How a dynasty made Vienna the capital of European music

What the empire left in the culture

Austrian culture was formed by interaction between Celtic, Roman, Slavic and Germanic peoples, and it is known for classical music, folk music, Baroque architecture, coffee culture and winter sport. That list is the tourist summary and it is also accurate, which is unusual.

The organising fact behind it is the Habsburg monarchy, which ran from 1273 to 1918 and championed Catholicism throughout. Austria is historically a strongly Catholic country for that reason: the dynasty made confessional allegiance a matter of state, and the Counter-Reformation was carried out here with more thoroughness and more architecture than almost anywhere else.

Baroque is the visible result. A style adopted as an instrument of religious and dynastic display produced churches, abbeys and palaces across the whole territory, built to be overwhelming, and a country of nine million now maintains a Baroque building stock scaled for an empire.

Austrian German is the dominant language, although the region historically had a diverse linguistic situation, which is what a multinational monarchy leaves behind. The vocabulary differs from the German of Germany in everyday words, particularly in food and administration, and the differences are a matter of some national attachment.

Why Vienna became the capital of music

Vienna has long been a centre of musical innovation, and the reason is patronage rather than accident. Composers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were drawn to the city by the patronage of the Habsburgs and made it the European capital of classical music, with Mozart and Beethoven among those who came and stayed.

Concentration compounds in music more than in most arts. A city with the orchestras, the publishers, the teachers, the aristocratic households commissioning work and the audiences to hear it becomes the place a serious composer has to be, and the resulting cluster produced a run of work that defines the classical repertoire rather than forming a national school within it.

The institutions built for that period are still running, and they are the reason Vienna remains a musical capital rather than a musical museum. Opera houses, concert halls, orchestras and a conservatory tradition survived the end of the monarchy that funded them, transferred to public support, and continue to operate at a scale a country of this size would not otherwise sustain.

Folk music runs alongside and is regional rather than national, differing between the Alpine provinces and the eastern lowlands, and it fed into the concert tradition repeatedly rather than sitting apart from it. The traffic went both ways: dance forms from the countryside became concert music, and concert music came back as something played at village festivals.

What Vienna produced at the turn of the century

For roughly two decades either side of 1900, Vienna produced an unusual concentration of new work across unrelated fields, and the people doing it knew each other.

The Vienna Secession broke with the academic art establishment, and its major figures were the architect Otto Wagner and the artists Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Koloman Moser. What they produced looks nothing like the Baroque city it was made in, and the buildings and paintings are now among the most reproduced images of the country.

Psychoanalysis came out of the same city in the same period. Freud's work reorganised how the twentieth century thought about the mind, and it was developed in a bourgeois Vienna whose social conventions supplied a great deal of the material.

The coffee house is where much of this happened, and it is a genuine institution rather than a marketing phrase. Coffee house culture in the West began in Austria and remains a fixture, and its reputation was made around the turn of the nineteenth century when writers including Peter Altenberg, Karl Kraus, Hermann Broch and Friedrich Torberg used them as places to work. A café where a customer may sit for hours over one coffee with the newspapers is a public library that serves alcohol, and it functioned as the city's intellectual infrastructure.

What the country eats

Viennese cooking is meat-heavy despite the variety of ingredients on offer at the city's markets. The dishes that define it are Wiener Schnitzel, veal coated in breadcrumbs and fried, Tafelspitz, boiled beef, and Beuschel, alongside a pastry tradition that is the other half of the reputation.

The imperial inheritance is visible on the plate most directly of all. Dishes and techniques arrived from Bohemia, Hungary, northern Italy and the Balkans while all of them were governed from Vienna, and were absorbed into a cuisine that is presented as Austrian and is genuinely composite. The dumplings and the strudel each came from somewhere the monarchy ruled, and the cooking of Vienna is in that sense the most complete surviving artefact of a state that no longer exists: the borders moved and the recipes stayed.

Regional cooking outside Vienna differs considerably and follows the terrain rather than the capital. The Alpine provinces cook dairy, cured meat and the food of a mountain economy; the eastern lowlands cook closer to Hungarian tradition; and the wine regions of Lower Austria and Burgenland have their own food culture built around the seasonal taverns where a grower sells the year's wine with cold food, which is an institution with no exact equivalent elsewhere.

