Episode 2 Vienna: Empire, Dynasty and Dream

For two centuries, Vienna was the frontier between East and West.

It was the capital of the Habsburgs,

Archdukes of Austria and Holy Roman Emperors.

They were the champions of Catholicism,

the guardians of European Christendom

against Islamic conquest.

In 1683, catastrophe had loomed when the Ottoman Turks

laid siege to Vienna.

With the city in peril, a pan-European army

rushed to the rescue,

unleashing the largest cavalry charge in history.

The city was saved.

In the camp of the defeated Ottomans,

they found a treasure trove of spoils.

They found gold and diamonds, they found ostriches and camels.

And they found 300 abandoned cannons.

And with those cannons melted down they built this,

the Pummerin, the Boomer.

The victory ushered in a new age.

Power and prestige were given visceral and visual form,

recast into art, music and architecture.

The bell was so big

it almost destroyed the Tower of St Stephen's Cathedral,

where it still hangs.

But when the Viennese

heard it ring, heard it boom, they heard the sound of victory.

PUMMERIN RINGS

This is the story of Vienna triumphant.

The house of Habsburg in its golden age.

The emperors now surged east and west,

dreaming of European supremacy.

Wealth and power awoke Vienna, artists projected Habsburg majesty.

The fortress city became a cosmopolitan capital.

Vienna was reborn a city of palaces, peoples and ideas.

A beacon of the arts, a capital of music,

and a laboratory of enlightened and despotic ideologies.

I'll see how Vienna would inspire the incandescent genius of Mozart,

survive the depredations of Napoleon Bonaparte,

and become the cultural and diplomatic capital of the world.

Vienna, Imperial City, dynastic city, city of art and music.

City of ideas. This is the crucible and the crossroads of the great

struggles of history.

Protestantism versus Catholicism, Islam versus Christendom,

democracy and tolerance versus nationalism and intolerance.

This is the story of the city where the modern world was invented,

and poisoned.

Vienna. The capital of annihilation and civilisation.

The victory over the Ottoman Turks left Vienna euphoric.

The reigning Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor was Leopold I,

and he now vowed to transform his capital

into the world's greatest city.

For Vienna and for the house of Habsburg, it was a new beginning,

a new era.

The empire was striking back.

Emperor Leopold offered fame and fortune to the knights

who'd saved Vienna.

One of them was an unlikely Viennese hero, adopted by the city,

but who achieved such glory

that he would build the city's most magnificent palaces.

He would outshine three emperors,

become the greatest Habsburg warlord in history,

and make Vienna the capital of a European superpower.

This was Eugene, Prince of Savoy.

His story became inseparable from Vienna,

but he arrived as a penniless refugee from France

when the city was under Ottoman siege.

Prince Eugene grew up at the Court of Louis XIV, the Sun King,

sworn enemy of the house of Habsburg.

His mother, an ex-mistress of the King himself,

was a promiscuous intriguer who is ultimately implicated in

The Case Of The Poisons and had to flee Paris in disgrace.

Escaping execution for the murder plot,

his mother was vilified by Louis XIV, who ridiculed Eugene

for his looks, his homosexuality, and his diminutive stature.

He wanted to be a soldier.

"No," said Louis XIV,

"you're only good enough to be a little vicar in the church."

But Eugene defied the Sun King.

He ran away to Austria.

He offered his service, his life, his very blood,

to the house of Austria, and Leopold accepted.

He then joined the army that was rushing to relieve besieged Vienna.

And outside these gates he made his name

in the battle that saved the city.

Eugene joined Emperor Leopold's counteroffensive,

he became a commander, renowned for ruthless discipline

and brilliant ingenuity.

During the campaigns against the Ottomans he rose to fame,

becoming the hero of Vienna.

At 22, he was a Major General.

At 24, he helped take Hungary and Budapest.

At 29, he was a Field Marshal,

and such was his success and his share of the spoils of the Ottomans,

that he was able to build this, the Winter Palace,

his residence right in the centre of Vienna.

Eugene's Palace shows off the baroque taste for symbolism,

muscle-ripped statues project his power and virility.

In 1697, Eugene, aged 33,

was given command of the Imperial Army.

He would face his greatest test.

In the 14 years since the Ottomans had been repelled

from the walls of Vienna, Leopold had seized vast swathes of land.

Now, the Turkish sultans desperately needed to stem their losses and

launched a final, brutal, all-or-nothing assault.

100,000 men marched on Vienna.

Eugene had been ordered by Emperor Leopold to go on the defensive,

but he defied those orders.

When he heard that the Ottoman army was crossing the river Tisa

in strength, he force-marched his army to the place

and then fell upon them, taking them completely by surprise.

