vienna in the late 1700s -- 6/16/23

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Today's selection -- from The Habsburgs by Martyn Rady. The complex and varied life of Vienna under Joseph II:
 
"[The Holy Roman Emperor] Joseph II took [the censorship restriction removal] further, removing most restrictions after 1780.

"Whereas under [his mother] Maria Theresa some five thousand works were still listed as banned, Joseph reduced the number to nine hundred. (The number looks large, but often the same work was published under different titles.) He also relaxed controls on the news press. The consequence was a proliferation of pamphlet literature and an effervescence of debate. Previously, only two twice-weekly newspapers had circulated in Vienna -- the short-lived Gazette de Vienne and the Wienerisches Diarium (renamed the Wiener Zeitung, it claims to be the world's oldest newspaper still in production).

"Both reported foreign news without comment and reprinted court communiques. New dailies and twice-weeklies now appeared, churning out gossip, political opinion, and reports of (literally) hair-raising experiments with electricity, magnets, and amber. Captain James Cook's voyages in the Pacific also pro­vided a fund of good stories. 

"Some seventy coffee shops provided venues for reading and discussion in Vienna, with the one on the Charcoal Market (Kohlmarkt), just next to the Hofburg, setting up eighty additional seats in the narrow street. Vienna began to acquire what it had hitherto lacked -- a public sphere that was sep­arate and critical of government. From the coffee shops, a new species of 'idler' (Müssigganger) drifted between salons, lodges, theatres, the parks, and meetings of learned societies, the variety and number of which astonished one visiting French nobleman. Libraries, too, opened. Vienna's imperial li­brary and the library of the university were already open to the public, but aristocrats now welcomed visitors to their private collections. Booksellers and printers also functioned as lending libraries.

"There was a seedy side to Vienna. A city of about two hundred thou­sand people, it had ten thousand 'common prostitutes', four thousand 'higher-class' courtesans, twelve thousand persons registered with syphilis, and an infant mortality of 40 per cent. The 'Stretch' (Strich) along which prostitutes touted for business extended from St Stephen's Cathedral, along the Graben thoroughfare and the Charcoal Market, and thence to the city wall and the grounds of the Hofburg. Plenty of churches along the Stretch had dark corners inside. The cheaper sex workers kept to the parks. Maria Theresa ordered recidivist prostitutes to be deported to Hungary, where as one wag put it, 'they can only debauch Turks and infidels.' But Joseph was kinder. He had the bushes in the parks uprooted, the churches locked, and made convicted streetwalkers work as street cleaners. He instructed their heads to be shaved and that they be deprived of the broad hoop skirts by which they advertised their trade.

View of Vienna during the baroque era, by Bernardo Bellotto

"Morality mattered. Maria Theresa instituted a Chastity Commission (Keuschheitskommission) to prosecute prostitutes in Vienna and the coun­tryside beyond the city, but it fell into ridicule -- when walking alone, hon­est and disreputable women alike now carried rosaries as if on their way to Mass. Even so, a chastity court under the oversight of the city council lin­gered on in Vienna until the beginning of the nineteenth century. The the­atre was also a concern, both to Maria Theresa and to her son. Actresses were thought by vocation to be of loose morals, and itinerant players were suspi­cious because of their rootlessness. On top of this, the theatre was believed to communicate easy messages that influenced impressionable audiences. The ribaldries of the harlequin Jack Sausage, a mix of earthy innuendo and social satire often delivered impromptu, were considered especially harmful.

"Whereas the press became freer, the theatre faced increasing censorship. Joseph von Sonnenfels, who briefly served as a censor, imagined that the theatre might act to inculcate 'manners, courtesy, and language' and thus promote Enlightenment values. The censor with special responsibility for the theatre, the long-serving Karl Franz Hagelin, also defined the theatre as 'a school for manners and taste.' This meant interfering with plots that concluded unsatisfactorily. Most notoriously, a succession of playwrights re­wrote the ending of Shakespeare's Hamlet to satisfy the censors by giving the tragedy a more uplifting and less bloody final scene. So the dying Queen Gertrude confesses to conspiring against her first husband and saves her soul, and although Hamlet still slays Claudius, he fights no deadly duel with Laertes but succeeds as king. 

"Other productions saw lines and stage directions cut, so that lovers did not exit without chaperones, a woman's virtue was not tested in the bed­room, and dishonest conduct was never rewarded. Political constraints applied too, with words like 'liberty', 'equality', 'despotism', and 'tyrant' ex­punged. In Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, the line 'Because you are a great lord, you believe yourself to be a great genius' had to be excised before the censor allowed the opera to be performed. The finale to act one of Mozart's Don Giovanni, which premiered in Vienna in 1788, was also altered so that the important line 'Long Live Freedom' was replaced by the anodyne 'Long Live Jollity.'

"There were originally just two theatres in Vienna. The Burgtheater (Cas­tle Theatre) in the Hofburg was the descendant of the old wooden theatre erected by Leopold I but since transferred several times to new venues un­til ending up in a converted indoor tennis court. The Kärntnertortheater (Carinthian Gate Theatre), on the site of what is now the Hotel Sacher, had been taken over by the court following a fire in 1761. The two ven­ues had different repertoires. In the Burgtheater, French and Italian opera were mostly performed, while the Kärntnertortheater showed more pop­ular productions and ballets. Although there was some overlap of genres, comedies were almost exclusively shown in the Kärntnertortheater. During the 1770s, a few commercial theatres were given licenses. Mostly showing comedies, they were subject to the same censorship as the Burgtheater and Kärntnertortheater.

"Children famously like the same story to be read out to them. The Vien­nese too expected the popular theatre to rehearse the same plot -- a hero, at­tended by a harlequin, goes through various trials in a magical country. He outwits his adversaries using magical instruments, assisted by the harlequin, and they both find brides. The harlequin may be Jack Sausage, Pulcinella (a forebear of Mr Punch), or the umbrella maker Staberl -- it is only important that he be ludicrously dressed, coarse, cunning, and drawn from the lower orders to act as a foil to the hero. As for setting, the main requirement was frequent shifts of set, each as exotic as the last. The changes of scenery, de­livered by cranes and pulleys, earned productions of this type the name of 'mechanized comedies' (Maschinenkomödien).

"Mozart's The Magic Flute premiered in 1791 in the Wieden Theatre, just outside the city wall. It is typical of 'magic opera' as well as conforming to the principles of German Singspiel, which interwove singing with dialogue. The story is set in ancient Egypt and involves a mysterious brotherhood, headed by an apparently evil man, Sarastro. But at the end the brotherhood turns out to be benign and Sarastro to be kindly and wise. Over two acts, the hero, the prince Tamino, aided by his companion, the bird catcher and harlequin Papageno, goes through various tests to see if he is worthy of the princess whom Sarastro keeps hidden for her own safety."

author:	Martyn Rady
title:	The Habsburgs
publisher:	Basic Books
date:	Copyright 2020 by Martyn Rady
pages:	219-222