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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 April 2009
Ifhigh culture, asTheodorAdornoonce proposed, promises a reality that does not exist, why, at the fin de siècle, did it hold such great attraction for Central Europe's populist politicians who were most attuned to the realities of everyday life? The answer, at least for imperial Austria, is that those politicians believed high culture to possess an integrative social function, which forced them to reconcile notions of “high” culture with “mass” culture. This was particularly true in Vienna, where the city's public performance venues for art, music, stage theater, and visual art stood as monuments to the values that the liberal middle classes had enshrined in the 1867 Constitution. A literate knowledge of this cultural system—its canon of symphonic music; the literature of tragedy, drama, and farce; and classical and contemporary genres of painting—was essential for civic participation in an era of liberal political and cultural hegemony. This article examines one cultural association that attempted to exploit the interaction between German high culture and two spheres, which are commonly thought to stand at odds with elite, high culture: popular culture and mass politics. Rather than a simple, cultural divide, this relationship created a contested “terrain of political and social conflict” in the decades preceding World War I. This terrain was of enormous consequence for Viennese of every social class.
1 Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (London, 1991), 17. Two recent monographs explore the relationship between the political world and the worlds of elite artists and popular culture in more nuanced terms. Jennifer Jenkins examines methods that liberals used to advance the aesthetic education of their fellow Hamburgers through the popularization of high art. Mary Gluck likewise argues for the absence of a division between the world of elite artists and the everyday world of popular culture of contemporary Paris. Instead, she shows how artist-elites functioned within a “mass culture public sphere,” drawing inspiration from and at times parodying urban life. See Mary Gluck, Popular Bohemia: Modernism and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge, 2005); Jennifer Jenkins, Provincial Modernity: Local Culture & Liberal Politics in Fin-De-Siècle Hamburg (Ithaca, NY, 2003).
2 See Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson, Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies (Berkeley, 1991), 1.
3 As this anecdote suggests, the primary task of mass political parties in the nineteenth century was to integrate previously nonparticipatory social classes into civil society. Margaret Anderson, “The Kulturkampf and the Course of German History,” Central European History 19, no. 1 (1986): 101. See also Margaret Anderson, Practicing Democracy: Elections and Political Culture in Imperial Germany (Princeton, 2000).
4 Fritz Kaufmann, Sozialdemokratie in Österreich: Idee und Geschichte einer Partei von 1889 bis zur Gegenwart (Vienna, 1978), 36. On the origins and development of the Christian Social Party, see John W. Boyer, Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna: Origins of the Christian Social Movement, 1848–1897 (Chicago, 1981).
5 Only 15 percent of male inhabitants in the Austrian half of the empire held the franchise before 1883; after 1883, it was only 40 percent. Of the twenty-six million inhabitants in Cisleithania, only 1,732,057 were eligible to cast ballots in the 1891 election. See Kaufmann, Sozialdemokratie in Österreich, 36.
6 Of Vienna's two million residents counted during the 1910 census, nearly a quarter had recently immigrated from Bohemia and Moravia, and only 20 to 25 percent of these were native German speakers. R. Banik-Schweitzer, Zur sozialräumlichen Gliederung Wiens, 1869–1934 (Vienna, 1982), 126–31. The membership of the Christian Social Party, as John Boyer has shown, became the primary beneficiaries of the system of municipal services that Lueger developed between 1897 and 1910. However, the party was never able to capture a simple majority of votes cast in the Viennese municipal elections. In the 1907 election, the Christian Social Party captured one hundred fifty-nine thousand votes, or 49 percent of the total ballots. During the 1911 elections, the party received only one hundred twenty-eight thousand votes. See John W. Boyer, Culture and Political Crisis in Vienna. Christian Socialism in Power, 1897–1918 (Chicago, 1995), 272n150.
7 “Wien, 1. Mai,” Neue Freie Presse, 2 May 1890, 1.
8 Following the first May Day procession, one participant boasted that the “struggling proletariat's proud walk along the Prater took the place of high society's vain Praterfahrt.” H. Schulz, “Wiener Maifahrt einst und jetzt,” Maifeier 1902, 7 cited in Stefan Riesenfellner, “Das andere ‘Ver Sacrum’: Zur Kulturgeschichte einer politischen Feier in Österreich 1890–1918,” in Freiheitsbilder: Kunst und Agitation in den Maifestschriften der österreichischen Arbeiterbewegung, 1890–1918, ed. Stefan Riesenfellner (Graz, 1990), 9.
