The cultural essay presented below is from vol. 5, The Viennese Period, from The Oxford History of Music. The volume’s musical scope is from C.P.E. Bach to Schubert. The essay is offered to briefly illustrate the social conditions of Mozart’s life and works. While the text can certainly be read independently, it also adds context for the series on Mozart’s music.
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The Oxford History of Music, Vol. V. The Viennese Period. By W. H. Hadow. Oxford – At the Clarendon Press, 1904. London, Edinburgh, New York. [Most original punctuation is retained.] (p. 1-18)
The Viennese Period. Chapter 1.
On the General Condition of Taste in the Eighteenth Century.
Among the many paradoxes which lie along the surface of the eighteenth century there is none more remarkable than its combination of lavish display with an almost barbarous discomfort. Wealth was abundant, and on occasion could be freely expended: at no time since the Roman Empire was pageantry more magnificent or ostentation more profuse; and yet men, who had at their command everything that money could buy, were content to lack pleasures which we take for granted, and to endure hardships which we should assuredly regard as intolerable. In most European capitals the streets were narrow, filthy, and ill-paved, lighted by a few feeble cressets, protected by a few feeble watchmen, the nightly scenes of disturbance and riot which you could scarce hope to traverse without a guard. Through country districts the high roads lay thick in dust and neglect; scored with deep ruts, or strewn with boulders, amid which your carriage tumbled and jolted until at evening it brought you to some wretched inn where you were expected to furnish your own bedding and provisions. Mr. Clarke, writing from Madrid in 1761, mentions that the houses are built with dry walls, ‘lime being very dear and scarce,’ that house-rent is exorbitant, and that ‘if you want glass windows you must put them in yourself.’ ‘There is,’ he adds, no such thing in Madrid as a tavern or a coffee-house, and only one newspaper.’ Paris under Louis XV was little better: visitors like Walpole and Franklin, natives like Mercier, have left us equally unpleasing records of dirt, noise, confusion, and shameless robbery1: while Vienna, though ‘fed from the Imperial kitchen’ and, we may almost add, lodged under the Imperial roof, appears to have been no less wanting in the bare essentials of amenity and refinement. Yet the splendours of the Escurial rivalled those of Versailles: the banquets at Schonbrunn were served upon solid gold, and the extravagance of dress ranged from Prince Esterhazy in ‘a gala-robe sewn with jewels’ to Michael Kelly the actor with his gold- embroidered coat, his two watches, his lace ruffles, and his ‘diamond ring on each little finger2.’
Of this curious contrast three possible explanations may be offered. In the first place money was spent not only for the pleasure that it purchased but for the social position that it implied. The days of the rich roturier had not yet come: wealth was still an inherited privilege of nobility, and its display served mainly to adorn the blazon of the sixteen quarterings. The strongest motive principle of the age was the pride of birth. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu gives an amusing picture of two Austrian countesses whose chairs met one night at a street corner, and who sat till two in the morning because neither would be the first to give way: the intercourse of the great families was regulated by strict order of precedence, and hedged about with the most thorny and uncompromising etiquette. It became therefore a point of honour that a noble should emulate his equals and outshine his inferiors; that at all hazards he should live brilliantly in public; that he should sit at the top of the fashion and maintain such state and dignity as befitted his rank. A notable instance may be found in one of the small German courts. The temperament of the country, the exigencies of the time, the example of the great king, all combined to foster the military spirit: every potentate had his army, from Oldenburg to Hohenzollern ; and among them (a pathetic figure) reigned the Graf von Limburg-Styrum, starving his revenues to raise a Hussar-corps of which the full fighting-strength amounted to a colonel, six officers, and two privates. It is little wonder that roads were ill-kept, towns ill-lighted, and dwelling-rooms ill-furnished, when the chief object of human existence was to make a brave show on state occasions.
1 See De Broc, La France sous I’ancien régime, ii. 174-187. For a companion picture from Thuringia, see Lewes’s Life of Goethe, Bk. iv. ch. i. ‘Weimar in the eighteenth century.’
2 See M. Kelly, Reminiscences, i. 249. For the magnificence of ladies’ court dress the reader may consult Le Livre-journal de Madame Éloffe (quoted entire in vol. i. of De Reiset’s Modes et usages au temps de Marie-Antoinette‘) and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s letters from Vienna.
