The German Genius

concertos.
    Everyone knows a little bit about the Bachs but at much the same time there was in Germany another group of composers known as the Mannheim school, a talented ensemble who helped to make up the orchestra of Elector Karl Theodor, Count Palatine and Duke of Bavaria (1724–99) at Mannheim. It was there that full orchestral scores were first developed, with parts written out and individually exploited. This innovation is regarded as the birth of the modern era as far as orchestral music is concerned.
    T HE O RIGINS OF G RAND O PERA
     
    Until the middle of the eighteenth century, in Germany as in England and in France, Italian opera was dominant. Libretti were invariably in Italian, and singers, whether or not they were Italian themselves (and they usually were, however bad), were imported to sing the principal roles, complete with “stereotypical Italian gestures.” 7 Toward the end of the eighteenth century, this began to change. This period saw the spread of the comic opera, known as the Singspiel , one feature of which was spoken dialogue in the vernacular (i.e., German in Germany), so that the interpolated songs were also in the vernacular. This practice reached near perfection in Mozart’s 1782 opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail ( The Abduction from the Seraglio ), but the new form actually owed more to the ideas of Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714–98).
    Gluck, almost single-handedly, took on the Italian idea of opera, identifying a new approach and composing a set of powerful works which embodied his new vision. He introduced his new practice in Orfeo ed Euridice , in Vienna in 1762, but it was with Alceste , another “Italian” opera on a classical subject, that he wrote his celebrated preface, setting out his new philosophy. 8 He argued that the singers should confine their vocal displays so as to highlight and develop the course of the dramatic action rather than launch into virtuosi fireworks for the sake of it; he also argued that the overture should be “a proper emotional preparation” for the drama, “not just a set of tunes presented while the audience was finding their seats” above all, he insisted that the music should serve the needs of the text to intensify the dramatic effect. This is another of those ideas that seem unexceptional to us today, but in its time it was very controversial and Gluck’s view prevailed only because his operas achieved such dramatic intensity that it became obvious that what he said was right. Harold Schonberg commented, “One can reasonably claim that the tradition of grand opera in the modern theatre begins with Gluck.”
    F OUR G IANTS
     
    In Italy, the period of the “High Renaissance” refers to those thirty years, 1497–1527, when three artists—Raphael, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci—were all supremely active. In the German renaissance the equivalent period was the last twenty-five years or so of the eighteenth century, when four magnificent musical giants—geniuses—emerged whose pre-eminence lies beyond dispute and who set the stage for the great century of German music which followed. Indeed, we may regard the following hundred years as the greatest century of all time in the history of composing. 9
    Born into a poor family in Lower Austria, Franz Joseph Haydn (1732–1800) was a choirboy at St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna until he was seventeen and a music teacher until his mid-twenties. The turning point in his life came in 1761, when he entered the service of Prince Paul Anton von Esterházy. Haydn continued as kapellmeister at Esterháza for the next three decades, until 1790, and they were without question golden years. The family was the most enlightened of patrons and, under them, Haydn produced his brilliant series of symphonic and chamber music triumphs, which gained him an international reputation. This reputation took him to London in the 1790s, where he wrote twelve of his finest symphonies. Despite being more in the public eye now, he rejoined the Esterházys and, during his later years in Vienna, produced his great string quartets, op. 76 and op. 77, and the two oratorios Die Schöpfung ( The Creation ) and Die Jahreszeiten ( The Seasons ). 10 Haydn’s output includes more than a hundred symphonies, some fifty concertos, eighty-four string quartets, forty-two pianoforte sonatas, a variety of masses, operas, and other pieces for various solo instruments. His brilliance has a familiar, unaffected quality.