9 In the 1897 election, the Social Democratic Party received one-third of the more than six hundred thousand votes cast in a newly created fifth curia, which secured it fourteen of the seventy-two parliamentary votes assigned to this new voting segment. See Vincent J. Knapp, Austrian Social Democracy, 1889–1914 (Washington, DC, 1980), 149.
10 Ibid.
11 Victor Adler, “Neue Aufgaben,” [Der Kampf 1, no. 1 (1907): 5].
12 Pieter Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics, Social Experience, and National Identity in the Austrian Empire, 1848–1914 (Ann Arbor, MI, 1996), 149.
13 For immigrant workers from the Bohemian lands, the process of cultural and social integration began long before their arrival in Vienna. Tara Zahra's recent work on “national indifference” in the Bohemian lands has shown that many workers, farmers, and immigrants to Vienna were functionally fluent in both German and Czech. This idea of national indifference among Germans and Czechs suggests that Social Democracy could, in fact, rely on a linguistically German cultural program to pursue its cultivating mission of Viennese workers. The present argument thus refers to cultural assimilation, rather than previous historians' assertions regarding Social Democracy's “negative integration” of workers into bourgeois society. See Tara Zahra, “Reclaiming Children for the Nation: Germanization, National Ascription, and Democracy in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1945,” Central European History 37, no. 4 (2004): 501–43; Guenther Roth, The Social Democrats in Imperial Germany: A Study in Working-Class Isolation and National Integration (Totowa, NJ, 1963).
14 On the origin of the Arbeiterbildungsverein, see Harald Troch, “‘Quelle der Belehrung und Veredelung’: Die Arbeiterbildungsvereine als Keimzelle,” in Wissen ist Macht!: Zur Geschichte sozialdemokratischer Bildungsarbeit, ed. Harald Troch (Vienna, 1997), 7–30. On workers' educational associations, see also Dieter Langewiesche, Zur Freizeit des Arbeiters: Bildungsbestrebungen und Freizeitgestaltung österreichischer Arbeiter im Kaiserreich und in der ersten Republik (Stuttgart, 1979); Karl Birker, Die deutschen Arbeiterbildungsvereine 1840–1870 (Berlin, 1973).Vernon Lidtke's study of labor association culture in imperial Germany provides an important reference on the formation of associational networks. See Vernon Lidtke, The Alternative Culture: Socialist Labor in Imperial Germany (New York, 1985), 21–49. Siegfried Mattl's “Politik Gegen Tod: Die Stellenwert von Kunst und Kultur in der frühen sozialdemokratischen Bewegung. Eine Skizze,” in Die Bewegung: Hundert Jahre Sozialdemokratie in Österreich, ed. Erich Fröschl (Vienna, 1990) provides an excellent overview of Viennese labor associations from 1890 to 1914. Following Guenther Roth's argument on Social Democracy's negative integration of workers into dominant middle-class society, Dennis Sweeney recently argued that the attempts of radical German Social Democrats to “develop a specifically Socialist” literary culture “largely reconfirmed existing social distinctions and identities.” See Dennis Sweeney, “Cultural Practice and Utopian Desire in Germany,” Social History 28, no. 2 (2003): 174–201.
15 Troch, “‘Quelle der Belehrung und Veredelung’: Die Arbeiterbildungsvereine als Keimzelle,” 25.
16 Julius Deutsch, Geschichte der österreichischen Gewerkschaftsbewegung, 2 vol. (Vienna, 1929), 1:94.
17 Liberalism, as Pieter Judson has observed, demanded a fundamental loyalty to its ideals of progress and civilization, which required that “conceptions of difference … had to be decreased, if not erased.” See Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries, 147.
18 Adler's evolving vision of working-class identity relied heavily on an existing working-class musical tradition, which in turn drew heavily on an existing network of music and choral groups. See Reinhard Kannonier, “Zur Entwicklung der österreichischen Arbeitermusikbewegung,” in Bewegung und Klasse: Studien zur österreichischen Arbeitergeschichte, ed. Gerhard Botz (Vienna, 1978): 501–10. On working-class musical culture, see Dorothea Muthesius, “Schade um all die Stimmen …”: Erinnerungen an Musik im Alltagsleben, Damit es nicht verlorengeht…. 46 (Vienna, 2001). Two other useful examinations of music in working-class culture are Vernon Lidtke, The Alternative Culture: Socialist Labor in Imperial Germany (New York, 1985) and Johann Wilhelm Seidl, Musik und Austromarxismus: Zur Musikrezeption der österreichischen Arbeiterbewegung im späten Kaisserreich und in der Ersten Republik, Wiener Musikwissenschaftliche Beiträge 17 (Vienna, 1989). See also Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley, 1989), 246; Celia Applegate, Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelssohn's Revival of the St. Matthew Passion (Ithaca, NY, 2005), 126. On the cultural and political milieu that shaped the first generation of Social Democratic Party leadership, see William McGrath McGrath, Dionysian Art and Populist Politics in Austria (New Haven, 1974), 17–87.
