Music and the Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century

Hollander Distinguished Lecture in Musicology, Michigan State University, 15 March 2013

             London was eighteenth-century Europe’s largest and richest city. The Grand Tour, in the narrow sense in which I’m using it now, was one way in which London spent its great wealth. It used that wealth to buy access to—and in many cases actually to buy—the artistic, historical and cultural riches of Italy. I can think of no single document that better demonstrates this aspect of the Grand Tour than Johann Zoffany’s painting of British tourists in the Tribuna—a room in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence—which portrays the Grand Tour as a confrontation of British wealth and Italian artistic richness.

            Another painter is even more closely identified with the Grand Tour than Zoffany. In Rome young British tourists often had their portraits painted by Pompeo Batoni, the most expensive and sought-after portraitist in Italy. Batoni depicted John Montagu rather atypically, without any trappings of Roman antiquity but instead with a score of Archangelo Corelli’s Violin Sonatas Op. 5, and an elaborately decorated mandolin under his arm.

            Montagu was one of many music lovers and amateur musicians among the British tourists. Zoffany portrayed others in his well know painting of the Gore and Cowper families in Florence. George Nassau Clavering, Third Earl Cowper (wearing the green coat) had come to Italy as a young man; he fell in love with Florence and stayed there for the rest of his life. His Grand Tour ended early, or perhaps we might say it never ended at all.

            A couple of examples of how British travelers affected the course of music history. Research by Thomas McGeary has revealed a musically fruitful relationship between Thomas Osborne, the fourth Duke of Leeds, and the great singer Carlo Broschi, known by the stage-name Farinelli. Leeds arrived in Venice at the beginning of Carnival 1734. (When I say “Carnival,” I mean the Carnival opera season, which in most of Italy extended from the day after Christmas to the day before the beginning of Lent.) Leeds enjoyed the singing of Farinelli so much that he joined a coterie of Farinelli’s British fans in Venice; and he organized his subsequent itinerary in order to see and hear as many of Farinelli’s performances as possible, in Venice, Vicenza, and Florence. He commissioned a poem in praise of the singer, while the Earl of Essex (another British admirer of Farinelli in Venice) played a major role in negotiations that led to Farinelli’s engagement by the Opera of the Nobility in London for the following season. Leeds, on his return to England near the beginning of 1735, became one of Farinelli’s most generous patrons and friends: “tanto mio amico e patrone particolare.”

            In his first London appearance, in Artaserse, Farinelli sang “Per questo dolce amplesso,” which he had first sung five years earlier in Hasse’s Artaserse in Venice. Arbace, unjustly accused of regicide, is about to face what he believes to be certain death. He bids farewell to his father and ask him to take care of his beloved Mandane. The situation is tragic, yet the young hero manages to keep his emotions under control. The text expresses tender melancholy rather than intense sorrow, despair, or anger. Hasse’s music embodies, above all, qualties associated with the text’s first adjective, “dolce” (MUSIC). Farinelli’s success in the performance of such music helped make the 1735-36 opera season in London a high point in the city’s operatic history.

            Many years later, in 1780, the London music publisher Robert Bremner issued a set a trio sonatas under the title Twelve Sonatas for two Violins and a Bass or an Orchestra compos’d by Gio. Batt.a Pergolese. The attribution was doubted already in the eighteenth century and was definitely rejected in the twentieth, but not before Igor Stravinsky, in Pulcinella, reworked several movements and, in doing so, identified them indelibly with Pergolesi and himself. More recently some of the sonatas have surfaced in manuscripts with attributions to one Domenico Gallo, on the basis of which the whole set has been tentatively attributed to Gallo. 

            The publication of this music in London was a product of the Grand Tour. Bremner’s title page informed perspective buyers: “The Manuscript of these Sonatas were [sic] procured by a curious Gentleman of Fortune, during his Travels through Italy.” If true, this manuscript was one of hundreds that British tourists brought back from Italy, many of them now preserved in the British Library.

