The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (81 page)

The term “symphony” and its variants were first used in the seventeenth century simply for the various forms of instrumental music. But it came to be used mainly for the Italian opera overture of three movements (fast, slow, fast). These overtures began to be played in concerts apart from their operas. Meanwhile the three-movement (or four-movement) symphony for orchestra became a form all its own for the classical symphony, quite separate from the overture, with a unique dignity. “Symphony” now came to mean a sonata for orchestra. It would have been impossible without the new wealth of musical instruments.

In Western Europe the practice began, about the fifteenth century, of building whole “families” of instruments. A typical family, like the shawms (double-reed woodwind instruments), would be made in instruments from the smallest to the largest size. The social role of music was revealed by the fact that instruments were differentiated mainly into
haut
(loud) and
bas
(soft). Loud instruments were for outdoor music and soft were for more intimate, usually indoor, occasions. The shawm came to be known as the
hautbois
(loud wood), which left its trace on the modern version of this same instrument, the oboe (a correct transcription of how the French word was pronounced in the eighteenth century).

A clue to the newly flourishing technology of musical instruments was the piano. “Pianoforte” (later abbreviated to “piano”) first appears in English about 1767. An abbreviation of
piano e forte
, meaning “soft and strong,” “pianoforte” named a new instrument that, unlike the harpsichord, could vary its tone. The harpsichord could only be plucked. But the sound of the piano was made by hammers operated from a keyboard and striking metal strings. The varying force of the hammer, controlled by dampers and pedals, made the gradations of tone. The first successful piano, about 1726, was the work of an Italian harpsichord maker, Bartolomeo Cristofori (1655–1731). Described at the time as a “harpsichord with soft and loud,” it had all the essentials of modern piano action. Haydn’s active life as a musician spanned the years from the piano’s invention nearly to its modern form. He had decided tastes in pianos, preferring the Viennese to the English. Mozart, too, was interested in the mechanics of the piano, still developing in his lifetime, and he contributed to its improvement. He had a pedal constructed for his piano that he used when improvising and for the
basso continuo of his concerti. Beethoven believed the musical possibilities of the piano were still imperfectly understood and helped reveal them.

When cast iron replaced wooden frames to hold the strings, it increased their tension and the loudness of their music. The piano was designed in various shapes and sizes as the Industrial Revolution brought mass production. Within a century the piano in the living room became a symbol of middle-class gentility, and eligible young ladies needed their piano lessons. As the audiences of music lovers multiplied, the power and versatility of the piano enlisted the talents of the best composers.

But the piano was only one of a wide array of new instruments and of newly perfected ancient instruments that would make the modern symphony orchestra. The violin, originating in the medieval fiddle and developed during the Renaissance, was much improved by Antonio Stradivari (1644–1737), Giuseppe Guarneri (1698–1744), and others. The modern bow was invented by François Tourte (1747–1835), and the violin had its modern form by the early nineteenth century. Trumpets and horns were elaborated and made more versatile by added lengths of tubing; clarinets became respectable in the woodwind section by 1800. There was hardly an instrument of the modern orchestra, from the trombone to the harp, that did not acquire greater volume and subtlety in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

As the elaborated sonata was matched by the elaborating instruments of all kinds, the modern large orchestra emerged—a collection of instruments equipped to play symphonies. Mid-eighteenth-century orchestras were commonly solo ensembles with one player in each part and little interdependence of the parts. The large orchestra for a public concert hall needed other music. Meanwhile chamber music, in the form developed by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, attained an intimacy and expressive range it lacked when it was merely synonymous with instrumental music. “Chamber music” acquired an elite and even arcane tone by contrast with the newly flourishing public music.

