The Beloved Vision: A History of Nineteenth Century Music

INTRODUCTION

A Difficult and Dangerous Undertaking

On the wall of the music-room of my children’s prep school in deepest Herefordshire in the 1990s was one of those time-line charts that simulate the flow of history in the form of a polyphony of overlapping lines. Music history began sparsely with Pérotin, Machaut, Dufay, then broadened out into the Renaissance – Josquin, Palestrina, Victoria, Tallis, Byrd, etc.: a well-populated era, it seemed. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, likewise, were busy times for music. But as the eighteenth century faded into the nineteenth there was a curious lull. In 1800, it turned out, there were only two composers worth mentioning: Haydn, still clinging on, and otherwise only Beethoven, thirty years old and monarch of all he surveyed. A few years into the new century things picked up again, but for a few short years it looked as if music history had practically died out, preserved only in the musical Noah’s Ark by a single pair of composers.

Beethoven’s superiority was certainly no myth. It was recognised in his own day by composers, performers, patrons and musical institutions all over Europe and even, from quite early on, America. In 1803, the Paris piano manufacturer Sébastien Érard sent him a piano as a gift that was also, of course, a promotional exercise. By 1808 Beethoven’s reputation outside Austria was so great that Napoleon’s brother Jérôme Bonaparte, the so-called king of Westphalia, invited him to take up the post of Kapellmeister in Kassel at a tempting salary of six hundred ducats (some sixty thousand pounds in today’s money), while in Vienna his standing was such that a trio of aristocratic patrons put up an equivalent annuity to stop him leaving.

Above all, Beethoven’s fame tended to act as a magnet for sweeping historical classifications, both in his lifetime and in the years that followed. Most notorious was E. T. A. Hoffmann’s description of him, in a contemporary review of the Fifth Symphony, as ‘a purely Romantic, and therefore truly musical, composer’ (because, for Hoffmann, music was ‘the most Romantic of all arts – one might almost say the only one that is purely Romantic’). Admittedly, Hoffmann also considered Haydn and Mozart to be Romantic, though his verbal portraits of their music suggest that their romanticism was largely in the mind of the writer. Haydn’s symphonies, for example, ‘lead us through endless, green forest-glades, through a motley throng of happy people. Youths and girls sweep past dancing the round… a world of love, of bliss, of eternal youth, as though before the Fall; no suffering, no pain; only sweet melancholy longing for the beloved vision floating far off in the red glow of evening.’ Mozart, on the other hand, ‘leads us deep into the realm of spirits. Dread lies all about us, but withholds its torments and becomes more an intimation of infinity.’¹

Hoffmann, as well as being one of the great novella and short-story writers of his day, was himself a composer and a knowledgeable music critic. His best-known opera, Undine (1816), though disappointing for anyone looking for the sources of Romantic music in the literary world of the early 1800s, is important as the first in a line of operas, songs and (eventually) instrumental works about water sprites who marry mortals against the best fairy advice and suffer the bitter consequences. There will be more to say about fairies; but it seems reasonably safe to assert, at this stage, that they are not a significant component of Beethoven’s music.

So does it make sense, at the start of a book about Romantic music, to think of Beethoven and his immediate predecessors as in this or any other sense Romantic? The answer is clearly yes, but only because the idea of romanticism is something altogether broader and richer than might be deduced from Hoffmann’s superbly imaginative definitions. To get at some kind of satisfactory image of what this much abused expression might signify in its particular application to music, we have somehow to get away from the habit of imposing on music our own emotional predilections and try to understand the nature and historical context of the phenomenon itself. After all, Hoffmann’s description could just as well apply to Monteverdi, Handel or Bach, or even Josquin des Prez or Palestrina, as to composers like Schumann or Berlioz or Wagner, of whom he naturally knew nothing but whom we think of as Romantic. His idea of music as the most purely Romantic art plainly comes from the fact that instrumental music, at least, lacks overt subject matter and therefore lends itself to having subject matter thrust upon it in the privacy of the listener’s mind. We can swoon to Brahms or Tchaikovsky, but we can also swoon, perhaps less dramatically, to Handel or Vivaldi. But if all ‘Romantic’ means is having the capacity to set us all swooning, we might as well pass on to some more interesting topic. Luckily, there is a little more to it than that.

It has seemed to me that the best way of exploring this complicated question would be through the entirely enjoyable process of writing a narrative history of what most of us think of as the Romantic epoch, very broadly defined; enjoyable, of course, because a lot of the research involved would be simply listening to an immense amount of music, including a good deal that, quite frankly, I had not heard before, and some that I barely knew existed. The nineteenth century was crucially a time of stylistic diversity, a time when a composer asserted his or her existential being through a recognisable, even idiosyncratic musical language, after several centuries during which composers were generally less concerned with self than with craftsmanship, and individuality emerged almost by accident, in small turns of phrase rather than wholesale linguistic contrasts. This is much truer for music than for literature, because music is less restricted by semantics; truer perhaps than for the visual arts, which, in the nineteenth century, were still largely tied to representation, or for the architectural design of buildings, which, after all, had to be lived in and to stay up.

