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Documentary, BBC - Vienna- Empire, Dynasty and Dream - Part 2 - Vienna Triumphant
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00:00For two centuries, Vienna was the frontier between East and West.
00:10It was the capital of the Habsburgs, Archdukes of Austria and Holy Roman Emperors.
00:16They were the champions of Catholicism,
00:19the guardians of European Christendom against Islamic conquest.
00:24In 1683, catastrophe had loomed when the Ottoman Turks laid siege to Vienna.
00:34With the city in peril, a pan-European army rushed to the rescue,
00:40unleashing the largest cavalry charge in history.
00:44The city was saved.
00:46In the camp of the defeated Ottomans,
00:49they found a treasure trove of spoils.
00:54They found gold and diamonds.
00:56They found ostriches and camels.
00:59And they found 300 abandoned cannons.
01:02And with those cannons melted down,
01:04they built this, the Pomeran, the Boomer.
01:09The victory ushered in a new age.
01:11Power and prestige were given visceral and visual form,
01:14recast into art, music and architecture.
01:18The bell was so big,
01:21it almost destroyed the tower of St Stephen's Cathedral,
01:25where it still hangs.
01:27But when the Viennese heard it ring, heard it boom,
01:32they heard the sound of victory.
01:41This is the story of Vienna triumphant,
01:44the House of Habsburg in its golden age.
01:49The emperors now surged east and west,
01:52dreaming of European supremacy.
01:55Wealth and power awoke Vienna.
01:58Artists projected Habsburg majesty.
02:01The fortress city became a cosmopolitan capital.
02:05Vienna 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,
02:24survive the depredations of Napoleon Bonaparte,
02:28and become the cultural and diplomatic capital of the world.
02:33Vienna, imperial city, dynastic city, city of art and music, city of ideas.
02:43This is the crucible and the crossroads of the great struggles of history.
02:49Protestantism versus Catholicism, Islam versus Christendom,
02:53democracy and tolerance versus nationalism and intolerance.
02:58This is the story of the city where the modern world was invented and poisoned.
03:06Vienna, the capital of annihilation and civilisation.
03:12The victory over the Ottoman Turks left Vienna euphoric.
03:29The reigning Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor was Leopold I,
03:32and he now vowed to transform his capital into the world's greatest city.
03:39For Vienna and for the House of Habsburg,
03:41it was a new beginning, a new era.
03:44The empire was striking back.
03:48Emperor Leopold offered fame and fortune to the knights who'd saved Vienna.
03:54One of them was an unlikely Viennese hero, adopted by the city,
03:59but who achieved such glory
04:01that he would build the city's most magnificent palaces.
04:05He would outshine three emperors,
04:08become the greatest Habsburg warlord in history
04:11and make Vienna the capital of a European superpower.
04:15This was Eugene, Prince of Savoy.
04:19His story became inseparable from Vienna,
04:22but he arrived as a penniless refugee from France
04:25when the city was under Ottoman siege.
04:28Prince Eugene grew up at the court of Louis XIV,
04:33the Sun King, sworn enemy of the House of Habsburg.
04:37His mother, an ex-mistress of the king himself,
04:40was a promiscuous intriguer who was ultimately implicated
04:45in the case of the poisons and had to flee Paris in disgrace.
04:50Escaping execution for the murder plot,
04:53his mother was vilified by Louis XIV,
04:56who ridiculed Eugene for his looks,
04:59his homosexuality and his diminutive stature.
05:02He wanted to be a soldier.
05:06No, said Louis XIV,
05:08you're only good enough to be a little vicar in the church.
05:12But Eugene defied the Sun King.
05:17He ran away to Austria.
05:20He offered his service, his life, his very blood,
05:24to the House of Austria, and Leopold accepted.
05:27He then joined the army that was rushing to relieve besieged Vienna.
05:32And outside these gates,
05:34he made his name in the battle that saved the city.
05:39Eugene joined Emperor Leopold's country
05:41counter-offensive.
05:43He became a commander,
05:44renowned for ruthless discipline and brilliant ingenuity.
05:48During the campaigns against the Ottomans,
05:50he rose to fame, becoming the hero of Vienna.
05:57At 22, he was a major general.
05:59At 24, he helped take Hungary and Budapest.
