In the late eighteenth century and for most of the nineteenth, Vienna was the one large cosmopolitan city in German-speaking Europe that sustained a theatrical life comparable to that of Paris or London. The evolution of the theatre there illustrates basic problems of theatre history as a discipline: the relation of the theatre to social change (reflected in changes in the public and its expectations), to political pressure (reflected most directly in censorship) and to the cultural climate (manifested most explicitly in press reviews). Vienna also provides a notable contrast to the English theatre: in the survival of the repertory system, in the practice of subscription (abonnemeni), in the level of state subsidy — all symptomatic of a culture in which the theatre and theatre-going have a central place in public and political consciousness. The importance of Vienna in the history of drama, opera, and operetta is such that anyone working on subjects connected either with international theatre history or with German-speaking drama needs information on the Viennese theatre; yet there is no general history of it in English to complement monographs on the main dramatists (Grillparzer, Raimund, Nestroy, Anzengruber, Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal) and composers (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Johann Strauss, Richard Strauss).

When the most recent and fullest scholarly history of the Viennese theatre in German, Franz Hadamowsky's Wien. Theatergeschichte, appeared in 1988, I had the privilege of reviewing it in the Modern Language Review (Vol. 85 [1990], 515-18), and wrote that while it was admirably packed with facts, what he had ‘deliberately omitted might properly be the subject of another account’.