Secondly, there went with this a certain homeliness of manner, rising at its best into simplicity, at its worst sinking into vulgarity and coarseness. The elaborate ceremonial of the age was mainly a matter of public exhibition, put on with the diamonds and the gold embroidery, returned with them to the wardrobe or the tiring-room. Maria Theresa, stateliest of empresses on the throne, was in private careless and unceremonious, often slovenly in attire, speaking by preference the broadest and most colloquial Viennese. Joseph II used to dine off ‘boiled bacon and water with a single glass of Tokay,’ and to spend his afternoon wandering about the streets, ‘one pocket full of gold pieces for the poor, the other full of chocolate-drops for himself.’ Nor were the hobbies of royalty less significant. Our own ‘Farmer George’ is no isolated exception; Charles III of Spain was a turner, Louis XVI a locksmith, while the Hapsburgs, as an audacious bandmaster ventured to tell one of them, would certainly have made their mark as professional musicians.
At the same time this unconstrained ease of life had its darker side. Speech ventured on a freedom which surpasses our utmost limits, habits were often indelicate and pleasures gross. Frederick at Sans-Souci, Karl August at Weimar, were both fond of rough practical joking; the behaviour of Kaunitz, the famous Austrian chancellor, would not now be tolerated at a village ordinary; and in the little Salon of the Hermitage, to which only the inner circle of diplomacy was admitted, an official notice imposed a fine of ten kopecks for ‘scowling, lying, and using abusive language1.’ It was but natural that the tone set by the court should be echoed and re-echoed through society at large. If Serene Highnesses were unmannerly, no better could be expected of their subjects. If patrician amusements were often coarse and cruel, it was not for the humble plebeian to improve upon them. Spain kept up her auto-da-fé till the mid-century; France, though more civilized than her contemporaries, often mistook the accidents for the essentials of civilization; while in London criminals were still drawn and quartered before a gaping crowd, the national sportsmanship found its outlet in the cock-pit and the prize-ring, and our banquets may be estimated by the tavern bill of a dinner for seven persons, which, with no costly dish, swells by sheer bulk to a total of eighty pounds2.
In the third place there was a remarkable instability among all matters of judgement and opinion. The Age of Reason made frequent lapses into extreme superstition and credulity the most practical of centuries often wasted its money on schemes beside which those of Laputa were commonplace. Nothing was too absurd for a sceptical generation to believe: Cagliostro carried his impostures from court to court; Paganini was compelled to produce a certificate that he was of mortal parentage; Harlequin, in London, gathered a thronging crowd by the public announcement that he would creep into a quart bottle. Nor is the literary taste of the time less fertile in contrasts. The France of Voltaire took Crébillon for a genius; the England of Gray and Johnson accepted Douglas as a tragedy and Ossian as a classic: throughout Europe the standard fluctuated with every breath of fashion and fell before every impact of caprice. Even in Germany, where the progress of literature was most continuous, it seems to have spread but slowly through the prejudices and preoccupations of the social life: elsewhere the haphazard and uncertain verdict indicated a temper that cared but little for any questions of principle or system.
1 See Waliszewski, Catharine II, p. 516.
2 See G. W. E. Russell, Collections and Recollections, ch. vii. It is dated 1751.
Here, then, we have a background for the musical history of the period: a society brilliant, light, artificial, sumptuous in ceremonial, lavish in expenditure, ‘presenting,’ as Ruskin says, ‘a celestial appearance’ and claiming in return the right of unlimited amusement: a Church which appeared to have outlived its Creed and forgotten its duties; its lower offices ranking with the peasant or the lackey, its higher given up to principalities and powers: a bourgeoisie solid, coarse, ill-educated, but sound at heart, beginning, as the century waned, to feel its strength and prepare for its coming democracy. It is impossible to over-estimate the importance to music of the social and political changes which culminated in the decade of Revolution. They meant that the old régime had been tried and found wanting; that the standard of taste was no longer an aristocratic privilege; that the doors of the salon should be thrown open, and that art should emerge into a larger and more liberal atmosphere. A couple of generations separated Georg von Reutter from Beethoven, each in his time regarded as the greatest of Viennese composers, and in this one fact we may find the artistic record of the age.
