Vienna Empire episode 2
Vienna Empire episode 2
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00:00For two centuries, Vienna was the frontier between East and West.
00:10It was the capital of the Habsburgs,
00:13Archdukes of Austria and Holy Roman Emperors.
00:17They were the champions of Catholicism,
00:20the guardians of European Christendom against Islamic conquest.
00:26In 1683, catastrophe had loomed
00:30when the Ottoman Turks laid siege to Vienna.
00:34With the city in peril, a pan-European army rushed to the rescue,
00:39unleashing the largest cavalry charge in history.
00:43The city was saved.
00:45In the camp of the defeated Ottomans,
00:48they found a treasure trove of spoils.
00:53They found gold and diamonds.
00:55They found ostriches and camels,
00:58and they found 300 abandoned cannons.
01:01And with those cannons melted down, they built this,
01:05the Pomeranian, the boomer.
01:08The victory ushered in a new age.
01:10Power and prestige were given visceral and visual form,
01:14recast into art, music and architecture.
01:17The bell was so big, it almost destroyed the tower
01:21of St Stephen's Cathedral, where it still hangs.
01:26But when the Viennese heard it ring, heard it boom,
01:30they heard the sound of victory.
01:38This is the story of Vienna Triumphant,
01:42the House of Habsburg in its golden age.
01:46The emperors now surged east and west,
01:49dreaming of European supremacy.
01:53Wealth and power awoke Vienna.
01:56Artists projected Habsburg majesty.
01:59The fortress city became a cosmopolitan capital.
02:04Vienna was reborn a city of palaces, peoples and ideas,
02:10a beacon of the arts, a capital of music
02:14and a laboratory of enlightened and despotic ideologies.
02:20I'll see how Vienna would inspire the incandescent genius of Mozart,
02:25survive the depredations of Napoleon Bonaparte
02:29and become the cultural and diplomatic capital of the world.
02:33Vienna, imperial city, dynastic city,
02:38city of art and music, city of ideas.
02:42This is the crucible and the crossroads
02:45of the great struggles of history.
02:48Protestantism versus Catholicism, Islam versus Christendom,
02:52democracy and tolerance versus nationalism and intolerance.
02:57This is the story of the city
03:00where the modern world was invented and poisoned.
03:05Vienna, the capital of annihilation and civilisation.
03:23The victory over the Ottoman Turks left Vienna euphoric.
03:29The reigning Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor was Leopold I
03:33and he now vowed to transform his capital
03:36into the world's greatest city.
03:39For Vienna and for the House of Habsburg,
03:42it was a new beginning, a new era.
03:46The empire was striking back.
03:49Emperor Leopold offered fame and fortune
03:52to the knights who'd saved Vienna.
03:55The new kingdom was an unlikely Viennese hero,
03:58adopted by the city, but who achieved such glory
04:02that he would build the city's most magnificent palaces.
04:06He would outshine three emperors,
04:09become the greatest Habsburg warlord in history
04:12and make Vienna the capital of a European superpower.
04:17This was Eugene, Prince of Savoy.
04:20His story became inseparable from Vienna.
04:23But he arrived as a penniless refugee from France
04:27when the city was under Ottoman siege.
04:31Prince Eugene grew up at the court of Louis XIV, the Sun King,
04:35sworn enemy of the House of Habsburg.
04:38His mother, an ex-mistress of the king himself,
04:41was a promiscuous intriguer
04:44who was ultimately implicated in the case of the poisons
04:48and had to flee Paris in disgrace.
04:52After a sweeping execution for the murder plot,
04:55his mother was vilified by Louis XIV,
04:58who ridiculed Eugene for his looks, his homosexuality
05:02and his diminutive stature.
05:06He wanted to be a soldier.
05:08No, said Louis XIV,
05:10you're only good enough to be a little vicar in the church.
05:14But Eugene defied the Sun King.
05:18He ran away to Austria.
05:21He gave his service, his life, his very blood
05:25to the House of Austria, and Leopold accepted.
05:28He then joined the army
05:30that was rushing to relieve besieged Vienna.
05:33And outside these gates,
05:35he made his name in the battle that saved the city.
05:40Eugene joined Emperor Leopold's counter-offensive.
05:43He became a commander,
05:45renowned for ruthless discipline and brilliant ingenuity.
05:49In his campaigns against the Ottomans,
05:51he rose to fame, becoming the hero of Vienna.
05:58At 22, he was a major general.
06:00At 24, he helped take Hungary and Budapest.
06:04At 29, he was a field marshal.
06:06And such was his success and his share of the spoils of the Ottomans
06:10that he was able to build this, the Winter Palace,
06:14his residence right in the centre of Vienna.
06:17Eugene's palace shows off the Baroque taste for symbolism.
06:21Muscle-ripped statues project his power and virility.
06:28In 1697, Eugene, aged 33, was given command of the Imperial Army.
06:34He would face his greatest test.
06:40In the 14 years since the Ottomans had been repelled
06:43from the walls of Vienna,
06:45the Ottomans had seized vast swathes of land.
06:48Now, the Turkish sultans desperately needed to stem their losses
06:53and launched a final, brutal, all-nothing assault.
06:57100,000 men marched on Vienna.
07:03Eugene had been ordered by Emperor Leopold to go on the defensive,
07:07but he defied those orders.
07:09When he heard that the Ottoman army was crossing the river Tisza in strength,
07:13he force-marched his army to the place and then fell upon them,
07:17taking them completely by surprise.
07:19And as you can see from this painting, he annihilated the Ottoman troops.
