MUSIC IN PUBLIC LIFE: VIENNESE REPORTS FROM THE ALLGEMEINE MUSIKALISCHE ZEITUNG, 1798-1804 A dissertation submitted to the College of the Arts of Kent State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Carol Padgham Albrecht May 2008 Dissertation by Carol Padgham Albrecht B.A., North Texas State University, 1974 M.M., North Texas State University, 1980 Ph.D., Kent State University, 2008 Approved by _______________________________ , Chair, Doctoral Dissertation Committee _______________________________ , Members, Doctoral Dissertation Committee _______________________________ , _______________________________ , _______________________________ , Accepted by _______________________________ , Director, Hugh A. Glauser School of Music _______________________________ , Dean, College of the Arts ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page APPROVAL PAGE . ii TABLE OF CONTENTS . iii PREFACE . iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . xiv CHAPTER I. VOLUME I: OCTOBER 3, 1798-SEPTEMBER 25, 1799 . 1 II. VOLUME II: OCTOBER 1, 1799-SEPTEMBER 24, 1800 . 28 III. VOLUME III: OCTOBER 1, 1800-SEPTEMBER 23, 1801 . 41 IV. VOLUME IV: OCTOBER 1, 1801–SEPTEMBER 22, 1802 . 103 V. VOLUME V: OCTOBER 1, 1802-SEPTEMBER 21, 1803 . 116 VI. VOLUME VI: OCTOBER 1, 1803-SEPTEMBER 26, 1804 . 170 APPENDIXES A. VIENNA HOFTHEATER SALARY LISTINGS, COMBINED CASTS . 231 B. GERMAN OPERAS GIVEN IN THE COURT THEATER, 1798-1800 . 233 C. ITALIAN OPERAS GIVEN IN THE COURT THEATER, 1798-1800 . 234 BIBLIOGRAPHY . 236 iii PREFACE The Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (General Musical Times, or AmZ) was not the first German-language periodical devoted exclusively to music. But with a fifty-year initial run spanning from 1798 until the various European revolutions of 1848, it documented the history of music (primarily in the German-speaking lands) from the first biographies of Johann Sebastian Bach and Palestrina up to the early operas of Wagner and Verdi.1 Founded as an arm of the Leipzig music publishing firm of Breitkopf & Härtel, the AmZ adopted a broad, comprehensive outlook, publishing articles on an array of topics: new music, analytical essays, biographies of important composers (both present and past), and reports on musical activities from local correspondents in cities across Europe (and beyond, even including the United States of America). The AmZ is thus a significant source of information on reception history, and given the extent of its coverage, was in a position to reflect the emerging canon of western art music, and even to shape it as it developed. Leipzig was a free city, located in the Duchy of Saxony but governed by a town council, infamous in musical circles because of Johann Sebastian Bach’s struggles with this body. It was a noted commercial hub, home to frequent trade fairs, as well as an important center of learning and literature. Famous students from the University of Leipzig included Goethe and Lessing; the poet and German language reformer Gottsched was a member of the faculty. Leipzig was also home to a vibrant literary industry, stimulated in part by an influx of booksellers from Frankfurt who were threatened by severe censorship in that city. In addition to its thriving book trade, Leipzig was also a vigorous publishing center, and home to many newspapers. 1A short-lived revival of this newspaper ran from 1863 to 1865. iv The original Breitkopf, Bernhard Christoph (1695-1777), founded a book publishing firm in 1719. His son Johann Gottlob Immanuel (1719-1794) followed him into the business. Neither of his sons then felt inclined to carry on the family tradition, but in 1795 Gottfried Christoph Härtel (1763-1827) joined the firm, now specializing in music. A year later he bought it outright.2 Härtel evidently had excellent business sense. He courted Constanze Mozart for the publishing rights to her late husband’s works and was quick to seize upon the marketability of Joseph Haydn, just returned from his second residency in London. When Härtel decided to publish a journal addressing multiple facets of musical activity, he found a worthy editor in Friedrich Rochlitz (1769- 1852). Rochlitz was a product of Leipzig’s cultural environment. Educated at the famous Thomasschule, he had studied musical composition and counterpoint with its cantor, Johann Friedrich Doles, who in turn had been a pupil of Johann Sebastian Bach. In 1789 Rochlitz met Mozart, who was then performing in Leipzig on tour. According to tradition the Viennese master’s impact was so overwhelming that Rochlitz turned away from music, first to theology, then to writing, at which he proved to be quite accomplished. His translation of Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1801), for example, became the standard German version of this work for many years, and one of the Viennese reports in the AmZ contains a very pointed criticism of the “inferior” adaptation by the court opera singer Friedrich Carl Lippert.3 In the early years of AmZ's existence it must have taken some time to recruit a cadre of suitable correspondents who would send in regular reports from the various 2Hans-Martin Plesske, “Breitkopf & Härtel,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., ed. Stanley Sadie (London and New York: Macmillan/Grove’s Dictionaries Inc., 2001), IV, 309. 