wean mondän. 150 years of the World's Fair

Concert and reading

The Vienna World's Fair of 1873 was also to influence Viennese music and continue to shape it to this day: Johann Strauss Sohn was appointed music director of the World's Fair. And so Strauss and his colleagues - such as his brother Eduard Strauss, Carl Michael Ziehrer and the regimental bandmaster Philipp Fahrenbach - composed a number of waltzes, marches and polkas especially for the World's Fair. Military bands played these pieces in the daily concerts in the Vienna Prater. And of course, these melodies were also performed and interpreted elsewhere in Vienna in taverns, dance halls and entertainment establishments.

Quasi as a counterpart to the progress that was to be conveyed by the World's Fair, the "good old days" were evoked in the folk songs of the time. In their transfigured songs, the Viennese carol singers in the Heurigen and wine taverns told of a cozy Vienna, the Vienna before the construction of the Ringstrasse and before the stock market crash. They sang of a time when everything was supposedly better and thus coined the myth of "Wiener Sudern".

With the Bravour Schrammeln, Chris Lohner and Traude Holzer