06:03At 29, he was a field marshal.
06:05And such was his success and his share
06:07of the spoils of the Ottomans
06:09that he was able to build this, the Winter Palace,
06:13his residence right in the centre of Vienna.
06:16Eugene's palace shows off the Baroque taste for symbolism.
06:21Muscle-ripped statues project his power and virility.
06:28In 1697, Eugene, aged 33,
06:31was given command of the Imperial Army.
06:33He would face his greatest test.
06:39In the 14 years since the Ottomans had been repelled
06:42from the walls of Vienna,
06:43Leopold had seized vast swathes of land.
06:47Now, the Turkish sultans desperately needed to stem their losses
06:51and launched a final, brutal, all-nothing assault.
06:56100,000 men marched on Vienna.
07:02Eugene had been ordered by Emperor Leopold
07:04to go on the defensive.
07:06But he defied those orders.
07:08When he heard that the Ottoman army
07:09was crossing the river Tiza in strength,
07:12he force-marched his army to the place
07:14and then fell upon them,
07:16taking them completely by surprise.
07:18And as you can see from this painting,
07:20he annihilated the Ottoman troops.
07:23They're being slaughtered as they ran into the river.
07:28Defeat at Zenta forever ended the Ottoman hopes
07:31of holding back the Viennese advance.
07:35Eugene had almost single-handedly
07:37made the Austrian Habsburgs a great European power,
07:40and to make his success palpable,
07:43he turned his victories into art.
07:46He became Vienna's greatest patron,
07:48its greatest connoisseur.
07:55Habsburg expansion seemed unstoppable.
07:58It even harked back to the glories of the 16th century,
08:01when Emperor Charles V had ruled over a vast Habsburg Empire,
08:06stretching from the Americas to the Balkans.
08:10Vienna thrived on the trade between East and West.
08:16But to maintain this overstretched empire,
08:19Charles V had divided his lands
08:21between two branches of the family.
08:23One ruled Austria, one ruled Spain.
08:28For decades, the two branches of the Habsburg family
08:31had 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.
08:43But it was ironic that the very policy that was meant
08:46to strengthen the House of Habsburg
08:48actually destroyed the Spanish branch.
08:52The last Spanish Habsburg was King Charles II.
08:56He was the gruesome living aberration of what was in effect
09:00generations of royal incest.
09:03He struggled to walk, to talk, and he was infertile.
09:06With no heir, he lay dying in 1700.
09:10And in Vienna, Emperor Leopold wanted his own younger son,
09:14Charles of Austria, to succeed in Spain.
09:17But he had a rival.
09:19There were two candidates for the Spanish throne.
09:22One was Charles of Austria,
09:25and the other was the grandson of Louis XIV,
09:29the French candidate.
09:31But when Charles II died, he left Spain to the French.
09:36The outraged Austrian Habsburgs denounced the will as fake,
09:40and in 1701 declared war.
09:49Emperor Leopold faced the superpower of the early 18th century.
09:54France fought the Austrians' band.
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.
10:21The capital was in peril.
10:24Eugene's armies marched to protect Vienna,
10:29but he was vastly outnumbered.
10:31He needed reinforcements,
10:33and 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 outmaneuvered the French and marched unopposed across Europe.
10:51John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough,
10:53came to his aid.
10:56When the two rendezvoused near the village of Blenheim,
10:59it inaugurated one of the great partnerships
11:02in all of military history.
11:04Eugene and Marlborough instantly became friends.
11:07I really loved Prince Eugene, Marlborough told his wife.
11:11And when the battle came the next day,
11:14the Battle of Blenheim,
11:15they routed the French
11:17and forever shattered the invincibility of the Sun King.
11:24When Leopold died in 1705,
11:26the war over Spain was unresolved.
11:29His oldest son, Joseph, inherited Austria,
11:32and Eugene's victory at Blenheim
11:34now meant his younger son, Charles,
11:36could march towards Madrid.
11:38Charles was a dim and unimpressive leader,
11:43but 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.
11:55Now that France had been humbled,
12:02the British were afraid that Spain and Austria
12:06would 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.
12:18When Charles realised he was never going back to Spain,
12:24he decided to recreate Spain in Vienna.
