^ I CHICAGO JOURNALS
School, Stage, Salon: Musical Cultures in Haydn's Vienna Author(s): James Van Horn Melton
Source: The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 76, No. 2, A Special Issue on Cultural Practices
(Tun., 2004), pp. 251-279
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3555456
Accessed: 14/12/2010 01:58
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress.
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
	
9	
STOR	
The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Modern History.
http://www.jstor.org
School, Stage, Salon: Musical Cultures in Haydn's Vienna*
James Van Horn Melton
Emory University
Vienna's reputation as a musical capital dates back to the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when it became synonymous with the names of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert. True, with the exception of Schubert, none of these composers—canonized since the nineteenth century as the creators of "Vienna classicism"—could claim the Habsburg capital as their birthplace. Haydn was born in a Lower Austrian village near the Hungarian border. Mozart was a native of Salzburg, which, despite its reputation today as quintessentially Austrian, was the capital of a semiautonomous archbishopric that did not become a Habsburg territory until 1814. And Beethoven was a native of Bonn. Still, there is no denying the importance Vienna would acquire as a musical capital in the course of the eighteenth century. Haydn may not have been a Wiener by birth, but he did spend most of his career either in the city or within a day's drive, at the palace of his Esterhazy patrons. Vienna was more or less Mozart's permanent home from 1781, when he was released from his service at the Salzburg court, to his death ten years later, and Beethoven resided in Vienna and its environs from 1792 until his death in 1827.
In focusing on Haydn, the earliest representative of Viennese classicism, this essay addresses several broader issues related to the role of music in the culture of the Habsburg monarchy and to Haydn's place in that culture. In particular, my article explores three key moments in Haydn's career and development as a composer. These include, first, his boyhood years in the Lower Austrian town of Hainburg, where he acquired his earliest musical training in a modest parish school; second, the decade that followed his leaving the Choir School of St. Stephen's in Vienna (1748 or 1749—Haydn scholars are still uncertain about the precise date), when he began his career as a composer; and finally, his participation in Viennese salon life during the 1770s and 1780s. These moments—cultural snapshots, as it were—highlight important stages
* I wish to thank Tom Beghin, Raymond Knapp, and Elizabeth Le Guin of the UCLA Departments of Music and Musicology for inviting me to present an earlier version of this essay in April 2001 at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. Their conference, "Exploring Rhetoric in Haydn's Chamber Music," was cosponsored by the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies.
The Journal of Modem History 76 (June 2004): 251-279
© 2004 by The University of Chicago. 0022-2801/2004/7602-0001S10.00
All rights reserved.
252 Melton
not only in his musical development but also in the Habsburg monarchy's transition from the culture of the Catholic baroque to that of the Josephinian Enlightenment. At one level these stages underscore Haydn's roots in the baroque culture of the Counter-Reformation, elements of which help explain why the Habsburg capital could achieve such prominence as a musical center. Yet these moments of transition also shed light on the dissolution of the baroque and the rise of Vienna as a center of Enlightenment culture, processes that occurred with astonishing rapidity between the accession of Maria Theresia in 1740 and the reign of her son in the 1780s. So if this is an essay about Haydn, it is also about the culture that transformed both him and his world.
* * *
The opening scene is not Vienna but Rohrau, the Lower Austrian village some twenty-five miles to the southeast of the capital, where Joseph Haydn was born in 1732 to the wheelwright Mathias Haydn and his wife, Anna. Toward the end of his life the composer recalled an event that occurred in the Haydn household in 1737, recounted by his friend and biographer Georg August Griesinger:
One day the headmaster from the neighboring town of Hainburg, a distant relative of the Haydn family, came to Rohrau. Meister Mathias and his wife gave their usual little concert, and five-year-old Joseph sat near his parents and sawed at his left arm with a stick, as if he were accompanying on the violin. It astonished the schoolteacher that the boy observed the time so correctly. He inferred from this a natural talent for music and advised the parents to send their Sepperl (an Austrian diminutive for Joseph) to Hainburg so that he might be set to the acquisition of an art that in time would unfailingly open to him the prospect of "becoming a clergyman." The parents, ardent admirers of the clergy, joyfully seized this proposal, and in his sixth year Joseph Haydn went to the headmaster in Hainburg. Here he received instruction in reading and writing, in catechism, in singing, and in almost all wind and string instruments, even in the timpani. "I shall owe it to this man even in my grave," Haydn oftentimes said, "that he set me to so many different things, although I received in the process more thrashings than food."1
If Griesinger's account here is accurate (and other sources indeed corroborate it), Haydn's parish school in Hainburg played a key role in his musical development. Note, first of all, that it was a Hainburg schoolmaster who "discovered" Haydn, and, second, that he acquired his earliest formal training in music at this rather humble parish school in a small Lower Austrian town. Both aspects of his early biography point to the role that music played in parish
1 Georg August Griesinger, Biographical Notes concerning Joseph Haydn (Leipzig, 1810), published in Haydn: Two Contemporary Portraits, ed. and trans. Vernon Gotwals (Madison, Wis., 1968), p. 9.
Musical Cultures in Haydn 's Vienna 253
schools in early modern Austria and help to explain why the Habsburg monarchy could develop such a vibrant musical culture in the eighteenth century.
The importance of music in the parish schools of the Habsburg monarchy was closely tied to the pervasive influence of post-Tridentine baroque piety. In the Habsburg lands, the culture of baroque Catholicism developed out of the close alliance between church and dynasty, forged through the efforts of the Habsburg dynasty to defend the church against two enemies. One was Protestantism, which the Habsburgs, though unable to eradicate in the Holy Roman Empire as a whole, did manage to suppress in their own hereditary territories. The second was the Ottoman Turks, who advanced to the gates of Vienna in 1529 and 1683 but whose threat to Christian Europe had largely receded by the early eighteenth century owing to Habsburg military leadership. The struggle of the dynasty against Protestant and Turk helped forge the symbiotic relationship between throne and altar on which Habsburg baroque Catholicism rested. Here the Catholic Church celebrated the Habsburgs as defenders of the faith, while the dynasty for its part upheld the church's preeminent position in the cultural and intellectual life of the monarchy up to the middle of the eighteenth century.
A notable characteristic of Habsburg baroque Catholicism was a distrust of vernacular (specifically, German) print culture.2 Up to the reign of Maria Theresia (1740-80), the Habsburg ecclesiastical hierarchy had traditionally associated Bible reading among the German-speaking laity with Protestantism and thus condemned it as a potential source of heresy. Fearing forms of religious proselytization that employed the printed vernacular, the Church relied all the more heavily on the visual, sensual, and theatrical media associated with Habs-burg baroque Catholicism—architecture and sculpture, cults of the saints and of the Virgin, religious processions and pilgrimages, the imposing religious pageants written and directed by Jesuit dramatists, to name just some of its components.3 Parish education also became a target of counter-reform. Beginning in the later sixteenth century, a relatively extensive network of Catholic parish schools developed in Austria and Bohemia in response to the dramatic
2 James Van Horn Melton, "From Image to Word: Cultural Reform and the Rise of Literate Culture in Eighteenth-Century Austria," Journal of Modern History 58 (1986): 97-105, and "Von Versinnlichung zur Verinnerlichung: Bemerkungen zur Dialektik repräsentativer und plebejischer Öffentlichkeit," in Österreich im Europa der Aufklärung, ed. Richard Plaschka and Grete Klingenstein, 2 vols. (Vienna, 1985), 2:919-41.
3 The standard works on the ideology of Habsburg baroque Catholicism are Anna Coreth, Pietas Austriaca: Ursprung und Entwicklung barocker Frömmigkeit in Osterreich (Vienna, 1959), and R. J. W. Evans, The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1550-1700: An Interpretation (Oxford, 1979), pp. 100-116, 189-91, 223-32. On cults, see Gerhardt Kapner, Barocker Heiligenkult in Wien und seine Träger (Munich, 1978).
254 Melton
spread of Protestantism in those territories.4 Forced to compete confessionally with an ascendant Protestantism, the Catholic Church and the Habsburg dynasty made parish schools a major battleground. A classic example was Archduke Ferdinand of Styria (later Emperor Ferdinand II), who waged an aggressively anti-Protestant campaign in the lands under his care by closing Protestant schools, exiling their schoolmasters, replacing them with confessionally correct ones, and mandating the instruction of parish youth in the basic articles of Catholic faith.5 Throughout the monarchy, the re-Catholici-zation campaigns of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries left in their wake a sizable number of new or confessionally cleansed parish schools. Hence church officials in the bishopric of Passau, whose jurisdiction included most of Upper and Lower Austria (and thus the Hainburg school attended by the young Joseph Haydn), could report in 1772 that almost every parish in these provinces had a school instructing children between the ages of five and twelve.6
Although primary schooling today is commonly associated with the acquisition of literacy, only with the school reforms of Maria Theresia and Joseph II in the later eighteenth century were reading and writing universally taught in Habsburg parish schools. Instead, two subjects dominated. One, not surprisingly, was religion, the instruction of which was usually oral rather than literate in nature. Here the oral recitation and memorization of the catechism had occupied pride of place ever since the late sixteenth century, when the Jesuit missionary Peter Canisius had effectively employed his catechism in the reconversion campaigns he supervised in Austria, Bohemia, and Bavaria. What appears in Catholic visitation reports as a "school," then, often signified little more than catechistic instruction provided on Sundays and religious holidays by the church sacristan (i.e., the assistant to the parish priest). The second subject to dominate parish schooling in the Habsburg lands was music. The sacristan, in addition to assisting the priest at mass, instructing the youth of
4 By the mid-sixteenth century, for example, around 90 percent of Lower Austrian nobles had become Protestant, many working actively to convert their subjects. See Gustav Reingrabner, "Religiöse Lebensformen des protestantischen Adels in Niederösterreich," in Spezialforschung und "Gesamtgeschichte": Beispiele und Methodenfragen zur Geschichte der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Grete Klingenstein and Heinrich Lutz (Vienna, 1981); Evans, pp. 3-40.