Even within its seemingly rather strict grammatical rules, music turned out to be the most naturally deviant art form; the textbook rules proved less limiting than had been thought and could be broken without much damage as long as a coherent framework were preserved and could be perceived. I don’t want to characterise Romantic composers as a procession of irresponsible tearaways. All the composers in this book were conscientious artists who knew what they were doing and who took the risks they took with a clear intention and an understanding of the always precarious balance between expression and technique. But risk-taking – the braving of the unknown – was certainly an important part of what they wanted to do, and that is as true of Chopin and Verdi as it is of Berlioz and Wagner. Perhaps one can say that the riskiest thing of all for an artist, the baring of the soul in language that might collapse under the weight of its own emotion, is an essential part of Romantic music, independent of categories and ostensible subject matter. But it is certainly not the only part. The new, the original, the unexpected, the beautiful, the sublime, but also the intimate and domestic, what Germans call the gemütlich, the supremely brilliant and the supremely simple: there is a range to Romantic music that is absent from the music of earlier centuries, with all its perfection. These things bring with them imperfections, disasters as well as triumphs. Writing music, when you leave the safety and comfort of the well-trodden, well-mapped path, is a difficult and dangerous undertaking, and what could be more Romantic than that?

In what follows I have tried not to be dogmatic about terminology. The academic fraternity, of which I was once a fortunate member, would be careful to limit what was meant by romanticism. We would hear about various categories: the Individual, Nature, the Outcast, Magic, the Antique, Dreams, Nightmares, Insanity, Folk Tales and Poetry, Myth, the Exotic, the Artist as God, etc., categories into which it would be hard or in one or two cases impossible to fit several of the greatest composers in what Eric Hobsbawm called the long nineteenth century. Verbal categories can be met by verbal, less well by instrumental, music. Programme music can help bridge the gap, but only if we take its assurances on trust, since they can hardly be demonstrated beyond question. If, on the other hand, we start with Hoffmann’s idea and project it exclusively on to the music of his own time and the following hundred years or so, we may conclude that the issue is less about subject matter as such, more about freedom and individuality of style, allied to an increasing consciousness of self. More perhaps than in the other arts, the Romantic composer is the real subject of his own work, while any ostensible subject matter is merely its vehicle.

Most of this book has been written at a time when, for reasons that are all too well known, libraries have been closed, and research has mostly been limited to one’s own bookshelves, the vast but by no means unlimited resources of the internet, and the remarkable amenity of overnight book deliveries – expensive but occasionally life-saving. I have availed myself of all these aids; and perhaps it has even been a mercy, with a topic of this kind, to have been denied the kinds of research facility that would have resulted in a still more tiresomely detailed, perhaps more erudite, probably longer and certainly later text than the present one. This is, in other words, an armchair book which, I optimistically hope, will also be an armchair read, at least for those who love this music and would like a conspectus of how it all came about, why it took the form it did, and indeed what it actually amounts to.

1

Longing for Chaos

The literary origins of romanticism are well, if a shade too precisely, documented. The standard source, cited in every book on the subject, is Goethe’s early epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), whose hero shoots himself at the end of a long correspondence with a friend about his unhappy love for the daughter of the high steward of a local prince; she is engaged to another man and, in the course of the novel, marries him. Werther rapidly became a cult novel; it was said that young men of a sensitive disposition would dress like Werther, go around with copies of the book under their arms, and even – in one or two not very well attested cases – carry pistols and shoot themselves. But Goethe’s novel was only one of a number of books and plays of the 1770s and 1780s that portrayed the fate of the rejected poetic soul in a rational age. Werther is one kind of outcast, self-indulgent no doubt, but outcast none the less. Goethe’s own play of a year earlier, Götz von Berlichingen, is based on the memoirs of a real-life sixteenth-century soldier-poet, portrayed by Goethe as a mercenary of the soul who stands out against the authoritarian Holy Roman Empire and dies in prison predicting evil times and crying, ‘Freedom! Freedom!’

But Götz and Werther were only the latest manifestations of a growing reaction against the certainties of the Enlightenment, certainties so crisply summed up by Pope in his Essay on Man:

And, spite of Pride, in erring Reason’s spite,

One truth is clear, whatever is, is right.