            These trio sonatas bring together elements of the learned and galant styles in a combination that seems to have particularly pleased English listeners, fond as they were not only of modern but also of what they called “ancient” music. The trio sonata as a genre was favored by composers born before 1700, such as Handel and Bach, as was the particular combination of two violins and basso continuo. But those composers usually laid out their sonatas in four movements, slow-fast-slow-fast; Gallo, in contrast, used the more modern fast-slow-fast format. His Sonata No. 1 in G major begins with a movement (one of those that Stravinsky adapted) in binary form, without repeats; it continues with a slow movement in the minor mode, and concludes with a learned fugal finale (MUSIC).

            I’d like to go beyond “the British abroad” and consider the Grand Tour in a wider sense, involving travelers from many countries and destinations that included such leading musical centers as London and Vienna.

            An early Grand Tour in which music played a crucial role was that of Friedrich von Uffenbach, a young law student and amateur musician from Frankfurt. A lutenist, Uffenbach loved instrumental music as much as opera. He travelled in Switzerland, Italy and France in 1714-16 and recorded his itinerary and his impressions in a diary. Starting in Strasbourg, he ascended the Rhine valley to Basel, then crossed Switzerland into Italy; crossed northern Italy from west to east, aiming for Venice, then south to Rome and Naples. Heading back north, he crossed into France, spent some time in Geneva and then went to Paris, where he stayed for eight months taking lute lessons. The last leg of his Grand Tour took him back to his native city of Frankfurt by way of the Netherlands.

            Like the Duke of Leeds fifteen years later, and many other tourists, Uffenbach timed his trip so as to arrive in Venice during Carnival. He attended a masked ball and several operas, during one of which Antonio Vivaldi astonished him with the performance of a cadenza for solo violin. His account is particularly valuable because it refers to music that Vivaldi did not necessarily write down:

February 4th 1715. Went with several acquaintances to the St. Angelo theater... The manager of this theater is the famous Vivaldi, who was also the composer of the opera, which was very good indeed and a fine spectacle too; the machines, however, were not as sumptuous as those at the other theater, and the orchestra was not as large, but well worth hearing nevertheless. ...Toward the end, Vivaldi played an admirable solo to accompany an aria, at the conclusion of which he added an improvisation that really frightened me, for I doubt anything like it was ever done before, or ever will be again: he came to within a hairsbreadth of the bridge, leaving no room for the bow, and this on all four strings, with imitations and at incredible speed. He astonished everyone with this, although to say it touched me would not be true, because it was not as agreeable to listen to as it was cunningly contrived.

For an idea of the kind of aria with obbligato violin that Uffenbach might have heard Vivaldi play, here is part of an aria from Andromeda liberata, a serenata performed in Venice in 1726 that almost certainly consists of music by several different composers. Vivaldi contributed “Sovente il sole,” a wonderful duet for voice and violino that gave him the opportunity to display his talents both as a composer and a violinist (MUSIC). 

To quote further from Uffenbach’s diary:         

March 9th, 1715. Vivaldi came to see me this afternoon and brought me what I had ordered, namely ten concerti grossi, some of which, as he said, he had composed expressly for me; and so that I might hear them better, he wished to teach them to me at once and come to see me from time to time; and we made a beginning today. 

March 6th, 1715. Vivaldi, the famous composer and violin player, came to see me, for I had repeatedly left word at his house requesting him to do so. I had spoken of certain concerti grossi which I wished to obtain and had ordered them from him; and I also sent him (since he belongs to the musical tribe) several bottles of wine. And so he let me hear his very difficult and quite inimitable improvisations on the violin; and I was compelled to admire his dexterity the more at close quarters, although I saw quite clearly that, while he played extra difficult and colorful things he did so with no great charm and tunefulness.

