ played during feasts and banquets) as providing the necessary rhythms and metres for dancing.

Figure 1.2 Josef Schütz, Ansicht des k. k. Redouten Saales während eines Masquen-Balles, c. 1815. Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Kartensammlung und Globenmuseum

The orchestras in the imperial ballrooms evidently performed their minuets and German dances without the expectation that the guests would stop their conversations in order to dance. The repetitious programme of dance music, in which minuets alternated with German dances over the course of the whole evening, was further cause for the music to blend into the background. This made the Redoute different from balls that included a prearranged schedule of dances, in which there was a wider range of dance types and where a certain dance might occur only once during the course of the evening’s programme. Monika Fink cites dance programmes as an essential element of ball culture from the eighteenth century into the nineteenth, and many have survived in the form of printed dance cards or dance fans.⁵⁹ In some ways the music in the imperial ballrooms was part of the background and demanded less attention than balls where dancing formed the main activity. However, the format of these balls also opened up the possibility that attendees could engage with the music on its own terms, rather than primarily as an accompaniment for dancing. Dance may not been central to the activities at the Redoute, but the music at these events was particularly renowned. One contemporary description stated that music for the Redoute was newly composed each year ‘by the most famous composers of the day’, and the proliferation of music publications from the imperial ballrooms attests to its popularity.⁶⁰

The diary of Joseph Karl Rosenbaum (1770–1829), a former official at the Esterházy court, includes several reports of Redoutensaal balls in which he explicitly responded to the music as a listener rather than as a dancer. His diary entries rarely mention dancing, in which he himself evidently did not participate; instead, they mainly focus on his social interactions, the variety of costumes on display and other general descriptions of the balls. Yet his diaries indicate that the music was still an important aspect of his experience of these events. Of his visit to the Redoute on 7 January 1798, for instance, he recorded the following:

In the evening I went to Stessel’s, stayed there until 9 o’clock, and then went with him to the Redoute. At the Redoute we listened to the minuets and German dances by Fuchs at the beginning, which are very pleasant, then we walked around and conversed with Lippert.⁶¹

The ball on 7 January was the first of the carnival season, and Rosenbaum’s diary entry suggests that he experienced the occasion as a musical premiere, since it marked the first performance of the new season’s dance repertoire. It is even possible that Rosenbaum was not alone in listening to the dance music at the start of the ball, and that the assembled guests treated the first hearing as a musical performance before the general dancing and socialising began. The fact that Rosenbaum noted the name of the composer implies that some kind of formal announcement preceded the opening performance, since the court theatre’s playbills did not name the dance composers when announcing carnival balls.

Rosenbaum’s diary indicates that the new music for the annual Artists’ Pension Society balls in November usually received an even more formalised premiere performance than the music for the carnival season. The Katharinen-Redouten, so-called because they fell on the Sunday on or before St Catherine’s Day (25 November), always featured music specially composed for the society. In the years 1801–4, and again in 1808, Rosenbaum attended rehearsals for the new minuets and German dances for the Katharinen-Redouten, which always took place in the imperial ballrooms on the afternoon before the ball. At the 1801 rehearsal he noted an invited audience of forty people, making the occasion similar to a small private concert. These rehearsals were in fact the best opportunity for listening to the newly composed music, since it would be largely drowned out by the general hubbub of thousands of guests at the ball itself. This is confirmed in Rosenbaum’s account of attending the rehearsal of Anton Eberl’s new minuets and German dances for the 1804 Katharinen-Redoute: ‘They are lovely, but we’ll still hear nothing of them.’⁶² Of the ball itself the following day, Rosenbaum’s diary entry makes no mention of the music, instead commenting on the number of guests, the unbearable heat and the lack of interesting costumes.

