Transcription
Well, again, we are starting a new unit today, a new historical era in music history, and that is the Classical period. And as I usually do, I'm just going to start off with a discussion of what that word means, classic or classical, and also talk about the dates of this era, which are 1750 to 1820, if you go by what our textbook says. Most textbooks have something like that, although you might find some textbooks that say 1750-1825 or maybe 1830. We know the significance of 1750 from our previous unit on the Baroque era; 1750 happens to be the year that J.S. Bach died. But in talking about that date earlier, I said that it's really kind of misleading because what we now call the classical style was already emerging as early as the 1730s, the 1740s. In fact, I made the point that when J.S. Bach died in 1750, he would have been considered kind of an old-fashioned composer.
And in fact, two of his sons—he had 20 children, he had many sons who were important musicians—but two of them in particular, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, known as CPE Bach, and Johann Christian Bach, J.C. Bach, were two of the leading composers of the classical style, and they were composing in this style while their father, the old Bach, was still alive. So Bach's sons represented sort of the new avant-garde; the composer Bach himself represented a style that was already becoming considered old-fashioned. So 1750 isn't really a good date, and we keep that date probably just out of respect to J.S. Bach and because it lies conveniently right there in the middle of the 18th century. But that's the date that we will go with. If there's a testing—a test question on the dates of the Classical era—it's something in the neighborhood of 1750. How about the other end? 1820, or 1825, or 1830, depending on which textbook you read. Again, there is nothing that we can point to really in the way that we could point to the invention of opera as a significant musical thing that we can use to delineate between, let's say, the Renaissance and the Baroque. But there isn't really anything either as we move into the Classical era or as we move out of it. It's a gradual transition, and we really can't point to any one thing. Therefore, it doesn't necessarily make sense to use any one year, even if we use the year of Beethoven's death, 1827. First of all, it's an inconvenient year; it doesn't end in a 5 or a 0. But also, it doesn't—because Beethoven died—that's not something that caused the style to change.
So now, there definitely was change in the first third, let's say, of the 19th century, a change into a style which we call now the Romantic style, but it happened so gradually. Again, we kind of just have to pick a year somewhat arbitrarily, and 1820 works as well as any other in that, let's say, decade, one side or the other. So 1750-1820; no real significance to the dates. Took me a long time to explain that, but there isn't really all that much significance. How about the word classical? Well, this is a—this is a word which, unlike the word Baroque, this is a word that we actually use sometimes in everyday conversation when we say something is classic. And normally, if we were having our in-person class, our usual class, I would ask the class—this would be a class participation moment—I would ask my class, "Okay, well, what does that word mean to you?" And we would kind of explore that word a little bit. And usually what—what ends up happening is that we kind of agree that, first of all, the word classic—if something is a classic, that means it's good. It means it's good. It was just interesting because remember the original meaning of the word Baroque was not intended to be complimentary. The word Baroque originally meant distorted, exaggerated, somewhat grotesque, like a misshapen pearl. But calling something a classic is definitely complimentary. Okay, and it implies something else; not—it implies something as a quality that it is—that its value is lasting. And how do we know that its value is lasting? Because it's old. This is another implication of the word classic: something that is an oldie but a goodie. And in fact, those two are mutually reinforcing because the reason that we know something is good if it's a classic, the reason we know it's a classic is because it's good, and the reason we know it's good is because we still think it's good; it has stood the test of time. To use a classic cliché, something which is a classic sort of stands above changes in fashion trends. Fashions, fads come and go, but that which is a classic always looks good.