19 Although the Arbeiterbildungsverein organized a number of art lectures for workers and portrait exhibitions in the party's suburban community centers between 1909 and 1913, the Social Democratic Party never sponsored an association dedicated to teaching workers about art. The party's aspirations for working-class theater were first realized in Graz with the establishment of the Arbeiterbühne in 1898. On the Grazer Arbeiterbühne, see Stefan Riesenfellner, “Konkurrenzkultur—Anmerkungen zur Grazer ‘Arbeiterbühne’ (1898–1934),” Historisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Graz 15 (1984): 167–81. On the Wiener Freie Volksbühne, see Christina Wesemann-Wittgenstein, “Stefan Großmann: Publizist, Theatermacher und Schriftsteller zwischen Wien und Berlin” in Wien und Berlin, ed. Bernhard Fetz and Hermann Schlösser. Profile, Magazin des österreichischen Literaturarchivs 7 (Vienna, 2001); Jonathan Koehler, “The Rise and Fall of the Freie Volksbühne,” in “‘Revolutionizing the Mind’: Social Democratic Associational Culture in Late Imperial Vienna” (PhD Dissertation, University of Rochester, 2006), 154–208.
20 Historians have typically viewed political aestheticization in two terms. Carl Schorske and William McGrath, for example, have interpreted political aestheticization in late imperial Austria as a retreat into culture brought about by frustrated political ambitions. Other historians have characterized the aestheticization of nineteenth-century politics as the infusion of aesthetic modes of thought into political life, for example the pageantry of mass street demonstrations or Karl Lueger's self-portrayal as “Der schöne Karl.” See Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York, 1981); McGrath, Dionysian Art and Populist Politics in Austria; George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses (Ithaca, NY, 1975); Wolfgang Maderthaner, “Politik als Kunst: Victor Adler, die Wiener Moderne und das Konzept einer poetischen Politik,” in Die Wiener Jahrhundertwende, ed. Jürgen Nautz and Richard Vahrenkamp (Vienna, 1993): 759–76.
21 On inner migration in Cisleithania, see Michael John, “Zuwanderung in Österreich, 1848–1914. Zu ökonomisch und psychologisch bedingten Faktoren der Zuwanderung,” Jahrbuch des Vereins für Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung 4 (1988): 102–32.
22 Henriette Kotlan-Werner, Kunst und Volk: David Josef Bach, 1874–1947 (Vienna, 1977), 9.
23 David Josef Bach, “Politik der Schuljungen,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, 3 January 1905, 5.
24 Ibid.
25 The neogothic Akademisches Gymnasium opened in 1866. It was built according to plans by the architect Friedrich von Schmidt, who also designed Vienna's 1883 city hall. See David Josef Bach, “Als ich meine Bücher ordnete,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, 1 January 1925, 5; Kotlan-Werner, Kunst und Volk, 10.
26 Schönerer founded the periodical Deutsche Worte with Lueger and Pernerstorfer in 1881. This collaboration became a victim of the anti-Semitism and political populism that permeated Austrian politics in the 1880s, and in 1883 Schönerer and his followers resigned to establish their own periodical, the Unverfälschte deutsche Worte. See William J. McGrath, Dionysian Art and Populist Politics in Austria, 174, 198. On Schönerer's populist politics, see also Andrew Whiteside, The Socialism of Fools: Georg Ritter von Schönerer and Austrian Pan-Germanism (Berkeley, 1975); Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 120–33; Jean-Paul Bled, “Schönerer et le Los von Rom Bewegung,” Revue d'Allemagne et des Pays de langue allemande 32, no. 2 (2000): 257–62.
27 Bach, “Politik der Schuljungen,” 5.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid.; Hugo Schulz, “Aus den Flegeljahren,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, 1 January 1925, 1.
30 Schulz, “Aus den Flegeljahren,” 2.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid.
34 Bach, “Politik der Schuljungen,” 5.
35 David Josef Bach, “Aus der Jugendzeit,” Musikblätter des Anbruch 6 (1924): 317.
36 These three Lieder include Schönberg's first complete work still extant, “In hellen Träumen hab ich Dich oft geschaut.” See “Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951),” The Arnold Schönberg Center, http://www.schoenberg.at/1_as/bio/biographie_e.htm (accessed 13 November 2007).