5 Helmut Engelbrecht, Geschichte des österreichischen Bildungswesens, vol. 2, Das 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Vienna, 1983), pp. 122-34; Ignaz Hübel, "Das Schulwesen Niederösterreichs im Reformationszeitalter," Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für die Geschichte des Protestantismus in Österreich 51 (1880): 25-61; James Van Horn Melton, Absolutism and the Eighteenth-Century Origins of Compulsory Schooling in Prussia and Austria (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 5-6.
6 Archiv des Erzbischöflichen Ordinariats (Vienna: Schulakten), Mappe 120, fasz. 3, 1772, as cited in Melton, Absolutism, p. 8.
Musical Cultures in Haydn's Vienna 255
the parish, and keeping the church in good repair, was charged with providing music during mass and on religious holidays. Musical ability was in fact a prerequisite for obtaining a position as a schoolmaster/sacristan. In 1648 parishioners in the Tyrolean village of Nonsthale requested a schoolmaster "who is trained in music, sings, plays organ, and can also teach," and more than a century later the pedagogical reformer Johann Ignaz Felbiger noted with exasperation that "a man who applies to be a schoolmaster is considered qualified as long as he knows enough music to sing, lead a choir, play a little organ, and perhaps write a bit."7
In this regard the duties of Catholic schoolmasters were not so different from those of their counterparts in Protestant territories. In Protestant schools the terms Schulmeister and Cantor were interchangeable, suggesting the place of music in the occupation of schoolmaster. Here the most famous example was Johann Sebastian Bach, who in 1723 became Cantor of the Thomaschule in Leipzig—though unlike most who held the position of Cantor, Bach's teaching duties were confined to music alone. In any case, Protestant and Catholic parishes alike required the musical services of the schoolmaster and his pupils at mass, baptisms, weddings, and funerals.
What made Catholic parishes different was the far greater number of religious holidays, which multiplied the number of occasions requiring music. When Haydn was a pupil in Hamburg, for example, Catholics in the Habsburg monarchy universally observed around eighty-six religious holidays, including Sundays; added to these were the locally celebrated full or partial feast days that could number as many as thirty, depending on the region.8 On most of these occasions it was common for the schoolmaster to assemble his pupils and provide some sort of choral or instrumental performance. Albert Christoph Dies, another early biographer of Haydn, related how the Hamburg schoolmaster Johann Matthias Franck immediately pressed the six-year-old Haydn into musical service following the boy's arrival in May of 1738:
It was just then Rogation Week [the week preceding the Feast of the Ascension, which falls on the fortieth day after Easter Sunday], a time of many processions. Franck was in great difficulty because of the death of his drummer. He cast his eyes upon Joseph, who would have to learn the kettledrums in a hurry and thus resolve the difficulty. He showed Joseph the elements of drumming and then left him alone. [But] since Joseph
7 Quotes taken from "Geschichtlicher Abriss über die Schule zu 'Unsere liebe Frau im Walde' im Nonsthale," Die katholische Volksschule 27 (1897): 393, and Julius Scheveling, ed., Johann Ignaz Felbiger: General-Landschulreglement: Eigenschaften, Wissenschaften, und Bezeigen rechtschaffener Schulleute (Paderborn, 1958), p. 66, as cited in Melton, Absolutism, p. 14.
8 J. Mössner, Sonn- und Feiertage in Österreich, Preussen, und Bayern im Zeitalter der Aufklärung (Berlin, 1915), p. 33.
256 Melton
was very short, he could not possibly in the procession reach as high as the former drum-bearer; so they chose a little man who was unfortunately a hunchback and provoked the laughter of the onlookers.9
Despite this aborted debut, Haydn's musical training continued under his Hamburg schoolmaster at the parish school attached to the Church of St. Philip and Jacob. Franck, the schoolmaster, organist, and choral leader, trained some of his pupils to sing in the church choir during mass and evening vespers. Others, like Haydn, were also taught to play musical instruments in the parish orchestra, which performed on major religious holidays. Haydn learned to play several instruments under Franck's tutelage, and the parish church was relatively well equipped musically.10 A 1762 inventory of the instruments stored in its choir loft listed eight trumpets, two hunting horns, six violins, one cello, one double bass, and a pair of kettledrums.11
Haydn is just one example of how music and musical talent were nurtured in parish schools of the Habsburg monarchy. Charles Burney, the noted English music critic and a friend of Haydn, commented on the place of schools in the musical culture of the Habsburg monarchy during a journey through Bohemia in 1772. In Prague, Burney observed, "the nobility were now out of town, but in winter they are said to have great concerts frequently at their hotels and palaces, chiefly performed by their own domestics and vassals, who have learned music at country schools."12 Burney went on to mention two composers of his day whose musical talents developed within the milieu of the parish school. One was Johann Wenzel Anton Stamitz (1717-57), known today for his symphonies and especially for his key role in developing the symphonic form as director of the Mannheim orchestra. Stamitz acquired his musical training through his father, an accomplished organist and choirmaster who worked as a schoolmaster in the Bohemian town of Deutsch Brod (Německý Brod). Burney also mentioned Josef Mysliveček (1737-81), a friend of Mozart who for a brief period in the 1770s was the most prolific composer of opere serie in Europe. Mysliveček learned music from his Prague schoolmaster. One can add to Burney's list Ignaz Pleyel (1757-1831), a former Haydn pupil whose compositions enjoyed considerable popularity in Vienna during the 1780s. Pleyel grew up the twenty-fourth child of a parish schoolmaster in the village of Rupperstal, near Vienna.
9 Albert Christoph Dies, Biographical Accounts of Joseph Haydn, According to His Spoken Narration (Vienna, 1810), in Gotwals, ed. (n. 1 above), pp. 81-82.
10 Dies, p. 82.
" E. F. Schmid, Joseph Haydn: Ein Buch von Vorfahren und Heimat des Meisters, 2 vols. (Kassel, 1934), 1:103-4.
12 Charles Burney, The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands, and United Provinces, ed. Percy A. Scholes (London, 1959), p. 135.
Musical Cultures in Haydn's Vienna 257
That parish schools in the Habsburg lands continued to foster musical talent in the nineteenth century is attested by the more familiar examples of Franz Schubert and Anton Bruckner. Schubert's father was a parish schoolmaster in the impoverished Viennese suburb of Lichtental. Franz, who attended the school and received his first violin lessons from his father, later enrolled at the normal school adjacent to Vienna's St. Stephen's Cathedral and became a certified schoolmaster in 1814. Schubert worked as an assistant schoolmaster at his father's parish school until 1816, when he gave up teaching to devote himself fully to his music. Anton Bruckner's father was a parish schoolmaster in the Upper Austrian village of Ansfelden (near Linz), and Bruckner's first music teacher was his godfather, Johann Baptist Weiss, a schoolmaster and occasional composer in the nearby village of Horsching. Bruckner, who wrote his first compositions under Weiss's tutelage, later trained to be a teacher at the normal school in Linz and then taught in Upper Austrian parish schools from 1841 to 1845, when he became organist at the Augustinián abbey of St. Florian.13
None of the figures mentioned above came from elevated social backgrounds, and the social milieu of the parish school was a humble one indeed. The poverty of schoolmasters was legendary, and most of their pupils were equally poor, since propertied bourgeois and noble families usually preferred private tutors for their sons and convent schools for their daughters. The cen-trality of music in parish schools helps to explain how those from otherwise modest backgrounds could begin to acquire the training necessary for a musical career. This emphasis on music was the by-product of a post-Tridentine devotional world that subordinated the printed vernacular to a visual, aural, theatrical, and fundamentally nonliterate culture of the senses. The persistence of this culture throughout the early modern period helps account simultaneously for the richness of musical life in eighteenth-century Austria and for the meager Austrian contribution to German literary culture. Vienna was the capital of the Holy Roman Empire and the largest German-speaking city in Europe, yet not a single major writer associated with the German literary revival of the eighteenth century came from the Habsburg monarchy. Gellert, Lessing, Klopstock, Goethe, Schiller—all hailed from Protestant territories of the Holy Roman Empire. Nothing better symbolizes the underdeveloped state of vernacular print culture in German-speaking Austria than the fact that in the 1730s, the
13 On Stamitz and Mysliveček, see the biographical entries in the New Grove Dictionary of Music, 2d ed., ed. Stanley Sadie (London and New York, 2001). On Pleyel, see H. C. Robbins Landon, Haydn: Chronicle and Works, 5 vols. (Bloomington, Ind., 1980), 2:375. I have taken biographical information on Schubert and Bruckner from Elizabeth Norman McKay, Franz Schubert: A Biography (Oxford, 1996), pp. 3-11, and Erwin Doernberg, The Life and Symphonies of Anton Bruckner (New York, 1960), pp. 29-30.