One could even characterise romanticism, in the most general sense, as a search for ways out of a world in which everything is properly ordered and nothing may be questioned. This point was well made by the poet and critic August Wilhelm Schlegel in a series of lectures in the early 1800s, where he used the term for what seems to be the first time as an aesthetic category opposed to the neoclassicism of the eighteenth century. Thinking of the Greeks, he observes that

Ancient poetry and art is rhythmical nomos, a harmonious promulgation of the eternal legislation of a beautifully ordered world mirroring the eternal Ideas of things. Romantic poetry, on the other hand, is the expression of a secret longing for the chaos which is perpetually striving for new and marvellous births, which lies hidden in the very womb of orderly creation.¹

This is, admittedly, a somewhat Romantic definition of romanticism. The earlier Romantics were interested not so much in disorder as in different kinds of order that took power away from the social and political status quo and handed it over to the imagination of the artist or the philosopher. One could, for instance, take refuge in a historical time other than one’s own. Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) was a highly edited, amplified and partly rewritten compilation of old ballads that Percy rescued from a friend’s housemaid who was using the folio sheets to light the fire. More famously, James Macpherson’s Ossian prose-poems, Fingal (1762) and Temora (1763), were presented as genuine translations from the Gaelic of the third-century bard Ossian, allegedly taken down by Macpherson from oral sources. They made a huge impact and were widely translated, and admired by poets as notable as Wordsworth and Goethe, if not for their poetic virtues – which are sometimes hard to detect behind the sub-Homeric prose – at least for their stirring evocation of ancient times when heroes were heroes and maidens were maidens, and blood flowed across the fields of battles fought for no discernible reason by indistinguishable warriors, as the wind howled through mighty oak woods and the moon cast its pallid light on the swirling waters of the western sea.

The past was preferable to the present, not always because it was more dramatic, but sometimes because it was simpler, purer, more authentic. The world, as the eighteenth century proceeded on its enlightened way, was an increasingly complex, confused, challenging and eventually dangerous place. The Industrial Revolution transformed urban life, by no means always for the better, gradually depopulated the countryside, and created a new, wealthy middle class ready for adventure, political, technological and artistic; it also created poverty and misery on a hitherto unknown scale. Yet when Rousseau opened his Social Contract in 1762 with the explosive ‘Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains,’ he was by no means expressing a proto-Marxist response to the condition of the urban proletariat, which had scarcely emerged at that stage. On the contrary he was pursuing an argument – partly inspired by the republic of his native Geneva – about the relations between the individual and society that went back at least to Hobbes and Locke in the previous century, which did not prevent his ideas being taken up and distorted by the French Revolutionaries.

The past was also the repository of a great many things that the Enlightenment had either rejected or ignored. Neoclassicism was a kind of historical revival, true, but somewhat rigid and impersonal, like the society it represented. Writers and eventually musicians and painters were beginning to look for something more differentiated and less like the world they saw around them. Hence Ossian; but hence also the rediscovery of the Middle Ages, not necessarily as the source of Schlegel’s Romantic chaos, but as a place of mystery and magic, of religious belief and divine intervention. The Middle Ages, broadly defined, were also the origin of a force that was to prove of overwhelming importance to Romantic artists, musicians especially, as well as to philosophers and, alas, in due course politicians: the force of national culture and identity. So far as this was already a political issue in the eighteenth century, its most lucid advocate was Edmund Burke, who (in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790) saw nationhood as an aspect of the community spirit held together by centuries of tradition, descending in England’s case from Magna Carta. But the broader originator of such thinking was the German historian and philosopher, Johann Gottfried Herder, who as early as 1773 read Ossian in German translation and found in it an authenticity, a truthful expression of the wild nature of the ancient northern tribes that he missed in ‘the artificial Horatian style we Germans have fallen into at times’.²

Of all the great forerunners of romanticism, Herder was the liveliest and in many ways the most likeable. He was, it’s true, a prime advocate of German national self-determinism; he argued for the German language, German art, German culture. He was in effect a proponent of German unification. But this was only one element of his general argument that every nation ought to identify and study its own particular character. Herder took up the concept of Das Volk, an untranslatable term that embraces not just the ‘folk’ in the rustic English sense of the word ‘folksy’, but the whole nation in its ethnic soul. To understand the importance of this concept for Germans in the 1770s and onwards one has to remember that until 1870 there was no such political entity as ‘Germany’, only a large agglomeration of highly disparate kingdoms, princedoms, dukedoms, and statelets of one kind or another. But Herder argued the same for other, non-Germanic peoples, particularly the European populations to the east: the Slavs and the Magyars, who were still under the rule of alien empires, and those farther north, the Scandinavians and Finns and the inhabitants of the Baltic region. These peoples, he maintained, should study their own history, their own myths, folk legends and music, speak their own languages, and above all not kow-tow to supposedly superior western cultures, especially the French, which had so dominated the Enlightenment. Folk song and folk poetry, which Herder himself collected, could tell us more about the inner character of the people concerned than the most elaborate verbal description; he called folk music ‘the true voice of its organs of feeling’.

