Let’s imagine, for a minute, a city. One crowned with towering buildings designed to impress. A bustling hive of activity, where languages from around the globe can be heard on its streets. A centre of commerce where, if you are lucky, opportunity flows and fortunes are made.
Would it surprise you to discover that this city was 19th-century Vienna and not modern-day Dubai?
This week, the Vienna Concert-Verein perform two concerts at Dubai Opera, and both programmes are framed by the musical legacy of this most musical of European cities.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Joseph Hadyn, Franz Schubert, Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Liszt, Johann Strauss and Gustav Mahler – the city’s association with musical greats is an embarrassment of riches.
During the 18th and 19th centuries, the world’s superstar composers flocked to its gates – and they weren’t the only ones. Positioned between continental Europe, Russia and the Ottoman Empire, Vienna – like Dubai today – attracted a colourful melange of nationalities and ethnicities.
Had Mozart been alive today and living in Dubai, he undoubtedly would have felt right at home in the city’s ethnic mix – like many of the other composers featured in the Vienna Concert-Verein’s two performances.
An Austrian who had travelled widely, Mozart had a canny magpie-like ability to draw on all the cultural influences he encountered and fuse them together in his music.
Turkish marches are assimilated alongside Italian arias and German minuets. Even Strauss, the composer of the famed Blue Danube waltz and perhaps the most Viennese composer of the lot, had a Spanish grandmother. Collectively their music embodied Vienna's secret weapon. As the capital of an empire whose army spoke four languages, it wasn't nationalism that held the empire together, but the 18th century's big idea – the enlightenment.
Clarity, optimism, eternal “rational” truths – these are all hallmarks of this philosophical movement which fermented in the minds of some of Vienna’s greatest thinkers of the day.
And they also shaped the music these great composers wrote. Not only did Mozart, like Schubert after him, want to create an accessible, universal music that went beyond a national identity – the restrained, classical beauty of his Eine Kleine Nachtmusik being a perfect embodiment of this – he also wove enlightenment ideas into his great operas.
The arias that populate the Vienna Concert-Verein's concert today come from The Magic Flute, Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro – three classics that each neatly tick the enlightenment's must-have box: a happy ending. This is the lieto fine in which the critic Antonio Planelli found "certain proof of the progress humankind has made in peacefulness, sophistication, and clemency.
Meanwhile, composers such as Franz Lehár and Johann Strauss illustrate beautifully the second trick 19th-century Vienna had up its sleeve – Gemütlichkeit.
This concept conjures up something friendly, warm and always full of good cheer – and it describes the coffeehouses and salons that bustled with life when this busy city became home to so many nationalities. In the swirling waltzs you hear the joy of the ballroom and in the polkas the chatter of the street. This is pure Viennese gemütlichkeit.
Of course, when put together, the various pieces of the Viennese jigsaw generated a unique picture – the perfect environment where great music could thrive.
It became an international city, a melting pot of cultures and ideas, in which rulers and entrepreneurs invested in its cultural life by building impressive concert halls and catalysing new opportunities.
Suggesting that Dubai might one day match the legacy of Vienna is certainly bold. But if building the opera house represents a new development in the cultural life of the city and generates exciting opportunities for composers, then who knows, the potential could be there. After all, if you asked most composers 1600s where Vienna was, they wouldn’t have had a clue.
• Postcards from Vienna by the Vienna Concert-Verein is on September 22 at Dubai Opera. 8pm. Tickets begin from Dh300 from www.dubaiopera.com.