Before we trace the development which this change implies, it may be well to modify an over-statement commonly accepted among musical historians. We are told that between J. S. Bach and Haydn there spread a dreary and unprofitable desert, in which men had strayed from the wonted paths and had not yet found others; an inglorious period of darkness, dimly illuminated by the talents of Carl Philipp Emanuel, but otherwise lost in silence and old night. ‘At the particular time at which E. Bach lived’ says Dr. Maczewski1, ‘there were no great men. The gigantic days of Handel and J. S. Bach were exchanged for a time of peruke and powder, when the highest ideal was neatness, smoothness, and elegance. Depth, force, originality were gone, and taste was the most important word in all things.’ As here presented this remark can only lead to error and misconception. The so-called ‘Zopf’ period is not an interval between J. S. Bach and Haydn; the former died in 1750, and the tatter’s first known compositions were produced in 1751; it overlapped with a wide margin the work of both generations, it flourished before the Matthaus Passion, it lingered after the Salomon Symphonies. That Dr. Maczewski has correctly described the general taste of the midcentury is unquestionably true; but he has impaired the value of his description by a false attribution of causes. When J. S. Bach died there was no reaction against his methods, for they had never exercised any influence in his lifetime. He was famous as a brilliant player, as a learned contrapuntist, as the father of an amiable and talented son, but no one, not even Frederick the Great, had any idea that there was a difference between his music and that of Graun or Hasse. His choral works were absolutely unknown, granted a single hearing before the good people of Leipsic, and then consigned to dust and oblivion until Mendelssohn discovered them eighty years later. A few of his instrumental compositions were engraved, the Wohltemperiertes Klavier was sometimes used as a textbook for students: but apart from these his writings were treated with as little respect as the commentaries ofa schoolman or the dissertations of a university professor. Indirectly, he influenced the art through his sons, of whom two at least were taught by him to stem the shallow tide of Italian music; directly, he exerted no real authority till the time of Beethoven, and very little till that of Mendelssohn and Schumann.
1 Grove’s Dictionary (first edition), i. 113.
At the beginning of our period aesthetic judgement was controversial rather than critical. It cannot be doubted that there was a widespread desire for musical enjoyment, that emulation was keen and party spirit vigorous; but opinion, on some points punctilious and exacting, maintained on others a callous indifference which we find it very difficult to comprehend. Pagin the violinist was hissed in Paris for daring to ‘play in the Italian style’; but the same audience that condemned him listened with complacence to an opera in which the orchestra was loud and strident, in which the conductor ‘made a noise like a man chopping wood’ and in which the quality of the singing had become so proverbial that Traetta, wishing to express the shriek of a despairing heroine, left the note blank in his score, and wrote above the line ‘un urlo francese’ — a French howl. No doubt Italy was more sensitive; at least it had some feeling for quality of tone, and ‘a nice strain of virtuosity’: but even in Italy the verdict was often a mere matter of popular clamour and caprice. Take, for instance, the Roman opera-house, at that time the highest school in which a musician could graduate. The first part of the performance usually went for nothing, since the audience made so much disturbance that even the orchestra was inaudible. Then, when quiet was established, the abbes took their seats in the front row, a lighted taper in one hand, a book of the play in the other, and uttered loud and sarcastic cries of ‘Bravo bestia’ if an actor missed or altered a word. No allowance was made for circumstances: the soprano who showed signs of nervousness, the tenor who was out of voice from a cold, were driven off the stage by a torrent of street abuse. The composer, who presided for the first three nights at the harpsichord, had to thank fortune for his reception. In 1749 Jommelli brought out his Ricimero, and the audience boarded the stage and carried him round the theatre in triumph. Next year he produced his first version of Armida, and was obliged to fly for his life through a back door. So far as we can tell there was very little to choose between the two works; but in the interval he had applied for the directorship of the Papal Choir, and the Roman public disapproved of his youthful presumption. Nor had the composer any serious chance of appealing to posterity by publication. To print an orchestral score was difficult in France and England, more difficult in Germany, and in Italy almost impossible. ‘There is no such thing as a music shop in the country,’ says Dr. Burney, writing from Venice in 1770. ‘Musical compositions are so short-lived, such is the rage for novelty, that for the few copies wanted it is not worthwhile to be at the expense of engraving.’