And sometimes I will also—in my class—I will use the example—in fact, I will ask the class, and—and you can try this right now—think, if you're—especially for women—think of the one thing in your wardrobe, in your closet right now, which could be called a classic that will never go out of style, that looks good in many different situations. You could wear this thing that I'm thinking of to, let's say, a party, or you could wear it to a concert; you could wear it in a slightly more casual situation; you can wear it to—in a business situation, even, let's say—or—and it looks good no matter what. The thing that I'm thinking of is the little black dress. The little black dress is a classic item that all women must have in their wardrobe. And what is it that makes it a classic? You think about it. Well, one of the things is that it is simple. All right, you can describe it in three words: it's little, it's black, and it's a dress. And—and this is a—it's what I'm getting at now are some of the—the characteristics of the classical style. The little black dress doesn't usually have like frilly, poofy things on it or a lot of sequins or a lot of ornaments, a lot of decoration, right? Because if it did, that's the kind of thing that goes out of style sometimes, right? So simplicity, we might say, is a classical virtue. All right. Now, before I get too far into some other classical virtues or classical characteristics, I want to—I want to talk a little bit more about that word and why it is potentially confusing. So first of all, in the very beginning of this semester, I mentioned that this course was going to be about classical music, but that's a problematic term, and sometimes we—we use the word Western art music instead of classical music. And this is one of the reasons—that is—that is confusing, potentially, is that within the world of classical music—which we could say goes all the way from Gregorian chant to film scores that were composed yesterday—and it's a very, very broad area within music—but the problem is that within that which we call classical music, there's an era which we call the Classical era. So depending on which meaning of classical you use, for example, J.S. Bach is not a classical composer; Johannes Brahms is not a classical composer in that sense. Bach was a Baroque composer, and Brahms would be a Romantic composer, but they compose classical music. So this is one of the—one of the things that we just kind of have to be on the lookout for—what that word classic means. Another implication of that term, classic, is that we generally associate that term—and when we talk about, for example, the classical civilizations—what we are talking about in that case is ancient Greece and Rome. And when we talk about the classical world—so to a general historian, like not a music person necessarily, but let's say to a historian or to a professor of classics—I'm not sure if many of you have heard that—that use of the word as a subject. You can go to a university—at least you used to be able to—and I don't think this is offered at as many universities as it used to, but classics is an area of study, and what it is is history, literature, and languages of ancient Greece and Rome. So you—if you are a classics major, you would study Latin, you would study Greek, and you'd study the history and the culture and the literature and—and maybe also the art of that period. So that's another thing to be mindful of.
Now, as it turns out, there—there are connections between the art and the architecture and the literature of this period of time, let's say 1750-1820, or even a little bit before, and the art and literature and architecture of ancient Greece and Rome. There isn't much of a connection in the musical world, however, because, as we've already learned, very, very few examples of ancient Greek music have survived to the modern era. And my understanding is that there are pretty much zero examples of Roman music. If—when you think about it, it's kind of incredible. You have this—this Empire, the Roman Empire, which lasted for so long, and yet we don't have any music from that period. We know that they had music; they enjoyed it, but we don't have any written-down music surviving to the present day which we could decipher. And for that reason, unlike, let's say, classical architects or classical—or let's say unlike 18th-century artists or architects or writers who had examples that they could follow, that had—they had models they could work from if they wanted to imitate that style of the Greeks and Romans, musicians didn't have that. However, there are some principles that we associate with the classical style of the Greeks and Romans which could be kind of extrapolated or drawn from. I mean, in other words, it might not be a—a direct musical example that you can imitate the way that, for example, in the neoclassical style of architecture, you know, you look at—look at the buildings from Washington, D.C., for example. They are deliberately modeled on the style of Greek or Roman temples. You've got those—those columns, that facade with the column and pediment, and that look that we—you know—think of the—the Lincoln Memorial, for example. It's—it's designed to make you think of a Greek temple, and that sort of a philosophical statement. It's not just—it's not an accident that those buildings, let's say, look like that; there's—they're sort of deliberate intent. It's sort of an affirmation of your—your sort of philosophical outlook in a way. So there are principles that can be sort of gleaned or extracted from the classical style and applied to music, but we don't have, you know, sort of direct imitation that you might find in the other arts. Okay, so