37 Arnold Schönberg, Katalog zur Gedenkausstellung 1974, 159, cited in Kotlan-Werner, Kunst und Volk, 12–13.
38 William Weber examines how Richard Wagner transformed the idealistic tradition of musical classicism by interjecting it with an ideology taken from his political activity during the Revolution of 1848. See William Weber, “Wagner, Wagnerism, and Musical Idealism,” in Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics, ed. David C. Large and William Weber (Ithaca, NY, 1984): 28–71.
39 James J. Sheehan, Museums in the German Art World from the End of the Old Regime to the Rise of Modernism (Oxford, 2000), 141–42.
40 David Josef Bach, “Beim Schreiben,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, 7 October 1904, 4.
41 David Josef Bach, “Mahlers dritte Symphonie,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, 20 December 1904, 1.
42 David Josef Bach, “Erinnerungen,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, 9 June 1922, 4.
43 Peter Franklin, The Life of Mahler (Cambridge, 1997), 134. On Nietzsche's literary and intellectual influences in Mahler's Third Symphony, see McGrath, Dionysian Art and Populist Politics in Austria, 120–62. Mahler's confidant Natalie Bauer-Lechner described in detail the development of Mahler's Third Symphony in Recollections of Gustav Mahler (Cambridge, 1980), 59. Mahler's composition of the Third Symphony between 1895 and 1896 provoked a personal and spiritual transformation in the composer, which led him to a preoccupation with personal suffering and a rejection of Nietzsche's condemnation of Christian asceticism. According to Bauer-Lechner, Mahler's original attraction to Nietzsche's celebration of community and nature led him to seek a similar aesthetic experience in Catholicism. For an in-depth examination of Mahler's composition of the Third Symphony, see Henry-Louis de La Grange, Gustav Mahler. 3 vols. (New York, 1973), 1: 327–29, 363–77.
44 Bach, “Erinnerungen,” 4.
45 Ibid.
46 David Josef Bach, “Mahlers dritte Symphonie,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, 20 December 1904, 1. Bach later recalled that his feuilleton generated considerable controversy and even drew the personal attention of Mahler. See Bach, “Erinnerungen, 4.”
47 Bach, “Erinnerungen,” 4.
48 Social Democracy's appropriation of Friedrich Schiller as a symbol of freedom and equality, as Karl F. Bahm has observed, played a central role during the 1905 Schiller celebrations in both Austria and Germany. See Karl F. Bahm, “Beyond the Bourgeoisie: Rethinking Nation, Culture, and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Central Europe,” Austrian History Yearbook 19 (1998), 32n33. See, for example, Martin Rector, “Wozu der Arbeiter die bürgerliche Kultur braucht. Anmerkungen zur Schiller-Feier der SPD von 1905,” in Arbeiterbewegung und kulturelle Identiät, ed. Peter Eric Stüdemann and Martin Rector (Frankfurt, 1983), 74–101; Gerhard Kurz, “Von Schiller zum deutschen Schiller. Die Schillerfeiern in Prag 1859 und 1905,” in Die Chance der Verständigung, ed. Ferdinand Seibt (Munich, 1987): 39–48.
49 “Schiller-Feste,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, 7 May 1905, 1.
50 Ibid.
51 Engelbert Pernerstorfer, “Friedrich Schiller,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, 9 May 1905, 1.
52 The Dreherpark was located until 2001 at the intersection of Schönbrunnerstraße und Grünbergstraße in Vienna's twelfth district of Meidling. The brewer Anton Dreher leased his property to Johann Weigl, who developed the plot into an amusement park and in 1894 built the Katharinenhalle, a large wood-framed building that could hold as many as four thousand people. See Alfred Walk, “Heimatkunde—12. Bezirk—Meidling,” Heimatkunde Rodaun, 2007, http://www.rodaun.info/bezirk-030/download/wien-12.pdf (accessed 26 April 2007).
53 “Die Schiller Feier der Wiener Arbeiterschaft,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, 9 May 1905, 6.
54 Ibid.
55 Ibid.
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid. David Jospeh Bach similarly recalled on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the workers' symphony concerts that Zemlinksy's performance had quickly won over a skeptical crowd; all listeners, he wrote, were transfixed to their seats, “full of expectation and highly critical.” See David Josef Bach, “Fünfundzwanzig Jahre Arbeiter-Sinfoniekonzerte,” Kunst und Volk 4, no. 2 (1929): 41.
