We cordially invite you to the lecture from the cycle Dialogo della musica, which will be given by John D. Wilson (Vienna) on the topic of Concert Life in Vienna 1780–1830: The Challenges of Preparing a Concert Database for the 21st Century.
The lecture will take place on Tuesday, March 25, 2025 at 5 pm in the Musicological library IAH, Puškinovo nám. 9, Prague 6.
Similarly to Prague, Vienna’s musical life in the decades around 1800 was as vibrant as it was loosely defined. Professional and amateur performers alike gathered in drawing rooms, cafés, representative halls, and theaters to play, sing, and listen to music. For the music historian, the very nature of concert culture presents multiple difficulties in documentation and interpretation: besides the vagaries of naming conventions at this early stage of music journalism, even the notions of what constituted a concert, of public and private, and of the boundaries between audience and players, were all conceptualized in different ways from today. The digital medium however offers many advantages in studying and communicating concert data from this era. In this talk, a presentation of the new web database “Concert Life in Vienna” (viennaconcertlife.univie.ac.at) will serve as a launching point for discussing the ontological challenges associated with and best practices for bringing historical concert data into the digital realm.
John D. Wilson is a leading Beethoven scholar whose research has highlighted 18th-century court music in Bonn, the works of Antoine Reicha and Andreas Romberg, and music at the Congress of Vienna. Rooted in his background as a pianist, he is passionate about sharing music history with the public, developing innovative ways to communicate research with broader audiences and bringing unknown music to life through collaboration with orchestras. He has directed research projects at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the University of Vienna’s Institute of Musicology.