The Story of Music: From Babylon to the Beatles: How Music Has Shaped Civilization

by Howard Goodall

  Haydn, Beethoven and Mozart all lived through the American and French Revolutions, and Mozart diced briefly with political jeopardy when he composed an operatic setting of a banned play, Beaumarchais’s The Marriage of Figaro, in 1786. The widespread alarm, though, that gripped the European aristocracy – the paymasters and patrons of musicians, remember – is hard to detect in the bulk of Haydn’s and Mozart’s symphonies, sonatas and concertos, and in the early work of Beethoven. The overwhelming impression is of an ordered, untroubled world. It is as if composers felt their job was not to join the revolutionaries, but to keep the aristocracy calm. ‘All will be well,’ they seem to be saying. ‘We will create a virtual world of order and harmony.’

  Listening to the playfully vivacious music Haydn was writing in 1793, his ninety-ninth symphony, while the Terror raged in Paris and agents of the mob were cutting off Marie-Antoinette’s head, makes one wonder if he even knew what was going on in the outside world. (Which of course he did: the execution of France’s Austrian queen deprived Haydn of his most famous and outspoken admirer.) Even allowing for the traditional plea of composers to be immune from political events irrelevant to their art, Haydn’s symphonies sound as if they were written in a vacuum. The charismatic composer-conductor who championed and oversaw the premières of Haydn’s six ‘Paris’ symphonies (nos. 82–7) between 1785 and 1786, Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-George, was denounced and imprisoned by revolutionary tribunal in 1793. Bologne, the first mixed-race colonel in the French Army, was thereupon abandoned by all his previous patrons and friends, and died in impoverished obscurity. Meanwhile, Haydn was setting Beethoven counterpoint exercises while on summer retreat at the palace of Eisenstadt.

  The happiest months of Haydn’s life, according to the composer himself, were those spent being treated like a celebrity in England, in 1791–2 and again in 1794–5. The clamour surrounding his appearances there, much written-up at the time and oft-quoted since, should not blind us to the reality that, when we talk of fame in this context, it means ‘among the rich and privileged’. Haydn was fêted by the likes of Messrs Darcy and Bingley rather than by the Bennets and Lucases. The Bennets, had they lived in London and as a special treat visited an opera house or theatre, would more likely have queued to see Colman and Arnold’s immensely successful comic opera Inkle and Yarico, which also delighted audiences in New York, Dublin, Jamaica, Philadelphia, Boston and Calcutta in the last decade of the eighteenth century. Inkle and Yarico, an interracial love story set in Barbados, in which the heroine is saved from slavery, not only reminds us that attitudes among the middle classes were not as instinctively racist as we might suppose, but also falls into a long tradition of popular entertainment reflecting or influencing public opinion – in this case on the subject of slavery – with greater efficacy than its more sophisticated equivalent. John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera was an early example of this, and later the music hall songs of Arthur Lloyd, and Sam Cooke’s ‘A Change is Gonna Come’. (Before we leave Samuel Arnold, composer of Inkle and Yarico, organist of Westminster Abbey and yet another musical Freemason, I feel compelled to report that he holds the British record for the musical publication with the longest single word in its title: his 1781 comic opera The Baron Kinkvervankotsdorsprakingatchdern.)

  Other than during his sojourns in England, Haydn’s long career was mostly unaffected by what the public thought of his music. The reason for this was that he worked for an aristocrat, Prince Esterházy, at his private houses. Haydn would be the last major composer for a hundred and fifty years to whom this artistic luxury was granted without question, but the price he paid for this security was being treated as a glorified footman by the prince. In the ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’ world of eighteenth-century European nobility, the in-house composer was definitely Downstairs, even one with an international reputation as prestigious as Haydn’s. In any case, this sort of arrangement was on its way out: between Haydn and his young friend Mozart lies the fault line that divides the old world of musical patronage and the modern concept of the freelance composer offering his or her wares to an open, public market.

  Unlike Haydn, Mozart needed the public to enjoy his music in order not to starve, carving out for himself in Vienna what we would call a portfolio career, involving public performing, teaching, writing on commission, composing for the theatre and producing a considerable body of dance music. This may explain why Mozart’s music is so full of catchy melodies. Melody was a way to win an audience’s heart, whether that audience was in the public gallery at Vienna’s unstuffy Freihaus-Theater auf der Wieden, singing along to The Magic Flute in 1791, or the cream of the Habsburg ruling class at the Imperial Court Theatre (Burgtheater) chatting their way through Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Harem).

