The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  Handel has been described as “the greatest assimilator of pre-existing material in the history of music.” What this means is that he was a magpie, who borrowed or stole—mainly from Italian composers—theme after theme, even whole movements, reworking them as his own. In his oratorio Israel in Egypt, no fewer than sixteen of the thirty-nine tunes rely (in some cases heavily) on themes devised by other composers. Handel invariably adds his own brand of grace and polished simplicity.4

  For many people, professional musicians in particular, Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) is the greatest composer the world has seen. In contrast to Handel, he never left Germany, remaining for many years as the cantor at St. Thomas’s Church in Leipzig. Hardly any of his music was published in his lifetime, his reputation being less that of a composer and more that of an organist and improviser at the keyboard.5 Practically, Bach played an important part in the development of the organ and had his instruments modified to meet his wishes. He was fortunate, too, in living in the great age of baroque organ builders, men such as Arp Schnitger (1648–1718) and the well-known Silberman family. Andreas Silberman, who begat the tradition, designed and built the Strasbourg Cathedral organ (1714–16), while his brother Gottfried did the same for the cathedral at Freiberg in Saxony in 1714. Gottfried brought the pianoforte to Germany after its invention in Florence by Bartolomeo Cristofori.

  Bach’s ability to juggle themes, to state thesis and antithesis, to explore a melody in diverse directions, returning almost unnoticed to the main thread, is a form of musical weaving unparalleled in human achievement, not just in its technical intricacy, which went—goes—beyond anything anyone else has ever been able to do, but because at the same time it retains and maintains emotional richness and satisfaction. Nor should we overlook his formal innovations: under his guidance, the harpsichord was transformed from an accompaniment to a virtuoso solo instrument.6

  Though Johann Sebastian was a genius by any standard, in the midand late eighteenth century the name of Bach that most people knew was Carl Philipp Emanuel (1714–88), one of a number of talented musician-sons, who included Wilhelm Friedman (1710–84), the eldest, a composer of church cantatas and keyboard concertos, and Johann Christian (1735–82), the “London Bach,” who spent several years by the Thames and penned a score of Italian operas and concertos.

  Everyone knows a little bit about the Bachs but at much the same time there was in Germany another group of composers known as the Mannheim school, a talented ensemble who helped to make up the orchestra of Elector Karl Theodor, Count Palatine and Duke of Bavaria (1724–99) at Mannheim. It was there that full orchestral scores were first developed, with parts written out and individually exploited. This innovation is regarded as the birth of the modern era as far as orchestral music is concerned.

  THE ORIGINS OF GRAND OPERA

  Until the middle of the eighteenth century, in Germany as in England and in France, Italian opera was dominant. Libretti were invariably in Italian, and singers, whether or not they were Italian themselves (and they usually were, however bad), were imported to sing the principal roles, complete with “stereotypical Italian gestures.”7 Toward the end of the eighteenth century, this began to change. This period saw the spread of the comic opera, known as the Singspiel, one feature of which was spoken dialogue in the vernacular (i.e., German in Germany), so that the interpolated songs were also in the vernacular. This practice reached near perfection in Mozart’s 1782 opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio), but the new form actually owed more to the ideas of Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714–98).

  Gluck, almost single-handedly, took on the Italian idea of opera, identifying a new approach and composing a set of powerful works which embodied his new vision. He introduced his new practice in Orfeo ed Euridice, in Vienna in 1762, but it was with Alceste, another “Italian” opera on a classical subject, that he wrote his celebrated preface, setting out his new philosophy.8 He argued that the singers should confine their vocal displays so as to highlight and develop the course of the dramatic action rather than launch into virtuosi fireworks for the sake of it; he also argued that the overture should be “a proper emotional preparation” for the drama, “not just a set of tunes presented while the audience was finding their seats” above all, he insisted that the music should serve the needs of the text to intensify the dramatic effect. This is another of those ideas that seem unexceptional to us today, but in its time it was very controversial and Gluck’s view prevailed only because his operas achieved such dramatic intensity that it became obvious that what he said was right. Harold Schonberg commented, “One can reasonably claim that the tradition of grand opera in the modern theatre begins with Gluck.”