And as you can see from this painting,

he annihilated the Ottoman troops.

They are being slaughtered as they ran into the river.

Defeat at Zenta forever ended the Ottoman hopes

of holding back the Viennese advance.

Eugene had almost single-handedly

made the Austrian Habsburgs a great European power,

and to make his success palpable, he turned his victories into art.

He became Vienna's greatest patron, its greatest connoisseur.

Habsburg expansion seemed unstoppable.

It even harked back to the glories of the 16th century

when Emperor Charles V had ruled over a vast Habsburg empire

stretching from the Americas to the Balkans.

Vienna thrived on the trade between East and West.

But to maintain this overstretched empire,

Charles V had divided his lands between two branches of the family.

One ruled Austria, one ruled Spain.

For decades, the two branches of the Habsburg family had intermarried.

Nieces married uncles, first cousins married each other.

The idea was to keep the sprawling Habsburg lands

within the same family.

But it was ironic that the very policy

that was meant to strengthen the house of Habsburg

actually destroyed the Spanish branch.

The last Spanish Habsburg was King Charles II.

He was the gruesome living aberration of what was, in effect,

generations of royal incest.

He struggled to walk, to talk, and he was infertile.

With no heir, he lay dying in 1700.

And in Vienna, Emperor Leopold wanted his own younger son,

Charles of Austria, to succeed in Spain.

But he had a rival.

There were two candidates for the Spanish throne.

One was Charles of Austria,

and the other was the grandson of Louis XIV,

the French candidate.

But when Charles II died, he left Spain to the French.

The outraged Austrian Habsburgs denounced the will as fake

and in 1701, declared war.

Emperor Leopold faced the superpower of the early 18th century.

France fought the Austrians back.

There was a very real danger that Europe would find itself

under the domination of Louis XIV and France.

Only the alliance of Austria and Britain would stop him.

The French had the biggest and best armies,

but the Austrians had Prince Eugene.

Now, a French army marched south to attack and capture Vienna -

the capital was in peril.

Eugene's armies marched to protect Vienna,

but he was vastly outnumbered.

He needed reinforcements, and fortunately, the British commander,

the brilliant Duke of Marlborough, came to the rescue.

Marlborough was every inch Eugene's equal,

and a like-minded disciplinarian and superb strategist.

He outmanoeuvred the French and marched unopposed across Europe.

John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, came to his aid.

When the two rendezvoused near the village of Blenheim,

it inaugurated one of the great partnerships

in all of military history.

Eugene and Marlborough instantly became friends.

"I really love Prince Eugene," Marlborough told his wife.

And when the battle came the next day, the Battle of Blenheim,

they routed the French

and forever shattered the invincibility of the Sun King.

When Leopold died in 1705, the war over Spain was unresolved.

His oldest son, Joseph, inherited Austria,

and Eugene's victory at Blenheim now meant his younger son, Charles,

could march towards Madrid.

Charles was a dim and unimpressive leader,

but he was determined to rule Spain as king.

But when his brother, Joseph I, died unexpectedly,

he was recalled to Vienna to be Holy Roman Emperor.

Now that France had been humbled,

the British were afraid that Spain and Austria

would be united under one Habsburg emperor.

And so they betrayed the Austrians and made peace.

Poor Charles had to give up forever his Spanish dream.

When Charles realised he was never going back to Spain,

he decided to recreate Spain in Vienna.

He imported Spanish dress, Spanish court rituals, and this,

his pride and joy, the Spanish Riding School.

And I'm sitting right in Charles' Imperial Box.

Charles finally agreed peace.

He exchanged his claim to the Spanish throne for parts of Italy

and the Low Countries.

At last, Vienna could take centre stage

as the sole Habsburg capital of a much-expanded empire

enjoying an economic boom.

Now a multinational empire of Hungarians, Italians,

Bohemians and Austrians,

the monarchy and the nobility celebrated their prestige

and Vienna's status

as THE imperial city by building palaces, churches, and monuments.

Every aristocrat worthy of their name

had to build a palace in Vienna.

400 new summer residences were constructed in the next 50 years.

'But of all those palaces, none rivalled Eugene's.'

This is the Belvedere Palace.

One of the glories of 18th-century Vienna.

Everything here is designed to project, to trumpet,

the victories of Eugene over his two great enemies.

On one hand, the Ottoman sultans,

and on the other hand, Louis XIV of France,

the Sun King, who had humiliated and disdained him as a young man.

Eugene's Summer Palace projects his victories and his personality.

The roofs resemble conquered Ottoman tents,

the gardens are meant to outdo the glory of Versailles.