07:24They're being slaughtered as they ran into the river.
07:29Defeat at Zenta forever ended the Ottoman hopes
07:32of holding back the Viennese advance.
07:36Eugene had almost single-handedly made the Austrian Habsburgs
07:40the most powerful European power, and to make his success palpable,
07:44he turned his victories into art.
07:47He became Vienna's greatest patron, its greatest connoisseur.
07:56Habsburg expansion seemed unstoppable.
07:59It even harked back to the glories of the 16th century,
08:03when Emperor Charles V had ruled over a vast Habsburg Empire,
08:07from the Americas to the Balkans.
08:11Vienna thrived on the trade between East and West.
08:16But to maintain this overstretched empire,
08:19Charles V had divided his lands between two branches of the family.
08:24One ruled Austria, one ruled Spain.
08:28For decades, the two branches of the Habsburg family had intermarried.
08:33Nieces married uncles, first cousins married each other.
08:37The idea was to keep the sprawling Habsburg lands
08:41within the same family, but it was ironic that the very policy
08:45that was meant to strengthen the House of Habsburg
08:49actually destroyed the Spanish branch.
08:53The last Spanish Habsburg was King Charles II.
08:57He was the gruesome living aberration of what was, in effect,
09:01generations of royal incest.
09:03He struggled to walk, to talk, and he was infertile.
09:07With no heir, he lay dying in 1700.
09:11And in Vienna, Emperor Leopold wanted his own younger son,
09:15Charles of Austria, to succeed in Spain.
09:18But he had a rival.
09:20There were two candidates for the Spanish throne.
09:23One was Charles of Austria,
09:26and the other was the grandson of Louis XIV, the French candidate.
09:32But when Charles II died, he left Spain to the French.
09:37The outraged Austrian Habsburgs denounced the will as fake
09:41and, in 1701, declared war.
09:50Emperor Leopold faced the superpower of the early 18th century.
09:54France fought the Austrians back.
09:59There was a very real danger that Europe would find itself
10:02under the domination of Louis XIV and France.
10:07Only the alliance of Austria and Britain would stop him.
10:11The French had the biggest and best armies,
10:14but the Austrians had Prince Eugene.
10:17Now a French army marched south to attack and capture Vienna.
10:22The capital was in peril.
10:26Eugene's armies marched to protect Vienna,
10:29but he was vastly outnumbered.
10:31He needed reinforcements and, fortunately, the British commander,
10:35the brilliant Duke of Marlborough, came to the rescue.
10:39Marlborough was every inch Eugene's equal
10:42and a like-minded disciplinarian and superb strategist.
10:46He outmanoeuvred the French and marched unopposed across Europe.
10:51John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, came to his aid.
10:55When the two rendezvoused near the village of Blenheim,
10:59he had inaugurated one of the great partnerships
11:02in all of military history.
11:04Eugene and Marlborough instantly became friends.
11:07I really love Prince Eugene, Marlborough told his wife.
11:11And when the battle came the next day, the Battle of Blenheim,
11:15they routed the French
11:17and forever shattered the invincibility of the Sun King.
11:24When Leopold died in 1705, the war over Spain was unresolved.
11:29His older son, Joseph, inherited Austria
11:32and Eugene's victory at Blenheim now meant his younger son, Charles,
11:37could march towards Madrid.
11:40Charles was a dim and unimpressive leader,
11:44but he was determined to rule Spain as king.
11:47But when his brother, Joseph I, died unexpectedly,
11:51he was recalled to Vienna to be Holy Roman Emperor.
12:00Now that France had been humbled, the British were afraid
12:04that Spain and Austria would be united under one Habsburg Emperor
12:09and so they betrayed the Austrians and made peace.
12:13Poor Charles had to give up forever his Spanish dream.
12:21When Charles realised he was never going back to Spain,
12:24he decided to recreate Spain in Vienna.
12:28He imported Spanish dress, Spanish court rituals
12:32and this, his pride and joy, the Spanish Riding School.
12:36And I'm sitting right in Charles' imperial box.
12:45Charles finally agreed peace.
12:47He exchanged his claim to the Spanish throne
12:50for parts of Italy and the Low Countries.
12:54APPLAUSE
13:03At last, Vienna could take centre stage
13:06as the sole Habsburg capital of a much-expanded empire,
13:11enjoying an economic boom.
13:16Now a multinational empire of Hungarians, Italians, Bohemians
13:20and Austrians, the monarchy and the nobility celebrated their prestige
13:25and Vienna's status as THE imperial city
13:29by building palaces, churches and monuments.
13:32Every aristocrat worthy of their name had to build a palace in Vienna.
13:37400 new summer residences were constructed in the next 50 years.
13:44But of all those palaces, none rivaled Eugene's.
13:49This is the Belvedere Palace, one of the glories of 18th-century Vienna.
13:53Everything here is designed to project,
13:56to trumpet the victories of Eugene over his two great enemies.
14:01On one hand, the Ottoman sultans,
14:03and on the other hand, Louis XIV of France, the Sun King,
14:07who'd humiliated and disdained him as a young man.
14:12Eugene's summer palace projects his victories and his personality.
14:17The roofs resemble conquered Ottoman tents.
14:20The gardens are meant to outdo the glory of Versailles.
14:25Inside, his ceilings show him as the god Apollo,
14:29the symbol of artistic patronage.
14:31Signs and spoils of his victories are everywhere.
14:43Still concealed in a small room of Eugene's palace
14:46is a statue that reveals the great general's confidence
14:49in his own grandeur.
