Paper given at the conference “New Perspectives on the Austrian Enlightenment,” Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, 23–24 September 2011. For a version with musical examples and illustrations, please consult PDF
“We live in this world in order to learn industriously and, by exchanging our ideas, to enlighten one another and thus endeavor to promote the sciences and the fine arts.”[1] Writing in 1776, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart expressed ideals typical of his century: an optimistic era that believed in the value of education and the possibility of improving human life through the spread of knowledge. Mozart may have never used the word “Aufklärung” in writing. Yet it is possible to hear his music, and that of his contemporaries, as a product and a manifestation of the Enlightenment.
Eighteenth-century musicians in general shared with the philosophes ideals of clarity, elegance, accessibility, and optimism. The didactic impulse that drove Denis Diderot to complete the Encyclopédie (literally: “circle of teachings”) also drove Johann Sebastian Bach to assemble the great cycles of Clavier-Übungen (including the Goldberg Variations) and other cycles such as the Well-Tempered Clavier and the Brandenburg Concertos. The publication in 1735 of the first edition of Carl Linnaeus’s Systema naturae (which led to the system of binomial nomenclature that assigns every animal and plant to a genus and species) followed by ten years the publication of Johann Joseph Fux’s Gradus ad Parnassum , which divides counterpoint into five rhythmic species.
“Vaghezza, chiarezza, e buona modulazione” (charm, clarity, and good melody): this recipe for good music, by the composer Baldassare Galuppi, represented ideals to which many musicians aspired. Mozart wrote of his Piano Concertos K. 413–15 in terms that elegantly capture enlightened values: “The concerts are somewhere between too difficult and too easy. They are very brilliant, pleasant to the ear, natural without being vapid. Here and there is a passage from which only connoisseurs can derive satisfaction, but arranged so that less sophisticated listeners are pleased, without knowing why. ”[2]
Mozart and his contemporaries expressed optimism in favoring major keys over minor, not only in the choice of keys for whole works but in the tendency to end in the major mode works that begin in the minor. Most eighteenth-century operas have a happy ending—the lieto fine in which the critic Antonio Planelli found “certain proof of the progress humankind has made in peacefulness, sophistication, and clemency.”[3]
Sunlight, Enlightenment, and Music
There was no more powerful symbol of the Enlightenment than the sun, so it is not surprising that the eighteenth century produced several musical depictions of the sunrise. At the beginning of Joseph Haydn’s Symphony No. 6, “Le Matin,” composed in 1761, various parts of the orchestra, entering one after the other, and a gradual rise in pitch dramatize a crescendo that depict the rising sun. Without making any explicit reference to the Enlightenment, Haydn’s sunrise stands as a powerful emblem of his century’s most pervasive intellectual movement (Ex. 1).
Two images of music-making in France show instrumental music and sunlight together conveying Enlightenment values. In Le concert, based on a drawing by Antoine Duclos, musicians entertain guests who divide their attention between music and conversation (Fig. 1). Large windows allow sunlight to fill the room, lighting up the score on the keyboard instrument’s music stand. The musicians transform light into audible illumination: musical enlightenment.
Light plays a similar role in a painting of the child Mozart playing in a Parisian salon (Fig. 2). Again sunlight, entering through huge windows, floods the room from behind the musicians and becomes for the artist, Michel Ollivier, a means of making visible the musical enlightenment that, together with conversation and refreshments, stimulates and delights the guests.
Musical enlightenment needed no audience. The title page of an early edition of Haydn’s Piano Trio No. 10, written in 1785 and published in Vienna shortly thereafter, evokes the Enlightenment with its French title, elegant script, and a picture (Fig. 3) whose unknown artist brought diversity—male and female, strings and keyboard, treble and bass—into almost geometrically perfect visual harmony, thereby evoking the pleasures of musical harmony. The shadows tell us that the scene is illuminated from the left. The brightness of the light and the absence of candles suggest that the source of light is, again, the sun shining through a window.
Other windows decorated the façade of the Burgtheater in Vienna. I say “decorated” because some of these windows may have had no practical function. A photograph taken shortly before the theater was demolished in the 1880s (Fig. 4) shows the windows on the ground floor replaced with walls. Possibly the walls were there all along, and the windows served a purely decorative function. But that does not mean that they were unimportant aesthetically or ideologically. The windows identified the Burgtheater as a building that promoted the Enlightenment. In so doing, they encouraged composers who wrote music for the Burgtheater and other musical venues in Vienna to identify their music with Enlightenment values.