Of course, the vast majority of the people Herder was thinking of were never going to read his books. Nationalism, when it came, would, like so much else in the art and politics of the time, be a movement of middle-class intellectuals. But Herder was responding, with the sharp antennae of the original thinker, to changes that were in the air. Rousseau had already argued for a return to Nature as a corrective to the rigid, over-civilised world of mid-eighteenth-century France; and he had defended the simple, uncomplicated melodic style of Italian opera against what he regarded as the over-elaborate harmonies of the French, and had even composed operas (most famously Le Devin du village) illustrating the point. His distaste for society in the French sense had led inexorably to an elevation of the individual over the collective. ‘I aspire to the moment’, his pseudonymous Savoyard Vicar tells us in Émile, ou de l’éducation, ‘when, released from the fetters of the body, I shall be me without contradiction, without sharing, and shall need only myself in order to be happy.’³

Whatever Rousseau may have seen as the outcome of this individualism, it was plainly a direct challenge to the universalism of ‘enlightened’ France. It leads on to the subjectivism of Fichte and the relentless selfhood of early Romantic writers like Byron, Chateaubriand and Novalis.

Werther is often seen as a founding example of the so-called Sturm und Drang movement in 1770s Germany, the movement that first got romanticism into its stride. But ‘storm and stress’ (the usual English translation) had a number of manifestations in the literature and philosophy of the 1760s and 1770s. In Werther it favours excessive emotion and self-absorption to the point where suicide seems the only conceivable recourse. But in Götz von Berlichingen and Schiller’s Die Räuber (1781), in Jakob Lenz’s Der Hofmeister (1774) and Die Soldaten (1776), and in the Friedrich Klinger play by which the movement is known (Sturm und Drang, 1777), complex and often confused dramaturgy is marked by violence of various kinds, including sexual (the eponymous hero of Der Hofmeister castrates himself; the heroine of Die Soldaten is raped), and the classical unities are thrown to the four winds. All these works, and a number of others, represent a drastic rejection of the ideals of the Enlightenment. ‘The Tree of Knowledge’, Johann Georg Hamann wrote, ‘has robbed us of the Tree of Life.’⁴

A more precise encapsulation of the Counter-Enlightenment would be hard to find.

Where, then, does music fit into this turbulent narrative? For music, the Enlightenment version of classicism emerged late from the baroque initially in the form of what was known as the style galant, a light, gracious, agreeable instrumental manner partly derived from the simple melody-and-bass of Italian operatic arias. Essentially the galant style was a courtly reaction against the elaborate, learned counterpoint of the baroque, after which what we call the classical style evolved, most notably in the early works of Haydn, as a kind of Germanic intellectualisation of the (essentially French) style galant, rather than in any sense a revival of some notional pre-existing classicism, which simply didn’t exist. But while Haydn and a handful of followers were working away at their symphonies and string quartets in Vienna, Prague and the north, opera in Italy and France pursued its untroubled course towards a very different fin de siècle. And meanwhile the supposed classical values of order, formal balance and cool emotional restraint were being disturbed, discreetly at first, in the extraordinary music of J. S. Bach’s most talented son, Carl Philipp Emanuel.

The search for beginnings is always slippery, but it seems plausible to locate the first serious tremors of romanticism in the so-called empfindsamer Stil – literally the ‘sensitive style’ – which, in music, is associated with C. P. E. Bach. Like Sturm und Drang, Empfindsamkeit is more easily understood as first and foremost a literary tendency. Its master in Germany was the poet Friedrich Klopstock, best known today for his ‘Resurrection’ ode, which Mahler set in the finale of his Second Symphony, but famous in his own day for an epic poem, Der Messias, of which the playwright Gotthold Ephraim Lessing wrote that it was ‘so full of feeling that one often feels nothing in it at all’.⁵

Whether Lessing felt the same about the music of C. P. E. Bach, who was a friend of his in Berlin, where Bach was employed for almost thirty years at the court of Frederick the Great, is not as far as I know recorded. But Bach’s version of Empfindsamkeit was not quite parallel with Klopstock’s in any case. Whereas in Der Messias the hypersensitivity was part of the thought and its expression, in Bach it is a subversive element, an intervention in the smooth passage of a basically conventional musical language. Charles Rosen, a qualified admirer, called Bach’s music ‘violent, expressive, brilliant, continuously surprising, and often incoherent’.⁶

The keyboard sonatas especially are frequently disrupted by unexpected silences, abrupt contrasts of dynamics, remote changes of key, and strange chromatic harmonies. One often feels, playing or listening to this music, that Bach is reacting as he goes along; the unpredictability is not always supported by weight of architecture, as it is in Beethoven. And yet his music is rich in possibilities that would be taken up later. Whereas a typical sonata or suite movement by his father would be based on a single thematic figure with a particular unifying Affekt or emotion, C. P. E. Bach will often have contrasting themes in contrasting keys, and will develop this material in the middle of the movement before bringing the themes back in a recapitulation. Thus what came to be known as sonata form begins to emerge from the simple binary forms of baroque music; with it comes the idea of conflict and dramatic tension so essential to Haydn and Mozart, and eventually the lifeblood of Romantic music.