258 Melton
decade of Haydn's birth, Vienna ranked forty-sixth among German-language cities in German book production.14 This situation began to change during Haydn's day, as will be seen later in this essay, but it was not until the nineteenth century that Austrian writers began to contribute in any significant way to the German literary canon.
* * *
In 1740, Haydn, now eight years old, left Hainburg to continue his schooling as a pupil at the Choir School of St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna. The choirmaster at St. Stephen's, Karl Reutter, was a friend of Hamburg's parish priest and was visiting the town to recruit choirboys. The priest recommended Haydn, who soon returned with Reutter to Vienna and remained as a pupil until 1748 or 1749. The Choir School (Chorschule) had originally been established in 1460 as a part of the city's first municipal school, founded in the thirteenth century. The municipal school was supposed to prepare the sons of citizens for university study, and in the fifteenth century it won considerable renown for its humanist curriculum. But in the sixteenth century the school was torn by the confessional conflicts that wracked the city as a whole, and the triumph of the Counter-Reformation in the early seventeenth century accelerated its decline. As the Jesuits tightened their control over secondary and university education throughout the monarchy, secular municipal schools like St. Stephen's fell to the status of glorified parish schools offering elementary Latin at best.15
Although Haydn received instruction in reading, writing, and rudimentary Latin at St. Stephen's, instrumental and vocal lessons were the focus of his schooling there. The school hired out its pupils to perform in the cathedral's annual cycle of regular masses, requiems, Te Deums, and solemn processions. St. Stephen's choir boys also sang at the Habsburg chapel on those occasions when the court's own choir (the original Vienna Boys Choir) accompanied the
14 See Leslie Bodi, Tauwetter in Wien: Zur Prosa der österreichischen Aufklarung, 1781-87 (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1977), p. 87.
15 On the early history of the St. Stephen municipal school, see Anton Mayer, "Die Bürgerschule zu St. Stephan in Wien," Blätter des Vereines für Landeskunde von Niederösterreich 14 (1880): 341-82. St. Stephen's gained new visibility in the 1770s, when the educational reformer Joseph Mesmer (cousin of the magnetist Franz Anton Mesmer) took over the institution and made it a laboratory school for the training of teachers and the introduction of new pedagogical methods. Mesmer was a proponent of the so-called Zusammenunterrichtsmethode—the practice of teaching students simultaneously as a group rather than individually, as had been customary in primary schooling up to this time—and St. Stephen's was one of the first schools in Europe to promote the practice of collective instruction at the elementary level. On Mesmer and his pedagogical innovations, see Melton, Absolutism, pp. 19-20, 202-3.
Musical Cultures in Haydn's Vienna 259
emperor on trips outside the capital, as well as at services at Schonbrunn Palace, the nearby abbey of Klosterneuburg, or at private masses in aristocratic households. Haydn's education at St. Stephen's was basically an extension of his Hamburg schooling, if musically more specialized and extensive, and not very demanding. Dies's biography (1810) noted that although the young Haydn did acquire a smattering of Latin at the school, "everything else went by the board, and one might venture to say that he lost ten of the youthful years best suited for study."16 His schooling was practical and vocational in nature, heavily oriented toward vocal performance, and only after he left the Choir School in 1749—not, as legend has it, to escape castration, but because his voice changed—does he appear to have been exposed to broader and more contemporary currents in musical theory.
Haydn later recalled that one of the first theoretical treatises he read after leaving St. Stephen's was Johann Mattheson's The Complete Capellmeister {Der vollkommene Capellmeister), first published in Hamburg in 1738.17 As author, among other things, of the first musical periodical in Germany (his Critica Musica, 1722-25), Mattheson was a leading theorist of composition in eighteenth-century Germany and has been called the founder of German music criticism. He is especially known for his so-called doctrine of the affections (Affektenlehre), essentially a semiotics of musical expression that broke with prevailing music theory in championing melody over counterpoint and sense experience over abstract mathematical reasoning as principles of composition. For this reason music scholars have commonly viewed Mattheson as an important figure in the transition from the high baroque to the classical style.18
As a work that may have been Haydn's first exposure to formal theories of composition, Mattheson's Complete Capellmeister reflected the importance that the concepts of audience and public had acquired in early Enlightenment aesthetics. The concept of the public entered Enlightenment aesthetics with the work of influential critics like Joseph Addison in England and the Abbé Jean-Baptiste Dubos in France. Critical of the formalistic standards of neoclassical aesthetics, Addison and Dubos argued that a work of art was validated not simply by its conformity to preestablished rules but also by its public reception. A work of art was to be judged by how it moved its audience, not
16 Dies, p. 86.
17 Ibid., p. 96.
18 The standard biography of Mattheson is Beekman C. Cannon, Johann Mattheson: Spectator in Music (New Haven, Conn., 1947). On Mattheson's thought, I have found especially useful the analysis in Donald R. Boomgaarden, Musical Thought in Britain and Germany during the Early Eighteenth Century (New York, 1987), pp. 44-48,129-50. On his Affektenlehre, see Hans Lenneberg, "Johann Mattheson on Affect and Rhetoric in Music," Journal of Music Theory 2 (1958): 47-84.
260 Melton
merely by its "objective" internal structure. By subordinating the formal properties of a work to the response of its audience, Addison, Dubos, and subsequent eighteenth-century critics legitimized the role of the public as an aesthetic tribunal. Public judgment—what Addison called "the taste of the town" and Dubos called the parterre—and not the metaphysical maxims of classical poetics ultimately determined whether or not a work was beautiful and pleasing.19
In Mattheson's case, Addison was an especially formative influence. Mattheson was a native of Hamburg, and his exposure to Addison's work reflected the port's long-standing commercial and cultural ties with England. Mattheson became familiar with English literary culture and manners in his capacity as secretary to a British consul in Hamburg from 1706 to 1746. During this time he translated or adapted into German Daniel Defoe's Adventures of Moll Flanders (1723) and Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1742).20 Mattheson also published an adaptation of Addison's Spectator in 1713-14, which included some one hundred issues and expressed more directly his preoccupation with the themes of audience and public. Both Addison's Spectator and Mattheson's spin-off were aimed at a broad literate public and typified the proliferation of periodical literature that did so much to fuel the expansion of print culture in the early eighteenth century. As prototypes of the genre known as the moral weekly (of which Mattheson's was the first German exemplar), they inspired countless imitators: by the 1750s some 106 periodicals modeled on The Spectator had appeared in England, while in Germany around fifty were published between 1720 and 1750.21 Self-consciously nonpolitical in focus, moral weeklies offered kaleidoscopic commentary on everything from religion to marriage, morals, child raising, etiquette, dress, and the world of commerce. They targeted above all the emerging female reading public that comprised much of the audience for eighteenth-century novels. The moral weeklies of Addison and Mattheson thematized the concepts of audience and public through their epistolary form. Anticipating the epistolary novels of Richardson, Rousseau, and the young Goethe, moral weeklies were innovative in their inclusion of
19 On the idea of the public in Enlightenment aesthetics see James Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 116-17. For a good discussion of Dubos, see esp. Thomas E. Kaiser, "Rhetoric in the Service of the King: The Abbé Dubos and the Concept of Public Judgement," Eighteenth-Century Studies 23 (1989-90): 183-99.
20 Johann Mattheson, trans., Moll Flanders wundernswürdige Begebenheiten (Hamburg, 1723), and Pamela, oder die belohnte Tugend (Hamburg, 1742).
21 Alexandre Beljame, Men of Letters and the English Public in the Eighteenth Century, 1660-1744: Dryden, Addison, Pope, trans. E. O. Lorimer (London, 1948), p. 311; Wolfgang Martens, Die Botschaft der Tugend: Die Aufklärung im Spiegel der deutschen Moralischen Wochenschriften (Stuttgart, 1968), pp. 544-48.
Musical Cultures in Haydn's Vienna 261
real or fictitious letter to the editor. This epistolary technique fostered the impression of a direct dialogue between editor and public and served to construct a public arena where readers and writers engaged in a real or imagined dialogue. The moral weekly's use of letters pretended to eliminate the boundaries between writers and readers, dissolving both into a public whose members engaged in a continual and reciprocal process of communication.22
Mattheson ultimately made his mark as a music theorist, not a journalist, but here too he was concerned with issues related to audience reception. Mattheson, like Addison, grounded his aesthetic criteria in the reception of a work and not in its internal logic or structure. As elaborated in The Complete Ca-pellmeister, Mattheson's doctrine of the affections made the sense experience of melody, not the intricate mathematical structures of counterpoint, the ultimate carrier of the affections. The Complete Capellmeister explored the rhetorical dimensions of music, which constituted for Mattheson a form of sound speech (Klang-Rede) expressing a range of emotions. If music for Mattheson was speech and, by extension, sound, then the senses, in this case the organ of hearing, became the supreme tribunal in musical matters. The ultimate arbiter of musical taste was a composition's effect on the listener, not its inherent properties or structure. In this respect Mattheson's musical thought owed much to Lockean empiricism, which provided the philosophical underpinnings for the German critic's emphasis on the supremacy of melody over counterpoint, sense experience over mathematical reasoning. Mattheson exemplified in music the transition from Cartesian rationalism to Lockean sensationalism that characterized other areas of Enlightenment thought.23
Whether or not Mattheson was a direct "influence" on Haydn (and using the term influence, as intellectual historians well know, is fraught with pitfalls), the German critic did foreshadow the Austrian composer's keen sensitivity to audience. A concern with the public acceptance of his works pervades Haydn's correspondence. "From the press [öffentliche Blätter] and from letters I have received, it is evident that as far as the chamber style is concerned, I have enjoyed the good fortune of pleasing almost every nation except for the Ber-
22 Kathryn Shevelow, Women and Print Culture: The Evolution of Femininity in the Early Periodical (London and New York, 1989), pp. 37,104; Melton, Rise of the Public, pp. 95-98, 100.