Inside, his ceilings show him as the god Apollo,

the symbol of artistic patronage.

Signs and spoils of his victories are everywhere.

Still concealed in a small room of Eugene's Palace is a statue

that reveals the great general's confidence in his own grandeur.

Rather than use symbolism,

he commissioned his own image as supreme warlord.

He is clothed in the lion pelt of Hercules,

he stamps down on a defeated Turk.

The symbol for eternal legacy shines upon him.

This statue couldn't be exhibited during his lifetime -

only emperors could enjoy that sort of adulation.

Eugene had been military commander, and effectively chief minister,

of the Habsburg monarchy for 30 years,

and was now serving his third emperor.

But Charles VI was jealous of his famous paladin,

and secretly undermined him.

He sent Eugene on foolish campaigns that bankrupted the Treasury.

He was still fighting into his 70s.

When Eugene returned exhausted to Vienna,

he caught pneumonia and died.

His achievements had driven the imperial family

to the zenith of their power.

Now the future of the dynasty, and the city of Vienna,

would be defined by holding together this vast empire.

Charles VI was haunted by the loss of Spain.

He stamped the Habsburg's God-given right to rule on his city, Vienna,

using the sensuous magnificence of baroque architecture.

Vienna rang to the majestic compositions of his court composers.

This was truly a city of art, music and masses.

Yet all this was worthless if Charles could not produce an heir.

I'm in the sumptuous library of the Emperor Charles VI,

in the Hofburg Palace,

and this was the Habsburg monarch

whose life was dominated by his quest and need

for a male heir.

He chose his wife for her beauty, fecundity and health.

Elizabeth of Brunswick was her name.

She dazzled everyone with her gorgeousness.

But, as children came, the male ones died.

And only the daughters survived.

Charles was desperate.

First of all, he painted their apartments with erotic paintings

of nubile girls and boys, then he consulted his quack doctors.

First they proposed alcohol.

She was given more and more booze until she was an alcoholic,

then they proposed food.

She was almost force-fed until she became obesely fat.

But still, the result was the same - no male heir,

just the two daughters.

Charles's only option was to declare his daughter the heir.

There'd never been a female archduchess,

'and Charles knew his nobility and the kings of Europe

'may not accept his choice.'

He desperately tried to get their agreement,

and created a series of new laws known as the Pragmatic Sanction.

It was only half complete when, in 1740, he went hunting,

gorged on mushrooms and died.

He was succeeded by his daughter, Maria Theresa, aged just 23.

Austria's nobles knew her only as a card-playing, dancing,

and rather beautiful young woman.

She was completely unprepared for the appalling crisis

that would befall her monarchy, her empire and herself.

But what no-one knew was that she had a will of steel.

Her reign would dazzle Vienna.

Maria Theresa's first duty was in the Imperial Crypt.

This is where Maria Theresa came to bury her father, Charles VI.

It's the Kaisergruft, the imperial crypt of the Habsburg dynasty.

And on his sarcophagus here, right behind me,

you can see among all its elaborate decoration, his various crowns,

as the Archduchy of Austria, the crowns of Bohemia and Hungary,

and the Holy Roman Empire.

These were the crowns she would have to fight for.

If she was to succeed, this is what she had to keep.

Maria Theresa faced an uphill battle -

her father's mismanagement had weakened the Empire.

Vienna was now an artistic, palatial, imperial capital

thanks to the wealth of its empire.

But the muddled succession offered an ideal opportunity

for rivals to seize Austria's richest provinces.

The vultures began to mass on the Empire's borders.

And luckily for Maria Theresa,

the first raider was the most brilliant -

Frederick the Great, the newly-crowned King of Prussia.

He was the military and political genius of his age,

with a superb army and a full treasury.

He unleashed war, capturing Maria Theresa's richest province, Silesia.

Next into the fray came the heir of a medieval Habsburg rival,

Charles Albert of Bavaria.

Austria's armies were surrounded and routed

when Spain and France also declared war.

The Bavarians marched onwards, capturing Prague

and crowning Charles Albert King of Bohemia.

In 1742, Charles Albert went further.

He was elected the first non-Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor

in three centuries.

The extinction of Maria Theresa and the Habsburgs seemed inevitable.

Her armies were in retreat, her geriatric advisers were in panic,

she'd lost two of her father's crowns,

and her enemies were preparing to march on Vienna.

The story of what happens next

is preserved in a series of paintings

in Vienna's Hungarian embassy.

She rushed to Hungary and there she showed herself

not only the wilful politician,

but also the consummate actress.

Wearing mourning black for her father,

she charmed the Hungarian nobles.

