City Ball 1909 (Ball der Stadt 1909)

The Ball der Stadt, or Municipal Ball, was instituted in 1890 as a civic counterpart to the royal court ball that took place at the Hofburg. This annual event was held at the recently built town hall. For the 1909 Ball der Stadt, the ball committee commissioned Remigius Geyling and Wilhelm Melzer to design a program as a ladies' souvenir. The book celebrated two particularly significant matters of civic pride: the life of composer Josef Haydn, who died in 1809, and the centenary of the Austro-Hungarian victory over Napoleonic forces. In the manner of a Gesamtkunstwerk, each of the book's components- text, illustrations, patterned borders, decorative endpapers, and binding- is synthesized with the others to produce an organic unity. Geyling's brightly colored, near square format lithographs present commemorative scenes of 1809 and reflect the neoclassical style of that period. He rendered such memorable images as Master Haydn's last day at the spinet, the uniformed members of the Viennese Citizen Grenadier Division, and the nocturnal bombardment of Vienna by the French on May 11 and 12. The series ends with Archduke Karl's victorious entry into Aspern on May 23, 1809, and portraits of Vienna's mayors bracketing the period, Stephan Edl von Wohlleben (1809) and Karl Lueger (1909). (Skrypzak, Design Vienna 1890s to 1930s, no. 83)