  FOUR GIANTS

  In Italy, the period of the “High Renaissance” refers to those thirty years, 1497–1527, when three artists—Raphael, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci—were all supremely active. In the German renaissance the equivalent period was the last twenty-five years or so of the eighteenth century, when four magnificent musical giants—geniuses—emerged whose pre-eminence lies beyond dispute and who set the stage for the great century of German music which followed. Indeed, we may regard the following hundred years as the greatest century of all time in the history of composing.9

  Born into a poor family in Lower Austria, Franz Joseph Haydn (1732–1800) was a choirboy at St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna until he was seventeen and a music teacher until his mid-twenties. The turning point in his life came in 1761, when he entered the service of Prince Paul Anton von Esterházy. Haydn continued as kapellmeister at Esterháza for the next three decades, until 1790, and they were without question golden years. The family was the most enlightened of patrons and, under them, Haydn produced his brilliant series of symphonic and chamber music triumphs, which gained him an international reputation. This reputation took him to London in the 1790s, where he wrote twelve of his finest symphonies. Despite being more in the public eye now, he rejoined the Esterházys and, during his later years in Vienna, produced his great string quartets, op. 76 and op. 77, and the two oratorios Die Schöpfung (The Creation) and Die Jahreszeiten (The Seasons).10 Haydn’s output includes more than a hundred symphonies, some fifty concertos, eighty-four string quartets, forty-two pianoforte sonatas, a variety of masses, operas, and other pieces for various solo instruments. His brilliance has a familiar, unaffected quality. This may in part reflect his wide use of folk melodies—especially those from Croatia—which kept his music simple, direct and accessible. He was clear about his talent. “I was cut off from the world; and since there was no one to confuse or trouble me, I was forced to become original.”11

  Despite his brilliance as an orchestral composer, Haydn himself had hope of writing a great opera. It was never to be realized, though there are, in The Creation, moments where this possibility is hinted at. It was instead Mozart who shone in that vein. Haydn and Mozart met several times in the last decade of the latter’s life (Mozart died in 1791). Comparing their output, it is clear each influenced the other, so much so that, as Malcolm Pasley says, “run-of-the-mill Haydn is barely distinguishable from run-ofthe-mill Mozart.” At their greatest, on the other hand, the two composers are unmistakable.

  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s short life (1756–91) was very different from that of Haydn. He was born into a cultured musical family in which his father, Leopold (whose works are still occasionally heard today), was a musician at the court of the archbishop of Salzburg. Wolfgang was an infant prodigy, “a prodigy among prodigies”: he could play the pianoforte at three and could invent short compositions at five. At seven he added the violin to the piano, accompanying his sister, Maria Anna, known as Nannerl, and together they were taken by their father on a series of sensational tours of European cities (he was eight when they started and eleven when they finished). Mozart wrote his first opera, La finta semplice, when he was twelve. He was appointed court musician at Salzburg and later at Vienna and, like Haydn, lived much of his car
eer under a patron, many of his works being composed for particular court functions (this is true, for instance, of the three great string quartets, K. 575, K. 589, and K. 590). Mozart was nothing if not practical, and other works were written for specific outstanding performers, as with the clarinet concerto, written for the virtuoso Anton Stadler, the leading performer of the time on what was then still a new instrument.12

  For musicologists, it is Mozart’s development of the solo part that comprises his most distinctive contribution. Traditionally, in the early eighteenth century, in a concerto the musical argument was passed back and forth between the soloist and the orchestra, a principle originally derived from the concerto grosso, in which a group of soloists is pitched against the orchestra. Mozart evolved the independence of the solo instrument by increasing the virtuosity required to play his beautiful themes. It was also under his guidance that the concerto acquired three movements, which became standard. The first movement was generally an allegro, followed by a second, slow movement, terminating with a rondo. This too became a standard pattern throughout the nineteenth century.