  Mozart was by far more daring than Haydn, but then he was also younger. The main difference between Haydn’s style and Mozart’s is really quite simple: if you can instantly remember the tune, it’s by Mozart. A brutal assessment, but a true one. Technically, Mozart’s approach was similar to Haydn’s – the same orchestra, the same chords, the same architecture – but he had the melodic gift of a god. If he composed it, a tune sings like no other. Try, if you will, this little test: listen to the first thirty or so seconds of the aria for the Chinese princess Angelica, ‘Palpita adogni istante’, from Haydn’s opera Orlando Paladino, first performed at the Eszterháza Palace in December 1782. The conductor and expert on eighteenth-century music Nikolaus Harnoncourt describes the opera as ‘one of the best works in eighteenth-century music theatre’ – praise indeed from an impeccably knowledgeable source. The opera was the best-liked of all Haydn’s fifteen operas during his own lifetime. But play the opening statement just once and then try to sing it back to yourself. Then listen to the first fifteen seconds of Mozart’s aria ‘Welche Wonne, Welche Lust’ from his opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail of the same year. Unless something has distracted you in the meantime, I bet you can sing back that opening Mozart phrase immediately. It isn’t better than the Haydn; it is just catchier.

  Something else emerges in Mozart, though, beyond the sublime melodies, that Haydn’s music does not anticipate. Mozart, as well as being intrigued by the hidden curiosities and mystical secrets of Freemasonry, unashamedly celebrated in The Magic Flute, was fascinated by the supernatural, and by what we would call psychological motive.

  In the decorously polite world that Mozart inhabited but never wholeheartedly embraced – aristocratic Vienna of the late-eighteenth century – his operatic visions of heaven and hell, of the spiritual and the carnal, allow us to catch a glimpse of something very different and surprising. To be sure, people sensed he was an oddball at the time, disconcertingly gifted, outspoken, irreverent – in short, a strange mix of child and sage. Indeed, rather like Michael Jackson in our own time, Mozart’s childhood had been forfeited to make way for a career as a freakishly talented boy prodigy to be touted around an adult world. Both artists retained in their grown-up writing a sense of the fragility and potential pitfalls of close relationships. One of Mozart’s earliest friendships was with the young English prodigy Thomas Linley whom he met and befriended in Italy. There is a famous painting of the two boys together in Florence in 1770, Mozart at the piano, Linley with the violin. Mozart was devastated when his childhood friend was killed in a boating accident just eight years later, the same year as the death of Mozart’s mother.

  Thus, when we glimpse life’s darker side in Mozart’s music, or sense loneliness or insecurity – as in the desperately sad middle (slow) movement of his twenty-third piano concerto of 1786 – it is as if a veil has momentarily slipped. Other composers, especially Beethoven and Berlioz who followed in Mozart’s wake, do little else than expose their internal turmoil all over the music, as though they are in a modern-day self-help group of composers with personality disorders. Mozart’s emotional subtext, on the other hand, is disguised beneath the sheen of decorum and poise required of an eighteenth-century artisan. H
is dignified compassion in the face of life’s challenges makes his music irresistible, even when it is tranquil. We have responded to this distant Austrian’s voice across the years and the continents so spontaneously because his music seems simply to flow out of him, intuitively, without cynicism or intellectual pretension. Like the Gainsborough and Reynolds portraits painted during his lifetime, Mozart’s music says, ‘I will do my best to make this beautiful because that’s what life, at its best, can be.’ The 1770s and ’80s may have been dirty, unhealthy and dangerous for anyone but the most privileged, and life was grim and unfair, but it wouldn’t have occurred to Mozart, nor Gainsborough or Reynolds for that matter, to reproduce that misery. They wanted to ennoble humanity. They succeeded.