58 David Josef Bach, “Symphoniekonzerte der Wiener Arbeiterschaft,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, 12 December 1905, 7.
59 On the processional cultural of the Social Democratic May Day, see Riesenfellner, in Freiheitsbilder, 9; Josef Seiter, “Blutigrot und silbrig hell…”: Bild, Symbolik und Agitation der frühen sozialdemokratischen Arbeiterbewegung in Österreich (Vienna, 1991); Gottfried Korff, “Volkskultur und Arbeiterkultur. Überlegungen am Beispiel der sozialistischen Maifest-tradition,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 5, no. 1 (1979): 83–102; Harold Troch, “Die Mai-Feiern der österreichischen Sozialdemokratie 1890–1918” (PhD dissertation, University of Vienna, 1986); Jonathan Koehler, “‘Revolutionizing the Mind’: Social Democratic Associational Culture in Late Imperial Vienna” (PhD dissertation, University of Rochester, 2006).
60 Dieter Langewiesche subscribes to Guenther Roth's argument that such examples of the “Socialist cultural movement” as the Workers' Symphony Concert Association “accelerated the tendency toward ‘reluctant integration’” with bourgeois culture by encouraging the cultural improvement of the working class in a manner that denigrated their existing values and “indigenous culture.” See Dieter Langewiesche, “The Impact of the German Labor Movement on Workers' Culture,” The Journal of Modern History 59, no. 3 (1987): 516–17. See also Guenther Roth, The Social Democrats in Imperial Germany: A Study in Working-Class Isolation and National Integration (Totowa, NJ, 1963); Gerhard A. Ritter, Staat, Arbeiterschaft und Arbeiterbewegung in Deutschland: Vom Vormärz bis zum Ende der Weimarer Republik (Berlin, 1980).
61 Bach, “Fünfundzwanzig Jahre Arbeiter-Sinfoniekonzerte,” 42–43.
62 The board of directors that Bach recruited to help organize the association included Leopold Winarsky, the city council member who was also appointed secretary of the board of the Freie Volksbühne the following year. See Bach, “Symphoniekonzerte der Wiener Arbeiterschaft,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, 12 December 1905, 7; Lotte Pinter, “Sechs Jahrzehnte Arbeiter-Sinfoniekonzerte,” Arbeit und Wirtschaft 19 (1965): 32.
63 In a 1907 article, the working-class activist Emmy Freundlich cites the weekly wage for an unskilled factory worker between ten and sixteen crowns per week, depending on the trade. There were 100 heller per crown. See Emmy Freundlich, “Arbeiterinnenschutz,” Der Kampf 1, no. 5 (1907): 229.
64 David Josef Bach, “Symphoniekonzerte der Wiener Arbeiterschaft,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, 12 December 1905, 7.
65 “Die letzten Concerte in der Ausstellung,” Deutsche Kunst- und Musik-Zeitung 19 (1892): 263, cited in Margaret Notley, “‘Volksconcerte’ in Vienna and Late Nineteenth-Century Ideology of the Symphony,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 50, no. 2/3 (1997): 446.
66 Notley, “‘Volksconcerte’ in Vienna,” 449–50; Bach, “Fünfundzwanzig Jahre Arbeiter-Sinfoniekonzerte,” 42.
67 Eduard Hanslick was a primary contributor to an ongoing debate over musical aesthetics. Many of Hanslick's most widely circulated musical treatises, including The Beautiful in Music (1854), attacked such premises as those that formed the later ideology of Social Democratic cultural policy. Among Hanslick's formalist arguments, as Carl Dahlhaus relates, was the premise that music “is, or ought to be, a ‘world unto itself,’” rather than a “means to a social or psychological end.” By arguing for the social and political utility of art, the feuilleton Bach wrote after the performance of Mahler's Third Symphony subtly attacked such premises. From this perspective, Bach's enlistment of Hirschfeld represented an important alignment with the advocates of a far-reaching Wagnerian “aestheticization of the political subconscious.” This alignment placed Bach and the Workers' Symphony Concert Association explicitly alongside the Wagnerians in one of the most important rifts of nineteenth-century musical aesthetics that separated the Wagnerians from musical formalists such as Hanslick and Brahms. See Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, 92, 340. Margaret Notley has shown how such seemingly insular debates over musical aesthetics and performance could arouse passions that transformed these debates into events of political significance. See Margaret Notley, “Musical Culture in Vienna at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” in Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern: A Companion to the Second Viennese School, ed. Bryan R. Simms (Westport, CT, 1999), 37–71; Margaret Notley, “Bruckner and Viennese Wagnerism,” in Bruckner Studies, ed. Timothy L. Jackson and Paul Hawkshaw (New York, 1997), 54–71; Margaret Notley, “‘Volksconcerte’ in Vienna and Late Nineteenth-Century Ideology of the Symphony.”