Conversations in the Burgtheater—Operatic and Instrumental
Although composers in many parts of Europe wrote music that conveys the values alluded to in the previous paragraphs, Vienna in the 1780s was exceptionally productive in instrumental music of the highest quality, much of it first performed in the Burgtheater. Viennese instrumental music received two major boosts at the beginning of the decade, with the arrival of Mozart in the Habsburg capital and the ecclesiastic reforms of Emperor Joseph II. Eager to participate in Vienna’s culture of private music making and public concerts, Mozart contributed more than anyone else to the decade’s rich production of instrumental music. Joseph’s Enlightenment-inspired reforms of the Catholic Church included measures that discouraged the performance of large-scale church music. Mozart, who had devoted much of his compositional energy in the 1770s to church music in Salzburg, completed no masses or other multi-movement church compositions after 1780.[4] Joseph’s reforms allowed him, indeed encouraged him, to direct his musical creativity to opera and instrumental music.
In thinking about how the music that Mozart and his Viennese contemporaries projects the Enlightenment, it useful to divide that music into two broad categories: first, theatrical music, including opera, and program music—music to which the composer attached a particular, explicitly expressed meaning, of which Haydn’s sunrise is one example; and second, music that we might describe as “abstract”: without words and without titles or programs. Music in the first category can provide us with keys to the interpretation of music in the second category. In the rest of this paper I will move back and forth between operatic and program music on the one hand, and more “abstract” instrumental music on the other.
One crucial aspect of the Enlightenment was the free exchange of ideas that took place during conversations of the kind depicted in the Figures 1 and 2. An operatic scene that vividly depicts such an exchange is the beginning of Così fan tutte, first performed in the Burgtheater in 1790. The opera opens in a coffeehouse, with an argument of the kind that must have echoed through the coffeehouses and salons of eighteenth century Europe—a lively debate, fueled by caffeine, in which no preconceptions or traditions are spared rational scrutiny.
We hear analogous discussions in chamber music, such as the second movement of Mozart’s Quintet for Piano and Winds, first performed in the Burgtheater (with Mozart at the piano) in 1784. This conversation is more sedate than the one in Così, and it involves five individuals, not three; but the piano, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn are just as clearly differentiated as Ferrando, Guglielmo, and Don Alfonso; and their conversation is just as interesting (Ex. 2).
Juxtaposition of opposites in Dittersdorf and Mozart
A key text for the understanding of how the Enlightenment was translated into music is the series of dialogues on music that Diderot produced in collaboration with his daughter’s music teacher, Anton Bemetzrieder. Published in Paris in 1771, the Leçons de clavecin offer insights into how a leading spokesman of the Enlightenment perceived some of the most characteristic elements of the instrumental music of his time.[5]
One aspect of music that Diderot vigorously defended in the Leçons de clavecin was the juxtaposition of opposites, the necessity for contrast. The pupil asks “Does discord have a role to play in harmony? Her teacher, a musical philosophe, explains the desirability for dissonance as well as consonance in music, referring to analogous contrasts in all aspects of life: "Most assuredly. Discord plays the same role in the universe. It is pain that gives pleasure its edge; the shadow that makes us appreciate light; it is to hardship that satisfaction owes its pleasure; the cloudy day makes the clear day beautiful; vice enhances the effect of virtue; plainness allows beauty to shine; contrast allows differences in character to be clearly seen; the magic of painting resides in chiaroscuro; poets of refined taste rarely forget to insert a sad thought among the most delightful and pleasant images, which thereby become interesting; a little distant noise gives silence its charm; a thoughtful person on the edge of a deserted place enhances its solitude; unending happiness becomes vapid."
The pupil responds: “Despite your poetic outburst, I don’t think that I have ever wanted to season the good with a little of the bad.” That prompts the teacher to make his most dramatic philosophical statement: “One doesn’t appreciate the value of the two most important things in live until one has lost them: health and freedom.”[6]
It is astonishing that this passage—mainstream Enlightenment philosophy—should appear in a book ostensibly about music, and in particular instrumental music. It encourages us to make similar interpretative leaps concerning the music written just a few years after Diderot wrote those words.
