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The Vienna into which Haydn was thus cast, a friendless and
forlorn youth of seventeen, was not materially different from the
Vienna of to-day. While the composer was still living, one who had
made his acquaintance wrote of the city: "Represent to yourself
an assemblage of palaces and very neat houses, inhabited by the
most opulent families of one of the greatest monarchies in
Europe--by the only noblemen to whom that title may still be with
justice applied. The women here are attractive; a brilliant
complexion adorns an elegant form; the natural but sometimes
languishing and tiresome air of the ladies of the north of
Germany is mingled with a little coquetry and address, the effect
of the presence of a numerous Court...In a word, pleasure has
taken possession of every heart." This was written when Haydn was
old and famous; it might have been written when his name was yet
unknown.
Vienna was essentially a city of pleasure--a city inhabited by "a
proud and wealthy nobility, a prosperous middle class, and a
silent, if not contented, lower class." In 1768, Leopold Mozart,
the father of the composer, declared that the Viennese public had
no love of anything serious or sensible; "they cannot even
understand it, and their theatres furnish abundant proof that
nothing but utter trash, such as dances, burlesques,
harlequinades, ghost tricks, and devils' antics will go down with
them." There is, no doubt, a touch of exaggeration in all this,
but it is sufficiently near the truth to let us understand the
kind of attention which the disgraced chorister of St Stephen's
was likely to receive from the musical world of Vienna. It was
Vienna, we may recall, which dumped Mozart into a pauper's grave,
and omitted even to mark the spot.
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