She appealed to them, she said, "My son, my baby son,"

who she showed them, the future Joseph II,

"My son, the monarchy, the crown

"and the Kingdom of Hungary itself are in peril. Help me."

And they did.

The Hungarians enthusiastically crowned Maria Theresa

queen of Hungary.

But what she really needed was the troops.

And they provided that too.

There's her army. She'd save the monarchy.

Funded by a war chest from the old ally, Great Britain,

Maria Theresa turned the tide of the war.

Charles Albert retreated, Frederick the Great betrayed him

and, alone, the Bavarian fell ill and died in 1745.

She'd lost Silesia, but she'd survived.

She made peace to secure her borders

and in return, the apologetic German electors

crowned Maria Theresa's husband, Francis,

as the new Holy Roman Emperor.

She regained Bohemia, she ruled supreme in Hungary, and at last,

she was an empress too.

'This library holds a secret.

'It's the former throne room of the Favorita Palace.'

Between these bookcases

sat the thrones of Maria Theresa and her husband, Francis.

There was never any doubt that she was in charge.

He was a feckless politician, an incompetent military commander.

He was good only at making money and chasing actresses.

She, on the other hand, was a consummate stateswoman.

She knew exactly who to appoint, she chose excellent courtiers,

and politicians, and generals.

The Empress Queen reformed Austria's sprawling government.

This palace even became a school for a new civil service,

sometimes even chosen for merit, not high birth.

She centralised control of the army

and reorganised the imperial finances.

She managed, within a few years,

to balance the budgets of the Habsburg monarchy

for the first time in its history.

Seeing herself as the mother to a reborn Habsburg Vienna,

Maria Theresa wanted rid of the formal, rigid past of her childhood.

Now she commissioned a magnificent new palace, the Schonbrunn.

She personally oversaw its construction

and the fitting of almost 1,500 rooms.

In 1746, she moved in here with her family.

This is the great gallery of the Schonbrunn Palace.

And as you can see, the decoration is open, gilded, playful, humane.

No longer the Catholic oppression of earlier decades.

And that's because we're now in the age of the playful Rococo.

After the formal symbolism of Baroque,

Rococo celebrated character, joy, emotion, eroticism.

When you look up at this painting, the centrepiece,

amidst all the territories, principalities and duchies

of the Habsburg monarchy is a golden carriage.

And in it is Maria Theresa

and her husband, the Holy Roman Emperor, Francis.

Because, unusually, this was a happy marriage.

This was a love match.

But it had a price.

Because Francis was openly and notoriously unfaithful

with virtually every Italian singer, courtesan, prostitute in town.

And this caused Maria Theresa much pain.

She founded a chastity commission to hunt down immorality.

Italian sopranos were thrown out of the city, prostitutes were arrested,

and 3,000 of them were loaded on to barges and sent off

to populate new towns in the east.

'Because despite her anger, Maria Theresa knew'

they would provide the ideal, fertile settlers.

And there you have it all over.

That's Maria Theresa, the prim, the pious pragmatist.

A new intellectual movement was gaining force in Vienna.

This was the age of the Enlightenment.

Reason was replacing tradition as the basis for authority.

This sat uncomfortably with the Empress queen

who never forgot her zealous childhood.

She was both modern and medieval.

On one hand she made attempts to expel Jews and Protestants,

on the other she introduced a form of universal education.

Above all, Maria Theresa was practical.

Despite being conservative, she permitted gradual reform.

There was just one thing she couldn't let go.

Revenge.

Maria Theresa never gave up the dream

of getting back her province, Silesia,

stolen from her by that amoral arch-predator of genius,

Frederick The Great of Prussia.

But in 1756, she realised that she needed help to do so,

and that meant allying Austria with the ancestral enemy, France.

This diplomatic revolution so alarmed Britain

that she allied herself with Prussia.

Russia joined Austria.

This became the Seven Years' War.

Fought across the world from America to India,

the world's first global conflict.

In Europe, Maria Theresa's army

defeated a Prussian invasion of Bohemia,

and to celebrate that victory, they hastily built this monument,

the Gloriette.

Yet the ponderous Austrian, French and Russian generals floundered.

They were no match for the genius of Frederick the Great.

By 1763, Maria Theresa had to admit that Silesia was lost forever.

And this grand victory monument

became something of an embarrassment.

She used it for family picnics.

Maria Theresa had failed to restore Austrian dominance in Europe,

but she did ensure there was no problem with the succession.

She and Francis were blessed with 16 children.

In her characteristic fashion,

Maria Theresa had a practical use for them, too.

To secure the Franco-Austrian alliance,

she arranged for her 14-year-old daughter, Marie Antoinette,

to marry Louis, the French Dauphin.