The “orchestra,” a grand new instrument of instruments, was itself a creation of these “classical” Western composers and a by-product of their symphonies. Slowly after the Renaissance, with the rise of “wordless” music, there developed the arts of “orchestration,” of using instruments for their special music properties. Until then music, not generally composed for particular instruments, would be played by whatever instruments were available. An organist of St. Mark’s in Venice, Giovanni Gabrieli (1557–1612), may have been the first Western composer to designate particular instruments for the parts. The rise of opera in Italy about 1600, and the coming of the opera orchestra reinforcing dramatic effects, led to more
specific scoring and greater reliance on strings to balance winds and percussion. And the
Orfeo
of Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643), performed in Mantua in 1607 with an orchestra of some forty instruments, is said to be the first occasion when a composer specified which instruments were to be used at which moments.

Not until the eighteenth century did the word “orchestra” cease to have only its ancient Greek meaning for the space in front of the stage where the community had once danced and where dramatic choruses danced and sang. Now it meant a company of musicians performing concerted instrumental music. And now Byron condescended to “the pert shopkeeper, whose throbbing ear aches with orchestras which he pays to hear.” “To orchestrate” would not enter our language until the late nineteenth century.

The modern symphony orchestra arose out of the Italian opera orchestra and English and French court orchestras, which at first had only strings, but gradually added woodwinds and other instruments. By the mid-eighteenth century the basic modern symphony orchestra had its four sections—woodwinds, brass, percussion, and strings. Surprisingly, these features of the modern symphony orchestra took shape not in a great capital but in the phoenix-city of Mannheim on the right bank of the Rhine in southwestern Germany. Founded in 1606 on a checkerboard pattern of rectangular blocks, Mannheim was destroyed in 1622, during the Thirty Years’ War, rebuilt and then again destroyed by the French in 1689. But the irrepressible community at the convenient confluence of the Rhine and the Neckar rose again. It became a cultural center for the electors palatine in the mid-eighteenth century. The elector Karl Theodor (ruled 1743–59; in Mannheim, 1743–78) had a personal passion for music that attracted some of the best performers and composers, creating an orchestra that became a prototype for the modern symphony. This Mannheim School, which flourished until the abrupt removal of the court to Munich in 1778, adapted the dramatic Italian overture to the new form of the concert symphony, and devised novel instrumental effects. Musicians across Europe came to recognize the “Mannheim sign” (a melodic appoggiatura) and the “Mannheim rocket” (a controlled orchestral crescendo making a swiftly ascending melodic figure).

Here the classical symphony acquired the form that would be elaborated by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. And Mannheim announced the age of public concerts, when symphony orchestras would become symbols and catalysts of civic pride. As these orchestras multiplied in the next century the public appetite for music became more historical and more cosmopolitan. Now concerts not only offered works commissioned for the occasion or sacred or traditional music. They reached back to revive earlier works. The Concerts of Ancient Music held in London (1776–1848) pointed the way
to this “historicism,” dramatized by Felix Mendelssohn’s 1829 centennial performance of parts of Bach’s
Saint Matthew Passion
. Mannheim was destined to be destroyed again in World War II, but again showed its capacity to be reborn. Did the city’s shallow past help explain its openness to new ways in music?

The founder of the improbable Mannheim School of symphonists was the vigorous Johann Stamitz (1717–1757), whose leadership made it famous across Europe. His orchestra, large for its day, included twenty violins, four each of violas, violoncellos, and double basses, two each of flutes, oboes, and bassoons, four horns, one trumpet, and two kettledrums. The musical traveler-historian Charles Burney (1726–1814) was so impressed that he called this orchestra “an army of generals.” Stamitz achieved new melodramatic effects with the full range of these instruments for crescendo, diminuendo, sforzando, tremolo, and virtuoso violin performances, expanding from the whispery pianissimo to the explosive fortissimo. He added a contrasting second theme to the sonata’s allegro movements, and increased movements from three to four by adding a fast finale after the minuet. While these four movements would become standard for the symphonies of Haydn and Mozart, Beethoven would replace the minuet with a scherzo.

