The Life of Ludwig van Beethoven, Volume I

by Alexander Wheelock Thayer

We have now to turn our attention to Beethoven’s relations to Viennese society outside of his study.

Chapter XII

Music in Vienna in 1793—Theatre, Church and Concert-Room—A Music-Loving Nobility—The Esterhazys, Kinsky, Lichnowsky, von Kees and van Swieten—Composers: Haydn, Kozeluch, Förster and Eberl.

Opera and Concerts in Vienna

The musical drama naturally took the first place in the musical life of Vienna at this period. The enthusiasm of Joseph II for a national German opera, to which the world owed Mozart’s exquisite “Entführung,” proved to be but short-lived, and the Italian opera buffa resumed its old place in his affections. The new company engaged was, however, equal to the performance of “Don Giovanni” and “Figaro” and Salieri’s magnificent “Axur.” Leopold II reached Vienna on the evening of March 13, 1790, to assume the crown of his deceased brother, but no change was, for the present, made in the court theatre. Indeed, as late as July 5 he had not entered a theatre, and his first appearance at the opera was at the performance of “Axur,” September 21, in the company of his visitor King Ferdinand of Naples; but once firmly settled on the imperial throne, Joseph’s numerous reforms successfully annulled, the Turkish war brought to a close and his diverse coronations happily ended, the Emperor gave his thoughts to the theatre. Salieri, though now but forty-one years of age, and rich with the observation and experience of more than twenty years in the direction of the opera, was, according to Mosel, graciously allowed, but according to other and better authorities, compelled, to withdraw from the operatic orchestra and confine himself to his duties as director of the sacred music in the court chapel and to the composition of one operatic work annually, if required. The “Wiener Zeitung” of January 28, 1792, records the appointment of Joseph Weigl, Salieri’s pupil and assistant, now twenty-five years old, “as Chapelmaster and Composer to the Royal Imperial National Court Theatre with a salary of 1,000 florins.” The title Composer was rather an empty one. Though already favorably known to the public, he was forbidden to compose new operas for the court stage. To this end famous masters were to be invited to Vienna. A first fruit of this new order of things was the production of Cimarosa’s “Il Matrimonio segreto,” February 7, 1792, which with good reason so delighted Leopold that he gave the performers a supper and ordered them back into the theatre and heard the opera again da capo. It was among the last of the Emperor’s theatrical pleasures; he died March 1st, and his wife on the 15th of May following. Thus for the greater part of the time from March 1 to May 24, the court theatres were shut; and yet during the thirteen months ending December 15, 1792, Italian opera had been given 180 times—134 times in the Burg and 46 times in the Kärnthnerthor-Theater—and ballet 163 times; so that, as no change for the present was made, there was abundance in these branches of the art for a young composer, like Beethoven, to hear and see. All accounts agree that the company then performing was one of uncommon excellence and its performances, with those of the superb orchestra, proved the value of the long experience, exquisite taste, unflagging zeal and profound knowledge of their recent head, Salieri. Such as Beethoven found the opera in the first week of November, 1792, such it continued for the next two years—exclusively Italian, but of the first order.

A single stroke of extraordinary good fortune—a happy accident is perhaps a better term—had just now given such prosperity to a minor theatrical enterprise that in ten years it was to erect and occupy the best playhouse in Vienna and, for a time, to surpass the Court Theatre in the excellence and splendor of its operatic performances. We mean Schikaneder’s Theater auf der Wieden; but in 1793 its company was mean, its house small, its performances bad enough.

Schikaneder’s chapelmaster and composer was John Baptist Henneberg; the chapelmaster of Marinelli, head of another German company in the Leopoldstadt, was Wenzel Müller, who had already begun his long list of 227 light and popular compositions to texts magical or farcical. Some two weeks after Beethoven’s arrival in Vienna, on November 23rd, Schikaneder announced, falsely, the one-hundredth performance of “Die Zauberflöte,” an opera the success of which placed his theatre a few years later upon a totally different footing, and brought Beethoven into other relations to it than those of an ordinary visitor indulging his comical taste, teste Seyfried, for listening to and heartily enjoying very bad music.

The leading dramatic composers of Vienna, not yet named, must receive a passing notice. Besides Cimarosa, who left Vienna a few months later, Beethoven found Peter Dutillieu, a Frenchman by birth but an Italian musician by education and profession, engaged as composer for the Court Theatre. His “Il Trionfo d’Amore” had been produced there November 14, 1791, and his “Nanerina e Padolfino” had lately come upon the stage. Ignaz Umlauf, composer of “Die schöne Schusterin” and other not unpopular works, had the title of Chapelmaster and Composer to the German Court Opera, and was Salieri’s substitute as chapelmaster in the sacred music of the Court Chapel. Franz Xavier Süssmayr, so well known from his connection with Mozart, was just now writing for Schikaneder’s stage; Schenk for Marinelli’s and for the private stages of the nobility; and Paul Wranitzky, first violinist and so-called Musikdirektor in the Court Theatre, author of the then popular “Oberon” composed for the Wieden stage, was employing his very respectable talents for both Marinelli and Schikaneder.

The church music of Vienna seems to have been at a very low point in 1792 and 1793. Two composers, however, whose names are still of importance in musical history, were then in that city devoting themselves almost exclusively to this branch of the art; Albrechtsberger, Court Organist, but in a few months (through the death of Leopold Hoffmann, March 17, 1793) to become musical director at St. Stephen’s; and Joseph Eybler (some five years older than Beethoven), who had just become Regens chori in the Carmelite church, whence he was called to a similar and better position in the Schottische Kirche two years later.