6 - The late nineteenth century: new foundations

Summary

THE WIENER STADTTHEATER

By the 1870s the Viennese theatre was in the throes of change, as the city itself was. The demolition of the old walls round the inner city had begun in 1858, and the first section of the new Ringstrasse had been opened in 1865; but construction work continued throughout the 1870s, and some of the big new buildings, including the new Burgtheater, were not completed until even later. When Laube returned to Vienna in late 1870, he found that even after his relatively brief absence he ‘hardly recognized’ it. Not only was it a permanent building site; its whole social and cultural life was in flux. The population had been about 500,000 in 1860; by 1880 it was nearly half as much again, and over a million including outlying suburbs which were eventually incorporated in the city in 1891. By the end of the century the total was over 1,600,000, and with an industrial area across the Danube, including Floridsdorf, being incorporated in 1904, the 2,000,000 mark was topped by 1910 — a fourfold expansion in just half a century.

Of the old dialect theatres, the Carltheater and Theater an der Wien were by the 1870s targeting a predominantly middle-class audience by concentrating mainly on operetta; the Theater in der Josefstadt remained closer to the old idea of a ‘popular’ local theatre but was increasingly run-down.