12:28He imported Spanish dress,
12:30Spanish court rituals,
12:32and this, his pride and joy,
12:34the 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.
13:03At last, Vienna could take centre stage
13:06as the sole Habsburg capital of a much expanded empire,
13:11enjoying an economic boom.
13:13Now 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.
13:48This is the Belvedere Palace,
13:50one of the glories of 18th century Vienna.
13:52Everything here is designed to project, to trumpet the victories of Eugene
13:59over 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.
14:10Eugene's summer palace projects his victories and his personality.
14:16The roofs resemble conquered Ottoman tents.
14:19The gardens are meant to outdo the glory of Versailles.
14:23Inside, his ceilings show him as the god Apollo,
14:27the symbol of artistic patronage.
14:29Signs and spoils of his victories are everywhere.
14:33Still concealed in a small room of Eugene's palace
14:45is a statue that reveals the great general's confidence
14:48in his own grandeur.
14:50Rather than use symbolism,
14:53he commissioned his own image as supreme warlord.
14:57He's clothed in the lion pelt of Hercules.
15:01He stamps down on a defeated turf.
15:04The symbol for eternal legacy shines upon him.
15:09This statue couldn't be exhibited during his lifetime.
15:13Only emperors could enjoy that sort of adulation.
15:19Eugene had been military commander
15:21and effectively chief minister of the Habsburg monarchy for 30 years
15:25and was now serving his third emperor.
15:28But Charles VI was jealous of his famous paladin
15:32and secretly undermined him.
15:34He sent Eugene on foolish campaigns that bankrupted the treasury.
15:40He was still fighting into his 70s.
15:42When Eugene returned exhausted to Vienna,
15:44he caught pneumonia and died.
15:47His 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
15:56would be defined by holding together this vast empire.
16:00Charles VI was haunted by the loss of Spain.
16:14He stamped the Habsburgs' God-given right to rule on his city, Vienna,
16:20using the sensuous magnificence of Baroque architecture.
16:25Vienna rang to the majestic compositions of his court composers.
16:30This was truly a city of art, music and masses.
16:38Yet all this was worthless if Charles could not produce an heir.
16:43I'm in the sumptuous library of the Emperor Charles VI in the Hofburg palace.
16:55And this was the Habsburg monarch whose life was dominated by his quest and need for a male heir.
17:01He chose his wife for her beauty, fecundity and health.
17:06Elizabeth of Brunswick was her name.
17:08She dazzled everyone with her gorgeousness.
17:11But as children came, the male ones died and only the daughters survived.
17:18Charles was desperate.
17:19First of all, he painted their apartments with erotic paintings of 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.
17:43Just the two daughters.
17:45Charles' only option was to declare his daughter the heir.
17:49There'd never been a female arch-duchess.
17:52And Charles knew his nobility and the kings of Europe may not accept his choice.
17:58He desperately tried to get their agreement and created a series of new laws known as the Pragmatic Sanction.
18:05It was only half complete when, in 1740, he went hunting, gorged on mushrooms and died.
18:14He was succeeded by his daughter, Maria Theresa, aged just 23.
18:24Austria's nobles knew her only as a card-playing, dancing and rather beautiful young woman.
18:30She was completely unprepared for the appalling crisis that would befall her monarchy, her empire and herself.
18:37But what no-one knew was that she had a will of steel.
18:42Her reign would dazzle Vienna.
18:45Maria Theresa's first duty was in the imperial crypt.
18:56This is where Maria Theresa came to bury her father, Charles VI.
18:58It's the Kaiser Krupp, the imperial crypt of the Habsburg dynasty.
19:15And on his sarcophagus here, right behind me, you can see, among it all, its elaborate decoration.
19:28His various crowns.
19:30There's the Archduchy of Austria, the crowns of Bohemia and Hungary, and the Holy Roman Empire.
19:36These were the crowns she would have to fight for.
19:43If she was to succeed, this is what she had to keep.
19:50Maria Theresa faced an uphill battle.
19:52Her father's mismanagement had weakened the empire.
19:59Vienna was now an artistic, palatial imperial capital, thanks to the wealth of its empire.
20:05But the muddled succession offered an ideal opportunity for rivals to seize Austria's richest provinces.
20:12The vultures began to mass on the empire's borders.
