The traditional conflict in Vienna's musical life has been between German and Italian forces. It was strongly felt in the seventeenth century, it is evident in Mozart's work, it was a cause of great resentment in Weber's time, and it marked the reign at the Vienna Opera of Herbert von Karajan. Vienna's geographical position and its religious traditions will perhaps always sustain this conflict. In the late nineteenth century, however, a different conflict preoccupied the musical minds of the capital, and the course of that conflict largely determined the eruption of avant-garde musical activity as the century turned.

The central figure in this critical dispute was Wagner, whose world-wide fame and fashion soon after his death in 1883 is in stark contrast to the hostility and rejection he had faced from many quarters during his lifetime. In Vienna the story is a good deal more complex than it was in, say, Paris, where the reversal of Wagner's fortunes in the mid-1880s threw the entire musical world into turmoil as composers and critics hastily re-examined their ground and adjusted their fields of fire. In Vienna the change was less abrupt. Nevertheless, the mid-1880s mark the point at which Wagner's supporters there began to sense that they were on the winning side: these are also the years of Hugo Wolf's meteoric work as a music critic for the Vienna Salonblatt, and although my main concern here is to record the progress of Wagnerism in Vienna, Wolf's part in its triumphant rise offers a convenient point of focus.