  Despite the popularity of his classical concertos, it is Mozart’s piano concertos (twenty-five of them) and his last three great symphonies—no. 39 in E-flat major (K. 543), no. 40 in G minor (K. 550), and no. 41 in C major (the Jupiter, K. 551)—that are generally regarded as the most beautiful music the world has to offer. For many people, however, even they pale alongside his achievements in opera. “In opera he had—many would say has—no equal.”13

  It may have been Gluck who formally and originally spelled out what the new form of opera was trying to achieve, but it was Mozart who fulfilled the new ideal better—incomparably better—than anyone else.14 In Mozart, musical characterization is so vivid and reflects and amplifies the text so much that it produces a psychological depth to his characters that is simply nonexistent in earlier composers, a depth from which the drama emerges “directly and urgently,” so that the music itself is the means by which motivation is conveyed. Arguably, it is in the greatest of his German operas, Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), composed and first produced in the last year of his life, that Mozart achieves his most sublime work. If Haydn could rival him in instrumental virtuosity and Beethoven, as we shall see, in emotional depth, in the coloratura arias of the Queen of the Night there is something that has no counterpart anywhere.15

  Haydn, Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) are often pooled together as the “first Vienna school” and, to be sure, like Haydn and Mozart, Beethoven died in Vienna. But there is no real sense in which these three formed a Viennese school with common artistic aims or even common methods.

  Beethoven, born in Bonn, came from a family of musicians, as Mozart did. His father and grandfather had been professional players at the court of the Elector of Cologne. At the age of twenty-two Beethoven studied with Haydn in Vienna. After that, he gave lessons to the children of aristocratic families, but he always wanted to be a composer and gradually acquired fame in that direction.16

  Beethoven had an unhappy private life and that, perhaps, made his music different from that of Bach or Mozart. The mastery, mystery, and perfection of Bach and Mozart are like polished gems in their cool, classical beauty. “Theirs is the music of the gods, but Beethoven—his is the music of man, of his suffering, his impatience, his exhilaration, confronting the world and yet affirming it at the same time…The progress of [Beethoven’s] music is a passage to human greatness…a musical achievement which stands unchallenged as a monument to the mind of man.”17

  Beethoven’s output may be understood as falling into three periods. Before 1800 his works show the influence of Haydn. In 1800 the Piano Concerto no. 1, op. 15 and the First Symphony op. 21 appeared and this marks the emergence of the Beethoven with which the average concert-goer is most familiar. In the First Symphony Beethoven’s innovation in replacing the minuet of the third movement with a more lively scherzo, completed by a final allegro, vastly heightened the tension of the work, setting out Beethoven’s distinctive voice: tension-filled movement and restless passion. It is this restlessness that characterizes the middle period of Beethoven’s life: the first eight symphonies, the five piano concertos, the violin concerto, the opera Fidelio, the piano sonatas, including the Appassionata and the Waldstein. Beethoven was above all an instrumental composer. He once said, “I always hear my music on instruments, never on voices.”18

  As magnificent as all this was, it was in the final period of his life that Beethoven produced his greatest music, by common consent some of the greatest music in the world. “All music leads up to Beethoven and all music leads away from him,” says Mumford Jones. This is the period of the Ninth (Choral) Symphony, the Missa Solemnis, the last three piano sonatas and the Diabelli Variations for the piano, and the last five string quartets.19 After a life of turbulence, movement, and conflict, ending in his tragic deafness, Beethoven’s late music shows a serenity and a redemption that the composer never attained elsewhere in his life.

  Just as Haydn had excelled in the symphonic form, Mozart in opera, and Beethoven in instrumental music, so Schubert—the last of the four great Viennese masters—excelled in song.