Bach’s music suggests a kind of opening out, a directness and variety unlike the concentrated seriousness of the high baroque. His Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments (1753, 1762), was both a thorough method, admired by Haydn and Beethoven, and a comprehensive style guide. It talks a lot about technique, about ways of playing. But it also constantly touches on questions of feeling, taste and communication. ‘A musician’, it insists, ‘cannot move others unless he too is moved… In languishing, sad passages, the performer must languish and grow sad… Similarly, in lively, joyous passages, the executant must again put himself into the appropriate mood. And so, constantly varying the passions, he will barely quiet one before he arouses another.’⁷

This is still perfectly good advice for the performance of his father’s, and most baroque, music. But the explanation is post-baroque, more feeling-conscious, more empfindsam, and applies particularly to a music of volatile expression, like C. P. E’s own.

It may nevertheless not sound all that much like romanticism. It is too stereotyped, and still bears a certain taint of classical rhetoric and the objective truths of the Enlightenment. The music itself, on the other hand, has a more genuine, even arbitrary, freedom, and it was this freedom – of expression, design and discourse – that in the 1760s and 1770s merged imperceptibly, both with Bach and with a younger generation dominated by Joseph Haydn, into a kind of musical equivalent of the literary Sturm und Drang. Curiously, the musical storm blew up slightly earlier than the literary one, though the point can be overstated. The demonic finale of Gluck’s ballet Don Juan (1761), often cited as an early example of Sturm und Drang, is after all no more than a vivid description of a frightful event, like the rending of the Temple veil in the St Matthew Passion. More to the point are a number of Haydn symphonies and string quartets from the late sixties and early seventies, many in minor keys, of which there are hardly any previous examples in his work in these genres. Suddenly we have Symphony No. 39 in G minor (1766 or 1767), the so-called ‘Lamentation’ Symphony, No. 26 in D minor (1768), No. 49 (‘La Passione’) in F minor (1768), No. 44 (the ‘Trauer’ or ‘Mourning’ Symphony) in E minor (1770 or 1771), and most famously No. 45 (the ‘Farewell’ Symphony) in F sharp minor (1772). Of the string quartets of these years, four are in minor keys, but there is an increasing emotional and intellectual intensity also in some of the major-key works. Haydn also composed major-key symphonies, some of which reflect the emotional unease of the time while some do not. It looks, in general, as if storm and stress was an aesthetic choice for particular works, rather than a consuming force that swallowed up everything in its path.

Whatever the origins of this extraordinary burst of passionate energy in music, they can hardly have been literary. True, Burke had theorised about the Sublime – the aesthetics of awe, fear and the epic, as opposed to the calm contemplation of beauty – as early as 1757. But it would be hard to imagine Haydn immersing himself in English writing (though he did set English poetry), and Ossian was not published in German until 1769. He certainly knew the music of C. P. E. Bach, some of which belongs to the late sixties and seventies, but some of which – including examples of the empfindsamer Stil – goes back to the 1740s and 1750s. It’s difficult to resist the feeling, then, that these musical tendencies were a direct response to the ordered character of the late baroque and the elegant trivialities of the style galant, at first fragmentary and inchoate, then, in the hands of a master, reasserting the authority of formal design and discipline. In these minor-key symphonies and quartets Haydn does some strange, unorthodox things, but he hardly ever relinquishes control and sometimes asserts it through traditional methods applied in new ways. For instance, the brilliant fugal finale of the F minor String Quartet, op. 20, no. 5 (1772), retains the fizzing urgency of the G minor and F minor Symphonies, braced, however, by a strict baroque procedure. The ‘Lamentation’ Symphony reverts to the even older contrapuntal device of cantus firmus, in which a plainsong theme runs through a texture of free parts, imposing on it an oddly antique-feeling design. One is conscious of a certain tension between the flight of the passions and the discipline of the brain. The music is constantly disrupted by restless syncopations, unexpected silences, uneven phrase lengths. Loud unison themes, agitated string tremolos and other bold orchestral effects abound, and sometimes the music seems so anxious to hurry on that it can scarcely be bothered with more than one or two accompanying lines and the most basic harmonies.