14:52Rather than use symbolism,
14:54he commissioned his own image as supreme warlord.
14:59He's clothed in the lion pelt of Hercules.
15:02He stamps down on a defeated Turk.
15:05The symbol for eternal legacy shines upon him.
15:10This statue couldn't be exhibited during his lifetime.
15:14Only emperors could enjoy that sort of adulation.
15:20Eugene had been military commander
15:22and effectively chief minister of the Habsburg monarchy for 30 years
15:26and was now serving his third emperor.
15:29But Charles VI was jealous of his famous paladin
15:33and secretly undermined him.
15:35He sent Eugene on foolish campaigns that bankrupted the treasury.
15:41He was still fighting into his 70s
15:43and when he returned exhausted to Vienna,
15:45he caught pneumonia and died.
15:48His achievements had driven the imperial family
15:51to the zenith of their power.
15:53Now the future of the dynasty and the city of Vienna
15:57would be defined by holding together this vast empire.
16:02BUZZER
16:10Charles VI was haunted by the loss of Spain.
16:16He stamped the Habsburgs' God-given right
16:19to rule on his city, Vienna,
16:22using the sensuous magnificence of Baroque architecture.
16:26Vienna rang to the majestic compositions of his court composers.
16:31This was truly a city of art, music and masses.
16:40Yet all this was worthless if Charles could not produce an heir.
16:48I'm in the sumptuous library of the Emperor Charles VI
16:53in the Hofburg Palace.
16:55And this was the Habsburg monarch
16:57whose life was dominated by his quest and need for a male heir.
17:02He chose his wife for her beauty, fecundity and health.
17:06Elizabeth of Brunswick was her name.
17:09She dazzled everyone with her gorgeousness.
17:12But as children came, the male ones died
17:16and only the daughters survived.
17:18Charles was desperate.
17:20First of all, he painted their apartments with erotic paintings
17:23of nubile girls and boys.
17:25Then he consulted his quack doctors.
17:28First they proposed alcohol.
17:30She was given more and more booze until she was an alcoholic.
17:33Then they proposed food.
17:35She was almost force-fed until she became a beastly fat.
17:39But still, the result was the same.
17:42No male heir, just the two daughters.
17:46Charles' only option was to declare his daughter the heir.
17:50There'd never been a female Archduchess
17:52and Charles knew his nobility and the kings of Europe
17:55may not accept his choice.
17:58He desperately tried to get their agreement
18:00and created a series of new laws known as the Pragmatic Sanction.
18:05It was only half complete when, in 1740,
18:08he went hunting, gorged on mushrooms and died.
18:13He was succeeded by his daughter, Maria Theresa, aged just 23.
18:19Austria's nobles knew her only as a card-playing,
18:22dancing and rather beautiful young woman.
18:25She was completely unprepared for the appalling crisis
18:29that would befall her monarchy, her empire and herself.
18:33But what no-one knew was that she had a will of steel.
18:38Her reign would dazzle Vienna.
18:47Maria Theresa's first duty was in the imperial crypt.
19:00This is where Maria Theresa came to bury her daughter.
19:05This is where Maria Theresa came to bury her father, Charles VI.
19:10It's the Kaiserkrupp, the imperial crypt of the Habsburg dynasty.
19:22And on his sarcophagus here, right behind me,
19:25you can see, among all its elaborate decoration,
19:28his various crowns.
19:30He was crowned as the Archduchy of Austria,
19:33the crowns of Bohemia and Hungary and the Holy Roman Empire.
19:41These were the crowns she would have to fight for.
19:44If she was to succeed, this is what she had to keep.
19:51Maria Theresa faced an uphill battle.
19:54Her father's mismanagement had weakened the empire.
20:00Austria was now an artistic, palatial imperial capital,
20:04thanks to the wealth of its empire.
20:07But the muddled succession offered an ideal opportunity
20:10for rivals to seize Austria's richest provinces.
20:14The vultures began to mass on the empire's borders.
20:19And luckily for Maria Theresa, the first raider was the most brilliant.
20:24Frederick the Great, the newly crowned King of Prussia.
20:28He was the military and political genius of his age,
20:31with a superb army and a full treasury.
20:38He unleashed war,
20:40capturing Maria Theresa's richest provinces,
20:44He unleashed war,
20:46capturing Maria Theresa's richest provinces, Silesia.
20:50Next into the fray came the heir of a medieval Habsburg rival,
20:55Charles Albert of Bavaria.
20:58Austria's armies were surrounded and routed
21:01when Spain and France also declared war.
21:04The Bavarians marched onwards,
21:06capturing Prague and crowning Charles Albert King of Bohemia.
21:12In 1742, Charles Albert went further.
21:15He was elected the first non-Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor in three centuries.
21:25The extinction of Maria Theresa and the Habsburgs seemed inevitable.
21:30Her armies were in retreat, her geriatric advisers were in panic,
21:34she'd lost two of her father's crowns
21:36and her enemies were preparing to march on Vienna.
21:41The story of what happened next is preserved in a series of paintings
21:45in Vienna's Hungarian embassy.
21:49She rushed to Hungary and there she showed herself
21:53not only the willful politician, but also the consummate actress.
21:58Wearing mourning black for her father,
22:01she charmed the Hungarian nobles.
22:03She appealed to them, she said,
22:05my son, my baby son who she showed them the future Joseph II,
22:09my son, the monarchy, the crown and the kingdom of Hungary itself
22:14are in peril, help me.
