A Little History of Music by Robert Philip;

Author:Robert Philip;
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780300271720
Publisher: Yale University Press

CHAPTER 25

Becoming ‘Classical’

In the eighteenth century, Vienna was the capital of the Holy Roman Empire, ruled by the German-speaking Habsburg family. It stretched from Bohemia in the east (part of today’s Czech Republic) across to Belgium in the west, and from the Baltic Sea in the north down to the Mediterranean in the south. Vienna was an immensely wealthy city, and a centre for German culture, attracting artists and musicians who wished to reach the top of their professions.

From the late eighteenth century through to the early nineteenth, so much important music was centred on Vienna that later historians took to referring to this as the period of the ‘Viennese Classics’, focused on three of the acknowledged great composers, Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven. But ‘classic’ is a rather dry label to give these energetic thinkers. The manner in which they all pushed the expressive boundaries of the music of their day makes it more appropriate to think of them as early ‘Romantics’, if indeed they need a label at all. They were the heirs of the new dramatic style developed by the orchestral composers of Mannheim and Paris, and by Emanuel Bach on the keyboard. And they learned a great deal from each other. But their different experiences of the culture and society of the time also show how things were changing.

As boys, Joseph Haydn and his brother Michael (also a composer) were choristers at St Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna. After being thrown out for bad behaviour, Joseph spent a few years working in various households until he landed permanent posts, first with a count, and then with a prince. The prince was the head of one of the wealthiest families in Austria, the Esterházys, with palaces in Vienna and Eisenstadt. In the 1760s they built a new summer palace in the Hungarian marshes that included a theatre in which plays and operas were staged. Haydn stayed with the family for thirty years as their director of music (Kapellmeister). He was in charge of the court orchestra, leading it from the violin or keyboard instrument, and supervised the annual season of opera productions, which included more than a dozen composed by himself. He also wrote small-scale chamber music and church music including splendid settings of the Mass for singers and orchestra – Austria, unlike most German-speaking states, had remained Roman Catholic. Haydn’s employer for most of this period, Prince Nikolaus Esterházy, was an enthusiastic music-lover and amateur musician who gave Haydn free rein to compose.

The prince held the right to all of Haydn’s compositions, but his music circulated widely in manuscript copies, and was published from time to time. Eventually Haydn was allowed to write for outside commissions and to sell to publishers. The result was that he soon became the most famous composer in Europe, even though he was isolated in the Esterházy palaces. Haydn himself acknowledged that being ‘cut off from the world’ had its advantages. With the support of the prince, and

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