I need to talk some more about these principles of the classical style in the arts, but first I want to get a little bit into the historical background stuff. Again, I'm sort of trying to create a big picture for you, and this big picture has a frame, and the frame is 1750 to 1820, and the title of this picture is the Classical era, right? So now I'm kind of filling in the—the stuff in the background of the picture: what's going on historically, what's going on in society, so that we can understand a bit better the music that emerges—that—that is, let's say—I'm going to be in the foreground of our picture, since this is after all a music course. And all this stuff is covered pretty well in the Kenyon book. Again, if you have a Kenyon position, if you start at around page 155 or so, and I think I assigned reading up to page 165, and mostly this reading deals with the various meanings of the word classical and what that means, let's say, in the arts as a style in the arts, but also what's going on historically during this period. And it is important to—to understand what's going on during this time, not just for this class, but because it turns out that this is a period which—we see tremendous change; revolutions—presents the French Revolution, the American Revolution. We see—it's a period of tremendous upheaval and change in many, many different areas of life throughout Europe and, of course, the Americas. But even more so, I think it's important to understand this era because now—not just for this class, not just for academic reasons, but because I think most of us in the modern world walk around every day with—with assumptions, with ideas, with notions in our head that are a direct outgrowth of these times; that in other words, we are all creatures of our—products of the Enlightenment. What is the Enlightenment? Well, the Enlightenment is the—the term that I would give—or that occurs to me—but—but that historians give to, let's say, the 18th century generally. In fact, sometimes you see it referred to as the 18th-century Enlightenment. So in the same way that, for example, the Baroque era in music or in the arts existed within a historical era—a broader historical era which we might call the Age of Absolutism—the Classical era exists mostly within a period that we call the Enlightenment. And the Enlightenment itself is a—it's a vast, complex historical sort of movement or phenomenon or period that I can't possibly do justice in a half-hour lecture, or—you know—you couldn't even really do it justice in an entire course; it's—it's so complex and has so many different aspects. In fact, just to speak of the Enlightenment is a little bit simplistic because there are really different strands, different varieties of Enlightenment going on that are often very contradictory to each other. So, for example, we have a sort of a French Enlightenment which led to the French Revolution, but then we also had sort of an Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment which came to some very different conclusions—that in fact was very opposed in many ways to the direction that, let's say, the French Enlightenment ended up moving in. So it's a big, complex and fascinating topic, the Enlightenment, but I'm going to try and give you as—as digestible a chunk of it as I can in the time that I have. So right away, it's sort of like the word Renaissance, you know, the Renaissance means rebirth, and that implies that something must have died in order to be reborn, right? We talked about that in—when we were in the Renaissance. Well, the term Enlightenment implies that we must have been in the dark, and then I guess somewhere beginning in the 18th century, the 1700s, we began to see the light. Okay, well, yes. Okay, who is "we"? Well, this is a—this is a phenomenon that's taking place in Europe, and—and again, we often associate it with the French in particular; several French philosophers like Voltaire and Diderot. But put simply, I think probably someone like Voltaire—whose name probably more than anyone else is associated with the Enlightenment—would say something like, "Yes, we have been in the dark; we've been in the dark for ages, generations, centuries." Who's "we"? Who's been keeping us in the dark? Well, that would be the ruling classes, and before that the Church, right? Because, you know, think about—and think about the—the structure of society that I've talked about. Remember, the vast majority of people, certainly through the Middle Ages, through the Renaissance, through the Age of Absolutism, and still into, let's say, the—the Enlightenment, the vast majority of people have very little say over their own lives, right? They are ruled over by—in previous centuries, maybe the Church, but the Church became less powerful, as we know, as we move into the Renaissance, and the nobility became more powerful, the aristocracy, especially in this—this era immediately preceding—right—the—the Age of Absolutism, when you have absolute monarchs like Louis XIV. So we've been kept—we, meaning the vast majority of people, have been kept powerless and often ignorant—so in the dark—meaning sort of imprisoned, in a sense—and—and so there's—there's an element of class resentment of—and this appeals to the middle class. I've talked about the middle class before, and I said that, well, in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the middle class is really a very thin—what we call the middle class—but we think of the middle class as a very thin, small segment of society, let's say people who have to work for a living but are not farmers, are not peasants—you know, let's say skilled tradesmen, merchants, bureaucrats, or whatever. Well, this class