In 1786 the Viennese composer Carl Dittersdorf presented, in two concerts, twelve symphonies based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The symphonies offer dramatic contrasts—between light and darkness, peace and war, splendor and destruction—that reflect the century’s preoccupation with the Enlightenment and its antagonists and satisfy, at the same time, Diderot’s demands for musical contrast. What makes these symphonies especially useful in furthering our understanding of Viennese instrumental music in general is that Dittersdorf published a booklet for distribution at the performance of the first six symphonies in which he explained the meaning of each movement.[7]
The first symphony is Les Quatre Ages du monde. The third movement, a minuet, depicts the bronze age and, in more concrete political terms, despotism: a political system that constituted the opposite of the enlightened rule of monarchs like Frederick the Great and Joseph II. The first movement of this symphony is in C major. But in a remarkable departure from convention, which required that a minuet be in the same key and mode as the first movement, Dittersdorf made this minuet in A minor, thus differing from the first movement in both key and mode. The minuet begins with the strings in unison, creating an effect that Dittersdorf intended to be heard as dark, stern, and primitive (Ex. 3). The polyphonic textures that come later likewise convey antiquity; this musical depiction of despotism is about the opposite or the absence of enlightenment in the political sphere, reminding us of Diderot’s statement that we appreciate liberty only after we have lost it. This movement offers contrast not only in differing in character from the other movements, but also in featuring a trio (what Dittersdorf called l’alternatif) representing a response to the political system represented in the minuet proper: the plaintive cries of those oppressed by despotism.
The third movement of Mozart’s Symphony No. 40, composed about two years after the first performance of Dittersdorf ‘s “Despotism” minuet, shares with it the minor mode, jagged melodic contours, an opening idea repeated a third higher, and a modulation to the dominant minor (A minor to E minor in Dittersdorf, G minor to D minor in Mozart; see Ex. 4). The similarities become more striking in the second part of the binary structure, where both Dittersdorf and Mozart present their opening themes in imitative counterpoint. The musical similarities allow us attribute to Mozart’s minuet similar meaning: to hear it as another depiction of the absence of enlightenment. Mozart’s trio is quite different from Dittersdorf’s: it offers a sense of consolation and relief, rather than sorrow. But in the starkness of the contrast between minuet and trio, Mozart’s music closely resembles Dittersdorf’s and satisfies just as well Diderot’s insistence on contrast.
The fourth and final movement of the symphony that Dittersdorf entitled “La Délivrance d’Andromède” consists of two completely different parts: an Allegro in D minor and a minuet in F major. In the program, Dittersdorf explained: “The Allegro expresses the battle and the victory over the monster who was guarding Andromeda. The minuet paints the joy and the cries of happiness of her family; the Alternatif [i.e. trio] finally describes Andromeda’s tender gratitude toward her liberator.”[8]
In accordance with Diderot’s statement “C’est l’ombre qui fait valoir la lumière,” the violence of the “combat”(Ex. 5a)—its tonal instability and emphasis on the minor mode—increases the pleasure with which we hear the Tempo di minuetto that follows (Ex. 5b).
Two months before the first Viennese performance of Dittersdorf’s Andromède, Mozart presented his Piano Concerto in C minor, which begins with music of much the same character as Dittersdorf’s “Combat.” Both movements start with with a jagged unison that elaborates a descending chromatic scale (that is, a scale that descends in half-steps). Both movements repeat that melody to the accompaniment of the full orchestra. The similarities encourage us to hear Mozart’s opening as another battle (Ex. 6a). Like Dittersdorf, Mozart juxtaposed this violent music with something gentler; he used the convention of sonata form to incorporate sweetly lyrical passages in the major mode into a movement primarily devoted to the expression of violence (Ex. 6b). Mozart also juxtaposed “l’ombre et la lumière” on a much larger scale. Between two fast movements in C minor he placed a slow movement in E flat major that sounds especially gentle and consoling in its dark, violent context.
The Concerto in C minor ends as darkly as it begins; its contrast of “l’ombre e la lumière” does not include the lieto fine of which Dittersdorf’s Andromède offers an instrumental example. But Mozart’s other minor-mode piano concerto, K. 466 in D minor, ends with one of his most brilliant happy endings. The third movement is a rondo that begins with the piano and orchestra jointly presenting the main theme in D minor. As the movement approaches its conclusion, the piano begins the theme again, but interrupts itself. The orchestra enters in D major: a change of mode that transforms the movement’s character, from conflict to celebration. If you feel joy in listening to this music, you might recall Diderot’s words, “C’est la peine qui rend le plaisir piquant.”