            From Venice, Uffenbach travelled on to Rome, where he could not enjoy opera because Carnival had ended. But Lent was hardly a total loss from a musical point of view. As in many parts of Catholic Europe, musicians in Rome used the closing of theaters as an opportunity to present concerts. At the palace of a prominent patron of music, Uffenbach witnessed the performance of an oratorio by Antonio Caldara: 

In the evening was the great, weekly concert in the palace of Prince Rospoli [i.e., Ruspoli] which, because of the many expenses that he annually allots to it, is the best here; and since he welcomes and permits every foreigner to come in without introduction, we therefore went there together, and were led through a large number of exquisitely furnished rooms to an enormously large and long hall in which, as in the entire house, there is no lack of incomparable paintings and silver work. Everything was most brilliantly illuminated, and on both sides of the entire hall chairs were placed for the listeners; above, however, the place for the musicians was left free where a great number of virtuosos arranged themselves, and three female singers next to a small castrato...  sat in front. They then gave such an excellent concert, or so-called oratorio, that I was completely delighted ...  The composition is completely new each time and is composed by the well-known Caldara, papal maestro di cappella, who also conducted here. People listened to the excellent voices so attentively that not a fly stirred.... At about the middle of the concert they had an intermission, and then liquors, frozen things, confectionery, and coffee were brought around in quantity and presented to everyone. Afterward was performed the other half of the concert, which lasted altogether four hours. I would have remained even fourteen days with great pleasure, for I certainly left with genuine astonishment, and I have never in my life heard anything to compare with this. In the accompaniment there was a violin that was unusually well played, and many other instruments, all played to perfection. It was midnight when we were finished, but sleep did not hinder me from listening to it all to the end with the greatest pleasure....

The oratorio by Caldara performed on this occcasion, Abisai, has not been recorded, but an aria from another of his oratorios gives us a sense of how he could have delighted the audience that included Uffenbach (MUSIC).  

     Galleria of the Palazzo Ruspoli, Rome    

A completely different kind of Grand Tour, but again involving amateur musicians, took place 65 years after Uffenbach’s tour. From September 1781 to October 1782, Grand Duke Paul and his wife Grand Duchess Maria Feodorovna toured Europe. Paul was the son of Empress Catherine the Great and heir to the imperial throne; Maria was a princess of Württemberg, one of the many small principalities into which much of the German-speaking part of Europe was divided. Despite traveling incognito (as the Count and Countess of the North) all of Europe knew who they were and each city they visited treated them as celebrities.

 Alexander Roslin, Grand Duchess Maria Feodorovna, 1777

Both the grand duke and duchess were passionately fond of music and theater. It was natural that opera and instrumental music should play a crucial role in the festivities with which they were welcomed wherever they went. Moreover, the interest that the voyage inspired means that it was documented in great detail. A synthesis of contemporary reports of the voyage comes quite close to constituting an account of the state of music in Europe in the early 1780s, which is, of course, a decade of great significance in the history of music. It’s worth examining this Grand Tour in some detail.

Leaving St. Petersburg in September 1781, the grand duke and duchess traveled quickly southwest, heading by way of Berlin to Vienna, which was their first big stop (for the entire month of December). In early January 1782 they continued south, arriving at their second major destination, Venice. There they started to enjoy Carnival, which continued during their brief visit to Rome and several busy weeks in Naples. Heading back north, they stopped a few days in Florence, and then continued: through northern Italy to Turin. They crossed the Alps into Switzerland and France. They spent about a month in Paris and Versailles, then traveled on through the Loire Valley, Brittany, Normandy, north to the Netherlands, and east into the Germany. The final major destination of the tour was Stuttgart—the capital of Württemberg, the grandduchess’s homeland. After a brief second visit to Vienna, the grandducal couple headed home to Russia. They returned to St. Petersburg 13 months after they had left it.

Vienna had several months to prepare for the grand-ducal couple's first, longer visit. Mozart, newly settled in the Habsburg capital, hoped that Die Entführung aus dem Serail might be performed for the first time before the Russian dignitaries; but Emperor Joseph II preferred to mark the visit with a retrospective celebration of the operatic achievements of Christoph Gluck: performances of Orfeo ed Euridice, Alceste and Iphigénie en Tauride.  

