On 31 March 1913 Arnold Schoenberg conducted a concert in the Great Hall of Vienna’s Musikverein that would become known as that city’s most notorious scandal concert. The event was broken up by a melee, charges were filed, and the subsequent court proceedings were reported in the press. This paper analyzes the ways in which both the scandal and Schoenberg’s response to it sit at the nexus of fin-de-siècle anxieties about Central European concert life, the anti-noise movement, and emerging copyright law.

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