23 Mattheson's preoccupation with audience reception was further expressed in the novel emphasis he placed on gesture in musical performance. Since Mattheson considered music a form of rhetoric, gesticulation was no less important for the musical performer than it was for the orator: "Can the attentive listener be moved to pleasure ... if he sees a dozen violinists who contort their bodies as if they are ill? If the clavier player writhes his jaw, wrinkles his brow, and contorts his face to such an extent that it could frighten children?" Johann Mattheson, Der vollkommene Capellmeister, trans, with a critical commentary by Ernest C. Harriss (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1981), p. 135.
262 Melton
liners" (July 6, 1776); "my Stabat mater was performed [in Paris] four times to great applause" (May 27, 1781); "My arrival [in London] has occasioned considerable notice throughout the entire city; for three days I was written up in all the newspapers" (January 8, 1791); "my standing [Credit] among the common people has been well established for many years ... I am esteemed by everyone" (October 13, 1791); "Last year I composed a German oratorio, titled 'The Creation,' which was received with extraordinary and general acclaim" (June 25, 1799).24
In accounting for Haydn's attentiveness to audience, David Schroeder makes much of his time in London—and for good reason. Nowhere was the power of public and audience more evident than in London's highly commercialized cultural life, with its newspapers, theaters, subscription concerts, and public pleasure gardens.25 The opportunities for performance and composition offered by London's array of public concerts did, after all, help lure Haydn away from Esterhaza in 1790 and free him from the aristocratic patronage on which he had subsisted for almost thirty years. But without discounting the role of London in honing Haydn's sensitivity to audience, there is good reason to focus instead on the composer's Viennese milieu. Outside of two extended visits to London in the 1790s, after all, Haydn spent most of his life in or near Vienna. Esterhaza was only a day's journey to the Austrian capital, where the Ester-hazys also owned a palace and spent much of the year, with Haydn often in tow. Moreover, Haydn did not need to leave Vienna to gain an appreciation for audience; indeed, the baroque Catholic culture in which he attained maturity as a musician and composer would have already given him that. The Jesuits and other orders that promoted the rituals and cults of the Habsburg Counter-Reformation did so in order to win or reclaim adherents to the faith, which in turn required nothing if not being attuned to the emotions and sensibilities of their audience. A concern with audience pervaded the culture of baroque Catholicism, with its self-consciously lavish appeal to the senses. So, for example, it is no accident, as will be seen below, that the popular Viennese stage of Haydn's day developed on foundations established earlier by Jesuit dramatists.
But if the sensual and theatrical world of Catholic baroque piety would have fostered in Haydn a sensitivity to audience, that world had begun to unravel
24 Quotations are taken from Denes Bartha's edition of Haydn's letters, Joseph Haydn: Gesammelte Briefe und Aufzeichnungen (Kassel, 1965), nos. 21, 33, 157, 164, 222. For other examples of Haydn's concern with audience, see David Schroeder, Haydn and the Enlightenment: The Late Symphonies and Their Audience (Oxford, 1990), pp. 92-93.
25 On London's vibrant musical culture during this period, see John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1997), chaps. 10 and 14.
Musical Cultures in Haydn 's Vienna 263
by the time he began his career as a composer in the 1750s. The incipient dissolution of Austrian baroque Catholicism was in part hastened by the dynasty itself. Military defeat at the hands of Prussia in the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-48) ? id the Seven Years' War (1756-63) contributed to a belief on the part of Maria Theresia and reform-minded advisors that Austria was backward, culturally as well as economically and militarily. Accordingly, the Jesuits—hitherto preeminent in the cultural, educational, and religious life of the monarchy—came under increasing attack. In the 1750s and 1760s an alliance of state and ecclesiastical reformers succeeded in shattering the monopoly that the Jesuits had traditionally enjoyed in areas such as censorship and theological training.26 At the same time, the baroque Catholic devotional style promoted by the Jesuits and other Counter-Reformation orders also came under increasing attack. The curtailment of pilgrimages and the abolition of numerous religious holidays under Maria Theresia in the 1750s was followed in the 1780s by Joseph's even more radical assault on baroque religious practices.27 Hundreds of monasteries were abolished, burials and religious celebrations were more strictly regulated, and toleration for Protestants and Jews was expanded. Under Joseph, in short, the Counter-Reformation officially came to an end.
At the same time, the disintegration of baroque Catholic culture was not simply the result of policies imposed by the Habsburg state and its ecclesiastical allies but also the product of cultural changes indigenous to baroque Catholicism itself. Haydn's early years in Vienna, when he struck out on his own as a composer in the 1750s, highlight a key aspect of these changes. One of the ways Haydn supported himself during this period was by composing the music for a number of burlesques performed on the stage of Vienna's famous (and to some observers, notorious) Kärtnertor Theater. All in all, these burlesques point to a process of decomposition that had come to characterize late-baroque culture as a whole by the mid-eighteenth century. They also shed light on the origins of what is often seen as a central aspect of Haydn's style, namely, the important role of humor in his music.
* * *
Haydn composed his first opera sometime between 1751 and 1753, just a few years after leaving St. Stephen's. This piece was not—as one might oth-
26 Grete Klingenstein, Staatsverwaltung und kirchliche Autorität im 18. Jahrhundert: Das Problem der Zensur in der theresianischen Reform (Munich, 1970), pp. 158-202.
27 For the Theresian period see Melton, "From Image to Word" (n. 2 above), pp. 109-18. A convenient summary of Theresian and Josephinian religious reform can be found in H. M. Scott, "Reform in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1740-90," in H. M. Scott, Enlightened Absolutism: Reform and Reformers in Later Eighteenth-Century Europe (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1990), pp. 161-72.
264 Melton
erwise have expected, given the high baroque milieu in which Haydn had reached maturity—an opera seria of the sort composed by Johann Adolf Hasse, whose settings of Metastasio libretti were at that time much in vogue in Vienna. Haydn's opera was instead a musical farce composed for the popular comic actor Johann Joseph Felix Kurz, whose performances at the Vienna Kärtnertor Theater were repeatedly banned as bawdy and immoral. Haydn, left to his own resources following his dismissal from choir school in 1749, was so destitute that he occasionally contemplated taking holy orders. Meanwhile he launched into the serious study of composition, surviving financially on the income he earned from private lessons. With fellow musicians he also performed street serenades in the hope of earning a few kreuzer or attracting pupils. Haydn later recounted one such occasion to his biographer Griesinger, who wrote: "Once he went to serenade the wife of Kurz, a comic actor very popular at the time and usually called Bernardon. Kurz came into the street and asked for the composer of the music just played. Hardly had Haydn, who was about nineteen years old, identified himself when Kurz urged him strongly to compose an opera for him."28 Dies's biography of 1810, also based on conversations with the composer, describes how Kurz and Haydn subsequently began their collaboration:
"You sit down at the piano [said Kurz] and accompany the pantomime I will act out for you with some suitable music. Imagine now Bernardon has fallen into the water and is trying to save himself by swimming." Then he calls his servant, throws himself flat on the stomach across a chair, makes the servant pull the chair to and fro around the room, and kicks his arms and legs like a swimmer, while Haydn expresses in six-eight time the play of waves and swimming. Suddenly Bernardon springs up, embraces Haydn, and practically smothers him with kisses. "Haydn, you're the man for me! You must write me an opera!" So began Der krumme Teufel [The lame devil]. Haydn received twenty-five ducats for it and counted himself rich indeed. This opera was performed twice to great acclaim, and then was forbidden because of offensive remarks in the text.29
Apart from these passages we know little about Haydn's collaboration with Kurz at the Kärtnertor, nor are scholars even certain when Der krumme Teufel was first performed. The earliest reference to a performance of the piece is from 1753, but documentation of the Kärtnertor's repertoire is incomplete and it may have played as early as 1751.30 The Empress Maria Theresia found the
28 Griesinger (n. 1 above), p. 14.
29 Dies (n. 9 above), pp. 97-98.
30 Franz Hadamowsky, "Das Spieljahr 1753-54 des Theaters nächst dem Kärtnertor und des Theaters nächst der k.k. Burg," Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für Wiener Theaterforschung 11 (1959): 3-21. Daniel Heartz (Haydn, Mozart and the Viennese School 1740-1780 [New York and London, 1995], pp. 263-65) argues that the work was not
Musical Cultures in Haydn's Vienna 265
piece vulgar and obscene and banned both the play and Kurz from the Kärt-nertor stage in 1752, although his exile was brief and he was allowed to return in 1754. In 1758 Haydn and Kurz collaborated on a revival of Der krumme Teufel, billed as Der neue krumme Teufel—Return of the Lame Devil, as it were.