20:24And luckily for Maria Theresa, the first raider was the most brilliant.
20:29Frederick the Great, the newly crowned King of Prussia.
20:33He was the military and political genius of his age, with a superb army and a full treasury.
20:44He unleashed war, capturing Maria Theresa's richest province, Silesia.
20:50Next into the fray came the heir of a medieval Habsburg rival, Charles Albert of Bavaria.
20:58Austria's armies were surrounded and routed when Spain and France also declared war.
21:03The Bavarians marched onwards, capturing Prague and crowning Charles Albert King of Bohemia.
21:13In 1742, Charles Albert went further.
21:16He was elected the first non-Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor in three centuries.
21:21The extinction of Maria Theresa and the Habsburgs seemed inevitable.
21:31Her armies were in retreat.
21:32Her geriatric advisers were in panic.
21:34She'd lost two of her father's crowns and her enemies were preparing to march on Vienna.
21:40The story of what happened next is preserved in a series of paintings in Vienna's Hungarian embassy.
21:49She rushed to Hungary, and there she showed herself not only the willful politician, but also the consummate actress.
21:58Wearing mourning black for her father, she charmed the Hungarian nobles.
22:03She appealed to them.
22:04She 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 are in peril.
22:15Help me.
22:17And they did.
22:18The Hungarians enthusiastically crowned Maria Theresa Queen of Hungary.
22:27But what she really needed was the troops.
22:30And they provided that too.
22:32There's her army.
22:33She'd saved the monarchy.
22:37Funded by a war chest from the old ally, Great Britain, Maria Theresa turned the tide of the war.
22:44Charles Albert retreated.
22:46Frederick 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 crowned Maria Theresa's husband, Francis,
23:09as the new Holy Roman Emperor.
23:12She regained Bohemia.
23:13She 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 Favourita Palace.
23:30Between these bookcases sat the thrones of Maria Theresa and her husband, Francis.
23:36There 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.
23:55She 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.
24:17She centralised control of the army and reorganised the imperial finances.
24:23She managed, within a few years, to balance the budgets of the Habsburg monarchy
24:28for the first time in its history.
24:30Seeing herself as the mother to a reborn Habsburg Vienna,
24:45Maria Theresa wanted rid of the formal, rigid past of her childhood.
24:50Now she commissioned a magnificent new palace, the Schönbrunn.
24:55She personally oversaw its construction and 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, a decoration is open, gilded, playful, humane.
25:20It's no longer the Catholic oppression of earlier decades.
25:25And 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, principalities and duchies
25:47of the Habsburg monarchy is a golden carriage.
25:50And in it is Maria Theresa and our husband, the 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 and 3,000 of them were loaded onto barges
26:30and sent off to populate new towns in the east.
26:34Because, despite her anger, Maria Theresa knew
26:38they would provide the ideal, fertile settlers.
26:43And there you have it, all over.
26:45That's Maria Theresa, the 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.
27:18On 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.
27:33Revenge.
27:36Maria Theresa never gave up the dream
27:38of getting back her province, Silesia,
27:41stolen from her by that amoral arch-predator of genius,
27:46Frederick the Great of Prussia.
27:48But in 1756, she realised that she needed help to do so.
27:52And that meant allying Austria with the ancestral enemy, France.
27:59This diplomatic revolution so alarmed Britain
28:03that she allied herself with Prussia.
28:05Russia joined Austria.
28:08This became the Seven Years' War,
28:11fought across the world from America to India,
28:15the world's first global conflict.
28:18In Europe, Maria Theresa's army defeated a Prussian invasion of Bohemia.
28:24And to celebrate that victory,
28:26they hastily built this monument, the Gloriette.
28:30Yet 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,
29:04but she did ensure there was no problem with the succession.
29:07She and Frances were blessed with 16 children.
29:12In her characteristic fashion,
29:14Maria Theresa had a practical use for them too.
29:17To secure the Franco-Austrian alliance,
29:20she arranged for her 14-year-old daughter, Marie Antoinette,
29:24to marry Louis, the French Dauphin.
29:27From the very start, the marriage of Marie Antoinette
29:31and Louis XVI for France was a mismatch.
29:35She was not only young, but also foolish, unwise and tactless.
