Despite such impecuniousness it was Leopold’s reign that witnessed the most lavish of all 17th century operatic extravaganzas. Originally commissioned to celebrate the emperor’s wedding to the Infanta Margherita of Spain in 1666, Antonio Cesti’s Il Pomo d’oro suffered various delays before eventually being produced at court on July 12 and 14 1668. With a cast list of over 50 named characters, a huge chorus, and no less than 23 sets, the gargantuan opera took over nine hours in performance across the two nights it was staged. In addition to Cesti’s music, the opera included ballet music by Johann Schmelzer and even a scene with music composed by the emperor himself. The cost of the production was a staggering 100,000 florins, a figure that can be placed in context by comparing it with the annual (and handsome by the standard of the day) salary of 2000 florins paid to Antonio Draghi on his appointment as Kapellmeister in 1682. Il Pomo d’oro, with its prologue glorifying the Habsburg empire and the emperor, was the apogee of court opera. If its lavishness was never repeated on the same scale, the celebration of the glory of pomp and majesty would remain a central platform of the court operas produced in Vienna over the next seventy years.

The reality of life in the Vienna of 1685 was rather different. A city of some 80,000 inhabitants mostly crammed inside its medieval walls, it was the most densely populated city in Europe. Only two years earlier a siege by the Turks, a perpetual thorn in the side of Habsburgs, had been lifted. Although the remaining years of the century would witness a gradual lifting of the threat from the east, the city was at this time surrounded by an open space on which building was forbidden in order to deny potential invaders cover from which to bombard the city. The seat of the court was the Hofburg, a sprawling complex of interconnected buildings, the oldest of which dated back to the 13th century. Cramped and consistently described by visitors as unbefitting of a great dynasty, Leopold’s own efforts to improve and expand the Hofburg by building a new wing were twice thwarted, firstly by fire, then by the Turks, who severely damaged the building during the siege of 1683. The modest size of the Hofburg meant that court life in Vienna differed greatly from that at Versailles, where the entire court was gathered under one roof. While the Habsburgs never maintained as large a court as their Bourbon rivals, the lack of accommodation dictated that many court officials be housed in the city. For this purpose the first floor of appropriate buildings in the city was sequestered. Unusually for Europe at this time, most of Vienna’s houses consisted of five or six stories, an early example of building upward to compensate for lack of space. Residency was based on a strict hierarchy—the lower your status, the higher up the building you lived. (It may be recalled that when the poverty stricken Haydn was expelled from the choir of St. Stephens Cathedral in 1749 he took up residence in a “miserable garret” below the eaves of a five story building in the Kohlmarkt.)