Event number: 19970

According to one contemporary report, a performance of the Chamber Symphony no. 9 by Arnold Schönberg caused an outcry among the Viennese audience such as had not been seen in living memory. Most of the music was greeted with jeers, hisses and applause, and a policeman called in to restore law and order had to evict one trouble-maker using his key as a whistle. The members of the orchestra came down off the platform and engaged in heated dispute with the audience. Obviously highly explosive music, but an antidote is at hand in the strains of a Nubian love song in the slow movement of Saint-Saëns’s “Egyptian” Piano Concerto.