Following the death of Johann Strauss (Father) in 1849, Johann Strauss (Son) assumed the leading role in the dance culture in Vienna. His success was accompanied by ill health, which led to his two brothers, Josef and Eduard, joining him as directors and composers. At first, Johann was ignored by the Habsburg court; his popularity in Prussian and Russian environments led to a gradual thaw and an imperial appointment. Many dances were now composed as concert items and took their place alongside music by other composers, notably Schubert and Wagner.

This chapter examines the many roles played by signs in dissonant languages, that is languages no longer spoken on city streets, in the urban linguistic landscape. These ghost signs are examined in four cities designated by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as World heritage sites: Toledo, St Petersburg, Palermo, and Lviv. Primary data comes from my fieldwork, which included site visits, participation in tours in relevant languages, interviews with tour guides and visitors, and analyses of UNESCO reports, tourist guides, media, and travelogues. A critical analysis of the data shows that multilingual ghost signs perform multifaceted urban identity work: promoting attractive narratives of harmonious past diversity, they recontextualize the cities as “welcoming” and “cosmopolitan” and deflect attention from present-day suppression of minority languages, be it Uzbek in St Petersburg or Russian in Lviv.

By the time Stravinsky had penned his first musical epitaph Funeral Song (1908), marking the death of his teacher Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, the twenty-six-year-old composer had already witnessed many deaths; during his childhood and youth he often experienced the pain of losing close relatives, friends and peers. As residents of St Petersburg, then the capital of the Russian Empire, Fyodor Stravinsky and his family had attended many a funeral ceremony and bade farewell to several notable Russian musicians, writers and statesmen. The composer was already in his fifties when he published his autobiography Chronicle of My Life (1936), yet he chose to mention these events only briefly. Much later, in his eighties, possibly because he was approaching the final years of his own life, Stravinsky revisited these episodes in conversation with Robert Craft and described them in poignant detail. He would open up, too, about his emotions, revealing that he had never been able to erase such raw experiences from his memory. Even after many decades had passed he could still recall the appearance of the deceased persons lying in state and his own feelings as he filed past their open coffin.