29:43For seven years, the couple remained awkward,
29:46failing to consummate their union.
29:50Marie Antoinette's big brother, Joseph II, hurried to Paris.
29:54This unlikely sex therapist interviewed both husband and wife.
29:59And what he discovered was that the problem was a mixture
30:03of sexual incompetence, youthful clumsiness, premature ejaculation
30:09and physical abnormality.
30:12He advised instant circumcision of the king.
30:15The problem was solved.
30:17Consummation and a large family of children followed.
30:21Despite matters easing in the bedchamber,
30:31Marie Antoinette's behaviour continued to outrage the French.
30:36She was seen as profligate, silly, promiscuous and pro-Austrian.
30:44Maria Theresa's old age was ruined by her worry
30:48about her daughter Marie Antoinette's disastrously scandalous behaviour.
30:53You've thrown yourself into a life of pleasure and preposterous display,
30:58she wrote to her.
31:00And, going from pleasure to pleasure without your husband
31:04will end in misery for you.
31:07Soon, she was to be proved only too right.
31:11In 1765, Emperor Francis fell ill and died.
31:18Mary Theresa was devastated.
31:21A note was found in her Bible that recorded the exact length of her marriage,
31:30down to the number of hours.
31:32She fell into a pit of depression and to rule,
31:37first in her stead and then as co-regent,
31:39her 24-year-old son, Joseph II,
31:43was elected the new Holy Roman Emperor.
31:49Joseph 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.
32:17He pushed her towards more expansion abroad,
32:20like the partition of Poland, and more reforms at home.
32:24But his mother was still alive.
32:27She was formidable.
32:28He had to wait.
32:30For the moment, he had to get everything past his mum.
32:39Joseph had an unyielding belief in the power of reason.
32:42He rejected emotion,
32:44and that was partly due to tragic failed romances.
32:48In October 1760, Maria Theresa held a wedding.
32:54And as you can see from this painting,
32:56she didn't do it by halves.
32:58Her son, Joseph, was married to the beautiful, blonde,
33:02alabaster-skinned Isabella 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.
33:24Soon after her marriage, the 18-year-old Isabella fell in love.
33:29But she didn't fall in love with her husband.
33:31Awkwardly, she fell in love with her husband's sister,
33:35Archduchess, marry Christine.
33:38It soon turned into a full-blown, physical, lesbian love affair.
33:44Joseph, the doting husband who was passionately in love with his bride,
33:49was in denial.
33:50After three years of marriage,
33:52she caught smallpox and died aged only 21.
33:56Joseph was heartbroken.
33:58He felt he could never love again.
34:00But Mary Teresa persuaded her son to marry a second time,
34:07with the hope of new lands and an heir.
34:11The marriage was a disaster.
34:13Joseph complained his wife was hideously ugly.
34:16And when she also died of smallpox,
34:18he didn't even bother to attend the funeral.
34:21Joseph decided to remain single.
34:31And he approached his sex life with the same efficiency
34:34as he approached government.
34:36As a rationalist, he decided love was simply absurd.
34:40And as a Catholic, he regarded onanism 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,
35:09In 1778, Emperor 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,
35:27or fear of his prudish old mother,
35:29that he didn't just walk out of here,
35:31he actually ran.
35:33Joseph and Mary Teresa endured 15 troublesome years of co-rule.
35:46Joseph's reforms were long restricted by his conservative mother.
35:50He made vain threats to resign and run away.
35:55In 1780, Mary Teresa's long reign came to an end.
35:59She died in Joseph's arms.
36:03The monarchy was now solely Joseph's to command.
36:08He redrew Vienna according to his enlightened ideas
36:11and, with his over-controlling nature,
36:14devoted hours to each detail.
36:16He crafted open spaces for his subjects to meet and talk,
36:20and one of them is the Prater Park,
36:23where he designed every walkway and food store.
36:28Joseph started his reign with ferocious impatience
36:32and 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
36:53and reigned too little.
36:55But he really was the revolutionary emperor.
37:02Under his mother's era of gradual reform,
37:04100 new edicts were announced annually.
37:07At the height of Joseph's reign, that number rose to 700.
37:11Joseph's openness to change was music to the ears of artists
37:20seeking to escape traditional formality.
