OPERA AND BALLET IN THE BIEDERMEIER PERIOD

When the Ringstrasse was built, the placing both of the new Burg-theater and of the new Opera House in central positions on it — the Burgtheater opposite the new Town Hall, the Opera House on the intersection of the Ringstrasse with the wealthy Kärntner Strasse, very close to the old Kärntnertortheater which it replaced, which had nestled close to the city walls — had an obvious symbolical function, signalling the importance of the two theatres among the central institutions of the capital. By the late eighteenth century Vienna was celebrated for the vitality of its musical life. Within a month of arriving there in 1781, Mozart was convinced that it was for his profession ‘the best place in the world’; Charles Sealsfield's highly critical account of the repressively ruled Austria of the late 1820s still records a Vienna in which on a Sunday, ‘wherever you go, the sound of musical instruments will reach your ears’; and in the mid-1830s Frances Trollope was persuaded that ‘strains of music… seem to form as necessary a part of the existence of an Austrian as the air he breathes’. Yet if one applies to the court opera houses after Mozart's death the test suggested above (p. 57) for Schreyvo-gel's Burgtheater and asks how much new opera of distinction was generated within them, the record is much less impressive. Haydn's considerable operatic output was associated mainly with premiéres at Esterháza, and even Mozart's operas were not all performed first in Vienna.