Although Die Entführung had to wait for its premiere until the following summer, Joseph made good use of Mozart’s talents during the grand-ducal visit: he arranged for Mozart and the visiting pianist Muzio Clementi to compete in a pianistic duel. Mozart described the event to his father:

Clementi is an excellent keyboard player, but that is all. He has great facility with his right hand. His star passages are parallel thirds. Apart from this, he has not a bit of taste or feeling; he is a mere technician.

            After we had stood on ceremony long enough, the emperor declared that Clementi ought to begin. “La Santa Chiesa Cattolica,” he said, Clementi being a Roman. He improvised  and then played a sonata.  The emperor then turned to me: “Allons, fire away.” I improvised and played variations. The grand duchess produced some sonatas by Paisiello [maestro di cappella at the Russian court and Maria Feodorovna’s music teacher], wretchedly written out in his own hand), of which I had to play the Allegros and Clementi the Andantes and Rondos. We then selected a theme from them and developed it on two pianos.

            The sonata that Clementi played was later published as Op. 24 No. 2; Mozart may have remembered it when, ten years later, he wrote the overture to The Magic Flute (MUSIC: a performance in which the pianist, Balázs Szokalay, has added a surprise that I call "Clementi's Revenge").

The Russians had another musical treat in store two days later, according to an article in the Pressburger Zeitung:

[The emperor and his brother, Archduke Maximilian] attended a grand concert on 26 December in the chambers of the countess of the North. The author [Verfasser] of it was Prince Esterhazy’s Kapellmeister, the famous Haydn. At this occasion was presented a quartet played by Luigi Tomasini, Asplmayer, Weigl, and Huber. The illustrious company honored it not only with their gracious applause, but also bestowed on Haydn, as composer, a magnificent enameled box studded with diamonds; the four other artists named received a golden snuffbox apiece.

The musicians Haydn brought together on this occasion consisted of two of his colleagues at the Ezterhazy Kapelle (the violinist Tomasini and the cellist Joseph Weigl) and two Viennese musicians (the violinist Franz Asplmayer and the violist Pancras or Thaddeus Huber). They presumably played music soon too be published (in an edition dedicated to the grand duke of Russia) as Haydn’s celebrated opus 33.  A single quartet was probably not enough to fill “a grand concert” for which the participants received such rich rewards. The author of the report quoted above might have meant “quartetto” in the sense of an ensemble that played several of Haydn’s new quartets—perhaps even all six of them. If so, then the grand duke and duchess rewarded Haydn and his players, in part, for the beautifully crafted and consistently original opening movement of the Quartet in G Major (MUSIC).

            Moving to the next major stop on the grandducal tour, Venice, among the musical highpoints of the visit was a banquet and ball given in the city’s biggest theater, the Teatro San Benedetto. The floor of the auditorum was cleared of benches so it could be used for dancing; a staircase linked the dance floor with the stage, on which the Russians and their hosts enjoyed a banquet. The orchestra, on two levels and both sides of the stairs, accompanied both dining and dancing.

On another evening, the Russians were treated to a concert by the combined forces of several of the famous Venetian ospedali—institutions that had their origins as orphanages but by the eighteenth century had evolved into musical conservatories for girls and young women. According to a report published soon after the event:

The illustrious travelers were given an entertainment unobtainable anywhere except Venice. One hundred girls from the several conservatories or large “ospedali” of the city, dressed in black uniforms appropriate to their status, performed a cantata for several voices interspersed with choruses. It was accompanied by instruments of every sort, and the only man among them was the composer of the music.

            The Russians continued south, stopping in Rome just long enough to see some of the main sights—the Pantheon, St. Peters, the Capitoline, the Colosseum—and to attend operas at the Teatro Argentina and the Teatro Valle. They moved on to Naples, where they stayed for the rest of Carnival, attending many events that involved music: operas and ballets at the Teatro San Carlo, concerts, balls, and gala dinners.

            We saw earlier how Uffenbach had enjoyed music in Rome despite the closing of theaters during Lent. The Russians likewise continued to experience Italy’s musical treasures during the penitential season. On their way north from Naples, they stopped for several days in the capital of Tuscany, Florence. Tuscany was ruled by Grand Duke Leopold, brother of Emperor Joseph II. 