A more remarkable instance yet remains. The Mannheim Orchestra, conducted by Stamitz for the Elector Palatine, was unhesitatingly accepted as the finest in Europe. To gain a place in its ranks was an object of strenuous ambition, to attend its concerts was a rare and distinguished privilege. ‘It was here,’ says Dr. Burney, ‘that Stamitz, stimulated by Jommelli, first surpassed the bounds of common opera overtures, which had hitherto only served in the theatre as a kind of court cryer. It was here that the crescendo and diminuendo had birth, and the piano (which was before chiefly used as an echo, with which it was generally synonymous) as well as the forte were found to be musical colours, which had their shades as much as red and blue in painting.’ He then adds a qualification of which both the substance and the tone are equally interesting. ‘l found, however, an imperfection in this band, common to all others that I have ever heard, but which I was in hopes would be removed by men so attentive and so able: the defect I mean is the want of truth in the wind instruments. I know it is natural to these instruments to be out of tune, but some of that art and diligence, which the great performers have manifested in vanquishing difficulties of other kinds, would surely be well employed in correcting this leaven which so much sours and corrupts all harmony. This was too plainly the case to-night with the bassoons and hautbois, which were rather too sharp at the beginning, and continued growing sharper to the end of the opera1.’ This defect was still apparent when Mozart visited Mannheim in 1778, but it seems to have been ignored or disregarded by other visitors, such, for instance, as Reichardt and Marpurg. Perhaps they were overwhelmed at hearing soft passages which were not intended for the purpose of a mechanical echo; or felt a touch of reverential awe in the place where crescendo and diminuendo had their birth. Or it may be that they anticipated Gretry’s criticism of the Swedish ambassador: ‘II chantoit naturellement faux, mais il chantoit faux avec tant de grâce et d’expression qu’on avoit encore du plaisir à l’entendre2.’
In the reception of chamber-music toleration was superseded by indifference. Viotti, summoned to play before Marie Antoinette, after three vain attempts to break the conversation, put up his violin, and walked out of the hall. Giornovichi, engaged for a drawing-room concert in London, found himself powerless to attract the attention of his audience, and, with perfect impunity, substituted the air ‘J’ai du bon tabac’ for the concerto which was announced in his name. At the English embassy in Berlin, a roguish director performed the same piece, under different titles, the whole evening through, and was complimented at the end on the diversity of his programme. Nor are such incidents at all rare or exceptional; they occur so frequently that they soon cease to arouse wonder or excite comment. The only marvel is that any artist should have stooped to endure such usage, and have risked the pillory for so precarious and uncertain a reward.
1 Burney, Present State of Music in Germany (1772), pp. 95~97- Dittersdorf (Autobiography, ch. xiii) gives an even worse account of the orchestra at Venice.
2 Gretry, Essais sur la musique, ii. 402.
Finally, composition itself was infected by the prevalent taste for lightness and frivolity. Society wanted to be amused, and cared little for the propriety of the entertainment: at no time in the history of civilization has art been treated with a less degree of truth or reverence. We need do no more than allude to the farce seen by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu at Vienna, and the Passion-Play witnessed by Mr. Clarke at Madrid; but, gross and extreme as were these examples, music lagged but little behind in the race for degradation.
Grand Opera interspersed its tragedy with incongruous scenes of pantomime and burlesque; Oratorios were presented with comic intermezzi; even the services of the Church were often powerless to resist the prevalent fashion. ‘We have had two new Misereres this week’ says the Abbate Ortes, writing from Venice, ‘one by Galuppi, one by Sacchini. They were both strings of arias, jigs, balletti, and other movements which would be just as suitable to a Te Deum as to a Miserere1.’ Observe that there is no tone of irony in this criticism; only a regret that the jigs and balletti were not sufficiently distinctive to separate confession from the rest of worship.