From the very start,

the marriage of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI of France

was a mismatch.

She was not only young, but also foolish, unwise and tactless.

For seven years, the couple remained awkward,

failing to consummate the union.

Marie Antoinette's big brother, Joseph II, hurried to Paris.

This unlikely sex therapist interviewed both husband and wife.

And what he discovered was that the problem

was a mixture of sexual incompetence, youthful clumsiness,

premature ejaculation and physical abnormality.

He advised instant circumcision of the King.

The problem was solved.

Consummation and a large family of children followed.

Despite matters easing in the bedchamber,

Marie Antoinette's behaviour continued to outrage the French.

She was seen as profligate, silly, promiscuous, and pro-Austrian.

Maria Theresa's old age was ruined by her worry

about her daughter Marie Antoinette's

disastrously scandalous behaviour.

"You've thrown yourself into a life of pleasure

"and preposterous display,"

she wrote to her.

"And going from pleasure to pleasure without your husband

"will end in misery for you."

Soon, she was to be proved only too right.

In 1765, Emperor Francis fell ill and died.

Maria Theresa was devastated.

A note was found in her Bible that recorded the exact length

of her marriage down to the number of hours.

She fell into a pit of depression,

and to rule, first in her stead, and then as co-regent,

her 24-year-old son, Joseph II,

was elected the new Holy Roman Emperor.

Joseph was now the co-ruler with his mother, Maria Theresa.

He was one of the most extraordinary of the Habsburgs.

Personally, he was clumsy, awkward, impossible, dogmatic, egotistical,

but he was also highly intelligent.

A believer in reason. A man of the Enlightenment.

A radical zealot for reform.

A man of tolerance.

His relations with his mother were fond, but extremely tense.

He pushed her towards more expansion abroad,

like the partition of Poland, and more reforms at home.

But his mother was still alive. She was formidable.

He had to wait.

For the moment, he had to get everything past his mum.

Joseph had an unyielding belief in the power of reason.

He rejected emotion.

And that was partly due to tragic failed romances.

In October 1760, Maria Theresa held a wedding

and as you can see from this painting,

she didn't do it by halves.

Her son, Joseph,

was married to the beautiful, blonde, alabaster-skinned

Isabella of Parma.

It was a wedding that seemed ideal for the family.

She was gorgeous, and Joseph was wildly in love with her.

But things weren't all they seemed.

Soon after her marriage,

the 18-year-old Isabella fell in love,

but she didn't fall in love with her husband.

Awkwardly, she fell in love with her husband's sister,

Archduchess Marie Christine.

It soon turned into a full-blown, physical, lesbian love affair.

Joseph, the doting husband,

who was passionately in love with his bride, was in denial.

After three years of marriage,

she caught smallpox and died aged only 21.

Joseph was heartbroken.

He felt he could never love again.

But Maria Theresa persuaded her son to marry a second time,

with the hope of new lands and an heir.

The marriage was a disaster.

Joseph complained his wife was hideously ugly.

And when she also died of smallpox,

he didn't even bother to attend the funeral.

Joseph decided to remain single.

And he approached his sex life

with the same efficiency as he approached government.

As a rationalist, he decided love was simply absurd.

And as a Catholic he regarded onanism as sinful self-abuse.

Instead, he visited his gardener's daughter for sex

in the potting shed at the same time every day.

Or he came here to the red-light district to visit a brothel

like the one that stood right here.

Hidden in this restaurant is this somewhat mysterious sign.

It says, "In 1778, Emperor Joseph II flew through this archway."

Joseph, wearing disguise, had visited this brothel.

He'd mistreated some of the girls, been confronted and then recognised.

And such was his embarrassment, or fear of his prudish old mother,

that he didn't just walk out of here, he actually ran.

Joseph and Maria Theresa endured 15 troublesome years of co-rule.

Joseph's reforms were long restricted

by his conservative mother.

He made vain threats to resign and run away.

In 1780, Maria Theresa's long reign came to an end.

She died in Joseph's arms.

The monarchy was now solely Joseph's to command.

He redrew Vienna according to his enlightened ideas

and with his over-controlling nature,

devoted hours to each detail.

He crafted open spaces for his subjects to meet and talk,

and one of them is the Prater Park,

where he designed every walkway and food stand.

Joseph started his reign with ferocious impatience

and radical zeal,

trying to change everything in his vast Austrian monarchy

at the same time, in every place.

His own best friend, the Prince de Ligne,

described him as a raging erection that can never be satisfied.

His tragedy, said Ligne, was that he governed too much,

and reigned too little.

