MOZART wrote that it was the best place for his metier; Beethoven called it a cesspit; Schumann described it as the soul of musical Germany; and Mahler said that he became happier the further he got away from it. The image of Vienna as a musical city, one that acted as a mecca for leading composers from Joseph Haydn onwards, and the environment that nurtured many of the most treasured works of the musical canon, from Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro and Beethoven's Ninth, to Strauss's Blue Danube waltz and Mahler's Ninth, is a familiar and enduring one. From at least the middle of the nineteenth century it was also one that was consciously nurtured by the city as it embraced composers old and new within its tradition, often glossing over difficulties it had placed in the way of many of them, difficulties that prompted the exasperated comments of Beethoven and Mahler.

Nearly one hundred years ago, at the end of the First World War, Vienna lost its place as the capital city of one of the oldest empires in Europe. While the legacy of Habsburg times is still evident in the city, from the Schonbrunn palace to the popular dessert of Kaiserschmarrn, musical history is even more central to its continuing identity. The new baggage hall in Vienna airport greets its arrivals with a large-scale mural of the Blue Danube waltz, more than forty composers and performers are remembered in its street names (from Albrechtsberger to Zemlinsky), the state opera house commands a physical location in the centre of the city, and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, one of the great orchestras of the world, celebrates the New Year with a morning concert of music by the Strauss family that is broadcast to an international audience of millions.

It is an alluring vision, itself part of the history of music in Vienna, but what of its foundations? The city is very frank about its historical base, focussing on music from the Vienna of Mozart in the 1780s to the Vienna of Mahler, Schoenberg, Berg and Webern at the beginning of the twentieth century, and marginalizing musical life from the medieval period to the mid-eighteenth century and from the 1920s to the present day.