Haydn was obviously the major figure in this brief musical midlife crisis. But he was by no means the only one, nor even the first. A G minor Symphony of 1762 by the French-based German composer Franz Beck already breathes, somewhat gaspingly, the air of Sturm und Drang, and there are fine symphonies by the Bohemian Johann Baptist Vanhal, of which Haydn’s biographer H. C. Robbins Landon counted thirteen in minor keys from the years around 1770.⁸

In fact, so many composers of the time dipped into the Sturm und Drang as to make it seem like a fashionable resort, to be visited for a time in summer then abandoned in the autumn. Only two composers of any importance preserved the sheer energy and ferocity of the movement, and absorbed them into personal idioms of an emotional range that was to have significant consequences for the music of the next century. These composers were Christoph Willibald von Gluck and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

The turmoil of Gluck’s Don Juan finale was so specific to the action it was portraying that it hardly seems to qualify as a starting point for anything else. But his later, Paris operas are another matter. Iphigénie en Tauride (1779), for example, not only starts with an actual storm, it also has psychological storms and stresses, thrust from within (one possible meaning of Drang), and creates emotional ambiguities out of these feelings. When Orestes, pursued by the Furies for the murder of his mother and captured by the bloodthirsty Taureans, sings ‘Le calme rentre dans mon cœur’ he is, as Gluck himself famously remarked, lying, a fact made unforgettably clear by the orchestra, with its extremely uncalm, pulsating viola syncopations. But while his music had important admirers, his ideas about opera were if anything even more influential. In the preface to his opera Alceste (1767) he had already called for a less convention-bound approach to music drama: less indulgence of singers’ vanity, less vocal display for its own sake, more fidelity to the particular needs of the drama. He argued for more musical continuity, for orchestral music more relevant to the action, and against the anti-dramatic convention of the da capo aria, and he sought ‘a beautiful simplicity’ and to avoid ‘parading difficulties at the expense of clarity’. His target in all this, of course, was the long tradition of opera seria, the rigid operatic formula of the late baroque represented most notably by Handel, in seemingly endless successions of brilliant, very difficult da capo arias, separated by long stretches of dry recitative, and recounting convoluted, far-fetched plots about magnanimous Roman emperors, amorous crusaders, male lovers played, unpromisingly, by castrati, and other nonsensical but musically irresistible elements. Gluck had himself in earlier times made plentiful offerings on the altar of opera seria, and even has a lovelorn crusader in Armide (1777), one of his late reform operas. It is also true that his ideas were to some extent a distillation of changes that were afoot in existing operas, particularly in France, with its hybrid stage tradition represented most recently by the tragédies lyriques of Rameau, and in a variety of innovative works by Italian composers such as Tommaso Traetta and Niccolò Jommelli. But Gluck was the first to put forward thoroughgoing ideas of this kind while actually composing operas that demonstrate them coherently and on a grand scale.

Gluck’s ideas for operatic reform may seem remote from the purely musical considerations of Sturm und Drang, and even more remote from the literary movement of Goethe, Lenz, Schiller and the rest. But behind all these various tendencies was one central preoccupation: emotional truth. The Enlightenment had sacrificed individual truth to universal truths. All was for the best, in Voltaire’s satirical phrase, in the best of all possible worlds. One might indulge one’s feelings in private, but in public society knew what was best and would, in due course with the aid of science and philosophy, cure whatever minor ills managed to survive the Age of Reason. Sturm und Drang, in its different guises, was at bottom a cri de cœur against this denial of human misery and passion and the variety of individual experience. Instrumental music could at first explode in a kind of fury, but as yet lacked the technical resources to express the range of emotion available to literature while maintaining the coherence that music required. In Mozart, this is no longer the case.

Mozart was almost two generations younger than Gluck, but as a reformer Gluck came late while Mozart started early. His G minor Symphony, K. 183, composed probably late in 1773 when he was seventeen, is Sturm und Drang in the same sense as Haydn’s own G minor Symphony (No. 39) of five or six years earlier, which Landon supposes Mozart will have heard in Vienna in the late summer of 1773. But whereas with Haydn Sturm und Drang was a phase, with Mozart it opened a door that he never closed. Mature masterpieces like the D minor and C minor Piano Concertos of the mid-1780s and the late G minor Symphony of 1788 obviously draw on the dark strains of the early seventies while absorbing them into an altogether richer emotional and technical experience. But most of Mozart’s late instrumental music bears traces of this experience, even when the tone is not dark.

