Dvořák's Reception in Liberal Vienna: Language Ordinances, National Property, and the Rhetoric of Deutschtum

Abstract

AbstractAntonín Dvořák emerged into public consciousness in Vienna in late 1879, at a time of crisis within multinational Austria's German-speaking bourgeoisie. The German Liberals had recently fallen from power in the central government and were replaced by a coalition dominated by clerical, conservative, and Slavic parties. This sudden change in fortune initiated a gradual transformation in liberal ideology. Although the liberals' nationalist project had traditionally been of the “civic,” not “ethnic” variety, with a German liberal identity theoretically available to persons of any ethnicity who professed Bildung and Deutschtum, many increasingly adopted a particularist project of German nationalism, involving a decided defense of Nationalbesitzstand (national property). A comparative reading of the Dvořák reception among Viennese critics during the last decades of the nineteenth century suggests that much of what was seen to be at stake in the Czech composer's music was what did and did not count as “German.” Whereas Eduard Hanslick, critic for the Neue Freie Presse, consistently upheld traditional liberal ideology on this question, Theodor Helm's criticism in the Deutsche Zeitung stood more in line with the newer German-nationalist project. More than that, throughout his writings on Dvořák the younger critic seemed very much aware of acting the part of German-nationalist counterbalance to the more traditional liberal-nationalist Hanslick. Although Hanslick was the more powerful figure among the liberal elite, in many ways by the 1890s Helm had come to be more representative of the broader segment of Vienna's educated and semieducated middle classes.