The symphony orchestra, increasing in size and cost, needed patrons. It required new complex musical compositions, along with organization, leadership, and a responsive audience. In Beethoven’s lifetime a new creative role was beginning to be revealed for the conductor. The arts of drama and architecture also required leadership, organization, and community participation. But the writer, painter, or sculptor could create for himself, needed no other performer and no stage but paper, canvas, or stone. Music shared with painting, sculpture, and architecture the peculiarity that it too could be a “background” or ambient art. The classification of instruments as “loud” (for outdoors) or “soft” (for indoors) revealed this role. Music transformed the atmosphere as other things were happening. While the book required a focused reader, music allowed variant degrees of inattention. This ambient nature of music, which made it useful for worship, ritual, festival, nuptials, and coronations also explained its long subordination to the needs of church and court. And this wonderfully protean character explains Walter Pater’s observation that “all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.”

Just as the Gregorian chant enlisted music for the church, the symphony and its orchestra signaled the emergence of instrumental music as an art in its own right, becoming dependent not on prince or church but on a public of music lovers. In this story Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven played crucial roles in their creation of the modern symphony. Their lives overlapped, they
knew and influenced each other, but their careers and their products were spectacularly distinctive. In their lives they dramatized the changing resources and opportunities for Western music.

Joseph Haydn (1732–1809), often called the father of the symphony, found his opportunity and his challenge in a small but rich principality in western Hungary. His career showed how much could be done within the narrows of princely patronage, where he spent his thirty maturing years.

The story of Haydn’s life is how he secured and used this playground for his music. Then how he finally reached out to the wider world.

Born in 1732 into the family of a wheelwright in an eastern Austrian village near the Hungarian border, he fortunately impressed
the
choirmaster of the Cathedral of St. Stephen in Vienna, who toured the countryside to find choristers. The beauty of the eight-year-old Haydn’s voice and his remarkable ability to trill his notes brought him the reward of a pocketful of cherries, which he never forgot, and an invitation to the choir school of St. Stephen. There he acquired a wide musical experience but no education in musical theory. When his voice changed, he was dropped from the school and at seventeen had to shift for himself in the big city. He took young pupils, and made music for dances and serenades while he taught himself musical theory in the works of C.P.E. Bach and others. Recommended by his aristocratic pupils, in 1758 he became music director in the chapel of a minor Bohemian nobleman, Count Morzin. When Morzin found he could not afford a sixteen-piece orchestra, it was lucky for young Haydn. His first symphony composed for Count Morzin had already charmed a grander patron, Prince Paul Anton Esterhazy.

Along with his title of prince of the Holy Roman Empire, Prince Paul Anton (1710–1762) inherited a family tradition of hospitality and patronage. His baroque castle at Eisenstadt, outside Vienna, offered two hundred rooms for the guests who provided the audience for his concerts, the visitors to his picture gallery, the readers for his library, and walking companions on the countryside of grottoes and artificial waterfalls. The prince himself played the violin and cello and admired the young Haydn, whom he engaged as assistant conductor of his large and active orchestra. The contract, dated May 1, 1761, obliged Haydn “to conduct himself in an exemplary
manner, abstaining from undue familiarity and from vulgarity in eating, drinking, and conversation,” to preserve the harmony of the musicians, and “to instruct the female vocalists, in order that they may not forget in the country what they have been taught with much trouble and expense in Vienna.” His musical duties required him to “appear daily in the antechamber before and after midday, and inquire whether His Highness is pleased to order a performance of the orchestra,” to “compose such music as His Serene Highness may command … and not compose for any other person without the knowledge and permission of His Highness.”

The prince’s brother Nicholas “the Magnificent,” who succeeded to the title and the family tradition of patronage in 1762, put competing princes in the shade. Returning from France, he decided to build his own Versailles. To prove his power over nature, he purposely chose an insect-infested swamp, which he had drained and cleared, as the site of his fantasy castle, which he called Esterhaza. Prince Nicholas’s own illustrated book recalled its charms. Besides the usual country amenities of parks, grottoes, and waterfalls, there was a library of “seventy-five hundred books, all exquisite editions, to which novelties are being added daily,” manuscripts, “old and new engravings by the best masters,” a picture gallery “liberally supplied with first-class original paintings by famous Italian and Dutch masters,” a marionette theater “built like a grotto,” and a luxurious opera house that would hold four hundred people.