68 On Hirschfeld's musical activities on behalf of Vienna's workers, see “Robert Hirschfeld,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, 3 April 1914.
69 August Forstner, “Die Transportarbeiter im ersten Arbeiter-Sinfoniekonzert,” Kunst und Volk 3, no. 1 (1928): 1–4.
70 J. Robert Wegs has argued that, rather than an attempt to mimic the manners and dress of the middle classes, codes of cleanliness and respectability were a way for workers to “distance themselves from the slovenly masses at the bottom of the social ladder” and avoid “succumbing to the environment.” See J. Robert Wegs, Growing Up Working Class: Continuity and Change Among Viennese Youth, 1890–1938 (University Park, PA, 1989), 52.
71 Forstner, “Die Transportarbeiter im ersten Arbeiter-Sinfoniekonzert,” 3.
72 David Josef Bach, “Vierzig Jahre Arbeiter-Sinfoniekonzerte,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, 30 December 1945, 2.
73 Forstner, “Die Transportarbeiter im ersten Arbeiter-Sinfoniekonzert,” 3.
74 Arbeiter-Zeitung, 7 May 1905, cited in Kotlan-Werner, Kunst and Volk, 22.
75 Engelbert Pernerstorfer, “Theater und Demokratie,” Der Strom 1, no. 1 (1911): 3–5.
76 David Josef Bach, “Volkstümliche Musikpflege,” Der Strom 1, no. 1 (1911): 14. On composers' use of folk song and its relationship to national identity in the nineteenth century, see Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, 105–11.
77 Bach, “Volkstümliche Musikpflege,” 14. Despite compulsory education mandated in 1873 throughout Cisleithania, many working-class parents discouraged their children from developing advanced literacy skills. See Wegs, Growing Up Working-Class, 75–97; Adelheid Popp, Die Jugendgeschichte einer Arbeiterin (Munich, 1927), 4.
78 Bach, “Volkstümliche Musikpflege,” 14. Bach's panegyric followed the tradition of German cultural critics who, as Margaret Notley has written, “equated the performance of a (Beethoven) symphony with an ‘oration to the people.’” See Notley, “‘Volksconcerte’ in Vienna,” 430.
79 Stefan Kunze, “The Fifth and Sixth Symphonies: Antipoles in Beethoven's Symphonic Language,” in Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphonien 5 & 6, Herbert von Karajan and the Berliner Philharmoniker, Deutsche Grammophon compact disc D-115443. On Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, see David Wyn Jones, Beethoven: Pastoral Symphony (New York, 1995).
80 Richard Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, ed. Wolfgang Golther, 10 vols. (Berlin, 1913), 9:306, cited in Carl Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music (Chicago, 1989), 136.
81 Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, 135. Despite the importance Bach ascribed to the Beethoven Six, the Workers' Symphony Concert Association performed it only once before 1918, on 6 March 1908 for the occasion of a Social Democratic Party conference.
82 Pernerstorfer, “Theater und Demokratie,” 4.
83 Wagner described the origins of this art form in his 1849 essay “Art and Revolution”: “Inspired by Dionysus, the tragic poet saw this glorious god: when, to all the rich elements of spontaneous art, the harvest of the fairest and most human life, he joined the bond of speech, and concentrating them all into one focus, brought forth the highest conceivable form of art—the Drama.” Richard Wagner, The Art-Work of the Future and Other Works, trans. W. Ashton Ellis (Lincoln, 1993), 33.
84 Bach, “Der Arbeiter und die Kunst,” Der Kampf 1 (1913): 45.
85 Ibid.
86 Bryan Magee, The Tristan Chord. Wagner and Philosophy (New York, 2000), 308–9.
87 Ibid., 247–48.
88 Peter Branscombe, “Singspiel,” Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy, http://www.grovemusic.com (accessed 13 May 2005).
89 Robert Müller, “Hans Sachs,” Der Strom 2, no. 7 (1912): 239–41.
90 Ibid., 242–43.
91 David Josef Bach, “Zur Erinnerung,” Kunst und Volk 3, no. 1 (1928): 1–3.
92 For a complete listing of the Workers' Symphony Concert programs, see Johann Wilhelm Seidl, Musik und Austromarxismus: Zur Musikrezeption der österreichischen Arbeiterbewegung im späten Kaisserreich und in der Ersten Republik, Wiener Musikwissenschaftliche Beiträge 17 (Vienna, 1989).
