Vienna… 22/12/1808

I am being a little deliberately opaque with the title of this episode. There is a certain logic to letting people know what they are going to get. But not today. Because I am hoping that for a good selection of listeners out there the date of 22nd December 1808 is pretty much meaningless. And that what follows will be a bit of a surprise. What happened? Well I guess a lot happened but for our purposes there was a concert. A thirty-eight year old composer, with the help of some aristocratic patrons had booked a big theatre to showcase some of the new music he had been working on. And he was the composer, a performer, the conductor and the promoter. Now the concert turned out to be somewhere between a disappointing night out and an unparalleled disaster… depending on which sources you follow. And you might be wondering why am I featuring an event which, in a city filled with glittering musical events at that time… even as the Napoleonic Wars raged on, was essentially a failure. Might be something to do with the music.