  Much myth now surrounds Mozart, who was venerated in the nineteenth century as a kind of St John the Baptist to Beethoven’s Christ, and in the later twentieth century as an innocent vessel transmitting God’s message through music, sacrificing his health and ultimately his life in order to complete his final, incomprehensibly beautiful masterworks. Even in death he holds a quasi-religious significance for his devotees. If you visit Vienna’s Saint Marx cemetery, on the city’s outskirts in an undistinguished part of town, you can – if you have nothing better to do in that culturally plentiful capital – wander solemnly up its leaf-strewn gravel paths until you find the non-grave of Amadeus Mozart. I say non-grave, because his remains are not under the headstone that marks the spot. Indeed, the memorial plinth itself was constructed in more recent times to satisfy Mozart’s Grave tourists and is placed in what amounts to a random spot in the garden. Not only are the whereabouts of his bones not known but, along with many others, his remains were dug up after his death, possibly crushed to reduce their bulk, and reinterred somewhere else, location also unknown. There is a theory that his skull was implausibly identified by a local gravedigger in 1801, ten years after Mozart’s death, and that it eventually found its way to the vaults of the Mozart Foundation in Salzburg, but DNA tests have produced more or less the same divided outcome as with carbon-dating of the Turin Shroud: science says it’s impossible, ‘believers’ continue to hope.

  But worrying about this great composer’s remains is surely missing the point, as is the now two-hundred-year-old ‘mystery’ concerning Haydn’s skull, long since separated from his body and the object of scrutiny and ghoulish bounty-hunting worthy of Indiana Jones. Mozart left us far more poignant and permanent keepsakes of his existence than his bones: he left us his extraordinary music. What’s more, unlike the paintings bequeathed to posterity by Constable or Rembrandt, his music has not ossified, frozen for ever in time. Every time his music is performed it lives again, fresh, newly awoken, sometimes interpreted surprisingly or unexpectedly but always experienced in the here and now. This is music’s most spectacular conjuring trick. Far from dying, it is in a perpetual state of rebirth.

  What mattered to Mozart was that his music should be enjoyed, not that he should be worshipped or revered, and it is this quality of treasured delight that captures his age. His music, whether in the unutterably lovely slow movement of his clarinet concerto, or the majestic optimism of his Jupiter symphony, or the coming to life of a dead man’s statue in the concluding moments of Don Giovanni, or the heart-stopping delicacy of his later piano concertos, wants you – whoever and wherever you are – to feel good. That Beethoven changed the way society viewed composers should not cloud our judgement of his brilliant predecessor who sought and gave one thing: pleasure.

  It is not known definitively whether Mozart and Beethoven ever met, despite their lives overlapping by twenty-one years, but two more different artists, creatively or temperamentally, it is hard to imagine. While Mozart’s aim was to charm, seduce and occasionally tease his audiences, Beethoven’s mission was to confront them. With him, the composer as agent provocateur had arrived.

  Traditional histories like to equate Beethoven, the colossus of music in the early 1800s, with his contemporary Napoleon Bonaparte, revolutionary-turned-Emperor and serial military adventurer. This convenient comparison is given extra poignancy by Beethoven’s reference to the French despot in his momentous third symphony, these days known as the Eroica but originally dubbed the Bonaparte. In fact, neither the well-worn anecdote about a disenchanted Beethoven ‘scratching out’ the title page of his symphony bearing a dedication to Napoleon, nor the composer’s musical radicalism are quite what they seem.

  Beethoven wasn’t one composer but three. He started off as a Mozart clone with a flair for playing the piano, became a tormented version of Haydn, and ended up isolated from the world by deafness, composing music that was to baffle, bewitch and amaze every European musician of the next hundred years. Whatever you think of him, you cannot escape the fact that virtually everything that happened in nineteenth-century music in some way began with Beethoven. All roads lead from him.

  He comes to us saddled with a fair amount of baggage. He was a moody, complicated man, possibly suffering from some degree of clinical depression, who found himself in possession of musical talents even he couldn’t quite come to terms with. But ‘revolutionary’, the adjective often used of him, feels like the wrong word for a man who was fundamentally conservative, who rubbed shoulders with the political and aristocratic elite of his day and whose music, until quite near the end of his life, was well within the cultural mainstream of the early nineteenth century. As we see time and again, cutting-edge innovators like those of Beethoven’s youth were composers whose names are now mostly forgotten: Johann Dussek, Louis Spohr, Muzio Clementi, Étienne Méhul, François-Joseph Gossec… Beethoven’s genius was to convert their modernity into something that would, in due course, become the mainstream.