93 Bach, “Zur Erinnerung,” 1.
94 While Strauss and Lanner were absent from the programs of the Wiener-Abende, the Wiener Konzertverein did organize Strauss-Lanner concerts independently of the Workers' Symphony Concert Association. See Ronald Barazon, Wiener Symphoniker (Vienna, 1970), 10.
95 On the rehabilitation of the Gassenhauer in the nineteenth century, see Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, 107–8.
96 Stefan Grossmann's Freie Volksbühne did not observe the same ideological restrictions as Bach placed on the Workers' Symphony Concert Association, and the Volksbühne had included contemporary Viennese waltzes in its orchestral performances since 1910. The tenor of Bach's announcement, placed at the end of his review of Delius's Mass, suggests that he was responding to demands from the association's membership to include this popular music in the association's repertory. David Jospeh Bach, “Ein modernes Werk im Arbeitersymphoniekonzert,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, 14 March 1911, 1.
97 David Josef Bach, “Victor Adler und Gustav Mahler,” Kunst und Volk 1, no. 10 (1926): 6.
98 Bach, “Zur Erinnerung,” 2.
99 Ibid.; Arbeiter-Zeitung, 14 March 1911, 1.
100 “Ein modernes Werk im Arbeitersymphoniekonzert,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, 14 March 1911.
101 Anthony Payne, “Frederick Delius,” Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy, http://www.grovemusic.com (accessed 25 March 2005).
102 Sir Thomas Beecham's introductory talk on Delius and the Mass of Life was reissued by Sony in 2001. See Disc 1 of Frederick Delius, Mass of Life, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and London Philharmonic Choir, Sir Thomas Beecham, Sony Music compact disc SM2K89432.
103 Bach recounted that Franz Schrecker, director of the Vienna Philharmonic Chorus, finally turned to the Workers' Symphony Concert Association after other orchestral ensembles and his own subscription audience had declined to perform the piece. See Bach, “Zur Erinnerung,” 3.
104 David Jospeh Bach, “Mahlers dritte Symphonie,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, 20 December 1904, 1.
105 “Ein modernes Werk im Arbeitersymphoniekonzert,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, 14 March 1911, 1.
106 Herta Blaukopf and Kurt Blaukopf, Die Wiener Philharmoniker: Wesen, Werden, Wirken eines grossen Orchesters (Vienna, 1986), 219–20. On the development of the classical musical canon, see J. Peter Burkholder, “Brahms and Twentieth-Century Classical Music,” 19th-Century Music 8, no. 1 (1984): 75–83; William Weber, “The Rise of the Classical Repertoire in Nineteenth-Century Orchestral Concerts,” in The Orchestra: Origins and Transformations, ed. Joan Peyser (New York, 1986): 361–86.
107 Blaukopf, 219–20.
108 Ibid., 216.
109 Karl Seitz, “Das Erbe der Musik,” Kunst und Volk 3, no. 2 (1928): 2. In this reminiscence, Seitz wrote that the first workers' symphony concert represented a “victory achieved.” However, his claim should be viewed critically as a reaction to the political retrenchment of Social Democracy following the massacre of eighty-nine workers during the 1927 July Revolt. See Helmut Gruber, Red Vienna: Experiment in Working-Class Culture, 1919–1934 (New York, 1991), 41–43.
110 Hans Duhan, “Die Arbeiter-Sinfonie-Konzerte,” Kunst und Volk 4, no. 2 (1929): 54.
111 “Das erste Arbeitersymphoniekonzert,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, 31 December 1905, 1.
112 Bach, “Vierzig Jahre Arbeiter-Sinfoniekonzerte,” 2.
113 Bach, “Zur Erinnerung,” 1–3.
114 Forstner, 4.
115 Bach, “Zur Erinnerung,” 3.
116 Ibid., 2.
117 Stefan Grossmann, “Bemerkungungen zur ästhethischen Erziehung der Arbeiter,” Der Strom 1, no. 4 (1911): 206–9.
118 Ibid., 207. The German follows, in order: “Ach was, im Theater will ich mich nur unterhalten!”; “Im Theater will ich lachen!”; “Das ist mir zu hoch!”
119 “Theater und Kunstnachrichten,” Neue Freie Presse, 6 August 1907, 11.