Diderot’s Labyrinth
One way in which eighteenth-century music conveyed physical distance was by the distance between keys or tonal centers. The fewer notes that two keys had in common, the farther apart they were perceived to be. In one of the most striking passages in the Leçons de clavecin, the teacher likens music that moves through several keys to a man who wakes up in a labyrinth, through which he wanders until, finally, he finds himself back where he began. Addressing the student, the teacher says:
If you have a little imagination; if you can feel; if sounds captivate your soul, if you were born with a sensitive heart; if nature gave you the means to experience enthusiasm and to communicate it to others, what will happen to you? You will see a man who wakes up in the middle of a labyrinth. Here he is, looking to the right and left for a way out. For a moment he thought he had reached the end of his wanderings. He stops; with hesitant, trembling steps he follows a path, possibly misleading, that opens before him. Here he is, lost again. He walks on, and after several turns this way and that, he finds himself back where he started. There he looks around him; he sees a straighter path and starts down it. He imagines an open place on the other side of a forest that he decides to cross. He runs, he rests, he runs again; he climbs and climbs, reaching the top of a hill. He descends, he falls, he gets up again. Bruised from his repeated falls, he goes on; he arrives, looks around, and recognizes the place where he woke up.[9]
This passage offers a powerful verbal counterpart to some of the most intricate passages in eighteenth-century music, and in particular to music in the part of sonata-form movements known as the development. Beginning roughly halfway through a movement, the development offered composers an opportunity to explore a wide range of keys, and in doing so, to stage a musical drama analogous to the one described by Diderot.
A fine example of the development as labyrinth is in the slow movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 17 in G. The home key of this movement is C major (no sharps or flats). The development starts with a piano solo in D minor (one flat). The silence of the orchestra makes it easy for us to identify the piano as a single, isolated protagonist: “un homme qui s’éveille au centre d’un labyrinthe.” He starts to look for a way out, moving from one key to another, but each turn takes him further from the movement’s home key—from A minor to E minor (1 sharp), B minor (2 sharps), F# minor (3 sharps)—until he is lost in the remote regions of C# minor (4 sharps). Then, unexpectedly, the orchestra intercedes, bringing the tonality back, as if by magic, to the home key. Unlike the conventional modulations through which the protagonist lost himself, the orchestra’s move back to C major is surreal: a harmonic wormhole that seemingly defies musical laws.
Another remarkable extrication from a labyrinth comes near the end of the slow movement of the Quintet for Piano and Winds. This passage is extraordinary, in part, because of its location: it is in the middle of the recapitulation, the section that comes after the development, where convention encourages us to expect tonal stability. It is also unusual in its extreme tonal disorientation, which culminates in a rising series of rising dissonant chords—an astonishing passage that perfectly illustrates Diderot’s words “il grimpe, il grimpe; il a atteint le sommet d’une collline.” The twisted arpeggi (broken chords) with which piano follows the harmonic thread adds to the music’s labyrinthine quality (Ex. 7).
I am not saying that Mozart must have known the Leçons de Clavecin and found inspiration in it, although it is possible that he did (especially during his stay of several months in Paris in 1778). Yet the Leçons are still valuable in helping us to understand Mozart’s music, and in particular helping us to hear that music as an expression of aesthetic values that he shared with one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers.
The interpretations of Mozart’s instrumental music that I have offered here probably coincide, more or less, with what you have heard in this music already; but listening again to this music in conjunction with the Leçons de clavecin and programmatic music such as Dittersdorf’s offers confirmation, in the form of words, of the complex meanings that eighteenth-century intellectuals and musicians believed instrumental music capable of conveying to its listeners. In juxtaposing Diderot’s words, Dittersdorf’s programmatic music and its accompanying explanations, and the quintet and concertos by Mozart, I hope I have suggested some new ways of listening to familiar music, and some new ways of thinking about relations between that music and the culture that produced it.
NOTES
[1] The Letters of Mozart and His Family, trans. Emily Anderson, 3rd ed. (New York: Norton, 1985), 266.
