An Empire That Did Not End: Late and Post-Habsburg Musical Modernism

The concert audiences in the late Habsburg Empire were drowned in sounds of sadness, mortality and death. Following up on Carl Schorske´s parallelization of aesthetics and politics in Fin de Siècle Vienna, I would like to explore the wider meaning of sadness in late Habsburg compositions. Did the sadness express a feeling of decay; was it an anticipated nostalgia for a political and social configuration which soon ceased to exist? These speculative questions may seem like an ex-post imposition of extra-musical content, but also worth discussing the wider political significance of changing musical styles and emotions.

I will also question the caesura of 1918 from the vantage point of posterity. Although the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy collapsed as the result of World War I, it continued to exist as a musical empire. The paper will compare musical modernism, as practiced in Vienna, with modernist composers in Prague. Both modernisms came to an end at their original loci only in 1938, which we might also regard as a more important cultural rupture than the formal end of the empire in 1918. While the Viennese tradition of musical modernism was partially preserved and canonized in exile, and has dominated New Music ever since, the more tonal and ethno-musical traditions in modernist Prague have been marginalized. The paper will compare both traditions also on the basis brief musical examples, and thus use music as a source again.