22:16And they did.
22:20The Hungarians enthusiastically crowned Maria Theresa Queen of Hungary.
22:26But what she really needed was the troops.
22:29And they provided that too.
22:31There's her army.
22:33She'd saved the monarchy.
22:37Funded by a war chest from the old ally, Great Britain,
22:40Maria Theresa turned the tide of the war.
22:44Charles Albert retreated, Frederick the Great betrayed him
22:48and alone the Bavarian fell ill and died in 1745.
22:57She'd lost Silesia, but she'd survived.
23:00She made peace to secure her borders
23:02and, in return, the apologetic German electors
23:06crowned Maria Theresa's husband, Francis,
23:09as the new Holy Roman Emperor.
23:12She regained Bohemia, she ruled supreme in Hungary
23:15and, at last, she was an empress too.
23:25This library holds a secret.
23:27It's the former throne room of the Favorita Palace.
23:30Between these bookcases sat the thrones of Maria Theresa
23:34and her husband, Francis.
23:37There was never any doubt that she was in charge.
23:41He was a feckless politician, an incompetent military commander.
23:46He was good only at making money and chasing actresses.
23:50She, on the other hand, was a consummate stateswoman.
23:54She knew exactly who to appoint.
23:57She chose excellent courtiers and politicians and generals.
24:04The Empress Queen reformed Austria's sprawling government.
24:09This palace even became a school for a new civil service,
24:14sometimes even chosen for merit, not high birth.
24:18She centralised control of the army
24:20and reorganised the imperial finances.
24:23She managed, within a few years,
24:25to balance the budgets of the Habsburg monarchy
24:28for the first time in its history.
24:41Seeing herself as the mother to a reborn Habsburg Vienna,
24:45Maria Theresa wanted rid of the formal, rigid past of her childhood.
24:51Now she commissioned a magnificent new palace, the Schönbrunn.
24:58She personally oversaw its construction
25:01and the fitting of almost 1,500 rooms.
25:04In 1746, she moved in here with her family.
25:11This is the great gallery at the Schönbrunn Palace.
25:14And, as you can see, the decoration is open, gilded,
25:18playful, humane.
25:20No longer the Catholic oppression of earlier decades.
25:24And that's because we're now in the age of the playful Rococo.
25:30After the formal symbolism of Baroque,
25:33Rococo celebrated character, joy, emotion, eroticism.
25:41When you look up at this painting,
25:43the centrepiece amidst all the territories,
25:46principalities and duchies of the Habsburg monarchy
25:49is a golden carriage.
25:51And in it is Maria Theresa and her husband,
25:53the Holy Roman Emperor Francis.
25:55Because, unusually, this was a happy marriage.
25:58This was a love match.
26:01But it had a price.
26:04Because Francis was openly and notoriously unfaithful,
26:09with virtually every Italian singer, courtesan, prostitute in town.
26:15And this caused Maria Theresa much pain.
26:18She founded a chastity commission to hunt down immorality.
26:22Italian sopranos were thrown out of the city.
26:25Prostitutes were arrested,
26:27and 3,000 of them were loaded onto barges
26:31and sent off to populate new towns in the east.
26:35Because, despite her anger,
26:37Maria Theresa knew they would provide the ideal fertile settlers.
26:43And there you have it, all over, that's Maria Theresa,
26:47the prim, the pious pragmatist.
26:55A new intellectual movement was gaining force in Vienna.
26:59This was the age of the Enlightenment.
27:02Reason was replacing tradition as the basis for authority.
27:07This sat uncomfortably with the Empress Queen,
27:10who never forgot her zealous childhood.
27:13She was both modern and medieval.
27:15On one hand, she made attempts to expel Jews and Protestants.
27:19On the other, she introduced a form of universal education.
27:23Above all, Maria Theresa was practical.
27:26Despite being conservative, she permitted gradual reform.
27:30There was just one thing she couldn't let go.
27:34Revenge.
27:37Maria Theresa never gave up the dream
27:39of getting back her province, Silesia,
27:42stolen from her by that amoral arch-predator of genius,
27:47Frederick the Great of Prussia.
27:49But in 1756, she realised that she needed help to do so,
27:53and that meant allying Austria with the ancestral enemy, France.
28:01This diplomatic revolution so alarmed Britain
28:04that she allied herself with Prussia.
28:06Russia joined Austria.
28:09This became the Seven Years' War,
28:12fought across the world from America to India,
28:16the world's first global conflict.
28:19In Europe, Maria Theresa's army
28:21defeated a Prussian invasion of Bohemia,
28:24and to celebrate that victory,
28:26they hastily built this monument, the Gloriette.
28:31Yet the ponderous Austrian, French and Russian generals floundered.
28:36They were no match for the genius of Frederick the Great.
28:42By 1763, Maria Theresa had to admit that Silesia was lost forever,
28:49and this grand victory monument became something of an embarrassment.
28:54She used it for family picnics.
29:01Maria Theresa had failed to restore Austrian dominance in Europe,
29:05but she did ensure there was no problem with the succession.
29:08She and Francis were blessed with 16 children.
29:13In her characteristic fashion,
29:15Maria Theresa had a practical use for them too.
29:18To secure the Franco-Austrian alliance,
29:21she arranged for her 40-year-old daughter, Marie Antoinette,
29:25to marry Louis, the French Dauphin.
29:28From the very start, the marriage of Marie Antoinette
29:32and Louis XVI of France was a mismatch.
29:36She was not only young, but also foolish, unwise and tactless.
