The ÖNB: Vienna’s Baroque Musical Memory

Located at the heart of the Hofburg in Vienna, the music collection of the Austrian National Library (ÖNB) forms part of a history spanning several centuries, born at the end of the 14th century as the Habsburg court library. Structured and monumentalized under Charles VI with the construction of the Prunksaal, it was enriched by music-loving emperors such as Leopold I. Preserving major sources of Baroque opera, from Monteverdi to Caldara, and today largely digitized, it sheds light on Vienna’s central role in European musical history.

Beneath the paving stones, music

“Vienna’s streets are paved with culture. Those of other cities, with asphalt.” One might be tempted to dismiss this sentence as a symptom of a typically metropolitan self-satisfaction, were it not uttered by Karl Kraus—one of the most lucid and visionary intellectuals in Austrian cultural history, and at the same time one of the sharpest critics of that Viennese mentality so inclined to wallow in operetta-like nostalgia and to celebrate, in the present, a past that is heavily distorted and idealized. Kraus himself cared little for music, but he could not ignore the fact that Vienna, for good reasons, passes as a “capital of music”: for even the most distracted passer-by will notice everywhere the traces that Viennese musical history has engraved in asphalt and stone:

And this is but a tiny sample of the plaques and commemorative stelae which, almost at every street corner, recall the cultural—above all musical—heritage of the Austrian metropolis.

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