37:24APPLAUSE
37:34Ambitious musicians and composers flocked to Vienna.
37:38One of them was Mozart.
37:41For years, he toured Europe as a musical child prodigy,
37:46encouraged and trained by his ambitious father.
37:49Now he was 25 and he wanted to make it at court.
37:56In 1781, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart arrived here at court in Vienna,
38:02celebrating the accession of Joseph II.
38:05He was small, slight, pale, but with a huge head of wild blonde hair.
38:13He was irrepressible, untameable, exuberant and shameless.
38:18He was uninhibited and his taste for the scatological
38:21was soon notorious in Vienna.
38:24For example, as he wrote to his cousin,
38:26Good night, my darling.
38:28Sleep well, shit in your bed and let it all burst out.
38:32It's impossible to understand Mozart without some sympathy for the earthy.
38:38It was in the Schoenbrunn Palace that Mozart and Joseph II,
38:45the musical emperor, worked together.
38:48After the concert, conductor Vinicius Cattar agreed,
38:52tell me more about Mozart and play me some of his work on the clavicle.
38:57Nice to see you.
39:01Nice to see you too.
39:02Lovely to hear you playing.
39:04So, let me ask you first of all, why did Mozart come to Vienna?
39:07Vienna was, I think, still was 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 about, what in his personality,
39:25what in his talent made him so special?
39:28So, what Mozart did was just improvise.
39:31Is that somebody would give to him just small thing like...
39:40and tell him just with those four notes, improvise and do something.
39:45So, he would sit on the piano and play something like that.
39:56He would just play with music.
39:57He would enjoy it.
39:59He would just go with it.
40:01Mozart was no ordinary man.
40:03He was, for sure, really somebody who had a lot of energy.
40:06And he was, I would say, he was a rock star.
40:09I would say he was something like a jazz musician from nowadays.
40:13How did Vienna, this great cosmopolitan city,
40:16how did it influence Mozart's music?
40:19Well, Vienna was huge at that time.
40:21So, you've had a lot of influences from Germany, Turkey and everything.
40:24So, for example, you would hear a German dance in his music.
40:28Then, you would hear also an Italian cantoneta.
40:35Or even, the famous, A La Turca, a Turkish march.
40:50And I think only in Vienna you could have such a huge diversity of music,
41:04and Mozart was clever enough to write it down.
41:07I love that.
41:09Thank you very much.
41:11Mozart never became court composer,
41:14but Joseph II found him a role that allowed him to compose some of his finest works.
41:21But 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
41:44might not appreciate Mozart's music as much as he did.
41:48Joseph 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.
42:02He 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.
42:22A little-known fact about Joseph
42:24is that he micromanaged a solution.
42:27To see it, I've come to one of his new cemeteries
42:30that he established on the outskirts of Vienna.
42:36Hidden in its storage
42:37is the emperor's ingenious attempt to revolutionise the coffin.
42:44From now on, he decreed,
42:45everyone must be buried stark naked in a sack.
42:50And they must use this new design of coffin.
42:54All this was to accelerate decomposition and to save wood.
43:00And this is how it worked.
43:01The body was placed inside, it was lowered into the grave,
43:04and then this lever was pulled to open it,
43:09and out would fall the body.
43:16Joseph's new, reusable coffin proved a step too far.
43:21It was too plain,
43:22and the Viennese demanded the freedom to pursue their lavish funerals,
43:25what they called Schönerlech, a lovely corpse.
43:30The coffin riots broke out,
43:32and Joseph was forced to rescind his decree.
43:38Joseph's enlightened despotism was creating chaos.
43:41A rationalist at home, he was an expansionist abroad.
43:45He entered into an alliance with Catherine the Great of Russia.
43:49Together, they would carve up the crumbling Ottoman Empire.
43:52But the war failed.
43:54Joseph fell ill at the front and staggered back to his capital, sick.
43:59His treasury was empty.
44:00The empire was in revolt.
44:02In 1789, the French Revolution erupted.
44:05If rebellion spread throughout the Habsburg monarchy,
44:09disaster awaited Austria.
44:12To preserve his dynasty,
44:13Joseph began to repeal his reforms.
44:16Lying fatally ill, his last edict
44:19was how he himself should be interned in the imperial crypt.