  Beethoven’s eighth piano sonata, known as the Pathétique, was written when he was twenty-eight and making a name for himself in Vienna. Compared to the music of his teacher Haydn or to Mozart, it seems much more dramatic and pianistic, almost to the point of theatricality, than anything they had written for the same instrument. In the context of 1790s Vienna, it sounds daring, emotionally charged and original. Beethoven, though, knew his contemporary music, and particularly the groundbreaking piano music of two London-based composers, Italian Muzio Clementi and Bohemian Johann Dussek. This pair were boldly pushing the virtuoso and expressive boundaries of the instrument, in consultation with the leading piano builder of the time: John Broadwood, another Londoner. Clementi’s and Dussek’s music was virtually unknown outside Britain, though, but Beethoven had found out about it and learnt from their innovations in style and playing technique.

  Seven years after composing his Pathétique sonata, Beethoven stopped sounding like Mozart or Dussek or Haydn and started creating music beyond what they had imagined. The first major sign that he was breaking away from established formulas was his Eroica symphony of 1804, which was a considerable challenge for audiences of the time, exciting and alarming his fellow Viennese in more or less equal measure. The Eroica deliberately sought to disrupt what an audience expected to hear in a symphony. Its first movement alone was roughly the length of a whole early Haydn symphony. For audiences reared on the regular, predictable patterns of Haydn and Mozart, the Eroica’s many noisy surprises would have been both titillating and bewildering. Even its opening two chords seem to be bellowing, ‘WAKE UP!’

  The story goes that Beethoven first composed the Eroica in honour of Napoleon, hero of the French revolutionary struggle, but that he scrubbed out Bonaparte’s name in a rage and replaced it with the inscription ‘Heroic Symphony… composed to celebrate the memory of a great man’, on hearing that Napoleon had contradicted his earlier appeals to liberty, equality and fraternity by proclaiming himself Emperor. His student and later biographer Ferdinand Ries claims to have heard Beethoven fume when hearing the news: ‘Is he too, then, nothing more than an ordinary human being? Now he, too, will trample on the rights of man, and indulge only his ambition!’ It may be that this oft-told anecdote underwent some layers of exaggeration a
s Beethoven’s fame spread – not least because Beethoven dedicated a mass to Napoleon six years later, even after the Emperor’s troops had besieged and bombarded Vienna, with Beethoven (and a dying Haydn) in it.

  Musicologists love to wax on about the ambitious first movement of the Eroica symphony, mainly because it is unusually long and complex, and provides fuel for seemingly endless analysis and scholarly scrutiny. Beethoven takes a relatively simple tune and builds from it a giant tapestry of ideas and musical meanderings. For me, though, it is not the first movement that carries the killer punch but the funeral march that follows it.

  What is different, and new, about this movement is not its structure, orchestration or technical bravado, but its attitude. Whereas both Haydn and Mozart aimed to reveal human emotions through the filter of a gentlemanly, well-bred composure, the funeral march in Eroica is remarkable for the unflinching grip of its mood. It is not at all fanciful to link the mournful quality of the ‘Marcia funebre’ – Beethoven had borrowed the idea of a funeral march from French revolutionary music, the first of its kind in a symphony – with Beethoven’s discovery during the months of composition that his deafness was becoming worse and would not be curable. There are many aspects of the movement that must have seemed strange to contemporary audiences. It seems to be restless, for one thing, as if looking for a resolution it never finds, moving briefly into a sunnier major key, then returning to its darker starting point, only to be churned around, experimented with and fragmented. It plunges into a period of Bachian counterpoint (fashionable, by that time, only in sacred choral settings, where its old-fashioned earnestness seemed appropriate), followed by an impassioned, busy episode, with flurrying strings and slower-moving woodwind. Finally, the processional march is recalled, this time disjointed, exhausted and spent: the tune announced so confidently at the beginning now unexpectedly disintegrates. So for the perplexed audiences who first heard it in 1804 and 1805, even the funeral march is denied its thundering climax, collapsing rather than concluding. Grief is grief, pain is pain, and music, Beethoven seems to be proclaiming, is the art best placed to confront such darkness. Within the next two decades or so, most of his educated contemporaries gradually came to the same conclusion. For the first time since the death of Bach, the music of the moment seemed to be attempting to portray more accurately the sadness and anxiety that people were actually experiencing.