Kate M.
Prehistory:
Music and the Enlightenment in Vienna
The Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries

The Enlightenment is often depicted as a placid period, devoid of unrest. This image is an unrealistic one, in light of the eras of revolution and disintegration of social order that lay on either side of it. The seventeenth century marked an era of civil war and political disintegration, while in the nineteenth century rebellion ignited, starting with the French Revolution, and spread throughout Europe. The eighteenth century was an era sometimes called the “age of optimism,”(1) because of its ignorance of the tensions that lay below its seemingly tranquil surface.

Many of the Enlightenment’s tensions derived from class struggles. After a period of seventeenth century Absolutism, preceded by feudalism, a new bourgeois order began to emerge. These three orders formed a triangle of fear. The bourgeois feared the absolutist state and its limitations, and those who believed in the absolutist state feared the chaos of medieval Europe. In fact, just as the fear of Marxist Communism dominated the nineteenth century, so did the fear of chaos in eighteenth century Europe.

The eighteenth century Hapsburg Empire embodied the above class tensions. It was torn between economic freedom and the traditional institutions of social cohesion. During the reigns of monarchs Maria Theresa and her son, Joseph II (1740 - 1790), a reform battle was launched against the extensive power of the Church and the feudal nobility. These reforms (such as the opening of birth houses and the abolishment of serfdom in 1781) stimulated the Austrian economy, helping capitalism emerge, led by the bourgeois. The battle against the power of traditional institutions helped to lead to social and economic freedom and individualism. However, there were those who believed that this freedom and individualism undermined the power of the state and created a society more vulnerable to the grasps of medieval chaos. Thus, the Enlightenment was a period of great contradiction, longing for stability and order, but at the same time, petrified that the institution of this order would replace social freedoms.

The reforms of Joseph II were highly liberal and based on many of the social freedoms and ideals that drove the Enlightenment, such as religious toleration, legal equality, and individual freedom. His support of these ideals was shown first in his instituting of urban birthing houses that took in and raised illegitimate children, his Edict of Toleration in 1781 that gave rights to people of many religions, his abolishment of serfdom in 1781, and his establishment of the University of Vienna where a peasant could become a member of the civil service through scholarships and fellowship programs. This university was one of Joseph II’s most effective tools in encouraging the rise of the middle class. Most of all, because this kind of education was available to more than the aristocracy, Vienna came to harbor an “enlightened” body of intellectuals from all classes. The musician became one of the most respected professions. Musicians played for the court and, increasingly throughout the eighteenth century, for the public. Music became a part of the everyday life of Vienna, and by the early nineteenth century, it was a mandatory part of every child’s education.

Previous to the Enlightenment, the most common musical style in Vienna was the galant style which consisted of bland peasantries. This music was used primarily for education and entertainment. It was rated “impersonal to a fault,”(2) and devoid of feeling. However, during the 1760s and 70s, a more individualistic style of music emerged. This music was written more for the sake of art than for the sake of necessity of it and allowed flexibility for musical progress. Some examples of this music are: sentimentalism, used by Piccinni (an Italian opera composer), the expressionism of C.P.E Bach, a style wrought with passion and dissonance, and the emotional naturalism of Gluck. All of these forms help to make up the chequered musical history of Vienna. This history, however, would not be complete without the music of Mozart. He moved to Vienna in 1781, at the beginning of the reign of Joseph II, and performed for the court, salons, and various benefit concerts. He set the precedent for what we think of as “classical” music today.

Mozart’s music is not dissonant as is C.P.E. Bach’s. He is famous for following many of the formal rules of music, and being careful not to overstep his boundaries.

... as the passions, violent or no, must never be expressed in such a
way as to disgust, and as music, even in the most terrible situations,
must never offend the ear, I have gone from F (the key in which the aria
is written) not into a remote key but into a related one,

he once wrote in a letter.(3) However, his music is extraordinarily expressive, despite its formality.
His medium through which to express himself was contrapuntal music, a style originated by J.S. Bach and Handel in the 1780s. Contrapuntal music was a more systematic / scholastic / sacred approach to music, as opposed to the more melodic / secular galant styles. Mozart used contrapuntal music not only to express feelings, but to reflect the tensions present in eighteenth century Vienna. As Nicholas Till writes,

Contrapuntal music may have carried symbolic significance for Mozart.
In Baroque polyphony the individual elements are often rationally subordinated
by a homogeneity of tempo and rhythm to the overall dictates of the whole; an
apt paradigm for the procedures of the absolutist state. But in Mozart’s use of
counterpoint, the superabundance of individual melodic themes precludes their
submergence and loss of identity within a despotic polyphonic texture;
counterpoint becomes analogous to the interrelationship of free and equal individuals
in society. (4)

What Till means is that prior to the contrapuntal, music was pedantic and governed by strict rules, somewhat like the government before the Enlightenment. However, with the coming of the new era, music changed and became more of a dialogue between instruments, and each element was valued for its aesthetic value and individual sound. Possibly, this new dialogue reflected the new relationship between the individual and his society in eighteenth century Austria.