44:32Here's his coffin, designed by the emperor himself,
44:38and its simple austerity is in marked contrast
44:42to the sarcophagus of his mother, Mary Teresa.
44:47Look at its macabre magnificence.
44:52And yet, Joseph II himself was much more impressive
44:57than history has given him credit for.
44:59He was an autocrat, but he was way ahead of his time.
45:03His emancipation of minorities, especially the Jews,
45:07helped create the unique Viennese culture
45:11of the late 19th century.
45:14But he felt himself a terrible failure.
45:17He wrote his own epitaph, and this is what it reads.
45:20Here lies a prince whose intentions were pure,
45:24but who had the misfortune
45:26to see every one of his projects collapse.
45:30And yet, he was more successful than he ever knew.
45:39Joseph's radical reforms dragged Austria into the modern age.
45:43Although many laws were repealed,
45:45his reign introduced new ideas
45:47and 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,
46:01he actually chose to have a rational burial
46:04in one of Joseph's unmarked mass graves.
46:07The French revolutionaries despised the traditional order of kings and queens,
46:17and they especially loathed their own Austrian queen, Marie Antoinette.
46:22Indeed, they hated everything Austria and the Habsburgs stood for.
46:29In 1792, their aggression led to war.
46:32Austria failed to contain the energies of the French revolution.
46:37Many battles and lands were lost.
46:39And finally, to the horror of the Habsburgs,
46:41Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were beheaded with the guillotine.
46:52Pressure was growing on the new Habsburg emperor, Francis II.
46:56He vowed to annihilate the French,
47:00but to do so he would have to beat the embodiment of the revolution,
47:05Napoleon Bonaparte.
47:09The brilliant General Napoleon was the Superman of his age,
47:13representing the dynamism of the new.
47:16The Holy Roman Emperor Francis represented the obsolescence
47:21and weakness of the old.
47:23They were complete opposites.
47:24While Napoleon wanted to rule the world and win battles,
47:28Francis was happiest boiling toffee in the imperial kitchens.
47:35In 1804, Napoleon crowned himself emperor of the French.
47:39He already dominated Germany and Italy at the expense of the Habsburgs.
47:44And when Francis challenged him again on the battlefield,
47:48Napoleon defeated the Austrians and the Russians at the Battle of Austerlitz,
47:53his greatest battle at the height of his genius.
47:58Whilst many now feared Napoleon's expansionist ambitions,
48:02he was welcomed when he rode into Vienna triumphant.
48:06The Viennese watched him with a surprising degree of admiration and fascination.
48:14Francis 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 that he chose this beautiful but obscure church
48:30to announce the end of an institution that had lasted a thousand years.
48:36Francis was defeated.
48:41The Holy Roman Empire was no more.
48:43Vienna had fallen to his nemesis.
48:45Francis' 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, Francis tried to introduce the rising idea of the time,
49:04German nationalism.
49:07By 1809, Francis was able to assemble a new army.
49:10Once 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 of 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.
49:49It was quite an achievement.
49:55But victory turned to ashes.
49:58The Austrian army was paralysed with heavy losses.
50:03Napoleon called in reinforcements and planned his vengeance.
50:07The French emperor marched north and obliterated what remained of the Habsburg forces.
50:13Napoleon returned to Vienna and this time he decided to stay.
50:19In the coffee houses, palaces and theatres of French-occupied Vienna, ideas flourished.
50:34The French idealised free thinking.
50:37Nationalism, romanticism, rationalism intermingled and surged in popularity.
50:42And this had the most lasting impact on the city's greatest product, music.
50:48This is the musical concert hall in the palace of Prince Franz Lobkowicz.
51:01And it was here that one of his protégés performed for the first time his new third symphony.
51:10His name was Ludwig van Beethoven.
51:19He was famously irascible.
51:21If anyone talked or laughed during one of his concerts, he would storm out.
51:26He had produced a great symphony that celebrated the new rational, enlightened, revolutionary age that he so admired.
51:35And to him, the personification of this age was Napoleon Bonaparte.
51:39And hence he named the symphony the Bonaparte.
51:45But when he saw that Napoleon had not only crowned himself emperor,
51:49but was set on conquering a personal empire across the whole of Europe, he was disgusted.
