Hungarian Dances and Musical Life in Eighteenth-Century Vienna

Eighteenth-century accounts of Vienna portray the city as one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse in Europe, yet most scholarship about Viennese music at that time focuses on Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, painting a disproportionately Austro-German picture of the Habsburg capital's musical life.Hungarian Dances and Musical Life in Eighteenth-Century Vienna is a social history of a unique facet of the city's diversity, illuminating how it shaped everyday experiences, individual and collective identities, and boundaries of belonging from approximately 1750 to 1810.Each chapter presents a case study of Hungarian dances and their music in a particular setting, with close attention to the mediating and intersecting effects of gender and class on personal and communal experiences.Engagement with music and dance--especially by reading, playing keyboard instruments, and taking part in social dancing--made cross-cultural encounters possible for relatively socio-economically privileged