But he really was the revolutionary Emperor.

Under his mother's era of gradual reform,

100 new edicts were announced annually.

At the height of Joseph's reign, that number rose to 700.

Joseph's openness to change was music to the ears of artists

seeking to escape traditional formality.

ORCHESTRAL MUSIC PLAYS

Ambitious musicians and composers flocked to Vienna.

One of them was Mozart.

For years, he'd toured Europe as a musical child prodigy,

encouraged and trained by his ambitious father.

Now he was 25, and he wanted to make it at court.

In 1781, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart arrived here at court in Vienna

celebrating the accession of Joseph II.

He was small, slight, pale,

but with a huge head of wild, blonde hair.

He was irrepressible, untameable, exuberant and shameless.

He was uninhibited,

and his taste for the scatological was soon notorious in Vienna.

For example, as he wrote to his cousin,

"Good night, my darling.

"Sleep well, shit in your bed, and let it all burst out."

It's impossible to understand Mozart

without some sympathy for the earthy.

It was in the Schonbrunn Palace

that Mozart and Joseph II, the musical Emperor, worked together.

After the concert, conductor Vinicius Kattah

agreed to tell me more about Mozart

and play me some of his work on the clavichord.

-Simon.

-Hi.

-Nice to see you.

-Nice to see you, too.

-Lovely to hear you playing.

-Thank you.

-So let me ask you first of all,

why did Mozart come to Vienna?

Vienna was, and I think still is, the world capital of music.

And Mozart wanted to come to Vienna to become the court composer.

And, of course, Mozart wanted to present his art

to the musical Emperor, Joseph II.

What in Mozart's music, what in his personality, what in his talent,

made him so special?

So what Mozart did was just improvise.

Somebody would give to him just a small thing like...

HE PLAYS SIMPLE TUNE

And tell him with those four notes, improvise and do something.

So he would sit on the piano and play something like that.

PLAYS COMPLEX TUNE

He would just play with music.

He would enjoy it. He would just go with it.

Mozart was no ordinary man.

He was for sure really somebody who had a lot of energy.

And he was... I would say, he was a rock star.

He was something like a jazz musician from nowadays.

How did Vienna...

This great cosmopolitan city, how did it influence Mozart's music?

Vienna was huge at that time.

So you had a lot of influences from Germany, Turkey and everything.

So for example you would hear a German dance in his music.

HE PLAYS RHYTHMICALLY

And then you would hear also an Italian canzonetta.

HE PLAYS IN A DIFFERENT STYLE

Or even the famous alla Turca, a Turkish March.

HE PLAYS IN NEW STYLE

And I think, only in Vienna

you could have such a huge diversity of music.

And Mozart was clever enough to write it down.

-I love that. Thank you.

-Thank you very much.

Mozart never became court composer,

but Joseph II found him a role that allowed him

'to compose some of his finest works.'

But much of what we remember of Mozart today, historically,

is based on the great film and play Amadeus.

Joseph II appears as the bumbling, simplistic Emperor who complains

that Mozart's music has too many notes.

But, in fact, actually he meant exactly the opposite.

He was complaining that Viennese audiences

might not appreciate Mozart's music as much as he did.

Joseph wanted the Viennese to rethink everything.

As well as appreciating new artists,

he issued an edict of tolerance that gave unprecedented rights

to religious minorities.

He reformed the legal system. He abolished serfdom.

He even wanted to challenge the Viennese obsession, death.

In the 18th century, Vienna had doubled in size.

There was no space for burials.

Funerals became so lavish they were bankrupting the mourners.

A little-known fact about Joseph is that he micromanaged a solution.

To see it, I've come to one of his new cemeteries

that he established on the outskirts of Vienna.

Hidden in its storage is the Emperor's ingenious attempt

to revolutionise the coffin.

From now on, he decreed,

everyone must be buried stark naked in a sack.

And, they must use this new design of coffin.

All this was to accelerate decomposition and save wood.

And this is how it worked.

The body was placed inside, it was lowered into the grave,

and then this lever was pulled to open it.

And out would fall the body.

Joseph's new reusable coffin proved a step too far.

It was too plain,

and the Viennese demanded

the freedom to pursue their lavish funerals,

what they called "schone Leiche" - a lovely corpse.

The coffin riots broke out.

And Joseph was forced to rescind his decree.

Joseph's enlightened despotism was creating chaos.

A rationalist at home, he was an expansionist abroad.

He entered into an alliance with Catherine the Great of Russia.

Together they would carve up the crumbling Ottoman Empire.

But the war failed, Joseph fell ill at the front,

and staggered back to his capital, sick.