Leopold celebrated the Russians’ arrival in Florence during Lent with concert performance of two operas in the city’s principal theater. In describing the first of those concerts, the Gazzetta toscana of Florence noted that the opera’s librettist had enjoyed the patronage of the Russian court, implying that this made the choice of the opera particular appropriate:

On Thursday evening in the Royal Theater of via della Pergola, splendidly decorated with garlands and illuminated with the greatest profusion...  was sung, in the form of an accademia, in the presence of the aforementioned distinguished Conti del Nord, Ifigenia in Tauride, an opera of the immortal poet Marco Coltellini, who died several years ago in the service of the court of Petersburg, and set to music by the celebrated Traietta. In addition to the five famous and skilful singers who performed it, there were 50 choristers, all musical experts, uniformly dressed, and placed on several risers arranged in a semicircle on the stage. All the nobility and citizenry were admitted gratis to enjoy the celebration. The symmetry and multiplicity of the lights, the sparkling jewelry that adorned the women, and the richness of the clothing produced a truly magnificent and astonishing sight. Their Imperial Highnesses [the grand duke and duchess of Russia] together with our sovereigns [Leopold and his wife] deigned to stay until the end of the spectacle. Those occupying the boxes were served with lavish refreshments.

Tommaso Traetta’s Ifigenia in Tauride had been first performed in Vienna in 1763, as part of a series of innovative Italian operas that made heavy use of chorus—a series to which Gluck’s Orfeo and Alceste also belonged. As I mentioned earlier, Emperor Joseph had marked the visit of the Russians to Vienna with performances of operas by Gluck, including Orfeo and Alceste. Leopold, fully aware of how his brother had treated the grand duke and duchess in Vienna, did not allow the restrictions of Lent to keep him from indulging in a bit of sibling rivalry. He gave the Count and Countess of the North an equally splendid musical feast in Florence, and one that projected many of the same musical and theatrical values.

            The Russians continued north, enjoying, among other events, a performance at the Teatro Regio in Turin. They crossed the Alps into France. In Paris and Versailles Queen Marie Antoinette took personal charge of entertaining the guests with a splendid series of balls, dinners, excursions, and theatrical performances. Instrumental virtuosos who played for the Russians included the celebrated violinist Giovanni Battista Viotti; opera companies included the venerable Academie Royale de Musique founded by Louis XIV, which presented, among other works, Francois-Joseph Gossec’s brand-new Thesée.

            I’d like now to turn from music-loving tourists to professionals—and to present brief surveys of three of the most important Grand Tours by professional musicians of the eighteenth century.

First, the flutist Johann Joachim Quantz, a prolific composer and flute teacher of King Frederick the Great of Prussia, but most famous today as the author the best eighteenth-century book on playing the flute. Quantz was already a well-established musician in Dresden when he spent the years 1724-1727 travelling through Europe, meeting other musicians—including Hasse and both Domenico and Alessandro Scarlatti— attending the opera, listening to instrumentalists and singers. His itinerary closely resembled Uffenbach’s of ten years earlier, with major stops in Venice, Rome, Naples, and Paris. His tour differed from Uffenbach’s in taking in London, where he admired one of Handel’s operas.

No professional musician benefited more from travel than Mozart. The primary motive of his father Leopold in organizing the tour that he and his family made in 1763–66 was to make money from the performances of his two prodigious children, Nannerl and Wolfgang (who was only seven when they left Salzburg). But the trip, to Germany, France, England, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, also benefitted the children by exposing them to the languages, customs, and musical styles of Europe’s cities and courts. Three years later, it was not by accident that Mozart and his father, on their first trip to Italy, crossed the Alps in December—risking an early winter snowstorm—so as to arrive in Italy near the beginning of Carnival. Traveling quickly from one city to another, the thirteen-year-old musician received a crash course in Italian musical dramaturgy.