It seems incredible that any true artistic work can have been done under such conditions. Yet in the thirty years which followed the death of J. S. Bach, the years to which all these incidents belong, and of which they are all in a measure typical, there is no lack of noble and conspicuous achievement. To this despised period belong the most mature sonatas of Philipp Emanuel Bach, and of his brother Wilhelm Friedemann, all of the best operas of Gluck, some forty of Haydn’s symphonies and a like number of his quartets, over three hundred and fifty compositions of Mozart, including the Haffner Serenade, the Paris Symphony and Idomeneo, Boccherini’s early chamber-works, Grétry’s early operas, and, among lesser lights, many of the most characteristic scores of Piccinni, Hasse, Sarti, Sacchini, and Paisiello. If a composer of our own time were called upon to write for an orchestra which played habitually out of tune, and to submit his work to an audience which might be prejudiced or inattentive; if he knew that his success or failure would depend on a turn of the wheel — a chance accident to a singer, a chance rumour from the street, a hazard of victory between conflicting parties — we can imagine the terms in which he would decline the invitation. But it must be remembered that in the third quarter of the eighteenth century there were no better materials attainable, and that genius is forced to express itself through the best medium that it has at command. Besides, the case was not altogether hopeless. The controversies which agitated Paris from the ‘Guerre des Bouffons’ to the Iphigenie at least proclaimed a war from which the conquest of a kingdom might ultimately ensue. The love of virtuosity which filled Italy and England prepared the way for a more artistic temper which might one day attain to the love of music itself. For a time, indeed, there was little to be expected from the popular verdict: it was still regulated by an artificial code and an unthinking fashion. But at worst there were always a few good citizens to maintain the cause of truth and equity, and their number gradually increased as the years wore on.
1 Letter to Hasse (April 18, 1772) quoted in Wiel’s I teatri musicali venesiani del settecento.
Meanwhile, art turned for a livelihood to the munificence of wealthy patrons. In every capital, from Madrid to St. Petersburg, there were court- appointments of varying dignity and position: in most countries aristocracy followed the royal practice, and established a private orchestra as an essential part of its retinue1. The system appears to have depended but little on any question of personal taste. Frederick the Great, an enthusiastic amateur and a flute player of some eminence, was not more cordial in patronage than the Empress Catherine, who did not know one tune from another, and ‘could recognize no sounds except the voices of her nine dogs’: if the former encouraged native art by supporting Graun, Quantz, and C. P. E. Bach, the latter attempted to educate her people by successive invitations to Galuppi, Traetta, Paisiello, Sarti, and other famous Italians. All palace doors lay open to the musician: Hasse was maintained at Dresden by Augustus the Strong; Sarti, before his visit to St. Petersburg, held office under Christian VII at Copenhagen; Naumann at Stockholm received ten years’ continuous favour from Gustavus the Unlucky; Jommelli found at Stuttgart a full compensation for the ill-usage of his countrymen; Scarlatti and Boccherini grew old at the Spanish court, where, for two successive reigns the singer Farinelli acted as chief adviser. But it was in Austria that the custom was chiefly prevalent; partly, it would seem, froma doctrine of noblesse oblige, partly from a genuine love of music which ran through every rank and grade of society. Maria Theresa frequently sang in the operatic performances of her private theatre2, Joseph II played the violoncello in its orchestra, both alike invited the most famous artists to Vienna and rewarded them freely with offices or commissions.
1 ‘This elegant and agreeable luxury, which falls within the compass of a very large fortune, is known in every country of Europe except England.’ Arthur Young, à propos of the Due d’Aguillon’s private orchestra; Journal, Aug. 23, 1787.
The Hofkapelle had its band, the Cathedral its choir and its four organists, the royal opera-houses of Laxenburg and Schonbrunn welcomed every dramatic composer from Gluck to Giuseppe Scarlatti, and gave free places to every spectator from the archduke in the stalls to the farmer’s boy in the gallery3. Almost all the great Viennese families — Lichtenstein, Lobkowitz, Auersperg, and many others — displayed the same generosity, the same artistic appreciation, and the tone set vibrating from the capital spread far and wide to country houses like those of Fürnburg and Morzin, and to episcopal palaces like those of Gran, Olmütz, and Grosswardein.
2 The score of Reutter’s Il Palladio Conservato contains a note saying that at the first performance the parts were taken by Maria Theresa, the Archduchess Maria Anna, and the Countess Texin. Such instances are numerous, especially with Reutter’s operas.
