Beyond the Dancing Vienna

Vienna dances. Since the nineteenth century the waltz of Johann Strauss has shaped the image of the city — popular, influential and so overwhelming that “serious” composers often struggled to find a place beside it. Yet beyond this dancing Vienna, generations of composers sought their own paths. This cycle tells their story.

First step · the nineteenth century

From Schubert to Schoenberg, serious art music sought its place in the shadow of an omnipresent dance culture. The Classical inheritance — Schubert, Brahms — and the modernism of the Second Viennese School always stood beside a Vienna that above all wanted to dance.

Second step · the Nazi years

While National Socialist propaganda instrumentalised the apparently harmless music of Strauss — falsifying the composer’s genealogy to do so — almost all the composers heard here were driven out, proscribed or forced into inner emigration: Zemlinsky, Schoenberg and Kreisler to the United States, Wellesz to England, Dickenson-Auner banned from performing in her own Vienna.

Third step · the present

“Beyond” finally means the afterlife: how the waltz inspired the serious composers and lives on in their work — not as opposition but as creative echo. That this exiled music sounds again in the Musikverein is its late homecoming.

Two axes

Alexander Zemlinsky (1871–1942) forms the musical axis — a work of his is heard in each of the four concerts. Encouraged as pupil and friend by Brahms, teacher and brother-in-law of Arnold Schoenberg, dedicatee of Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite, he links every generation of this programme; his path from fin-de-siècle Vienna to American exile, where he died forgotten in 1942, embodies the fate of an entire musical culture.

Mary Dickenson-Auner (1880–1965), violinist, composer and namesake of the quartet, forms the dramaturgical centre — the knot at which the web of this Viennese history is drawn together. Almost all her string quartets survive only in manuscript and are currently being digitised by Dr Dima Khierbeck; the quartet plans a recording of these works for autumn 2026. At the Royal Academy of Music in London the violinist Erin Hennessey is writing a doctoral thesis on her chamber music. The transfer of her estate to the Exilarte Center of the mdw is coordinated by Gerold Gruber.