This must be why he responded so quickly to Gluck’s late works, particularly Iphigénie en Tauride and the revised Alceste, both of which he heard in Vienna in 1781. At the time he was working on Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio), a singspiel with dialogue that largely avoids the issues of reform. But Idomeneo, premiered in Munich the previous January, is a masterpiece that both does and does not show an active awareness of the issues involved. In a sense it argues the limitations of a work of art beholden to a theory. All right, it seems to say, let’s have an overture that prepares the drama; let’s get rid of empty vocal display and the stupid conventions that decree, for instance, that at the end of an aria the singer must leave the stage; let’s have genuine continuities, music carrying the drama forward, not stopping all the time for applause and encores, and let’s give the orchestra a dramatic role. But none of this will take us far in itself. What matters is that it should be the music, not the text, that dictates the shape of the drama.

Idomeneo, accordingly, was a reform opera that reformed through musical genius rather than doctrine. Many of its arias have formal reprises, rather than strict da capo repeats, and some even culminate – like any baroque aria – on half-cadences that invite expressive improvised roulades from the singer. But these devices are handled not just with discretion, but creatively. The reprise forms are often so highly developed that they resemble symphonic movements, with rich, often chromatic, harmony and middle sections that either develop the main ideas or at least serve as organic links to their recapitulation, without the more or less static formal divisions of the baroque. And this process is greatly enhanced by the variety of Mozart’s writing for orchestra, strikingly so, for instance, in Ilia’s ‘Se il padre perdei’, with its obbligato wind quartet. The characters speak for themselves, but the orchestra also speaks for them, so that they emerge fully rounded psychologically, realistic figures, not merely particular types in particular situations. Gluck had achieved something of the kind, but with less complex musical forms and generally less varied psychology. There is nothing in Gluck to compare with the quartet in the final act of Idomeneo, where the King is urging his reluctant son Idamante to leave the country in order to avoid being sacrificed, while Idamante’s beloved Ilia laments the tragedy of their love, and the unloved Electra laments her jealousy of Ilia. Eric Smith once wrote that in Idomeneo ‘traditional elements of opera seria struggle with innovations based on Gluck and the tragédie lyrique’.⁹

But it is the fusion of these elements that generates the work’s power and leads on to the even greater operas of Mozart’s last years.

Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro, 1786) calls itself an opera buffa, which locates it at the end of a long tradition of comic opera that had begun in Naples in the early eighteenth century, spread to the rest of Italy, then beyond, and reached its peak with this masterpiece, first performed in Vienna (but with an Italian text, by Lorenzo da Ponte) in May 1786. Its two Italian-language successors are both labelled dramma giocoso, an even older designation that might seem to imply something weightier, arguable in the case of Don Giovanni (1787), less so, perhaps, with Così fan tutte (1790). In essence the categories are the same. Opera buffa had early on specialised in picaresque characters talking in dialect, but had later begun to include upper-class lovers and to address some of the social problems they encountered. Above all, these characters were presented as real personages with real mentalities, unlike the cardboard stereotypes of opera seria. Sometimes a sentimental component would obtrude, as in the French comédie larmoyante, where sad, potentially tragic events were eventually resolved in happy endings. In The Marriage of Figaro Mozart combines all these elements, but raises them to a musical and dramatic plane far above any conceivable model.

For a start his comic characters are not merely picaresque. On the contrary, they are intellectually and emotionally at least as complicated as their aristocratic master and mistress; they are as clever, and as thoughtful. Figaro loses his inflammatory political speech in the last act of Beaumarchais’s play. But throughout the opera his behaviour, and above all his music, is inflammatory. He delivers his first-act cavatina, ‘Se vuol’ ballare, signor contino’ – ‘If you want to dance, Mr Countlet, I shall be playing the guitarlet’ – to an empty room, but in the second act he sings a verse of it openly in front of the Countess. The music is an ironic minuet, a specifically aristocratic dance. On the other hand the Count is throughout made to seem ridiculous in his sexual advances on his female servants, and is eventually humiliated in front of his whole staff. Meanwhile the Countess (not herself from an aristocratic background, but originally – in The Barber of Seville – a ward of the middle-class Dr Bartolo) is subjected to the larmoyant element, in what are surely the two greatest of all arias of this type: ‘Porgi amor’ and ‘Dove sono’. Mozart and Da Ponte have turned what was previously a more or less farcical genre into a profoundly serious character study, clinched by its music, addressing not only socio-political issues that were about to explode in violent reality in Paris but also issues of individual psychology that would soon be of lasting importance in the fields of art and philosophy.

With all these enrichments, The Marriage of Figaro remains an essentially eighteenth-century opera. Though it is free with convention, it is eighteenth-century convention it is free with. The same is broadly true of its immediate successor, Don Giovanni, and of Così fan tutte. But there are additional factors which, in the former, were to have an actual impact on early-nineteenth-century romanticism and, in the latter, were prophetic but exerted little or no influence.

