Classical music, as encountered in 1910 Vienna by characters in A Distant Prospect, owes nearly everything to four composers who worked in that city over a century earlier.
Joseph Haydn, by Thomas Hardy (1792)
The First Viennese School comprised Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, who all composed in Vienna in the latter 1700s, and were even known to have performed chamber music together. Franz Schubert is generally also included in the list.
1910 Vienna, with Mahler and Schoenberg now leading the way, would have been a most exciting time and place for Australian string musicians to be performing, studying, teaching and recording themselves onto shellac discs.