LITMIR.BIZ

      Foreword

      This year, the year of 2017, our orchestra is celebrating a special birthday. One hundred seventy-five years ago the Vienna Philharmonic was founded in Vienna, that city of music which has always attracted and been home to important composers and musicians. This anniversary is an appropriate occasion to trace the traditions and present-day challenges of our orchestra in a literary way. The well-known Austrian writer on musical matters, Christoph Wagner-Trenkwitz, has taken on this task, and with the present book A Sound Tradition he has written a short history in facts, pictures and anecdotes. (The German title is Das Orchester, das niemals schläft—The Orchestra that Never Sleeps).

      This same vitality that he ascribes to the orchestra in the original title is evident in his book. For Wagner-Trenkwitz takes his readers on a journey in a very charming and knowledgeable way. This way first leads us to a place where the orchestra was founded and which appears in the name of the orchestra as a sort of seal of quality: Vienna. If you take this walk through Vienna with the author you will meet music at every turning, and wherever you meet music, you will also discover traces of the Vienna Philharmonic.

      But this journey with the orchestra leads the reader further: to the cities of Austria, first of all Salzburg, to the cities of Europe and indeed to cities all over the world. Here I would like to emphasize one city above all: New York, where a group of friends of the orchestra have united to form the Vienna Philharmonic Society. Its particular concern is also to celebrate the orchestra’s 175^th anniversary in an appropriate way. So the Vienna Philharmonic Society and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra created the idea for this book together, which is being published not only in German but also in English, so that many people from all over the world can participate in this literary-musical journey.

      As the journey leads us to many different places, it also takes us to different times. Wagner-Trenkwitz takes us on a time journey from the orchestra’s beginnings up to the present, and not just as a mere account of dates and facts, but in an informative, anecdotal,

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