Two of Mozart’s operas also seem to echo the politics and thinking in Vienna during this period. The Marriage of Figaro, written in 1786 seemed to be analogous to urbanization’s affect on the role of marriage. With the industrial revolution in Vienna, many of the men started working in factories while the women stayed at home. This less fiscal approach to marriage brought about the feeling, in the middle class, that marriage for money or rank was immoral and that marriage should be associated with romantic love. The Marriage of Figaro features Count Almavia and Countess Rosina who marry for love instead of convenience. This opera is not only significant for what it appears to say about the time in which it was written, but for its role as propaganda for this kind of Bohemian thinking.
The other opera that does this job is The Magic Flute (or in German: Die Zauberflotte!), written in 1791. In 1728, Alexander Pope wrote his famous lines from The Dunciad,

She comes! she comes! The sable throne behold
Of Night primeval and of Chaos old!....
Philosophy that lean’d on Heaven before,
Shrinks to her second cause and is no more.
Religion blushing veils her sacred fires
And unawares morality expires...
Lo thy dread Empire, CHAOS! is restor’d;
Light dies before thy uncreating word:
Thy hand great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And Universal Darkness buries All. (5)

These lines by Pope demonstrate the intense fear eighteenth century Vienna associated with chaos, and it is this poem that Carl Ludwig Giesecke and Emanuel Shikaneder looked to when they created the character of the Queen of the Night for Mozart’s opera. The Magic Flute popularizes the hatred and fear of anarchy and confirms art’s role as a vehicle for the promotion of popular thinking.

Music was an effective vehicle in Vienna because it was so popular. All kinds of music could be found there from Italian opera, to guitar players, to violin players who played their instruments upside down. (6) The social season in which concerts were usually performed stretched from fall to spring. Occasional concerts took place outside of this season for benefits, holidays, deaths, and weddings. The concert season was determined by the liturgical calendar of the Catholic church. Most concerts took place on Sundays, because of the establishment of close ties between music and religion.

The first official concert hall was built in 1831. Before this event, concerts were usually performed in two of Vienna’s theaters, the Burgtheater of German drama, and the Karntnertortheater of opera and ballet where Beethoven premiered his ninth symphony. Performances in ballrooms and the Aula for the University of Vienna were also common. The function of concerts in Vienna was primarily one of experimentation. The concert hall was a forum for all musical instruments, including the introduction of the czakan, noseflute, keyed trumpet, and pedal harp.(7) It was in these halls that musicians developed new methods to play old pieces. Thus, the concert hall in early nineteenth century Vienna popularized music, fostered experimentation, and promoted progress.

Also new to the city was an entourage of musical societies. One of the most important ones was the Society of the Friends of Music (Gesellschaft der Musickfreunde) (8) founded in 1818. This society built a conservatory and organized individual concerts for its members. Its orchestra consisted of professional musicians as well as students and talented amateurs.

Increasingly,” Alice M. Hanson wrote, “the educated middle classes became
the guardians of Austro - German art music. Through their concerts, conservatory,
and writings, they began to define high art in music. Consequently, they shaped
what we consider today to be standard concert repertory and laid the groundwork
and biases for the new field of music criticism.(9)

In this way, the middle class and the musical societies brought together all the social groups, while educating the public, popularizing music, and paving a sturdy path for the future.
Salons in Vienna were important to the publication of the music of many famous composers such as Mozart, who played much of his work at Sweiten’s salon for its premiere. They were also forums for unknown artists to be able to perform their work without the pressure of the church’s eye on them. Salons were the factor that established music as a leisure activity as opposed to an educational or experimentational one. Vienna’s most famous salon was the salon of Fanny Arnstein, a Jewish Prussian woman from a rich Berlin family. Because of her wealth, she was able to throw balls and midnight soupees at the salon and provide orchestras as accompaniment.

A more functional form of music in the early nineteenth century was the religious music used in funerals, processions, and masses. Music in Synagogues was also an attraction. Tourists often visited Vienna’s churches to listen to music, as many of the pieces performed there had been written by Hadn, Mozart, Salieri, Priendl, and countless other famous musicians. One of the most famous religious songs ever written, Ave Maria, was written in Vienna by Schubert.

The musical culture of Vienna produced an outburst of artistic genius that has lasted up to today. The era of the Enlightenment certainly provided the conditions for a musical revolution against the bland peasantries of the galant style, just as an intellectual movement had risen against the colorless politics of the aristocracy and the absolutist state during this period. The role music came to play in the lives of the Viennese people is representative of their intellectual and educational progress. It is also representative of the general feeling of the need for social liberties and entertainment for all, not just the emperor. Many of the themes in the music of the Enlightenment also emphasized the newly important relationship of the individual to society. Most of all, the ideals of eighteenth century Vienna survived the next two centuries, because they live on in its music.

ENDNOTES

1 Nicholas Till, Mozart and the Enlightenment (Faber &Faber: London: 1992), p. 1

2 Nicholas Till. Mozart and the Enlightenment (Faber & Faber: London: 1992), p. 175

3 Nicholas Till. Mozart and the Enlightenment (Faber & Faber: London: 1992), p. 175

4 Nicholas Till. Mozart and the Enlightenment (Faber & Faber: London: 1992), p. 176

5 Nicholas Till. Mozart and the Enlightenment (Faber & Faber: London: 1992), p. 2

6 Raymond Erickson, Schubert’s Vienna. (Yale University Press: London: 1997), p. 98

7 Raymond Erickson, Schubert’s Vienna. (Yale University Press: London: 1997), p. 98

8 Raymond Erickson, Schubert’s Vienna. (Yale University Press: London: 1997), p. 104

9 Raymond Erickson, Schubert’s Vienna. (Yale University Press: London: 1997), p. 107

Bibliography:

Bernstein, Leonard. The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard. Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, 1976.

Erickson, Raymond. Schubert’s Vienna. Yale University Press, London, 1997.

Johnson, Paul. The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815 - 1830. Harper Collins Publishers, New York, 1991.

Schonberg, Harold C. The Lives of the Great Composers. WW Norton & Company, New York, 1970.

Till, Nicholas. Mozart and the Enlightenment: Truth, Virtue, and Beauty in Mozart’s Operas. Faber & Faber, London, 1992.

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