Unfortunately the music to Haydn's first "opera" has not survived, only the aria texts.31 The work is in any case only one of dozens of musical burlesques staged by Kurz in the 1750s. Although Der krumme Teufel is the only one with which Haydn has been definitively linked as composer, it is now generally believed he composed the music for numerous other Kurz burlesques as well. Extant scores from Kurz's stage point to Haydn as composer of at least three other farces, Bernardon auf der Gelseninsel (Bernardon on the isle of mosquitoes, 1754), Der auf das neue begeisterte und belebte Bernardon (Bernardon revived, 1754), and Leopold!, der deutsche Robinson (Leopoldl, the German Robinson Crusoe, 1756?), since they contain passages similar to those found in other Haydn works.32 The finale of Haydn's keyboard sonata in A major (Hoboken XVI. 5), for example, has as its theme an almost literal quotation from the aria "Wurstl, mein Schatzerl, wo wirst Du wohl seyn" in "Leopoldl, der deutsche Robinson."33
Beyond internal evidence for Haydn's authorship, the composer's dire financial straits in the 1750s would certainly have encouraged sustained collaboration with Kurz. Der krumme Teufel was the first composition that earned Haydn any sum worth mentioning, and indeed, according to Dies's testimony, it rescued him from dire poverty. Twenty-five ducats, or \\2Vi gulden, was certainly no fortune, but considering that in the late eighteenth century the maximum daily wage for a Viennese journeyman was two gulden or that a
performed until 1759. But see note 32 below for evidence of earlier collaboration between Haydn and Kurz, as well as Dies's account (n. 29 above), which states that the two began collaborating when Haydn was nineteen (i.e., in 1751).
31 The aria texts appear in a collection of thirteen Kurz farces, the only extant copy of which is located in the Vienna Stadtbibliothek (sig. 22.200).
32 Robert Haas, "Die Musik in der Wiener deutschen Stegreifkomödie," Studien zur Musikwissenschaft 12 (1925): 3-64, was the first to propose that Haydn composed these pieces. Several of their scores, including aria texts, were published in Haas, Deutsche Komödienarien 1754-1758, pt. 1 (Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich, vol. 64 [Vienna, 1926]); a subsequent volume was edited and published by Camillo Schoenbaum and Herbert Zeman, Deutsche Komödienarien 1754-1758, pt. 2 (Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich, vol. 212 [Graz and Vienna, 1971]), which, however, sheds little further light on the question. Haas's conclusions have been supported with some modification by Eva Badura-Skoda, "The Influence of the Viennese Popular Comedy on Haydn and Mozart," Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association 100 (1973-74): 185-99, and Landon, Haydn: Chronicle and Works (n. 13 above), 1:101-3.
33 Badura-Skoda, p. 190.
266 Melton
pound of bread cost six kreutzer (.10 gulden),34 this was a considerable sum for an impoverished musician who only a year or so earlier had considered entering a monastery to elude starvation. It seems improbable that Haydn, having once tasted the fruits of commercial success, would have passed up the financial opportunities offered by further collaboration with Kurz—all the more so since it was not until 1761, when Haydn entered the employ of Prince Paul Anton Esterhäzy, that he began to enjoy a measure of financial security.
Assuming, then, that Haydn worked extensively with Kurz at the Kärtnertor, what was the theatrical world he experienced there? Kurz's burlesques followed in the tradition of the Viennese popular comedy as it had developed since 1709, when the Kärtnertor opened as the city's first permanent German-language stage. In subsequent decades it evolved into one of the most commercially successful theaters in the Holy Roman Empire.35 Up until the 1770s much of its repertoire revolved around the comic figure of Hanswurst, a stock character in performances of wandering troupes in German-speaking Europe since the sixteenth century. It was at the Kärtnertor, however, that Hanswurst acquired the distinctive Viennese dialect and identity with which he has since been associated. The Viennese Hanswurst was the creation of Joseph Anton Stranitzky (1676-1726), the son of a liveryman from Graz who began his stage career in Vienna as owner of a marionette theater. He subsequently formed a theatrical troupe, improvising his Hanswurst routines in dance halls and market stalls. By 1710 Stranitzky and his players had earned sufficient renown to take up permanent quarters at the Kärtnertor Theater, which had opened a year earlier.
The Hanswurst portrayed by Stranitzky and his Kärtnertor successors was a servant who spoke in a pronounced Viennese dialect (though he claimed to be a Salzburg peasant) and wore a green cap, fool's collar, and beard. His improvised comedy took the form of raucous exchanges with the audience or running commentaries on the actions of his master. The source of much of his humor doubtless lay in this juxtaposition of master and servant, which made the aristocratic demeanor of the former all the more incongruous in light of the coarse, plebeian antics of the latter. The juxtaposition of master and servant also explains why the Kärtnertor could attract such a diverse audience, ranging from the aristocrats who populated the more expensive boxes to the chambermaids and footmen who paid a mere ten kreutzer to stand in the fifth-floor galleries. Hanswurst's popularity reflected Vienna's dramatic growth as a court city, a process that attracted not only aristocratic families to the capital but also
34 My figures on currency equivalents and wages are taken from the appendix in Bodi (n. 14 above), pp. 441-42.
35 On the origins of the Kärtnertor, see Eleonore Schenk, "Die Anfänge des Wiener Kärtnertortheaters 1710-1749" (Ph.D. diss., University of Vienna, 1969), pp. 19-20.
Musical Cultures in Haydn's Vienna 267
their entourage of servants. Although critics accused the Kärtnertor of pandering to plebeian tastes, noble patrons appear to have been just as drawn to Hanswurst's comedy. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, wife of the British ambassador to Constantinople, attended one of Stranitzky's performances at the Kärtnertor in 1716 and wrote that two of the characters "very fairly let down their breeches in the direct view of the boxes, which were full of people of the first Rank that seem'd very well pleased with their Entertainment." After visiting the Kärtnertor in 1768, Leopold Mozart noted disapprovingly that "a gentleman, even a nobleman with decorations, will clap his hands and laugh so much over some ribald or naive joke of Hanswurst as to get short of breath."36
Hanswurst's popularity continued to soar after 1741, when the Viennese court granted the Kärtnertor permission to perform comic operas in German. Stranitzky's successor as Hanswurst, Gottfried Prehauser, took advantage of the dispensation to add music to his performances. Therein lay the origins of the Viennese singspiel, the genre familiar to most through Mozart's German-language comic operas. Mozart's creations would have been unthinkable without the musical burlesques of Kurz and Prehauser, who at some point in the late 1740s began collaborating at the Kärtnertor. Traces of the servant types they portrayed—Prehauser the irrepressible Hanswurst, Kurz the witless Ber-nardon—survive today in Mozartian figures like Padrillo in The Abduction from the Seraglio (1782) or Papageno in The Magic Flute (1791).37 The latter singspiel was especially indebted to Kurz and Prehauser in its use of elaborate special effects and stage machinery. The serpent who pursues Tamino in the opening scene, the cherub-like figures who descend from the clouds to save Pamina, the musical instruments possessing magical properties, all could be found on the Kärtnertor stage of the 1750s.
Yet as Otto Rommel showed in his indispensable history of the Viennese popular stage, the musical burlesques of Kurz and Prehauser were themselves heirs to the baroque theatrical culture spawned by the Habsburg Counter-Reformation and its celebration of church and dynasty.38 The operatic spectacles of Apostolo Zeno and Niccold Minato, both popular at the Habsburg court in the early eighteenth century, or the so-called imperial plays (Kaiserspiele) performed in Jesuit school theaters from the early seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, epitomized this culture. In ideological terms, Habsburg
36 R. Halsband, ed., The Selected Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (New York, 1971), p. 83; Leopold Mozart is quoted in Badura-Skoda, p. 196.
37 Mozart's debt to Hanswurst is discussed in Gerhart Scheit, "Mozart und Hans Wurst: Bemerkungen zur Dramaturgie der Aufklärung," in Hanns-Werner Heister et al., eds., Zwischen Aufklärung und Kulturindustrie. Festschrift für Georg Knepler zum 85. Geburtstag, Bd. II: Musik/Theater (Hamburg, 1993), pp. 69-81.
38 Otto Rommel, Die Alt-Wiener Volkskomödie (Vienna, 1952).
268 Melton
court opera and the Jesuit Kaiserspiel expressed the synthesis of dynasty, Church, and aristocracy on which the monarchy rested. Both genres drew upon themes from Christian and classical antiquity in championing loyalty to dynasty, opposition to heresy, and aristocratic valor. Yet the boundaries between these courtly and religious genres on the one hand, and the popular stage on the other, had grown increasingly fluid by the time the Kartnertor opened in 1709. Of the fourteen Hanswurst texts of Stranitzky that have survived, for example, five were travesties of plots taken from operas performed at the Habsburg court.39 Kurz began his stage career in his father's wandering troupe, and its repertoire included not only comical farces but also adaptations of Jesuit-inspired dramas like "The Life and Martyrdom of St. Johannes von Nepomuk," "The Life and Death of St. Sebastian," and "The Blessed Genevieve."40 Conversely, Habsburg court opera and Jesuit school dramas increasingly included comical intermezzi in their performances. These interludes usually featured a comic figure of the sort found in performances of wandering troupes or—after 1710—on the stage of the Kartnertor. Although Jesuit theorists had justified this infusion of "low" humor into "high" drama as providing comic relief, the performances of Jesuit dramatists like Johann Baptist Adolf gave the comical intermezzo an importance that threatened to obscure altogether the sacred drama into which it was interposed.
