Concert Life in Vienna 1780–1830 (Web Database)

Viennese concert life in the decades around 1800 indisputably provided the setting for one of the most vibrant epochs in music history. The citys intensive patronage of music made it the destination of hundreds of virtuosi and composers whose legacy has, not without perennial controversy, been inescapably associated with the label Viennese Classicism. Among these, central figures in the musical canon such as Wolfgang Amadé Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Franz Schubert composed, played, and conducted their works in Vienna between 1780 and 1830. The prominence of this repertoire on modern concert programs and recordings, however, disguises a famously chaotic source situation and a dire lack of a central hub for the most current information on which concerts in fact took place in this time period, where they occurred, and who was involved with them. The website Concert Life in Vienna 17801830, based on the identically named research project underway at the University of Vienna and the TU Berlin since July 2022, will present all known data on the events, venues, works, and persons during this busy half century in a relational database with a clean, immersive, and user-friendly interface. The unique demands of our subject a decentralized music scene involving thousands of individuals, many appearing in multiple capacities, all playing out in a busy metropolis whose urban contours changed rapidly and dramatically require both a robust data architecture and an agile, intuitive user experience. The main interface will be a fully functional, zoomable digital map, fitted with a time slider that shows the changing urban landscape as the user travels through time, on which the search results are clearly overlaid. The persons, institutions, and works will be linked to entries in the German National Librarys Integrated Authority File (GND). The data on concert venues will not only be presented in numerical form, but also visualized in browsable 3D models and made audible in music clips projected virtually into the spaces in question. Given the fact that the known details of many concerts are often imprecise and, as a result, that not all data can be known with 100% certainty, the website offers a system for expressing the degree of certainty while still letting potential matches appear in search results. Stable permalinks to digitized primary sources will ensure that users are easily able to see the originals for themselves. The website will give many kinds of users a sense for Viennas rich sonic topography. Besides providing a reliable resource for any student or curious music-history enthusiast, the database will serve as an ideal jump-off point for further international research on concert life in Vienna.