3 See the account of the Laxenburg theatre in Michael Kelly’s Reminiscences, vol. i. p. 246.
The relation implied in this patronage was, for the most part, frankly that of master and servant. As a rule, genius sat below the salt, and wore a livery like the butler or the footman. No doubt the master was often genial and kindly, no doubt the gap was often lessened by the prevalent simplicity of manners; but the system in general was not well qualified to raise the dignity of art or to increase the self-respect of the artist. At best he might be admitted to the sort of friendship which a good sportsman felt for his keeper; at worst he might be dependent on the caprices of an ignorant or tyrannical despot. With the single exception of Farinelli, an exception, it may be added, which proves far too much, we have no case of real equality and only one of considerable freedom; indeed both were precluded by the conditions of the time. And even granted that examples of graciousness and condescension far outnumbered those of ill-treatment or neglect, it still remains true that the whole principle of patronage was fraught with danger to the art that it protected. Much of the music written during the mid-century is like the furniture of a Paradiesensaal: stiff, uncomfortable chairs, all gilding and damask; inlaid tables, too elegant to be of use; priceless statuettes made of sea-shells; fantastic clocks with musical boxes in the pedestal; a thousand costly trifles which could add no jot to the ease or amenity of human life. It would have been a miracle if, amid these unreal splendours, art had always maintained its sincerity unimpaired.
The effects of patronage, for good and ill, may be illustrated by the lives of two brothers, somewhat similar in gifts, greatly dissimilar in fortune. At the outset of their career there seemed but little to choose between the prospects of Joseph and Michael Haydn. For three years they sat side by side in the choir at St. Stephen’s: when the elder’s voice began to fail, the younger was chosen to succeed him as principal soloist: if the one was the more diligent, the other showed in early days the more promise: Michael obtained his first official appointment while Joseph was still giving lessons at five florins a month. Then came the parting of the ways. In 1761 Joseph Haydn was attached to the household of Prince Esterhazy, next year his brother was promoted from Grosswardein to Salzburg, and thenceforward the two careers diverged until the end. It is not, indeed, to be maintained that the differences were due to a single cause. The elder brother was more gifted, more temperate, far more industrious. But something at any rate must be allowed for material surroundings, and in these the inequality of condition can hardly be overstated. At Salzburg the grave, saintly Archbishop Sigismund encouraged the severer forms of Church music, but cared little for the stage or the concert-room; his successor Archbishop Hieronymus was coarse, brutal, and overbearing, wholly indifferent to art and letters, keeping his band and choir as a necessary adjunct of his office, but thwarting all serious effort by frivolous taste and arbitrary injunction. At Esterhaz there were two theatres, a first-rate choir, an orchestra of picked artists, and over all Prince Nicholas Esterhazy, wise, liberal, enlightened, a skilled amateur, a true enthusiast, who recognized from the beginning that his new director was a genius, and gave him not only cordial support but entire liberty of action. The result is in the highest degree significant. Michael Haydn wrote Church music of great strength and dignity, but in all other forms his composition is hasty, careless, and unequal the work of a disappointed man. Joseph Haydn ranged freely from opera to symphony, from symphony to quartet, and filled every corner of the art with fresh air and sunshine. The one found his chief opportunity of expression in the strictest and most conservative of all styles, and has been left behind as the representative of an outworn and obsolete method. The other, with an open choice before him, discarded the artifices of current phraseology, saturated his music with his native folk-songs, and thus infused it with a new strength and a new vitality. It is worthy of remark that the greatest composer ever fostered by a systematic patronage was the one over whose character patronage exercised the least control.
Meantime revolt was imminent, and the first blow in its cause was struck by Mozart. [Portrait above] He too had suffered from Archbishop Hieronymus. As Concertmeister at Salzburg he had been bullied, ill-paid, subjected to insult and indignity; in 1777 a reasonable request for leave of absence had been scornfully refused; during the next four years the position had grown more and more intolerable; at last, in 1781, the storm burst. Its occasion was trivial enough. The Archbishop had carried his court to Vienna for the season; his temper, always violent, had been exasperated by a mark of imperial disfavour; in a fit of pettish rage he determined to check Mozart’s triumphal progress through the capital, and sent him peremptory orders to cancel his engagements and return to Salzburg without delay. The Concertmeister, already at the end of his endurance, came to protest; was received with a torrent of uncontrolled abuse; and in white heat of anger proffered his resignation on the spot1. In that memorable interview the ancien regime of music signed its death-warrant. The revolution peacefully inaugurated by Haydn came to a sudden and abrupt climax; the old gilded idol toppled over and scattered its fragments in the dust. It must not be inferred that the influence of wealth and station passed altogether into abeyance. Beethoven was the guest of Prince Lichnowsky, the master of the Archduke Rudolph; Schubert held for six years a loose-knit appointment as musicteacher to the family of Count Johann Esterhazy. But wealth and station had no longer the power to prescribe, to command, to hold genius within artificial bounds. It commissioned works, but it ceased to exercise any control over their character. In a word, it paid for the dedication, and left the artist a free hand.