This blurring of boundaries between high and low, sacred and profane, explains why both the court and the Habsburg ecclesiastical hierarchy began to discourage Jesuit school dramas in the 1750s. (The issue became moot after 1773, when the papacy, bowing to anti-Jesuit sentiment in France, Spain, and Portugal, dissolved the order altogether.) It also helps to explain why the pious Maria Theresia and even more secular-minded theater reformers like Joseph Sonnenfels, the Habsburg official who succeeded in expelling Kurz and Pre-hauser from the Kartnertor stage in 1770, found their burlesques so objectionable. For in appropriating themes and dramaturgy of the baroque stage, they at the same time debased them. Although the gods, heroes, and allegorical figures who had dominated court and Jesuit drama still appeared, their roles had receded in comparison with the servants, common soldiers, and peasants who now occupied center stage. The plebeian characters had appropriated the world of the baroque stage in its entirety. This process of adulteration was above all evident in Kurz's use of stage machinery and special effects, a legacy of Habsburg court opera and the Jesuit Kaiserspiel. On the Jesuit stage, flying machines or mechanically simulated storms and earthquakes affirmed the pres-
39 Scipio (Apostolo Zeno), Adalbert (Niccolo Minato), Cafena (?), Ifigenia (Zeno), and Gordianus (Donato Cupeda): Rommel, p. 231.
40 Fritz Raab, Johann Joseph Kurz genannt Bernardon: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des deutschen Theaters im 18. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1899), p. 3.
Musical Cultures in Haydn's Vienna 269
ence of divine intervention; Kurz and Prehauser disjoined baroque effect from its sacred matrix, transforming the miraculous into a vehicle of comical slapstick. The fire and smoke simulated on the Habsburg stage depicted the burning of martyrs; in a Kurz burlesque, they portrayed a hapless Bernardon with his trousers afire. The machinery in a Jesuit drama that enabled, say, an angel to descend from the heavens to rescue a repentant sinner was, under Kurz's direction, employed to transport a live donkey across the stage, fly Bernardon through the air atop a mechanical rooster, or dangle Hanswurst from a cloud as be converses with, the devil.41
What did all of this mean for Haydn as composer? First, Haydn's early collaboration with Kurz would have helped cultivate the playful and mischievous qualities that came to be a hallmark of his compositions. The musicologist Gretchen A. Wheelock, who has studied the place of humor in Haydn's music, quotes a telling passage from Griesinger's 1810 biography:
A harmless roguery [Schalkheit], or what the British call Humour, was a dominant feature in Haydn's character. He easily and by preference discovered the comic side of a subject, and anyone who had spent even an hour with him must have noticed that the very spirit of Austrian cheerfulness breathed in him. In his compositions this mood [Laune] is most striking, and his allegros and rondeaux in particular are often planned to tease the audience by wanton shifts from the seemingly serious to the highest degree of the comic, and to be tuned to an almost wild hilarity [ausgelassenen Fröhlichkeit].42
Haydn loved musical gags, sudden changes of tempo, the injection of a humorous moment into an ostensibly serious one. His capacity for shifting unexpectedly between refinement and coarseness, the elevated and the vulgar, blurred the boundaries between high and low in much the same spirit as had the Kärtnertor stage of Kurz and Prehauser. Haydn came to enjoy enormous critical success in his day, but when he did come under attack, it was often this mixture of high and low that disturbed his critics. Johann Adam Hiller, a North German music critic, wrote of Haydn's style in 1786: "Is not that curious mixture of the noble and the common, the serious and the comic, which so
41 On the Jesuit theater's emphasis on special effects, see Willi Flemming, Geschichte des Jesuitentheaters in den Ländern deutscher Zunge (Berlin, 1923), pp. 152-71, and Kurt Adel, Das Wiener Jesuitentheater und die europäische Barockdramatik (Vienna, 1960), pp. 128-31. Examples of Kurz's use of stage machinery can be found under sig. A22.220 in the Vienna Stadtbibliothek. The example of the donkey is mentioned in Joseph Sonnenfels, Briefe über die wienerische Schaubühne, 2 vols. (Gesammelte Schriften, vols. 5-6, Vienna, 1784), 1:281-82.
42 Gretchen A. Wheelock, Haydn's Ingenious Jesting with Art: Contexts of Musical Wit and Humor (New York, 1992), pp. 31-32. Here Wheelock is quoting from Franz Grasberger's edition of Griesinger's biography, Biographische Notizen über Joseph Haydn (Vienna, 1954), p. 57.
270 Melton
often occurs in one and the same movement, sometimes of a bad effect?" Hiller further observed of Haydn's music: "We hear so many concertos, symphonies, etc., these days that impress us with music's dignity in serene and majestic tones; but before one suspects it, in comes Hans Wurst, who begs our indulgence with his low jokes."43 Johann Christoph Stockhausen, writing in 1771 in his Critischer Entwurf einer auserlesenen Bibliothek fur die Liebhaber der Philosophie und schönen Wissenschaften (Berlin, 1771), objected to "that curious mixture of the comic and the serious, of the trivial and the touching" in Haydn's music.44
This dissolution of boundaries pointed to a late baroque culture that had lost its internal coherence. That the courtly and Catholic theatrical media of the Habsburg Counter-Reformation could engender the fundamentally profane stage of Kurz and Prehauser was one symptom; another was the growing conviction on the part of state and ecclesiastical reformers that the popular devotional practices promoted so vigorously in the Counter-Reformation— pilgrimages, processions, cults of the saints, the proliferation of religious feast days—had acquired an increasingly profane character and should be curtailed.45 As critics examined these practices, they grew convinced that the theatricality and sensuality of baroque piety were inherently unstable, vulnerable to appropriation for profane purposes, and difficult to control. Implicit in their criticisms was the fear that popular religious celebrations had taken on a life of their own apart from their original devotional function. The 1754 Habs-burg ordinance announcing the abolition of numerous religious holidays expressed this concern: "We observe, not without displeasure, that those very days which were to be devoted to God and to the Saints are desecrated rather than kept holy because of extravagant celebrations and profane behavior.... Such holy days are now the occasion not of Christian devotion, but of pernicious sin."46 This mixture of the sacred and the profane was also the target of ordinances banning the performance of popular religious plays like the pageant of the Magi, and similar considerations led to tighter regulations on how popular saints' days (e.g., those honoring St. Johannes Nepomuk) were celebrated. The underlying motive behind all of these measures, a desire to restore the putatively eroded or violated boundaries between sacred and profane, were a leitmotif of the religious reforms of the Theresian and Josephinian eras.
Second, Haydn's work at the Kärtnertor would have further honed his sen-
43 Quotes of Hiller taken from Landon, Haydn: Chronicle and Works (n. 13 above), 2:154, andWheelock, p. 35.
44 Quoted in Landon, Haydn: Chronicle and Works (n. 13 above), 2:174.
45 On the background to the religious reforms of the Theresian period, see Franz A. J. Szabo, Kaunitz and Enlightened Absolutism (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 210-57. See also Melton, "From Image to Word" (n. 2 above), pp. 110-18.
46 Codex Austriacus, 5 vols. (Vienna, 1704-77), 5:837.
Musical Cultures in Haydn's Vienna 271
sitivity to audience. As Vienna's first permanent commercial stage, the Kärt-nertor subsisted not on court subsidies but on a paying public whose tastes had to be accommodated. From the outset of his career, Haydn learned to compose in a milieu that forced him to be attuned, almost seismographically, to the tastes of his public. The relationship between performers and audience in the productions of Kurz and Prehauser was a close if frequently raucous one. Public theaters in the eighteenth century were notoriously rowdy, of course, and in this respect the Kärtnertor was no different from commercial stages elsewhere in Europe. Audiences at London's Drury Lane Theater expressed their dissatisfaction by pelting the stage with oranges, patrons of Paris's Comedie Francaise with shrill whistles produced by blowing into the hollowed ends of housekeys.47 And like public theaters elsewhere, the Kärtnertor boosted its audience capacity by having spectators stand rather than sit in the parterre.48 A parterre filled with standing spectators packed cheek by jowl in direct view of the stage provoked frequent brawls, but it also encouraged a degree of audience participation that some eighteenth-century observers praised as a salutary vehicle of public influence over the theater.49
47 The behavior of London theater audiences is discussed in Harry William Pedicord, The Theatrical Public in the Time of Garrick (New York, 1954). On Parisian theater audiences, see Jeffrey Ravel, The Contested Parterre: Public Theater and French Political Culture, 1680-1791 (Ithaca, N.Y., and London, 1999). James H. Johnson's Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley, Calif., 1995) is an engaging study of opera audiences in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Paris, though I am skeptical of his assumption that the noisiness of opera audiences prior to the reception of Glück in the 1770s indicated a lack of interest in the action on stage. Chatter might just as easily have indicated audience engagement as inattention. For an insightful critique of the notion that eighteenth-century audiences did not "listen," see William Weber, "Did People Listen in the Eighteenth Century?" Early Music 25 (1997): 678-91.