29:44For seven years, the couple remained awkward,
29:47failing to consummate their union.
29:50Marie Antoinette's big brother, Joseph II, hurried to Paris.
29:55He was a practically sex therapist, interviewed both husband and wife.
30:00And what he discovered was that the problem was a mixture
30:04of sexual incompetence, youthful clumsiness,
30:08premature ejaculation and physical abnormality.
30:13He advised instant circumcision of the king.
30:16The problem was solved.
30:18Consummation and a large family of children followed.
30:26Despite matters easing in the bedchamber,
30:29Marie Antoinette's behaviour continued to outrage the French.
30:34She was seen as profligate, silly, promiscuous and pro-Austrian.
30:42Maria Theresa's old age was ruined by her worry
30:46about her daughter Marie Antoinette's disastrously scandalous behaviour.
30:52You've thrown yourself into a life of pleasure
30:55and preposterous display, she wrote to her.
30:59And going from pleasure to pleasure without your husband
31:03will end in misery for you.
31:06Soon, she was to be proved only too right.
31:13In 1765, Emperor Francis fell ill and died.
31:18Maria Theresa was devastated.
31:23A note was found in her Bible that recorded the exact length
31:27of her marriage down to the number of hours.
31:33She fell into a pit of depression and to rule,
31:36first in her stead and then as co-regent,
31:39her 24-year-old son, Joseph II, was elected the new Holy Roman Emperor.
31:48Joseph was now the co-ruler with his mother, Maria Theresa.
31:53He was one of the most extraordinary of the Habsburgs.
31:56Personally, he was clumsy, awkward, impossible, dogmatic, egotistical,
32:03but he was also highly intelligent, a believer in reason,
32:07a man of the Enlightenment, a radical zealot for reform,
32:11a man of tolerance.
32:13His relations with his mother were fond but extremely tense.
32:18He pushed her towards more expansion abroad,
32:21like the partition of Poland, and more reforms at home.
32:25But his mother was still alive.
32:27She was formidable.
32:29He had to wait for the moment he had to get everything past his mother.
32:35Joseph had an unyielding belief in the power of reason.
32:40He rejected emotion, and that was partly due to tragic failed romances.
32:46In October 1760, Maria Theresa held a wedding,
32:51and as you can see from this painting, she didn't do it by halves.
32:55Her son, Joseph, was married to the beautiful,
32:59Joseph was married to the beautiful, blonde, alabaster-skinned
33:04Isabella of Parma.
33:08It was a wedding that seemed ideal for the family.
33:12She was gorgeous, and Joseph was wildly in love with her.
33:18But things weren't all they seemed.
33:21Soon after her marriage, the 18-year-old Isabella fell in love,
33:26but she didn't fall in love with her husband.
33:28Awkwardly, she fell in love with her husband's sister,
33:32Archduchess Marie Christine.
33:35It soon turned into a full-blown physical lesbian love affair.
33:42Joseph, the doting husband who was passionately in love with his bride,
33:46was in denial.
33:48After three years of marriage, she caught smallpox and died,
33:52aged only 21.
33:54Joseph was heartbroken. He felt he could never love again.
34:02But Maria Theresa persuaded her son to marry a second time,
34:06with the hope of new lands and an heir.
34:09The marriage was a disaster.
34:11Joseph complained his wife was hideously ugly,
34:14and when she also died of smallpox,
34:16he didn't even bother to attend the funeral.
34:26Joseph decided to remain single,
34:29and he approached his sex life with the same efficiency
34:32as he approached government.
34:34As a rationalist, he decided love was simply absurd,
34:37and as a Catholic, he regarded Onanism, a sinful society,
34:42Onanism, a sinful self-abuse.
34:45Instead, he visited his gardener's daughter
34:48for sex in the potting shed at the same time every day.
34:52Or he came here, to the Red Light District,
34:55to visit a brothel like the one that stood right here.
35:04Hidden in this restaurant is this somewhat mysterious sign.
35:08It says, in 1778,
35:10Emperor Joseph II flew through this archway.
35:15Joseph, wearing disguise, had visited this brothel.
35:19He'd mistreated some of the girls,
35:22been confronted and then recognised.
35:25And such was his embarrassment, or fear, of his prudish old mother,
35:30that he didn't just walk out of here, he actually ran.
35:39Joseph and Maria Theresa endured 15 troublesome years of co-rule.
35:45Joseph's reforms were long restricted by his conservative mother.
35:49He made vain threats to resign and run away.
35:54In 1780, Maria Theresa's long reign came to an end.
35:59She died in Joseph's arms.
36:02The monarchy was now solely Joseph's to command.
36:08He redrew Vienna according to his enlightened ideas
36:12and, with his over-controlling nature devoted hours to each detail,
36:17he crafted open spaces for his subjects to meet and talk.
36:21And one of them is the Prater Park,
36:24where he designed every walkway and food stand.
36:28Joseph started his reign with ferocious impatience and radical zeal,
36:34trying to change everything in his vast Austrian monarchy
36:38at the same time in every place.
36:42His own best friend, the Prince de Lien,
36:45described him as a raging erection that can never be satisfied.
36:50His tragedy, said Lien, was that he governed too much and reigned too little.
36:55But he really was the revolutionary emperor.
36:59Under his mother's era of gradual reform,
37:02100 new edicts were announced annually.
37:05At the height of Joseph's reign, that number rose to 700.
37:13Joseph's openness to change was music to the ears of artists
37:18seeking to escape traditional formality.
37:22Ambitious musicians and composers flocked to Vienna.