His Treasury was empty, the Empire was in revolt.

In 1789, the French Revolution erupted.

If rebellion spread throughout the Habsburg monarchy,

disaster awaited Austria.

To preserve his dynasty, Joseph began to repeal his reforms.

Lying fatally ill, his last edict was how he, himself,

should be interred in the Imperial Crypt.

Here's his coffin.

designed by the Emperor himself,

and its simple austerity is in marked contrast

to the sarcophagus of his mother, Maria Theresa.

Look at its macabre magnificence.

And yet Joseph II himself

was much more impressive than history has given him credit for.

He was an autocrat. But he was way ahead of his time.

His emancipation of minorities, especially the Jews,

helped create the unique Viennese culture of the late 19th century.

But he felt himself a terrible failure.

He wrote his own epitaph, and this is what it reads.

"Here lies a prince whose intentions were pure

"but who had the misfortune to see every one of his projects collapse."

And yet, he was more successful than he ever knew.

MUSIC: Requiem Mass in D Minor by Mozart

Joseph's radical reforms dragged Austria into the modern age.

Although many laws were repealed, his reign introduced new ideas,

and changed Viennese attitudes.

As for Mozart, he barely outlived the musical Emperor.

While the myth persists that Mozart was buried like a pauper,

he actually chose to have a rational burial

in one of Joseph's unmarked mass graves.

The French revolutionaries despised the traditional order

of kings and queens.

And they especially loathed their own Austrian queen,

Marie Antoinette.

Indeed, they hated everything Austria and the Habsburgs stood for.

In 1792, their aggression led to war.

Austria failed to contain the energies of the French Revolution.

Many battles and lands were lost.

And finally, to the horror of the Habsburgs,

Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were beheaded at the guillotine.

Pressure was growing on the new Habsburg emperor, Francis II.

He vowed to annihilate the French,

but to do so, he would have to beat the embodiment of the revolution.

Napoleon Bonaparte.

The brilliant general Napoleon was the Superman of his age,

representing the dynamism of the new.

The Holy Roman Emperor Francis represented

the obsolescence and weakness of the old.

They were complete opposites.

While Napoleon wanted to rule the world and win battles,

Francis was happiest boiling toffee in the imperial kitchens.

In 1804, Napoleon crowned himself Emperor of the French.

He already dominated Germany and Italy,

at the expense of the Habsburgs.

And when Francis challenged him again on the battlefield,

Napoleon defeated the Austrians and the Russians

at the Battle of Austerlitz,

his greatest battle at the height of his genius.

Whilst many now feared Napoleon's expansionist ambitions,

he was welcomed when he rode into Vienna triumphant.

The Viennese watched him

with a surprising degree of admiration and fascination.

Francis had to sue for peace.

But now even he realised that the Holy Roman Empire was finished.

He'd already given himself a grand new title, Emperor of Austria.

But it was a sign of his own embarrassment

that he chose this beautiful, but obscure church to announce

the end of an institution that had lasted 1,000 years.

Francis was defeated.

The Holy Roman Empire was no more.

Vienna had fallen to his nemesis.

Francis' vast empire was crumbling.

And he believed its culprit was diversity.

His troops came from so many different territories,

they had their own languages, cultures, traditions.

And so to create unity,

Francis tried to introduce the rising idea of the time,

German nationalism.

By 1809, Francis was able to assemble a new army.

Once again, he declared war on France.

Two armies met here at Aspern,

right on the River Danube, just outside Vienna.

The Austrian commander was Archduke Charles,

a much more intelligent and dynamic brother

of the plodding Emperor, Francis.

As the French army crossed the river,

Charles ingenuously floated barges packed with explosives down.

They destroyed the French bridges, cutting off the French army.

The Austrians fell upon them.

Charles managed to defeat Napoleon,

the first time the French emperor had been defeated for ten years.

It was quite an achievement.

But victory turned to ashes.

The Austrian army was paralysed with heavy losses.

Napoleon called in reinforcements and planned his vengeance.

The French emperor marched north

and obliterated what remained of the Habsburg forces.

Napoleon returned to Vienna and this time he decided to stay.

In the coffee houses, palaces and theatres,

a French-occupied Vienna, ideas flourished.

The French idealised freethinking.

Nationalism, romanticism, rationalism,

intermingled and surged in popularity.

And this had the most lasting impact

on the city's greatest product, music.

This is the musical concert hall

in the Palace of Prince Franz Lobkowitz.

And it was here

that one of his proteges performed for the first time

his new Third Symphony.

His name was Ludwig von Beethoven.

He was famously irascible,

if anyone talked or laughed during one of his concerts,

he would storm out.