[2] die Concerten sind eben das Mittelding zwischen zu schwer, und zu leicht –– sind sehr Brillant –– angenehm in die ohren –– Natürlich, ohne in das leere zu fallen –– hie und da –– können auch kenner allein satisfaction erhalten –– doch so –– daß die nicht=kenner damit zufrieden seyn müssen, ohne zu wissen warum (Mozart: Briefe und Aufzeichnungen, ed. Wilhelm A. Bauer, Otto Erich Deutsch, Joseph Heinz Eibl, and Ulrich Konrad, 8 vols. [Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2005], III, 245–46).
[3] Antonio Planelli, Dell’opera in musica (Naples: Donato Campo, 1772), 72.
[4] Mozart wrote his last complete mass, the Missa solemnis in C, K. 337, in Salzburg in March 1780; the later Mass in C minor, K. 427, and Requiem, K. 626, remained unfinished.
[5] The Leçons de clavecin have been the object of much musicological interest in recent years. See Craig M. Wright, The Maze and the Warrior: Symbols in Architecture, Theology, and Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 258; Matthew Riley, “Straying from Nature: The Labyrinthine Harmonic Theory of Diderot and Bemetzrieder’s Leçons de clavecin (1771), Journal of Musicology 19 (2002), 3–38; Thomas Christensen, “Bemetzrieder’s Dream: Diderot and the Pathology of Tonal Sensibility in the Leçons de clavecin, “ in Music, Sensantion, and Sensuality, ed. Linda Phyllis Austern (New York: Routledge, 2002), 39–56; and Cynthia Verba, “Music and the Enlightenment” in The Enlightenment World, ed. Martin Fitzpatrick et al. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004), 307–22.
[6] L’ELEVE: Est-ce que la discorde se mêle aussi dans l’harmonie? LE MAITRE: Assurément; et elle y fait le même rôle dans l’Univers; c’est la peine qui rend le plaisir piquant; c’est l’ombre qui fait valoir la lumière; c’est à la fatigue que la jouissance doit sa douceur; c’est le jour nébuleux qui embellit le jour serein; c’est le vice qui sert de fard à la vertu; c’est la laideur qui relêve l’éclat de la beauté; c’est par l’opposition que les caracteres se distinguent, c’est dans le clair-obsur que consiste la magie de la peinture; les Poëtes d’un gout exquis n’ont guère manqué de jetter une idée triste au milieu des images les plus riantes ou les plus voluptueuses; celles-ci en deviennent intéressantes; un peu de bruit lointain prête un charme inconcevable au silence; un être pensif rélégué dans le coin d’une solitude, ajoute à la solitude. Un bonheur que rien n’altère devient fade. L’ELEVE: Malgré votre tirade poëtique, il me semble que dans le bien je n’ai jamais désiré l’assaisonnement d’un peu de mal. LE MAITRE: On ne sent le prix des deux plus grands biens de la vie que quand on les a perdus, la santé et la liberté. ([Denis Diderot], Leçons de clavecin, et principes d’harmonie, par Mr. Bemetzrieder [Paris: Bluet, 1771], 154–55).
[7] See John A. Rice, "New Light on Dittersdorf's Ovid Symphonies," Studi musicali XXIX (2000), 453-98.
[8] “L’Allègre exprime le combat et la victoire remportée sur le monstre qui surveillait Andromède. Le Menuet peint la joie et les cris d’allégresse de ses parents; l’Alternatif [i.e. trio] enfin décrit la tendre reconnaissance d’Andromède envers son libérateur”
[9] Si vous avez un peu d’imagination; si vous sentez; si les sons captivent votre ame; si vous êtes née avec des entrailles mobiles; si la nature vous a signée pour éprouver vous-même et transmettre aux autres de l’enthousiasme, que vous sera-t-il arrivé? De voir un homme qui s’éveille au centre d’un labyrinthe. Le voilà qui cherche de droite et de gauche une issue; un moment il a cru toucher à la fin de ses erreurs; il s’arrête, il suit d’un pas incertain et tremblant, la route, perfide peut-être, qui s’ouvre devant lui; le voilà derechef égaré; il marche, et après quelques tours et quelques retours, l’endroit d’où il est parti, est celui où il se retrouve. Là, il tourne les yeux autour de lui; il apperçoit une route plus droite; il s’y jette; il imagine une place libre au-delà d’une forêt qu’il se propose de franchir; il court; il se repose; il court encore; il grimpe, il grimpe; il a atteint le sommet d’une collline; il en descend; il tombe; il se releve; froissé de chutes et de rechutes, il va; il arrive, il regarde, et reconnoît le lieu meme de son réveil (Leçons de clavecin, 327).