Così fan tutte was not liked in the nineteenth century, presumably because its attitude to the Romantics’ favourite topic, love, and the bourgeois institution of marriage was seen as unduly cynical, even depraved. Don Giovanni is another matter. While this, too, in its forms and conventions, is still essentially an eighteenth-century opera, there are factors at work that transport it into a very different arena. For a start, the happy ending common to all opera buffa and dramma giocoso is called into question, and Don Giovanni, a ruthless seducer, gets his deserts and is dragged down to hell, to the undisguised relief of the other characters. Violent death is not a normal concomitant of comic opera; and Don Giovanni not only ends with one, it also starts with one. Moreover, the force of the ending is that an exceptional human being has been obliterated while ordinary, commonplace humanity looks on and applauds. That’s what happens, it crows, to naughty boys. The other deviant factor is the supernatural element, the deus ex machina which, instead of rescuing the hero and/or heroine from a tragic fate – its usual role in opera seria (including Idomeneo) – here acts as the hand of vengeance against the anti-hero.

These could be comic devices, but are elevated into something approaching genuine tragedy by the character and power of Mozart’s music. The overture begins in a grand, monitory D minor, music that will later accompany the arrival of the statue of the Commendatore, at which point it leads to a scene of positively infernal menace as the statue over and again demands Don Giovanni’s repentance and he over and again refuses, until he finally, amid fire and earthquake, is swallowed up into the ground. These are not episodes that belong in comic opera as normally understood; and there are several other moments where the enormity of the events is echoed: the murder of the Commendatore; Donna Anna’s recognition of Don Giovanni as her father’s murderer; her great following aria, ‘Or sai chi l’onore’; and the attempted rape of Zerlina.

The Romantics, of course, interpreted the opera in the light of their own preoccupations. For Hoffmann, in his short story ‘Don Juan’ (1813), Mozart’s Giovanni is a superhuman figure, endowed by Nature ‘with every quality that can exalt humanity, in its closest approach to the divine, above the vulgar rabble’, but all this ‘to no other end but that of dominating and defeating him’. From his hotel room, Hoffmann is able to go by way of a secret passage into a private box of the adjoining theatre, where Mozart’s opera is about to begin. Instantly he is drawn into a world of nightmarish fantasy:

In the andante, I was gripped by the terror of the frightful infernal regno al pianto; fearful premonitions of its horrors pervaded my soul… from out of the deep night I saw fiery demons stretching out their glowing claws upwards towards the life of joyful mankind, dancing happily on the thin crust of the bottomless abyss.¹⁰

For Søren Kierkegaard, on the other hand, Mozart’s anti-hero is something still grander than a mere exceptional human being. He is the very spirit of sensuality, which, in the context of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or (1843), a study of the relation between the aesthetic and ethical views of human behaviour, turns him into something like a foreshadowing of the Freudian id, or even Nietzsche’s concept of the spirit of music, since in Kierkegaard’s opinion music is the only art form that, because of its abstract nature, can adequately express something so physically immediate to human consciousness.

These interpretations take us a long way from the space between The Marriage of Figaro and Così fan tutte in which Don Giovanni was actually conceived and written, and perhaps they tell us more about the Romantic sensibility than about Mozart and Da Ponte’s intentions in the year 1787. But taking account of Figaro’s subversiveness and the confrontation in Così between social norms and individual passions, it hardly seems far-fetched to see Don Giovanni as a revolutionary figure intent on casting off the shackles of a well-ordered society in which all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

2

A Young Rhinelander

The events of 1789 in Paris, the fall of the Bastille and the revolution that followed, had an effect that still reverberates today. But they hardly came out of the blue. Leaving aside the social and political causes of the revolution in eighteenth-century France, there were plenty of warnings of impending change in the world at large. The striking thing is how seemingly diverse and unconnected these warnings were. Rousseau challenged the ideas of his time in almost everything he wrote. In The Social Contract (1762) he argued for political freedom and equality in a natural context devoid of the trappings of an over-sophisticated culture; in Émile (1762) for a liberal education freed from the impositions of a too prescriptive society; in the Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (1782) for an emotional absorption in nature itself and for solitary contemplation away from the distractions of urban life. Herder had undermined the whole concept of universal truth with his ideas of the autonomy of individual cultures and languages. Sturm und Drang had wiped the self-satisfied smile off the face of the Enlightenment. Above all the Industrial Revolution was creating a new, wealthy managerial class, a bourgeoisie with time and money to spare and in search of ways of spending them that, on the whole, the rigid eighteenth-century infrastructures did not provide. In the thirty years before the Bastille fell there had been a world war, the Seven Years War (1756–63), which robbed France of many of her colonies and left her with crippling debts; a revolution and war of independence in America against the British (1775–83); and serious anti-Catholic riots in London (1780). If there was a common cause in all this, it was the breaking of moulds, the