Paquita

Paquita is a ballet in two acts and three scenes originally choreographed by Joseph Mazilier to music by Édouard Deldevez and Ludwig Minkus.

Paul Foucher received royalties as librettist.

Paquita is the creation of French composer Édouard Deldevez and Paris Opéra Ballet Master Joseph Mazilier.

Sergiy Lyacevitch | Dancing flower

Radetzky March

The "Radetzky March", Op. 228, is a march composed by Johann Strauss (Senior) which was first performed on 31 August 1848 in Vienna to celebrate the victory of the Austrian Empire under Field Marshal Joseph Radetzky von Radetz (the piece's namesake) over the Italian forces at the Battle of Custoza, during the First Italian War of Independence.

Mozart | Concerto for Flute and Harp | 1 - Allegro

Mozart wrote the "Concerto for Flute, Harp, and Orchestra in C major" in April 1778, during his seven-month sojourn in Paris.

It was commissioned by Adrien-Louis de Bonnières, duc de Guînes (1735-1806), a flutist, for his use and for that of his eldest daughter, Marie-Louise-Philippine (1759-1796), a harpist, who was taking composition lessons from the composer, at the duke's home, the Hôtel de Castries.

Mozart stated in a letter to his father that he thought the duke played the flute "extremely well" and that Marie's playing of the harp was "magnifique".

Louis-Ernest Barrias (1841-1905) | Mozart child with a violin, 1887 | Musée Fabre

Ave Maria (Schubert)

"Ellens dritter Gesang" ("Ellens Gesang III", D. 839, Op. 52, No. 6, 1825), in English: "Ellen's Third Song", was composed by Franz Schubert in 1825 as part of his Op. 52, a setting of seven songs from Walter Scott's 1810 popular narrative poem The Lady of the Lake, loosely translated into German.

Giovanni Battista Salvi called Sassoferrato (1609-1685) | The Madonna in prayer | Christie's

Johann Strauss | By the Beautiful Blue Danube

"The Blue Danube" is the common English title of "An der schönen blauen Donau", Op. 314 / German for "By the Beautiful Blue Danube", a waltz by the Austrian composer Johann Strauss II (1825-1899), composed in 1866.

Originally performed on 15 February 1867 at a concert of the Wiener Männergesang-Verein (Vienna Men's Choral Association), it has been one of the most consistently popular pieces of music in the classical repertoire.

Its initial performance was considered only a mild success, however, and Strauss is reputed to have said:

"The devil take the waltz, my only regret is for the coda - I wish that had been a success!"

Mihály Zichy | Ball in the Concert Hall of the Winter Palace during the Official Visit of Nasir al-Din Shah in May 1873-1874 | State Hermitage, St. Petersburg

Cecil van Haanen | Genre painter

Cecil van Haanen (1844-1914) was a Vienna-born Dutch portrait and genre painter, whose significant work was centred at Venice.

Van Haanen was the son to landscape painter Remigius Adrianus Haanen (1812–1894) and Emilie Mayer von Alsó-Rußbach.

He received early artistic training from his father and Friedrich Schilcher, and from April 1854 was educated at the pre-school of the Vienna Academy under Peter Johann Nepomuk Geiger.

Stefan Zweig | The World of Yesterday: Memories of a European / Il mondo di Ieri, 1942

Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) was an Austrian writer.

At the height of his literary career, in the 1920s and 1930s, he was one of the most widely translated and popular writers in the world.

The World of Yesterday: Memoires of a European (German title Die Welt von Gestern: Erinnerungen eines Europäers) is the memoir of writer Stefan Zweig.

It has been called the most famous book on the Habsburg Empire.

He started writing it in 1934 when, anticipating Anschluss and Nazi persecution, he uprooted himself from Austria to England and later to Brazil.

He posted the manuscript, typed by his second wife Lotte Altmann, to the publisher the day before they both committed suicide in February 1942.

The book was first published in the original German-language by an anti-Nazi Exilliteratur publishing firm based in Stockholm (1942), as Die Welt von Gestern.

It was first published in English in April 1943 by Viking Press.

In 2013, the University of Nebraska Press published a translation by the noted British translator Anthea Bell.

In "The World of Yesterday", Stefan Zweig states:

"We of the new generation who have learned not to be surprised by any outbreak of bestiality, we who each new day expect things worse than the day before, are markedly more skeptical about a possible moral improvement of mankind.

We must agree with Freud, to whom our culture and civilization were merely a thin layer liable at any moment to be pierced by the destructive forces of the "underworld".

Caspar David Friedrich | Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818 | Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg

Egon Schiele | Quotes / Poems

• "Art cannot be modern. Art is primordially eternal".

• "Bodies have their own light which they consume to live: they burn, they are not lit from the outside".

• "I must see new things and investigate them. I want to taste dark water and see crackling trees and wild winds".

• "At present, I am mainly observing the physical motion of mountains, water, trees and flowers. One is everywhere reminded of similar movements in the human body, of similar impulses of joy and suffering in plants..."

• "I was in love with everything- I wanted to look with love at the angry people so that their eyes would be forced to respond; and I wanted to bring gifts to the envious and tell them that I am worthless.".