51:54And the irascible Beethoven furiously crossed out the 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.
52:09Joseph II's cultural ideas were back in favour.
52:22Public theatres were established.
52:24The arts became accessible to the masses.
52:27And Beethoven, he became a Viennese star.
52:30Napoleon had conquered most of Europe, and he wanted to establish his own Bonaparte dynasty.
52:43But he had no heir.
52:44He blamed his wife, Empress Josephine, who'd had children in her youth, but a botched abortion left her infertile.
52:51Napoleon divorced her and began to look for a new child-bearing bride.
52:59From the dynasties of Europe, two options emerged.
53:03The Russian Romanovs, or the Habsburgs.
53:06Austria's brilliant new foreign minister, Clemens von Metternich, knew his country needed time to recover from its defeats.
53:14He used the opportunity to create a new alliance with France.
53:18When the Romanovs procrastinated, Metternich proposed.
53:24To find out the result of this match, I've come to meet Dr Monocle-Kurzel Rundshiner,
53:29a historian who wants to show me the carriages that survive from this time.
53:33Napoleon himself decided that he needed to marry Marie-Louise, the favourite daughter of Emperor France of Austria.
53:43How did it come about?
53:44The interesting thing is that it was a very bad start.
53:48Marie-Louise was suffering a lot, and 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 how to deal with women and how to satisfy women.
54:02When she arrives in France, finally, Napoleon was so impatient that he came to meet her.
54:08And in the very first night, he made her his wife, even though they were not finally married.
54:13So it was a big shock for the court society.
54:15And she writes her father a letter telling, people 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, and it was quite a good marriage.
54:29Just one year after the marriage, he gave birth to the heir, to the little Napoleon II,
54:34who was getting by his father the very prestigious title as King of Rome, the Roi de Rome.
54:41And this is his carriage.
54:43Not just a carriage, it's an insignia and a symbol for the future of the little prince.
54:50And we know that the little prince was really riding this carriage on the terrace of the Thuyeri Gardens in Paris,
54:56pulled by a team of two Merino sheep, framed 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, Marie-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, recreate the empire of his father.
55:25And therefore, they took care that he could never become too important in political means.
55:30The marriage forced the Habsburg army to 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.
55:55And in 1814, the coalition army, proudly commanded by the Austrian Field Marshal, Prince Schwarzenberg,
56:02defeated Napoleon and took Paris.
56:05Napoleon, ranting against Austrian betrayal, abdicated.
56:10Napoleon had redrawn the map of Europe to promote his own personal empire.
56:28And 20 years of war had torn the continent apart.
56:32Now, the Austrian minister, Metnik, would invite all the rulers of the continent to Vienna to put it back together again.
56:42This Congress would be the greatest summit meeting in history and the most decadent junket, unparalleled in its power-breaking and pleasure-seeking.
56:55Emperor Francis would be the host of Europe.
56:59Metnik would be the arbiter of Europe.
57:01And for six months in 1814, Vienna would be the capital of the world.
57:07216 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.
57:30Five years after humiliation and defeat by Napoleon, Vienna was back and bigger than ever.
57:41More imperial, more majestic.
57:44A city of composers and conquerors and courtesans, palaces and coffee houses.
57:51But it was about to evolve into something much more.
57:54In the final chapter of the story of Vienna, I will discover how the city created the modern age while the Habsburgs headed for extinction.
58:05The imperial city became the capital of ideas and the battlefield of extremes.
58:11Monarchy versus revolution.
58:13Fascism versus communism.
58:16Wild decadence versus Catholic piety.
58:19It all happened here in Vienna, the world city.
58:24Would you like to explore further the history of the Habsburg monarchy?
58:29Find out more about its rulers and royal marriages through the Open University's family tree.
58:36Go to bbc.co.uk forward slash Vienna and follow the links to the Open University.
58:43And Vienna, Empire, Dynasty and Dream concludes next Thursday night at nine.
58:52You can watch the first two episodes of Six Wives with Lucy Worsley available now on BBC iPlayer.
58:58And next, Diffusing the Troubles, The Project Children's Story.
59:03How an NYPD bomb disposal expert brought Belfast kids together.
59:08A feature length documentary coming up.
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