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Minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels supervised the Berlin Philharmonic directly; under him, the orchestra experienced an unprecedented financial restructuring. This chapter explores in detail the measures Goebbels implemented and examines their basis, as well as the consequences for not only the orchestra, but National Socialist culture policies as a whole. In contrast, the political responsibility for Viennese cultural institutions—including the Vienna Philharmonic—was not as clear-cut; this chapter offers a detailed examination of the debates and conflicts surrounding this responsibility and discusses the ramifications for the Vienna Philharmonic, both in terms of its public image and in terms of its finances.

The Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics appeared not only in the popular press and specialist publications, but also in other media, such as novels and films. This chapter takes a comparative look at the reception of the two orchestras in these media.

By Brahms's time, elaborate metaphors — symphonies as “plain speaking”, symphonic performances as Volksversammlungen — had developed around the genre. This chapter evaluates this patently ideological perspective, which was especially glaring in Vienna, a city where only an elite fraction of the populace could hear orchestral performances of symphonies. Perceptions of deficiencies in symphonies by Brahms, who was considered always to compose in chamber style, are evaluated in light of genre aesthetics in which a political outlook and conception of a genre merge. Ideas about symphonies reflected how the constituency of 19th-century Liberalism chose to regard itself: like the Parliament members elected by a well-to-do minority with voting rights, the select gatherings at Vienna Philharmonic concerts could represent “the people”. Habermas's conclusion that the public sphere was “mere ideology” is pertinent here. Symphonic monumentality and mid-century rejection of Romanticism, as well as the enhanced contemporary significance of slow movements are discussed.

Chapter 3 drops in on a variety of “blind” auditions, commonly upheld as a gold standard in appraisals of musical excellence. Using screens and anonymizing apparatus, judges evaluate auditionees on sound alone, thereby doing right by the music they love. But a hidden cost of such auditions, whether for the Boston Symphony Orchestra or the reality show The Voice, is the wholesale severing of musicianship from human identity at large. With auditionees out of sight, the conceits of impartiality and meritocracy enable all parties to avoid talking about issues of discrimination altogether—that is, why anonymity is desirable or necessary to begin with. A short case study ventures outside the United States to consider the illustrious, nearly all-white and all-male Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. Tellingly, however, criticisms of this orchestra have come overwhelmingly from the United States, with music lovers exporting American brands of feminism and social justice to protest the ensemble’s discriminatory hiring practices.

Chapter 5 considers the reception of Czech music in Vienna during the 1880s,especially that of Dvořák. The generally muted music-critical support for Dvořák’s music is viewed against the backdrop of minister-president Eduard von Taaffe’s pro-Slavic policies. These included languages ordinances that threatened traditional German prerogatives in Bohemia and Moravia and hastened the development of a German nationalism—with an emphasis on protecting Nationalbesitzstand (national property)—that diverged from the more traditional German liberalism of Hanslick. This divergence is seen especially clearly in the writings of Hanslick in the liberal nationalist Neue Freie Presse and Theodor Helm in the national liberal Deutsche Zeitung. The chapter is supported by documents found in the archive of the Vienna Philharmonic, which provide an inside look at how political tensions between Germans and Czechs affected the orchestra’s own internal programming decisions.

When he was expelled from Germany in 1933, Bruno Walter and his family moved to Vienna, which would become his main center of activity for the next several years. The day after he arrived in Vienna, Walter received a telephone call from Rudolf Mengelberg, who asked him to conduct several concerts with the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam. For Walter, conducting the Concertgebouw was a welcome respite. He would take a number of lengthy trips in the next five years in order to continue conducting throughout Europe without crossing into German territory. He also conducted the Vienna Philharmonic on a regular basis and became a hero of the Salzburg Festival. The year 1933 was a tumultuous period for Walter personally, but saw him being more in command than ever before from a musical standpoint. In June 1936, however, Walter's musical serenity was disrupted when some Austrian Nazis threw stink bombs during one of his Viennese performances of Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.

On September 15, 1936, Bruno Walter celebrated his sixtieth birthday as an established conductor in Vienna. As a resident of Vienna, he conducted at the Vienna Opera and in concerts with the Vienna Philharmonic. He also wrote a biographical essay on Gustav Mahler, published that year. Aside from Mahler, Walter had to endure the loss of another friend, Ossip Gabrilowitsch, in 1936. Immediately after his season in Vienna opened, he traveled to Sweden and then to Amsterdam for an entire month. He returned to Vienna in the middle of November 1936 and became firmly entrenched in Vienna's musical life. The high point of December was a new production of Giuseppe Verdi's Don Carlo. In February and March 1937 Walter returned once more to Amsterdam for a concert production of Carl Maria von Weber's opera Euryanthe with the Concertgebouw Orchestra. In August 1939, Walter's daughter Gretel was murdered in Berlin by her husband.

This chapter focuses on the new Transfiguration CD performed by the Smithsonian Chamber Players and conducted by the cellist Kenneth Slowik. Slowik supplements his own performance of the slow movement from Mahler's Fifth Symphony with an excerpt from Willem Mengelberg's 1926 Concertgebouw recording along with another one performed by Bruno Walter and the Vienna Philharmonic. He has also reprinted a few lines of incontestably hideous doggerel that Mengelberg inscribed in his conducting score for the Adagietto. The chapter also criticises his performance of Mahler's 1898 string-orchestra arrangement of Beethoven's Quartet in F minor in the CD by calling it a bloated “modern” reading which fails to convey the expressive content of the music.