            Another musical Grand Tour, that of the Bohemian composer Adalbert Gyrowetz, is well documented because Gyrowetz wrote an autobiography, much of which deals with the European tour that he took as a young man from the mid 1780s to the early 1790s. Born in 1763 in the small town of Böhmisch Budweis (today České Budějovice), Gyrowetz fell in love with music from his earliest childhood. His father, music director in the cathedral of his hometown, taught him singing and violin, and soon he was playing the solo part in the violin concertos that were a normal part of Catholic church services in Bohemia (and in many other parts of Europe as well). With a local organist he studied organ and figured bass, and he began composing church music, serenades, quartets, and songs. In his memoirs (in which he referred to himself in the third person) he wrote:

As he grew older his talent for music grew ever more certain and more remarkable. It happened that he was brought for the first time to the theater, where a comic opera was being performed. When the overture began, and he heard the delightful music, he let out such a loud exclamation of joy, in the presence of the whole audience, that he could be calmed down only with some difficulty, and everyone saw with what intense pleasure he witnessed the whole opera, and he returned home completely drunk with pleasure. At home he sat for hours at the keyboard, improvising and (already then) composing some attractive melodies.    

            Gyrowetz's passion for music did not keep him from taking his other studies seriously, and when he moved to Prague it was to study law, not music. But as secretary to a nobleman he had opportunity to develop his musical talents; all the count's employees had to be musicians so they could form an orchestra and play concerts in additional to their regular duties.

            The wanderlust that affected so many young Bohemian musicians brought Gyrowetz, in the mid 1780s, to Vienna, where Mozart (seven years older than he) befriended and encouraged him. But he did not stay long, embarking on a self-financed Grand Tour that would take him to Italy, France, and England. During his travels he took formal lessons in composition; but just as important for his development as a musician was his exposure to an enormous variety of musicians, patrons, musical styles, and works. In Rome he met Goethe; in Naples he played string quartets in the house of Count Razumovsky, a lover of chamber music who was later to commission three great quartets from Beethoven. In Paris he found that one of his early symphonies had been published under Haydn’s name and won a commission to compose more of the same. Escaping the chaos of the Revolution, he went to London, where he witnessed performances of Handel's oratorios in Westminster Abbey, welcomed Haydn to England, and was present at the premieres of some of his symphonies.

            Gyrowetz never returned to Bohemia except to visit his family. He might have settled permanently in any of the big cities in which he lived during his tour of Europe. He came close to making London his home; he lived there for three years, establishing himself as one of the city's leading music teachers and composers of instrumental music, and left only after finding the climate harmful to his health. He ended up in Vienna, joining the large numbers of his compatriots who had already settled there. After working for several years as a freelance musician, he joined the staff of the Viennese court theaters, where he spent many years as a music director and composer of operas and ballets. He outlived many of his more famous contemporaries, including Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and Schubert.

            Even in an age of frequent international travel, Charles Burney’s two continental tours are remarkable for vast distances he covered, the number of places he visited, and the importance of the musicians he heard and met. The itinerary of his first trip, to France and Italy, closely resembled that of many British tourists. His second trip was a much more unconventional tour of northern Europe. But wherever he went—Paris, Naples, Vienna, Berlin— he studied with equal curiosity the manuscripts and old books on which he based his General History of Music (published in the 1780s) and the living musical culture in which he found himself. The lively accounts of these journeys that he published on his return to London constitute the successful marriage of two kinds of writing typical of the eighteenth century: travel books and musical criticism.

Let me end on a somewhat wistful note, with the words of a composer who never took the Grand Tour. Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach wrote in his memoirs with a mixture of defensiveness and regret that testifies to the importance of travel in eighteenth-century musical life: 

This lack of foreign travel would have been more disadvantageous to me in my profession if I had not had the special good fortune since my youth to hear, close by, the finest of all kinds of music and to make a great many acquaintances among masters of the first rank, sometimes winning their friendship…[Yet] I do not deny that it would have been of exceptional pleasure as well as advantage to me if I could have had the opportunity to visit foreign lands.