On May 18, 1900, the Vienna Court Opera celebrated the seventieth birthday of Carl Goldmark with a performance of the composer's Die Königin von Saba (The (Queen of Sheba), a grand opera in four acts on a libretto by Salomon Hermann Mosenthal. Although he would miss this celebratory performance, Eduard Hanslick, the semi-retired music critic for the Neue Freie Presse, made sure to mark the day with a feuilleton in which he paid friendly tribute to a composer whose works had long been a fixture in Vienna's operatic and concert bills. Hanslick had always harbored certain misgivings about Goldmark's music, but he was careful not to allow those to cloud the day. Moreover, he admired Goldmark's solid character and was genuinely fond of the man, with whom he had been friendly for many years. And so the critic begins by graciously extolling Goldmark's ascent to a hard-won place at the very center of Vienna's musical culture:

Well, could it be seventy already? How immeasurably long this distance seems to us in our younger years, and yet how incredibly quickly we turn up there one day! For Goldmark the first half of this journey was difficult and troublesome.