37:26One of them was Mozart.
37:29For years, he'd toured Europe as a musical child prodigy,
37:34encouraged and trained by his ambitious father.
37:37Now he was 25.
37:39He was a young musician,
37:41but he was also a young composer,
37:43and he was also a young composer.
37:46In 1781, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart arrived here at court,
37:51in Vienna, celebrating the accession of Joseph II.
37:56He was small, slight, pale,
37:59but with a huge head of wild blonde hair.
38:04He was irrepressible, untameable,
38:07and a man of great talent.
38:09But with a huge head of wild blonde hair.
38:14He was irrepressible, untameable, exuberant, and shameless.
38:19He was uninhibited, and his taste for the scatological
38:22was soon notorious in Vienna.
38:25For example, as he wrote to his cousin,
38:28"'Good night, my darling. Sleep well.
38:30"'Shit in your bed and let it all burst out.'"
38:33It's impossible to understand Mozart
38:36without some sympathy for the earthy.
38:42It was in the Schönbrunn Palace
38:44that Mozart and Joseph II, the musical emperor, worked together.
38:49After the concert, conductor Vinicius Cattar
38:52agreed to tell me more about Mozart
38:55and play me some of his work on the clavichord.
39:00Hi. Nice to see you. Nice to see you too.
39:02Lovely to hear you play it. Thank you.
39:04So, let me ask you first of all, why did Mozart come to Vienna?
39:07Vienna was, I think, still is, the world capital of music,
39:11and Mozart wanted to come to Vienna to become the court composer.
39:16And, of course, Mozart wanted to present his art
39:19to the musical emperor, Joseph II.
39:22What in Mozart's music, what in his personality,
39:25what in his talent made him so special?
39:28So, what Mozart did was just improvise.
39:31He said somebody would give to him just small thing like...
39:39..and tell him, just with those four notes,
39:43improvise and do something.
39:45So he would sit on the piano and play something like that.
39:55He would just play with music, he would enjoy it,
39:58he would just go with it.
40:00Mozart was no ordinary man.
40:02He was, for sure, really somebody who had a lot of energy.
40:06And he was, I would say, he was a rock star.
40:08I would say he was something like a jazz musician from nowadays.
40:12How did Vienna, this great cosmopolitan city,
40:15how did it influence Mozart's music?
40:18Well, Vienna was huge at that time,
40:20so you've had a lot of influences from Germany, Turkey and everything.
40:24So, for example, you would hear a German dance
40:27in his music.
40:32Then you would hear also an Italian cantonetta.
40:45Or even the famous alla turca, a Turkish march.
40:58And I think only in Vienna you could have such a huge diversity of music
41:03and Mozart was clever enough to write it down.
41:06I love that. Thank you. Thank you very much.
41:11Mozart never became court composer,
41:14but Joseph II found him a role that allowed him
41:17to compose some of his finest works.
41:20But much of what we remember of Mozart today, historically,
41:25is based on the great film and play Amadeus.
41:29Joseph II appears as the bumbling, simplistic emperor
41:34who complains that Mozart's music has too many notes,
41:38but, in fact, actually meant exactly the opposite.
41:42He was complaining that the Viennese audiences
41:45might not appreciate Mozart's music as much as he did.
41:50Joseph wanted the Viennese to rethink everything,
41:53as well as appreciating new artists.
41:55He issued an edict of tolerance
41:57that gave unprecedented rights to religious minorities.
42:00He reformed the legal system. He abolished serfdom.
42:05He even wanted to challenge the Viennese obsession.
42:09Death.
42:11In the 18th century, Vienna had doubled in size.
42:15There was no space for burials.
42:17Funerals became so lavish, they were bankrupting the mourners.
42:23A little-known fact about Joseph is that he micromanaged a solution.
42:28To see it, I've come to one of his new cemeteries
42:31that he established on the outskirts of Vienna.
42:36Hidden in its storage is the emperor's ingenious attempt
42:40to revolutionise the coffin.
42:44From now on, he decreed,
42:46everyone must be buried stark naked in a sack
42:51and they must use this new design of coffin.
42:55All this was to accelerate decomposition and to save wood.
43:00And this is how it worked.
43:02The body was placed inside, it was lowered into the grave
43:06and then this lever was pulled to open it,
43:09and out would fall the body.
43:12Joseph's new, reusable coffin proved a step too far.
43:18It was too plain, and the Viennese demanded the freedom
43:21to pursue their lavish funerals, what they called Schörnerlach,
43:25a lovely corpse.
43:27The coffin riots broke out,
43:29and Joseph was forced to rescind his decree.
43:35Joseph's enlightened despotism was creating chaos.
43:39A rationalist at home, he was an expansionist abroad.
43:43He entered into an alliance with Catherine the Great of Russia.
43:47Together, they would carve up the crumbling Ottoman Empire.
43:50But the war failed, Joseph fell ill at the front
43:53and staggered back to his capital, Sieg.
43:56His treasury was empty, the empire was in revolt.
44:00In 1789, the French Revolution erupted.
44:03If rebellion spread throughout the Habsburg monarchy,
44:07disaster awaited Austria.
44:10To preserve his dynasty, Joseph began to repeal his reforms.
44:14Lying fatally ill, his last edict was how he himself
44:19should be interned in the imperial crypt.
44:23Here's his coffin, designed by the emperor himself,
44:27and its simple austerity is in marked contrast
44:31to the sarcophagus of his mother, Mary Theresa.
44:35Look at its macabre magnificence.