Rosenbaum engaged with the orchestra’s performance most directly when he heard it outside of the context of the ball. At the rehearsals for the Katharinen-Redouten, he and the other audience members experienced the music in a similar manner to the symphonic concert waltzes of the later nineteenth century, where the music’s function as an accompaniment to dance crossed over with an independent function as music for listening. Dance music in Rosenbaum’s era already existed comfortably in the domestic sphere as music in its own right, particularly in keyboard transcriptions of ballroom dance music which proliferated on the sheet music market. The concept of the symphonic waltz is associated more with the era of Johann Strauss Jr (1825–99), who composed many of his scores with concert performance in mind (often indicating a cut, usually in the coda, for performance in the dance hall). Derek Scott points out that symphonic waltzes gained market value in the later nineteenth century, which had not been the case a few decades earlier when ‘there was a strict division between the ballroom waltz and concert waltzes’.⁶³ Rosenbaum’s experiences suggest, however, that while symphonic dance music at the turn of the nineteenth century may not have had market value outside of the ballroom, it did have some perceived cultural value, at least amongst the select audiences at the rehearsals for the Katharinen-Redouten. These audience members, whose status was high enough for them to be included in the private invitation, are also likely to have belonged to a category of people who did not dance in the public setting of the Redoute. Two groups of people, separated by social status, evidently responded to the music in the imperial ballrooms in separate ways: for those of the lower orders, the music functioned as an accompaniment to dance, whereas people of Rosenbaum’s circle experienced it as music for its own sake, worthy of attentive listening.

The existence of two categories of listeners presented dance composers with the option of catering for both categories in separate ways. Mozart was highly aware of the differing musical sensitivities of his listeners, as evidenced in a famous passage in a letter to his father concerning the piano concertos K. 413–415, composed for his forthcoming subscription series:

These concertos are a happy medium between what’s too difficult and too easy – they are Brilliant – pleasing to the ear – Natural without becoming vacuous; – there are passages here and there that only connoisseurs can fully appreciate – yet the common listener will find them satisfying as well, although without knowing why.⁶⁴

Since Mozart identified both ‘connoisseurs’ and ‘the common listener’ amongst the audience members at his subscription concerts, he was undoubtedly aware of the more obvious divide between dancers and non-dancers at the Redoute, and may have felt similarly tempted to cater for both in different ways. His use of unusual instruments in some of his German dances for the imperial ballrooms, such as the hurdy-gurdy in the trio of K. 602 no. 3 and tuned sleigh bells and post horn in the coda of K. 605, could have been partially for the benefit of those who responded to the music more as listeners than as dancers. Other composers for the imperial ballrooms certainly seem to have had non-dancing audiences in mind in some of their elaborate codas, including programmatic ones that do not easily accommodate dancing, discussed in Chapter 6. While the symphonic waltz may have become a genre in its own right only in the later nineteenth century, the dance repertoire in the imperial ballrooms at the turn of the century already crossed into the realm of music for listening, rather than merely for dancing.

When Rosenbaum attended the dance rehearsals for the Katharinen-Redouten in the first decade of the nineteenth century, he belonged to a select group who had the opportunity to experience the music as an audience member, as if at a private concert. By the 1820s, however, the practice of listening to dance orchestras outside the context of the ball was widespread and extended to the city’s many suburban ballrooms. An imperial decree of 24 August 1826 defined the important distinction between ‘Tanzmusik’ (music that accompanied dancing) and ‘Tanzmusiken’ (dance music, but without any dancing taking place), and specified separate regulations for each type. The rules governing ‘Tanzmusiken’ were less strict, and dance music was permitted on some days when dancing was forbidden.⁶⁵

The rules governed dancing in private homes as well as in public dance halls. The actor Heinrich Anschütz described in his memoirs an occasion when he and his friends, amongst them Franz Schubert, had spontaneously turned to dancing at a private gathering in his home during Lent. Schubert went to the piano and struck up some waltzes. The rest of the company began to dance amid drinking and laughter. A police officer, who evidently heard the commotion from the street, interrupted the party and told the host: ‘I must ask you to stop it, we are in Lent.’ When Anschütz asked if he was expected to send his guests home, the inspector replied, ‘I rely on your word that there won’t be any dancing.’⁶⁶ The governmental decree of 1826 specified only a handful of holy days when dance music was outright forbidden, including 22–25 December, Ash Wednesday and Holy Week.⁶⁷ In the five decades since the birth of Vienna’s public ball culture, and long before Johann Strauss Jr, dance music had moved beyond the confines of the ballroom to become a year-round fixture in the city’s musical life.