What is the capital of Austria?

Vienna, which was the capital of an empire of some 50 million people and is now the capital of a country of nine - a city built at a scale its state outgrew backwards. That is why the public buildings along the Ringstrasse look out of proportion to modern Austria: they were designed for a multinational monarchy that dissolved in 1918.

It has an extraordinary concentration in the history of music. Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Bruckner, Mahler and the Strauss family all worked there, and the second Viennese school of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern took the tonal system apart in the same city a century later. That was not coincidence but patronage: an aristocracy with money, competing households and a taste for music created a job market that pulled composers in from across Europe.

It was also where modernity had one of its worse arguments with itself. In the years before 1914 Vienna simultaneously held Freud, Wittgenstein, Klimt, Schiele, Mahler, Trotsky, Stalin and Hitler - some of them in the same coffee houses. The city has spent a long time being honest about the second half of that list, and about how thoroughly its Jewish population, which had produced much of the first half, was destroyed.