1 See the whole story in Mozart’s letter of May 9. Jahn’s Mozart, ch. xxii.
There is no incongruity in the fact that Mozart was the first active leader of this popular movement. Nothing is further from the truth than to regard him as a mere court composer, a Prince Charming of the salon and the presence chamber, a musical exquisite whose gifts can be summed up in brilliance and delicacy of form. Grant that his fertile genius and his ready command of resource often enabled him to write without the stress of great emotional impulse, yet the best of his music, and indeed almost all the work of his maturer period, is essentially human at heart, speaking always in polished phrase, but none the less speaking truths for the understanding of mankind. His dearest wish was to found a reputation on the suffrages of the people, and the favour shown to him by Joseph II seemed in his eyes a small matter beside the welcome accorded to his operas by the citizens of Prague1.
Yet the new-won freedom was purchased at a cost of much poverty and privation. In throwing off its dependence art forewent at the same time the most certain of its material rewards, and was compelled to engage in a struggle for the bare necessaries of existence. Mozart throughout his later years was continually pressed for money: Beethoven, though somewhat better paid, was forced to accept the charity of a private subscription: Schubert, for all his lavish industry, never earned enough to keep body and soul together. It seemed, indeed, as though the composer’s chances were trembling in the balance. If he approached the theatre he found himself confronted with an impresario always astute and often unscrupulous. If he tried his fortune in the concert-room, he soon discovered that profits could be swallowed by expenses. If he attempted to print his work an equal disappointment awaited him, for publishers were timid and purchasers few. Now and again he might earn a handful of ducats by writing on commission, but even with Beethoven such opportunities were not of frequent occurrence, and with Schubert they were of the extremest rarity. It is little wonder if genius were sometimes tempted to regret the flesh-pots of Egypt, and to complain that it had been brought out to die in the wilderness.
1 See Jahn’s Mozart, chs. xxxvi, xxxvii.
None the less it was moving onwards, and we can almost count the stages of its advance. Every decade saw it increase in personal dignity, in liberty of utterance, in depth and sincerity of feeling; every decade saw it slowly winning its way across barren tracts of apathy and ignorance. No doubt progress was difficult and toilsome; there were enemies to conquer, heights to scale, hardships to endure; more than once the march was checked by open antagonism or misled by treacherous counsel. Yet the true leaders preserved their faith unbroken, and won for music not only some of the most glorious of its achievements but the enduring right of free life and free citizenship. And though public opinion lagged far behind, it was never altogether stationary. It followed with hesitating and uncertain steps, it sometimes broke into murmur or revolt, it sometimes lent its ears to that smooth and superficial imposture which is the worst of all traitors in the camp. But, however blind and erring, it was not disloyal at heart; its mistakes, and they were many in number, gave at least some blundering indications of vitality; little by little its judgement formed and matured under the inspiration and example of the artist. The popular verdict may have been often foolish, but ‘it is better to be a fool than to be dead’.
We shall find a striking illustration if we divide into two half-centuries the period which elapsed between 1730 and 1830. The first saw all the greatest compositions of Bach, and paid no more heed to them than if they had been so many school exercises. It did not praise, or censure, or criticize; it simply ignored. The second witnessed the whole career of Beethoven, from the qualified success of Prometheus to the rapturous welcome which greeted the Choral Symphony. During the one, musical judgement was mainly occupied with the quarrels of theatrical parties, and work like the Matthäus-Passion or the B-minor Mass lay wholly outside its horizon. The other, with frequent lapses, began to offer some real attention to creative genius, and attempted in some measure to comprehend the value and import of the new message. And part at least of the reason is that the later generation was roused by direct appeal to a keener and more intimate sense of responsibility.
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