  Franz Schubert (1797–1828), who was born in Vienna and lived all his life there, had an even shorter life than Mozart, dying at thirty-one. Yet he managed to be one of the most prolific of composers.20 He never had the benefit of aristocratic patrons and lived entirely as a freelancer (as we would say). In the precocity of his musical talents he rivaled Mozart and began composing at an early age. But he did not attract attention like Mozart did and it was not until a group of his friends published twenty of his songs at their own expense in 1821 (when he was twenty-four) that he began to be noticed. By that stage he had composed seven of his nine symphonies, the string trio, the Trout Quintet, and several operas and masses. Many of his works were never performed in his lifetime, and many others were published only posthumously.21

  But it is for his Lieder (songs) that Schubert is chiefly known. Here too he was prolific—six hundred songs, including seventy-one settings of poems by Goethe and forty-two by Schiller. Despite his choice of Goethe and Schiller, Schubert was not particularly astute in his choice of verse; still, his music showed an unparalleled ability to use a tune to go beyond a mere “setting” and devise instead its musical equivalent. In doing so he elevated the piano accompaniment to a level it had never reached before, “a level for which the term accompaniment is no longer adequate.” 22

  The final new elements in music making (as opposed to listening, considered in the next section) were introduced by Carl Maria von Weber (1786–1826). Weber had a diseased hip and walked with a limp but he was a virtuoso of the guitar and an excellent singer, until he damaged his voice by accidentally drinking a glass of nitric acid. He was summoned to Dresden to take control of the opera house there and made the conductor (himself) the single most dominant force, setting a fashion that continues to this day. He too worked hard to counter the contemporary craze for Italian opera, based mainly on the works of Rossini. It was thanks to Weber that a German operatic tradition emerged that was to culminate in Wagner.23 Weber’s own opera Der Freischütz, first performed in 1821, with Heinrich Heine in the audience, opened up a new world. In Der Freischütz the orchestra now became far more than a background factor for the voices. The strings and wind sections, for example, were co-opted to express their own individuality, to add mood and color. This advance allowed more scope for the conductor to shape the operatic experience. Opera had, more or less, achieved the form we now know.

  MUSIC AS PHILOSOPHY

  The standard “backbone” of classical music consists today of Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms—all German. This backbone emerged first, in Germany, at the turn of the nineteenth century and continued throughout the 1800s, with only Hector Berlioz, Frédéric Chopin, Tchaikovsky, and Verdi among the great composers who were not German.

  But musical produ
ction is only half the picture. Just as the efflorescence of painting in the Italian Renaissance is now understood against the commercial and religious tendencies of the time, so in Germany in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, musical listening, musical consumption, musical understanding, were affected and influenced by the prevailing Idealistic philosophy. This is a long way from how we conceive the musical experience today.

  A completely new understanding of the arts—and in particular music—emerged in Germany at the end of the eighteenth century. Listening, as Mark Evans Bonds has shown, took on a new seriousness, in particular in relation to instrumental music.24

  At that time, the symphony was comparatively new. It emerged only in the 1720s, a development of the opera overture, itself often called a “symphony” at the time and a practice that did not die out until the 1790s.25 Until 1800 or thereabouts, the symphony was much less important than the opera, and even Kant, notoriously, in the Critique of Judgment, dismissed instrumental music as “more pleasure than culture” (“mehr Genuss als Kultur”), on a par, he said, with wallpaper. He was impressed by the ability of music to move listeners but since instrumental music contained no ideas (because it used no words), he thought its effects must be transitory “which would, in time, dull the spirit.”26 His views were widely shared, but around the turn of the century the status of the symphony underwent a profound change.

  One reason was the gradual shift from private to public performances, considered earlier. The wider audiences had wider tastes and consisted of the newly emerging middle classes eager to educate and improve themselves. Equally important—if not more so in the long run—were the changing attitudes toward the nature of art, in particular the relationship that came to be perceived between music and philosophy. This transformed the act of listening.27

  This new aesthetic, which began to value instrumental music, was directly derived from Idealism, in which it was argued that the benefits to be obtained from art needed much more than “idle reception” but, rather, activity. Any given artwork, any product of genius, reflected a higher ideal realm that listeners had to work on, to play their part in. The rapture of music, the extent to which we are “carried away” during a performance, the “forgetting of the self,” became for many the first stage in the journey toward this other, higher realm. Beethoven himself believed that art could be a bridge between the earthly and the divine.28