48 Actually the Kärtnertor included two parterres. The second was added in 1748, directly in front of the orchestra, where aristocratic patrons were seated. Directly behind this parterre, separated from it by a low partition, was the larger and less expensive standing parterre. Patrons also stood in galleries on the second, fourth, fifth, and sixth levels, which included, in addition, forty-nine loges; the third level was dedicated to loges only, twenty-four in all. On the architecture of the Kärtnertor prior to the fire of 1761, after which the theater was rebuilt, see Gustav Zechmeister, Die Wiener Theater nächst der Burg und nächst dem Kärtnertor von 1747 bis 1776 (Vienna, 1971), pp. 20-21.
49 In Paris, for example, the installation of benches in the parterre of the Comeclie Francaise in 1782 provoked a vigorous debate. Defenders of the measure, such as the philosophe La Harpe, argued that parterre seating would make spectators quieter and more attentive, while opponents like the journalist Mercier insisted that parterre seats transformed active spectators into passive consumers and thus undermined their sovereignty over the stage. On this debate, see Jeffrey Ravel, "The Police and the Parterre: Cultural Politics in the Paris Public Theater, 1680-1789" (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley, 1987), pp. 304-405.
272 Melton
But what helped fashion a particularly close relationship between stage and audience in the burlesques of Kurz and Prehauser was their extemporaneity, a distinctive feature of the Kärtnertor stage up to 1770. Louis XIV's government had banned the use of extemporized dialogue in performances on Paris's two leading stages, the Comedie Francaise and the Comedie Italienne. The Licensing Act of 1737 had done the same for the London stage by requiring theater managers at Drury Lane and Covent Garden to submit the text of a performance in advance to a censor. In Kurz's and Prehauser's performances at the Kärtnertor, much of the comedy was improvised, although the music and arias were written down. Off-the-cuff allusions to recent events, the use of vulgar gestures and sexual innuendo to spice up routines, bantering back and forth with the audience—such improvisation was standard at the Kärtnertor. One easily imagines a packed house, in an almost Dionysian frenzy, urging Hanswurst or Bernardon on to ever greater verbal or gesticular excesses (recall Lady Montague's description of Hanswurst mooning his public), which was another reason theater reformers were so hostile to the comedies of Kurz and Prehauser. "The more depraved the characters," wrote one critic, "the more applause they win."50 An improvised performance, unlike one based on a written text, was immune to censorship, which was why the official campaign against Kurz and Prehauser focused its efforts on ensuring that all performances at the Kärtnertor conformed to a written text submitted in advance to a theater censor.
* * *
By the mid-1770s, Haydn, having spent more than a decade in the employ of Prince Esterhäzy, was financially secure and had long ceased collaborating with Kurz and Prehauser. Hanswurst did make one final appearance in Haydn's Die Feuersbrunst, oder das abgebrannte Haus (The conflagration, or the house ablazed), which he composed at some point between 1776 and 1778 and which had all the markings of a Kurz and Prehauser farce. Significantly, however, the piece was performed not by Kurz and Prehauser but by puppets, in the marionette theater built for Prince Nicolas at Esterhäza.51 Hanswurst's disappearance from the Kärtnertor was a symptom of the changes that had occurred in the theaters of the capital. Sonnenfels and his successors had succeeded in banishing Hanswurst and Bernardon from the Kärtnertor, which was
50 Johann Heinrich von Engelschall, Zufällige Gedanken über die deutsche Schaubühne (Vienna, 1760), p. 16.
51 The score disappeared until 1960, when a manuscript copy was found in the library of Yale University. For a discussion of the piece, see H. C. Robbins Landon, "Haydn's Marionette Operas and the Repertoire of the Marionette Theater at Esterhäzy Castle," Haydn Yearbook/Das Haydn Jahrbuch 1 (1962): 165-67.
Musical Cultures in Haydn's Vienna 273
now transformed from an improvised stage into one whose performances followed fixed literary texts. Emperor Joseph II's announcement in 1776 that the court theater would be nationalized and turned into an institution performing a fixed repertoire of German-language drama was another sign of this "liter-arification" of the Viennese stage.
These developments highlighted the extent to which a literary culture, based on the German vernacular, had finally begun to emerge in the Habsburg capital. By 1765, in fact, thanks largely to the unscrupulous pirating of North German editions by the Viennese publisher Trattner, Vienna had become the third largest producer of German-language books in the Holy Roman Empire.52 The city reached its zenith as a publishing center in the years from 1781 to 1787, when Joseph II's relaxation of censorship fostered a thriving literary market in the capital. The cultural impact was noted by the poet and freemason Aloys Blumauer, writing of the Viennese in 1782: "Reading has become a necessity for us; almost everyone with any money at all has a private library, even if it is only to wallpaper a few rooms; whoever can read has at least a half dozen books."53 Haydn, who only now began to accumulate a library to speak of, himself personified this trend: of the approximately one hundred books that made up his library at his death, at least three-quarters were acquired after the mid-1770s.54 Haydn's career would itself profit from Vienna's growth as a publishing center, which included the establishment of Artaria, the first significant music-publishing firm in the city. Originally founded in Mainz in 1765, Artaria moved to Vienna in 1768. Haydn, who had by this time begun to market his music with Parisian and London publishers, soon began publishing scores with Artaria as well. The close relationship he developed with the firm did much to facilitate the sale and distribution of his music to a broad Viennese musical public.55
Another manifestation of Vienna's expanding literary culture was the emergence of the salon in the 1770s and 1780s. Overall the salon arrived much later in German-speaking Europe than it did in England or France, and it
52 Bodi (n. 14 above), p. 87.
53 Aloys Blumauer, Beobachtungen über österreichische Aufklärung und Literatur (Vienna, 1782), p. 54.
54 See Maria Hörwarthner, "Joseph Haydn's Library: Attempt at a Literary-Historical Reconstruction," in Haydn and His World, ed. Elaine Sisman (Princeton, N.J., 1997), p. 440.
55 On Haydn's relationship with Artaria, and on the importance of music publishing in general for the relationship between composer and public, see the discussion in T. C. W. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe 1660-1789 (Oxford, 2002), pp. 164-66. See also Alexander Weinmann and Rupert Ridgewell, "Artaria," in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie, 29 vols. (London and New York, 2001), 2:82-84.
274 Melton
became fashionable in Vienna at this time for several reasons. One was the cultural effects of Kaunitz's "diplomatic revolution" (1756), which by ending the monarchy's centuries-old enmity with France also helped open the door to French cultural influence in the Habsburg capital.56 Kaunitz himself had become familiar with salon life as Austrian ambassador to Paris (1749-51), and he corresponded with Marie-Therese Rodet Geoffrin and other salonnieres. During her visit to Vienna in 1766 Madame Geoffrin was royally entertained by Kaunitz, who mounted a bust of her in his drawing room.57 Moreover, it was not an accident that the Viennese salon emerged at a time when the Habs-burg throne was occupied by a woman. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France and England, the visibility and power of women at court—whether as regents in the former case or full-fledged sovereigns in the latter—had done much to encourage the female-centered culture of the salon in those countries. Not until the reign of Maria Theresia, however, did a woman govern a major court of the Holy Roman Empire,58 and the emergence of a salon culture during her reign gave symbolic expression to the presence of a powerful female on the Habsburg throne.
The first Viennese salon, that of Charlotte von Greiner (nee Hieronymous, 1739-1815), was in fact the direct offspring of the Theresian court.59 Charlotte was born in Hungary, the daughter of an officer in the Habsburg army. Her mother died soon after giving birth to her, and in 1744 she became an orphan when her father, whose regiment had just been transferred to Vienna, died of tuberculosis. Maria Theresia subsequently learned of the orphaned girl's plight from a chambermaid and arranged to have Charlotte brought to court, where she was entrusted to a governess of the imperial family and given an excellent education that included French, Italian, and Latin. At the age of thirteen she became a personal attendant of the empress, and after 1762 her chief responsibility was to read aloud to Maria Theresia in the evenings.
The education and social skills Charlotte acquired during more than two decades at court prepared her well for her future career as a salon hostess, which began after she left the empress's service in 1766 to marry Franz Sales
56 Hans Wagner, "Der Höhepunkt des französischen Kultureinflusses in Österreich in der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts," Österreich in Geschichte und Literatur 5 (1961): 509.
57 Szabo, p. 33; Wagner, p. 513.
58 This was in part the result of biological accident, since the major dynasties of the empire (e.g., Habsburg, Hohenzollern, Wittelsbach) enjoyed remarkable continuity in the male line. Only in 1740, when the Habsburg ruler Charles VI died without a male heir, was this continuity finally broken.
59 Unless otherwise noted, my discussion of Charlotte von Greiner and her salon is based on the autobiography of her daughter, Caroline Pichler, Denkwürdigkeiten aus meinem Leben, 2 vols., ed. Emil Karl Blümml (Munich, 1914), 1:3-159.