He had produced a great symphony that celebrated the new, rational,

enlightened revolutionary age that he so admired.

And to him, the personification of this age was Napoleon Bonaparte.

And hence he named the symphony The Bonaparte.

But when he saw that Napoleon had not only crowned himself emperor,

but was set on conquering a personal empire across the whole of Europe,

he was disgusted.

And the irascible Beethoven furiously crossed out

the name Bonaparte on his scripts,

so hard that it went through the page.

And he renamed this celebration of the heroic age The Eroica.

And that's how it's known to posterity.

Joseph II's cultural ideas were back in favour.

Public theatres were established.

The arts became accessible to the masses.

And Beethoven, he became a Viennese star.

Napoleon had conquered most of Europe.

And he wanted to establish his own Bonaparte dynasty.

But he had no heir.

He blamed his wife, Empress Josephine,

who'd had children in her youth,

but a botched abortion left her infertile.

Napoleon divorced her and began to look for a new, child-bearing bride.

From the dynasties of Europe, two options emerged,

the Russian Romanovs, or the Habsburgs.

Austria's brilliant new Foreign Minister Klemens von Metternich

knew his country needed time to recover from its defeats.

He used the opportunity to create a new alliance with France.

When the Romanovs procrastinated, Metternich proposed.

To find out the result of this match,

I've come to meet Dr Monica Kurzel-Runtscheiner,

a historian who wants to show me the carriages

that survive from this time.

Napoleon himself decided that he needed to marry Marie Louise,

the favourite daughter of Emperor Franz of Austria.

How did it come about?

The interesting thing is that it was a very bad start.

Marie Louise was suffering a lot,

and she really thought she was sacrificing herself for her father,

and for the country.

But, as we know, Napoleon was a man

who really knew how to deal with women.

And how to satisfy women.

When she arrives in France, finally,

Napoleon was so impatient that he came to meet her.

And in the very first night he made her his wife,

even though they were not finally married.

So it was a big shock for the court society.

She writes her father a letter telling,

"People really do not do him justice.

"You have to know him in order to understand

"what a wonderful person he is."

So in the end, they were both really in love with each other.

And it was quite a good marriage.

It's just one year after the marriage she gave birth to the heir,

to the little Napoleon II, who was getting, by his father,

the very prestigious title as King of Rome.

Le Roi de Rome. And this is his carriage.

Not just a carriage, it's an insignia,

and the symbol for the future of the little prince.

And we know that the little prince

was really riding this carriage on the terrace

of the Tuileries Gardens in Paris, pulled by a team of two Merino sheep

trained by the director of a circus in Paris.

What happened to Marie Louise and what happened to the King of Rome?

After the fall of Napoleon,

Marie Louise went back to Vienna to join her father with her son,

and so he grew up here in Schonbrunn Palace.

In fact, in Vienna he was very beloved.

But on the other side, everybody, especially the politicians,

feared that he could, one day, want to become like his father,

or recreate the empire of his father.

And therefore, they took care that he could never become

too important in political means.

The marriage forced the Habsburg army to support Napoleon

on his fatal Russian campaign.

But, after Napoleon catastrophically retreated from Moscow,

Metternich switched sides.

Austria joined a new anti-French coalition,

and in 1814 the coalition army proudly commanded by the Austrian

Field Marshal, Prince Schwarzenberg, defeated Napoleon and took Paris.

Napoleon, ranting against Austrian betrayal, abdicated.

Napoleon had redrawn the map of Europe

to promote his own personal empire.

And 20 years of war had torn the continent apart.

Now the Austrian minister, Metternich, would invite

all the rulers of the continent

to Vienna to put it back together again.

This congress would be the greatest summit meeting in history.

And the most decadent junket.

Unparalleled in its power-broking and pleasure-seeking.

Emperor Francis would be the host of Europe.

Metternich would be the arbiter of Europe.

And for six months in 1814, Vienna would be the capital of the world.

216 kings, princes and leaders,

20,000 officials and just about every con artist,

prostitute and mountebank in Europe

arrived in Vienna and revelled in this new era

of possibilities and depravity.

Five years after humiliation and defeat by Napoleon,

Vienna was back and bigger than ever.

More imperial, more majestic.

A city of composers and conquerors and courtesans.

Palaces and coffeehouses.

But it was about to evolve into something much more.

In the final chapter of the story of Vienna,

I will discover how the city created the modern age while the Habsburgs

headed for extinction.

The Imperial City became the capital of ideas,

and a battlefield of extremes.

Monarchy versus revolution.

Fascism versus communism.

Wild decadence versus Catholic piety.

It all happened here, in Vienna, the world's city.

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