Eighteenth-century accounts of Vienna portray the city as one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse in Europe, yet most scholarship about Viennese music at that time focuses on Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, painting a disproportionately Austro-German picture of the Habsburg capital's musical life. Hungarian Dances and Musical Life in Eighteenth-Century Vienna is a social history of a unique facet of the city's diversity, illuminating how it shaped everyday experiences, individual and collective identities, and boundaries of belonging from approximately 1750 to 1810.
Each chapter presents a case study of Hungarian dances and their music in a particular setting, with close attention to the mediating and intersecting effects of gender and class on personal and communal experiences. Engagement with music and dance—especially by reading, playing keyboard instruments, and taking part in social dancing—made cross-cultural encounters possible for relatively privileged Viennese women, even when their participation in public life and their ability to travel were limited. These cross-cultural encounters were critical to women's imaginative exploration of new affinities and identities without risk to their position or reputation.
Moving deftly from the Habsburg court and its theaters to public sites of sociability and domestic contexts, Catherine Mayes offers new perspectives on the wide range and significance of experiences of music and dance in the capital city of a multinational monarchy.