44:41And here's his coffin, designed by the emperor himself,
44:45and its simple austerity is in marked contrast
44:49to the sarcophagus of his mother, Mary Theresa.
44:52Look at its macabre magnificence.
44:55And yet Joseph II himself was much more impressive
45:00than history has given him credit for.
45:03He was an autocrat, but he was way ahead of his time.
45:07His emancipation of minorities, especially the Jews,
45:11helped create the unique Viennese culture
45:15of the late 19th century.
45:17He wrote his own epitaph, and this is what it reads.
45:21Here lies a prince whose intentions were pure,
45:25but who had the misfortune to see every one of his projects collapse.
45:31And yet he was more successful than he ever knew.
45:39Joseph's radical reforms dragged Austria into the modern age.
45:44Although many laws were repealed,
45:46his reign introduced new ideas and changed Viennese attitudes.
45:53As for Mozart, he barely outlived the musical emperor.
45:57While the myth persists that Mozart was buried like a pauper,
46:02he actually chose to have a rational burial
46:05in one of Joseph's unmarked mass graves.
46:09The French revolutionaries despised the traditional order
46:14of kings and queens,
46:16and they especially loathed their own Austrian queen, Marie Antoinette.
46:21Indeed, they hated everything Austria and the Habsburgs stood for.
46:27In 1792, their aggression led to war.
46:31Austria failed to contain the energies of the French Revolution.
46:35Many battles and lands were lost,
46:37and finally, to the horror of the Habsburgs,
46:40Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were beheaded for the guillotine.
46:50Pressure was growing on the new Habsburg emperor, Francis II.
46:55He vowed to annihilate the French,
46:57but to do so, he would have to beat the embodiment of the revolution.
47:02Napoleon Bonaparte.
47:06The brilliant General Napoleon was the superman of his age,
47:10representing the dynamism of the new.
47:14The Holy Roman Emperor Francis represented the obsolescence
47:18and weakness of the old.
47:20They were complete opposites.
47:22While Napoleon wanted to rule the world and win battles,
47:25Francis was happiest boiling toffee in the imperial kitchen.
47:31In 1804, Napoleon crowned himself Emperor of the French.
47:36He already dominated Germany and Italy at the expense of the Habsburgs.
47:41And when Francis challenged him again on the battlefield,
47:44Napoleon defeated the Austrians and the Russians
47:48at the Battle of Austerlitz,
47:50his greatest battle at the height of his genius.
47:55Whilst many now feared Napoleon,
47:58whilst many now feared Napoleon's expansionist ambitions,
48:02he was welcomed when he rode into Vienna triumphant.
48:08The Viennese watched him with a surprising degree
48:11of admiration and fascination.
48:13Francis had to sue for peace,
48:16but now even he realised that the Holy Roman Empire was finished.
48:20He'd already given himself a grand new title, Emperor of Austria,
48:25but it was a sign of his own embarrassment
48:27that he chose this beautiful but obscure church
48:31to announce the end of an institution that had lasted 1,000 years.
48:39Francis was defeated.
48:41The Holy Roman Empire was no more.
48:43Vienna had fallen to his nemesis.
48:46Francis's vast empire was crumbling.
48:49He believed its culprit was diversity.
48:52His troops came from so many different territories,
48:55they had their own languages, cultures, traditions,
48:58and so to create unity,
49:00Francis tried to introduce the rising idea of the time,
49:04German nationalism.
49:06By 1809, Francis was able to assemble a new army
49:10and once again he declared war on France.
49:17Two armies met here at Aspen,
49:19right on the River Danube just outside Vienna.
49:22The Austrian commander was Archduke Charles,
49:25the much more intelligent and dynamic brother
49:28of the plodding Emperor Francis.
49:31As the French army crossed the river,
49:33Charles ingeniously floated barges packed with explosives down.
49:37They destroyed the French bridges, cutting off the French army.
49:41The Austrians fell upon them.
49:43Charles managed to defeat Napoleon.
49:45The first time the French Emperor had been defeated for ten years
49:49was quite an achievement.
49:55But victory turned to ashes.
50:00The Austrian army was paralysed with heavy losses.
50:03Napoleon called in reinforcements and planned his vengeance.
50:09The French Emperor marched north
50:11and obliterated what remained of the Habsburg forces.
50:16Napoleon returned to Vienna and this time he decided to stay.
50:28In the coffeehouses, palaces and theatres of French-occupied Vienna,
50:32ideas flourished.
50:34The French idealised free thinking.
50:37Nationalism, romanticism, rationalism
50:40intermingled and surged in popularity
50:43and this had the most lasting impact on the city's greatest product, music.
50:56This is the musical concert hall in the palace of Prince Franz Lobkowicz
51:02and it was here that one of his protégés
51:06performed for the first time his new Third Symphony.
51:14His name was Ludwig van Beethoven.
51:17He was famously irascible.
51:19If anyone talked or laughed during one of his concerts,
51:22he would storm out.
51:24He had produced a great symphony
51:27that celebrated the new, rational, enlightened, revolutionary age
51:31that he so admired.
51:33And to him, the personification of this age was Napoleon Bonaparte
51:37and hence he named the symphony The Bonaparte.
51:44But when he saw that Napoleon had not only crowned himself emperor
51:48but was set on conquering a personal empire
51:51across the whole of Europe, he was disgusted
51:54and the irascible Beethoven furiously crossed out
51:58the name Bonaparte on his script so hard that it went through the page
52:02and he renamed the celebration of the heroic age The Eroica
52:07and that's how it's known, to posterity.