120 Julius Toldi, “Wie ich Musiker wurde,” Kunst und Volk 1, no. 3 (1926): 4; Johann Wilhelm Seidl, Musik und Austromarxismus, 207. Julius Toldi later immigrated to the United States, where he played with the 20th-Century Fox scoring orchestra in Los Angeles during the 1940s. See “Satellite Collections—Toldi, Julius,” Arnold Schönberg Center, http://www.schoenberg.at/6_archiv/satellite/satellite_t4_e.htm (accessed 20 May 2007).
121 As Stephen Kotkin has suggested in his study of Soviet workers' culture, the efforts of party elites to define working-class subjectivity were, in fact, accompanied by a high degree of voluntarism on the part of workers. See Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995), 358. The work of Kotkin and other historians of Soviet culture illuminates a number of useful questions about the role of discourse formation in the shaping of working-class identity. See, for example, Igal Halfin, From Darkness to Light: Class Consciousness and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh, 2000).
122 Hans Duhan, “Die Arbeiter-Sinfonie-Konzerte,” Kunst und Volk 4, no. 2 (October 1929): 54.
123 Bach, “Zur Erinnerung,” 3.
124 Adler died on 11 November 1918, after serving briefly as the Minister for Foreign Affairs under Karl Renner's interim government. The Worker's Symphony Concert Association held its first concert in honor of Adler on 11 January 1919, where Löwe directed the Adagio from Bruckner's Seventh Symphony and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. In July 1919 the association held three performances of Mahler's Second Symphony. The association resumed a regular concert series in November 1919.
125 David Josef Bach, “Tausend!” Arbeiter-Zeitung, 4 February 1923, 6. On Bach's direction of the Kunststelle, see Lisa Silverman, “The Transformation of Jewish Identity in Vienna, 1918–1938” (PhD Dissertation, Yale University, 2004), 55–73; Lisa Silverman, “Mapping Culture in the Metropolis: the Legacy of Bildung and Socialist Leader David Joseph Bach,” (lecture, St. Antony's College, Oxford University, Oxford, UK, 1 March 2005); Helmut Gruber, Red Vienna: Experiment in Working-Class Culture, 1919–1934 (New York, 1991), 96–102.
126 David Jospeh Bach, “Die Kunststelle,” in Kunst und Volk: Eine Festgabe der Kunststelle zur 1000. Theateraufführung, ed. Hugo von Hofmannsthal (Vienna, 1923), 116.
127 During the twentieth century, states throughout Central and Eastern Europe exercised coercive power in order to weed undesirable elements out of the body politic, as well as to shape the identity of their members. This is the subject of Amir Weiner's recent edited volume Landscaping the Human Garden: Twentieth-Century Population Management in a Comparative Framework (Stanford, 2003). See also Jochen Hellbeck, “Fashioning the Stalinist Soul: The Diary of Stepan Podlubnyi (1931–1939),” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 3 (1996): 344–73; reprinted in Stalinism: New Directions, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (New York, 2000).
128 Helmut Gruber has similarly argued that the party's defeat in 1927 resulted in a retreat into an idealism that further compromised its ability to respond to external threats. While Social Democracy was certainly invested with a great amount of idealism, its response can be more plausibly seen as a retreat to methods that had produced effective political results in the past, including victory over the Christian Socials in Vienna's 1911 municipal election. See Helmut Gruber, Red Vienna: Experiment in Working-Class Culture, 1919–1934 (New York, 1991), 10. See also Anson Rabinbach, The Crisis of Austrian Socialism. From Red Vienna to Civil War, 1927–1934 (Chicago, 1983), 4.
129 Bach, “Die Kunststelle,” 116.
130 See, for example, Charles King, “The Heuristics of Ethnicity, Nationhood and Identity,” HABSBURG Discussion Network (21 April 2005), as well as other contributions to the HABSBURG Forum “Rethinking Nationalism,” http://www.h-net.org/~habsweb (accessed April 2005).
131 Several historians have previously examined the mediating capacity of the empire's institutional structures. See Gary B. Cohen, “Neither Absolutism nor Anarchy: New Narratives on Society and Government in Late Imperial Austria,” Austrian History Yearbook 29, pt. 1 (1998): 37–61; John W. Boyer, “Religion and Political Development in Central Europe around 1900: A View from Vienna,” Austrian History Yearbook 25 (1994): 13–57; Gerald Stourzh, Die Gleichberechtigung der Nationalitäten in der Verfassung und Verwaltung Österreichs, 1848–1918 (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1985).