3See Vol. III, No. 3, “Short Overview of the Most Significant Aspects of Musical Activity in Vienna Today.” v locations. In keeping with its reputation as one of the important musical capitals, Vienna was among the first cities (alongside Leipzig itself) to become a regular contributor to the periodical. Many of these writings during the first two years were identified as excerpts from letters, although as editor, Rochlitz may well have shaped the material by asking for reports on specific types of musical activity, such as the latest operas or the merits of various local pianists. The most prominent essay to emerge from Vienna during the first three years of publication was the extended “Short Overview of the Most Significant Aspects of Musical Activity in Vienna Today,”4 spread across two issues in Volume III: No. 3 (October 15, 1800) and No. 4 (October 22, 1800). This unsigned article, a survey of the city’s primary musical venues, has been cited in the scholarly literature, but selectively, in a manner that does not give a sense of the overall context and tone of the writing itself. It provides an important eyewitness account of Beethoven’s first Viennese academy (April 2, 1800) and his subsequent performance with hornist Giovanni Punto (April 18, 1800), and it has influenced our perception of how the composer’s early public received his music at this important juncture in his career. This article is the source of the infamous criticism that the composer’s Symphony No. 1 made too much use of the wind instruments, “sounding more like a wind band than an orchestra.”5 But to gain a proper sense as to the reliability of this critique, one must read it not only in relation to the overall article (positive remarks offset by negative, sometimes provocatively so), but in relation to all the reported musical activity in the city for a sustained period of time. The 4Kurze Uebersicht des Bedeutendsten aus dem gesammten jetzigen Musikwesen in Wien. 5See Elliott Forbes, ed., Thayer’s Life of Beethoven (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1967), 255-56, as well as earlier versions of Alexander Wheelock Thayer’s famous biography of the composer. vi writer of the “Short Overview” (evidently an outsider from North Germany) must have ruffled some of the local feathers, for later on in the same volume appeared a rebuttal, “New Essay on the Representation of the Overall Musical Conditions in Vienna Today,”6 in Nos. 37 (June 10, 1801) and 38 (June 18, 1801). These remarks, however, have gone unnoticed. The first large-scale discussion of music criticism in English is Max Graf’s Composer and Critic: Two Hundred Years of Music Criticism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1946 and 1971). Graf, active as a critic in Vienna from 1890 until 1938, begins with the observation that although musical criticism was two hundred years old, its history had not yet been written. His work examines the rise of music criticism as an exponent of eighteenth-century French and German rationalist thought, then traces its progress through the stylistic movements and great composers of the nineteenth century, up to the close of World War II. It is a narrative about music criticism, rather than the writings themselves. Mary Sue Morrow adopts a similar approach in German Music Criticism in the Late Eighteenth Century: Aesthetic Issues in Instrumental Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). In her work she places a smaller, more circumscribed sample under the microscope to reveal its nuances in greater detail. Her treatment documents the rise in prestige of instrumental music, as well as the aesthetic attitudes used to judge it, particularly the concept of “genius.” This is significant, as instrumental music (at least, in the words of its 19th-century admirers such as E. T. A. Hoffmann) was about to emerge victorious as the ideal medium for Romantic expression, in that, unfettered by a text, it could sustain many interpretations. 6Neuer Versuch einer Darstellung des gesammten Musikwesens in Wien. vii Wayne M. Senner and Robin Wallace shift the focus from the medium to the person in The Critical Reception of Beethoven’s Compositions by His German Contemporaries, 2 vols., ed. William Meredith (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999 and 2001). This work is a compilation of reviews and articles relating to the works of a single composer, published in a variety of journalistic sources from 1783 to 1830. The articles, translated into English, literally speak for themselves, and are accompanied by brief explanatory notes. In Music Criticism in Vienna 1896-1897: Critically Moving Forms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), Sandra McColl moves from person to place.