Musical Cultures in Haydn 's Vienna 275
Greiner. Franz, at that time a promising young secretary in the war ministry, rose rapidly up the administrative ladder as the quintessentially enlightened Theresian bureaucrat. During his career he distinguished himself as an advocate of agrarian reform, universal education, and religious toleration. He enjoyed considerable favor with Maria Theresia, no doubt in part due to his wife's influence, and in 1771 the empress ennobled him at the rank of baron (Freiherr). The Greiner salon dates from around 1773-74, when Charlotte and her husband began to host weekly gatherings at their spacious Viennese apartment. For a decade they presided over the most fashionable salon in the city and a social center of the Austrian Enlightenment. The two were themselves a somewhat incongruous pair: Charlotte, unquestionably one of the most literate and cultivated women in the capital, had a special interest in natural history and astronomy, while Franz was a connoisseur of music, painting, and poetry. Charlotte's knowledge of Latin, unusual even for educated women of her day, would have facilitated her interest in these traditionally male fields. Her views on women were highly advanced for the time—she is the first Austrian woman I have encountered who espoused feminist views—and later in life she became an admirer of Mary Wollstonecraft. According to her daughter, Charlotte believed that "women were originally destined by nature and providence to dominate, but they lost this dominion through a kind of usurpation by the male sex, whose physical strength exceeds our own."60 At any rate, if the widely divergent interests of husband and wife pointed to what was, at least by their daughter's account, strictly a marriage of convenience, these differences also gave their salon considerable cultural breadth. There, as in the enlightened salons of Paris, discussions centered around philosophical, literary, and scientific topics (the magnetic theories of Franz Mesmer, a frequent guest, were debated there), but the Greiner salon also provided a regular audience for performances by composers like Haydn, Mozart, and Salieri. Haydn, Mozart, and Baron Greiner belonged to the same masonic lodge, True Harmony (Zum wahren Eintracht), which Haydn joined in 1785.
Haydn's flirtation with freemasonry was brief, and the more important result of his membership in the Greiner circle was the literary education he acquired there. The Greiners' daughter Caroline later recalled that "at our home all the new poetic works published here or abroad were immediately circulated, read, and discussed."61 The Greiner salon was particularly important for the Austrian reception of Protestant Germany's literary culture, especially the Sturm und Drang writers, even though Franz and Charlotte were themselves apparently lukewarm to the movement. Passages from Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther and Götz von Berlichingen were read aloud there, as well as the poetry of
»Ibid., 1:48. 61 Ibid.
276 Melton
Klopstock, with whom Charlotte corresponded. Haydn's membership in the Greiner salon in fact coincided with what H. C. Robbins Landon calls his Sturm und Drang phase, typified by his Symphony no. 45 (Farewell) and marked by a notably eccentric turn in his music. Landon notes Haydn's more frequent use during this period of effects like syncopated rhythms, unexpected crescendi, abrupt pianissimi, and in general the emotionalism and fascination with the irrational associated with the Sturm und Drang. During this time Haydn also composed incidental music (now lost) for Esterhäza performances of Götz von Berlichingen and various plays by Shakespeare, an icon of the Sturm und Drang movement.62
A more familiar example of Haydn's literary debt to the Greiner salon was his adaptation (Hoboken XXVIa:43) of Lorenz Leopold Haschka's "Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser." Haschka (1749-1827), a poet and a former Jesuit, resided for a time in the Greiner household in his capacity as Caroline's tutor. Haydn came to know him in the Greiner salon, and later, in 1797, the two collaborated to produce an Austrian rejoinder to the "Marseillaise." The work's more enduring significance was as the Habsburg counterpart to "God Save the King" and ultimately, in an ironic twist, as the German national anthem. (Haschka, by the way, was for a time also what the Viennese still euphemistically call a "male friend of the household" [Hausfreund], or a married woman's lover—in this case Charlotte von Greiner's.) Through his connection with the Greiner salon Haydn also obtained the lyrics for two sets of twelve German lieder, published in Vienna by Artaria in 1781 and 1784. At Haydn's request Baron Greiner supplied most of the texts, chiefly poems by mid-century North German writers like Lessing, Christian Felix Weise, and Gottfried August Bürger.63 Musically, they are not some of Haydn's better efforts—far more expressive are the songs he composed during his second visit to London in 1794-95, based on poems written by his friend Anne Hunter—nor are they helped by the cliched texts, which reflect poorly on Baron Greiner's literary tastes.
Haydn is in any case remembered today more for his string quartets than for his lieder, and this may well have been the Greiner salon's most lasting contribution to his musical style. As Dena Goodman has argued, the heart of sociability in the Enlightenment salon was conversation. The presence of the salon hostess was critical precisely because of her role in stimulating and regulating the flow of conversation among her guests.64 The communicative
62 Landon, Haydn: Chronicle and Works (n. 13 above), 2:273-79.
63 See Roswitha Strommer, "Wiener literarische Salons zur Zeit Joseph Haydns," in Joseph Haydn und die Literatur seiner 7Jeit, ed. Herbert Zeman (Eisenstadt, 1976), pp. 118-19; cf. Bartha, ed. (n. 24 above), p. 99.
64 Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, N.Y., and London, 1994).
Musical Cultures in Haydn's Vienna 211
structure of the Enlightenment salon was dialogical and egalitarian: conversation served not as an occasion for displaying or deferring to power and status, as had been the case in the older, more hierarchical model of court sociability, but functioned instead as a form of reciprocal exchange that temporarily suspended differences in rank. The purpose of conversation was to give pleasure to all participants by enabling each to contribute. Good conversation was the art of pleasing others through wit and cultivation, which required ease of comportment, spontaneity of expression, and attentiveness to audience.65
Haydn's exposure to salon sociability during the 1770s and 1780s helps illuminate a central aspect of his string quartets, namely, their conversational quality. Here the debate over whether or not Haydn "invented" the string quartet may be safely set aside.66 Most scholars would agree in any case that he transformed it by the equality he bestowed on the four voices, each of which was given the capacity to carry the melody. No longer was just one instrument the bearer of melody with the others providing accompaniment, as was the case with Haydn's early serenades. By establishing this equality of voices as a defining feature of the genre, Haydn helped make the string quartet what Goethe defined as "a stimulating conversation between four intelligent people."67 Haydn's quartets express this conversational dimension in various ways. In the second movement of the 1797 Emperor Quartet (op. 76, no. 3), for example, each voice alternates between melody and accompaniment, much like participants in a conversation alternately speak and listen. The melody circulates among the four instruments, its mood embellished by each in turn just as the subject of a conversation is refracted through the personality and identity of each participant. Observing that "the most striking innovation of Haydn's string-quartet writing [is] its air of conversation," Charles Rosen finds this aspect expressed in the composer's imitation of speech rhythms. Witness Rosen's analysis of the opening to Haydn's Quartet in E Major, op. 54, no. 3 (1788): "The second violin and viola begin a melody, and are literally interrupted at once by the violin, which takes immediate precedence. In the fourth and fifth measures the two middle voices try once more, and are again interrupted. The sociable comedy of Haydn's art becomes radiant at the end of the eighth measure: the second violin and viola, resigned, give up their phrase and accept the first violin's melody; begin it—and are again comically interrupted. Perhaps the wittiest point is that now (m. 9-10) the first violin retorts this time
65 Daniel Gordon, Citizens without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670-1789 (Princeton, N.J., 1994), pp. 95-100.
66 The different arguments are summarized in Reginald Barrett-Ayres, Joseph Haydn and the String Quartet (London, 1974), chap. 1, who himself credits Haydn with inventing the form.
67 Ibid., p. 7.
278 Melton
with the emphatic end of his opening phrase (m. 3-4) transposed up a ninth, and telescoping the original periodic movement."68 If the second movement of the Emperor Quartet expresses the consensus that characterized one side of salon sociability, these measures evoke the petulance and petty dissension that sometimes undermined the fragile solidarity on which the Enlightenment salon was based. Each, however, exhibits the conversational qualities that were the hallmark both of Haydn's quartets and of modes of sociability to which he was exposed in Enlightenment Vienna.
* * *
The three episodes of Haydn's life examined here—parish schooling in Hainburg in the 1730s, collaboration with the comic actor Kurz in the 1750s, membership in the Greiner salon in the 1770s and 1780s—shed light on the cultural origins of his music. The centrality of music in Austrian schools, an outgrowth of the baroque Catholic world into which Haydn was born, helps explain how the son of a wheelwright could have ever acquired musical training in the first place. Kurz's burlesques, performed in the uproarious environment of Vienna's improvised popular stage, reveal an inversion of this world that cultivated in the composer a particular style of humor as well as an enhanced sense of audience. Finally, this essay has suggested that both the literacy and the orality of Viennese salon culture shaped Haydn as a composer, for not only did the salon give him access to a new literary culture, it also helped foster the conversational qualities that marked his chamber music.
Beyond their impact on Haydn's music, however, these biographical moments illustrate the profound cultural shift that occurred during his lifetime. The world of the Greiner salon was radically different from the Catholic baroque milieu that had originally nurtured the young Haydn's talents. That milieu began to dissolve rapidly during Haydn's lifetime. Dissolution came partly from within, hastened by the unstable properties of baroque Catholic culture. It was also driven from without by reformers in church and state who, having lost confidence in the devotional efficacy and coherence of baroque Catholic culture, sought to prune its luxuriant undergrowth through measures like the reduction of religious holidays, abolition of the Jesuits, curtailment of pilgrimages, and restrictions on the use of orchestral music in the mass. This assault on baroque Catholic culture reached its peak during the late Theresian and Josephinian decades, and it is telling that of the fourteen masses Haydn composed during his lifetime, only two were composed between 1773 and 1796.
68 Charles Rosen, The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (New York, 1971), p. 141.
Musical Cultures in Haydn's Vienna 279
The waning of baroque Catholic culture and the rise of a vernacular print culture were not only central to Haydn's development as a composer; they also constituted a cultural revolution, one that in the final analysis marked the end of the Counter-Reformation and the creation of new audiences and new publics.