52:14MUSIC CONTINUES
52:20Joseph II's cultural ideas were back in favour.
52:24Public theatres were established,
52:26the arts became accessible to the masses
52:29and Beethoven, he became a Viennese star.
52:37Napoleon had conquered most of Europe
52:40and he wanted to establish his own Bonaparte dynasty
52:43but he had no heir.
52:45He blamed his wife, Empress Josephine, who'd had children in her youth
52:49but a botched abortion left her infertile.
52:52Napoleon divorced her
52:54and began to look for a new, child-bearing bride.
53:00From the dynasties of Europe, two options emerged,
53:03the Russian Romanovs or the Habsburgs.
53:07Austria's brilliant new foreign minister, Clemens von Metternich,
53:11knew his country needed time to recover from its defeats.
53:15He used the opportunity to create a new alliance with France.
53:19When the Romanovs procrastinated, Metternich proposed.
53:25To find out the result of this match,
53:27I've come to meet Dr Monocle Curzel Runtschiner,
53:30a historian who wants to show me the carriages that survive from this time.
53:35Napoleon himself decided that he needed to marry Marie-Louise,
53:40the favourite daughter of Emperor France of Austria.
53:43How did it come about?
53:45The interesting thing is that it was a very bad start.
53:48Marie-Louise was suffering a lot
53:50and she really thought she's sacrificing herself for her father and for her country.
53:54But as we know, Napoleon was a man who really knew
53:58how to deal with women and how to satisfy women.
54:02When she arrives in France, finally,
54:04Napoleon was so impatient that he came to meet her
54:08and in the very first night he made her his wife,
54:11even though they were not finally married.
54:13So it was a big shock for the court society.
54:16And she writes her father a letter telling,
54:18people really do not do him justice.
54:20You have to know him in order to understand what a wonderful person he is.
54:24So at the end, they were both really in love with each other
54:27and it was quite a good marriage.
54:29Just one year after the marriage,
54:31she gave birth to the heir, to the little Napoleon II,
54:35who was getting by his father the very prestigious title
54:39as King of Rome, the Roi de Rome.
54:41And this is his carriage.
54:45Not just a carriage, it's an insignia
54:47and a symbol for the future of the little prince.
54:50And we know that the little prince was really riding this carriage
54:53on the terrace of the Tuileries Gardens in Paris,
54:56pulled by a team of two merino sheep,
54:59trained by the director of a circus in Paris.
55:01What happened to Marie-Louise and what happened to the King of Rome?
55:05After the fall of Napoleon,
55:07Marie-Louise went back to Vienna to join her father with her son.
55:11And so he grew up here in Schönbrunn Palace.
55:14In fact, in Vienna, he was very beloved.
55:16But on the other side, everybody, especially the politicians,
55:19feared that he could one day want to become like his father
55:23or recreate the empire of his father,
55:25and therefore they took care
55:27that he could never become too important in political means.
55:37The marriage forced the Habsburg army
55:40to support Napoleon on his fatal Russian campaign.
55:44But after Napoleon catastrophically retreated from Moscow,
55:49Metnik switched sides.
55:51Austria joined a new anti-French coalition,
55:54and in 1814, the coalition army,
55:57proudly commanded by the Austrian field marshal, Prince Schwarzenberg,
56:02defeated Napoleon and took Paris.
56:05Napoleon, ranting against Austrian betrayal, abdicated.
56:22Napoleon had redrawn the map of Europe
56:25to promote his own personal empire,
56:28and 20 years of war had torn the continent apart.
56:33Now, the Austrian minister, Metnik,
56:36would invite all the rulers of the continent to Vienna
56:40to put it back together again.
56:42This Congress would be the greatest summit meeting in history
56:48and the most decadent junket,
56:51unparalleled in its power-breaking and pleasure-seeking.
56:56Emperor Francis would be the host of Europe,
56:59Metnik would be the arbiter of Europe,
57:02and for six months in 1814,
57:04Vienna would be the capital of the world.
57:13216 kings, princes and leaders,
57:1740,000 officials and just about every con artist,
57:21prostitute and mountebank in Europe,
57:24arrived in Vienna and revelled in this new era
57:28of possibilities and depravity.
57:34Five years after humiliation and defeat by Napoleon,
57:39Vienna was back and bigger than ever,
57:42more imperial, more majestic,
57:45full of composers and conquerors and courtesans,
57:49palaces and coffeehouses,
57:51but it was about to evolve into something much more.
57:57In the final chapter of the story of Vienna,
58:00I will discover how the city created the modern age
58:03while the Habsburgs headed for extinction.
58:06The imperial city became the capital of ideas
58:09and the battlefield of extremes.
58:12Monarchy versus revolution, fascism versus communism,
58:17wild decadence versus Catholic piety.
58:21It all happened here in Vienna, the world city.
58:26Would you like to explore further
58:28the history of the Habsburg monarchy?
58:30Find out more about its rulers and royal marriages
58:34through the Open University's Family Tree.
58:38Visit nypd.co.uk forward slash Vienna
58:41and follow the links to the Open University.
58:47And Vienna, Empire, Dynasty and Dream
58:50concludes next Thursday night at nine.
58:53You can watch the first two episodes of Six Wives with Lucy Worsley,
58:57available now on BBC iPlayer,
58:59and next, Diffusing the Troubles, the Project Children's Story,
59:04where a DVD bomb disposal expert brought Belfast kids together.
59:08A feature-length documentary coming up.