The sound of music in Vienna's cinemas, 1910–1930

Claus Tieber

Anna K. Windisch

pp. 84-102

in: Claus Tieber, Anna K. Windisch (eds), The sounds of silent films, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014

Abstrakt

This comment, entitled Wünsche eines Kino-Stammgastes (desires of a movie theater patron) and printed in an Austrian trade paper in 1915, aptly describes a number of issues related to the musical repertoire heard in Vienna's cinemas: exorbitant waltzes and marches, interspersed by opera and operetta arias, Wienerlieder^z and pieces from the "classical" canon had accounted for a considerable portion of the musical repertoire used in film accompaniment up to that point. However, despite this notion of a relatively small variety of typical Viennese music played in the city's movie theaters the actual modes of musical accompaniment display a diverse and differentiated picture of the cinema sound in the "city of music" during the silent film era.