Why sport means skiing

Football, skiing and ice hockey are the common sports, and skiing is the one that carries national identity. Austria straddles the Alps and is a prime location for it, and the country is the leading nation in Alpine skiing competition, consistently taking the largest points total of any country.

That success is infrastructural rather than mysterious. A country where a large share of the population lives within reach of a mountain, where school skiing weeks are a normal part of education, and where the resort economy employs a substantial workforce produces competitors from a much wider base than a country where skiing is a holiday.

Ski racing is broadcast as a mass spectator sport, its athletes are national figures, and a World Cup result is front-page news in a way that has no equivalent in most European countries.

Football is the other mass sport and is followed in the way it is everywhere, and ice hockey has a regional following concentrated in particular provinces. Mountaineering and hiking sit outside the competitive category altogether and are closer to a general habit than to a sport, supported by a network of marked routes and staffed mountain huts that makes multi-day walking a mainstream summer activity rather than an expedition.

What the language did with itself

Austrian German is the dominant language and it differs from the German of Germany in ways that go past accent. The vocabulary of food and of everyday domestic life diverges, and a substantial part of that vocabulary arrived from the other languages of the monarchy, so a word used in a Viennese kitchen may be Czech, Hungarian or Italian in origin.

The historically diverse linguistic situation is what a multinational state leaves behind. The territory that is now Austria was the German-speaking core of an empire that governed Czechs, Hungarians, Poles, Slovenes, Croats, Italians and others, and both the migration into Vienna and the administrative traffic outward left traces in the language.

Literature in that language has an Austrian tradition distinct from the German one and preoccupied with different things. The recurring subjects are bureaucracy, the gap between appearance and substance, the loss of a world that ended in 1918, and a scepticism about language itself, which is a set of concerns that follows fairly directly from the country's history.

The satirical tradition is the sharpest expression of it. Karl Kraus, working from the coffee houses of the same period as the Secession and psychoanalysis, built a body of criticism out of dismantling the language of newspapers and officialdom, and that suspicion of official phrasing runs through Austrian writing since.

What survived the twentieth century

The cultural institutions of the monarchy were built for a state that ceased to exist in 1918, and the question of what to do with them has been answered the same way each time: keep them and pay for them publicly.

The palaces, museums, opera houses and concert halls of Vienna were designed to display an empire, and a republic of nine million inherited the maintenance bill. That produces an unusual public spending pattern, in which cultural expenditure per head is high because the stock is large rather than because the policy is generous, and a permanent argument about whether it is worth it.

The answer the country has given is that it is, and the tourism figures support it. A cultural inheritance that would be a burden without visitors becomes an industry with them, and the imperial buildings pay for a substantial share of their own upkeep through the people who come to see them.

The awkward part is what else the twentieth century left. Austria spent seven years as part of Germany, participated in the war and the crimes committed during it, and spent much of the post-war period describing itself as the first victim of Nazi aggression rather than as a participant. That account was revised in public from the 1980s onwards, and the revision is recent enough that how the period is taught and discussed remains contested. Austria: history works through the sequence itself.

What is inscribed and what it says

Austria holds 12 properties on the UNESCO World Heritage List, eleven cultural and one natural, and the list describes a country whose heritage is composed of whole places rather than isolated buildings.

The urban entries are the historic centres of Salzburg, inscribed in 1996, and of Vienna, inscribed in 2001, along with the palace and gardens of Schönbrunn, inscribed in 1996, which is the Habsburg summer residence and the clearest single statement of what the dynasty built.

The cultural regions are the distinctive group. The Hallstatt-Dachstein and Salzkammergut region, inscribed in 1997, combines salt mining going back to prehistory with Alpine landscape. The Wachau, inscribed in 2000, is a stretch of the Danube valley with terraced vineyards, monasteries and towns. The Fertö and Neusiedlersee region, inscribed in 2001 and shared with Hungary, is a steppe lake on the eastern border.

And three entries are infrastructure and prehistory. The Semmering Railway, inscribed in 1998, is a mountain railway listed as engineering. The Danube Limes, inscribed in 2021, is the Roman frontier. The prehistoric pile dwellings around the Alps, inscribed in 2011 and shared with five other countries, are Neolithic settlements preserved in lake sediment. A list that puts a railway beside a palace is describing a country that values both, and the Semmering entry in particular reflects a state whose nineteenth-century self-image rested as much on engineering as on the court. Austria: travel covers reaching them and Austria: history the monarchy that built most of them.