of people, remember, I—I've said, has been growing; it's been getting better educated, and as it gets larger and as it gets more prosperous, this middle class is very receptive to these ideas, these notions that, you know, "Why should I be ruled over by a king anyway? You know, what—what license—what—a whole class of people, the nobility, have a different legal status than me; shouldn't we all be equal?" Right? This is an Enlightenment idea that we all—I think all of—all of us modern people—I like to think, anyway—certainly in America—we walk around with this idea that all men and women, hopefully, are created equal, and that we should have equal rights; we should be equal before the law, right? That we should have freedom of speech; the idea of freedom of speech definitely an Enlightenment idea. We might take it for granted today; it's obvious that you should have freedom of speech—at least I would hope that we believe that. There are some people now—I think there's sadly—not to get too far off into a political tangent—but I think there are people today who maybe are not so enamored of freedom of speech as I am, but—let's say freedom of the press, or let's say separation of church and state; that's a—that's a relatively recent concept. These are radical things. Now, if you—you might hear me—is talking about these things; think, "Oh, yeah, the things that we find in, let's say, the Bill of Rights in the Constitution"—exactly. This country that we live in, the notions that form this country, the ideas that are in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution are definitely products of the Enlightenment, and at the time there were—there were fairly radical ideas, right? There are ideas that are now, you know, 200-something years old. I think many of us sort of take for granted, but—and this is what I mean when I say that it's important to know about these things, even if you're not taking a class, even if you're not going to college or whatever, because it's important to know where your own ideas come from, and it's important, I think, not to take them for granted, to know what the alternatives might be. Anyway, the Enlightenment—it's—it's hard to even pick a place to start talking about it because it—again, it's so big and complex—but we associate the Enlightenment with the 18th century—that is the 1700s—with certain philosophers like, for example, Voltaire, or with, let's say, Immanuel Kant; many others who—it's hard to generalize about—but we might say, for one thing, that the Enlightenment prized rationality, logic, reason over things like tradition or superstition or religiosity. I'm—for example, on—this how—this idea might tie in with the political stuff I was talking about earlier. If you are a successful middle-class person in the 18th century and you are prosperous, you're well-educated, you think you're—you know—your life is pretty good—probably much better than your great-grandfather's was perhaps—and yet you still don't have any real political clout, you might think, "Well, it's really pretty irrational, this—this monarchy that we have, right, let's say in France." So someone gets to be a king just because their father was a king and their father before them, even if they turned out to be a lousy king. Well, that's just the way we've always done it; that's tradition. And also, by the way, we have this—this notion of the Divine Right of Kings. What is—what makes a king a king after all? Well, God has ordained him to be king; it's God's will that Louis is king and that you are whatever you are—that you are a shoemaker or you're a bureaucrat or whatever you are; it's all God's—God's will, right? So someone who is a more Enlightenment frame of mind—let's just—irrational and silly and illogical, and it's exactly this kind of thinking that has kept us in the dark, that has kept the vast majority of people essentially powerless and ignorant for so long. And what we need to do is become enlightened. So the Enlightenment is the time—it prizes rationality, reason—and the book starts off actually in a good way talking about this: Where does this—this relatively sudden interest in being logical and reasonable and rational as opposed to being, let's say, religious or superstitious or bound to tradition—well, a lot of it comes from the scientific progress that has been happening—all really since the Renaissance, but especially during the 17th century. There's—there's just an exponential increase in—in scientific advancement in the 17th century—that is the 1600s. Think about—particularly mentioned maybe just the two most famous scientific figures during that time: Galileo and Newton. But there's an awful lot of other scientific advance that's going on, and what we see is that—what we call perhaps the scientific method—although there really isn't one scientific method per se; there are various methods—but what they—what they generally involve is, first of all, a lot of observation, close observation, taking measurements, taking notes, right? Running experiments and starting from a position also of skepticism—that is, not believing that something is true just because it says so in some textbook, or not believing, for example, that everything Aristotle said was essentially correct. And if Aristotle said it, it must be—and this is basically how the universities taught for—for an awful long time. A lot of these experimental scientists—most of them during the 17th century—were not university professors the way that scientists tend to be today. The universities were mostly just kind of preserving the works of, let's say, Aristotle and a few others and just kind of assuming that they were true and teaching them. But it turns out that Aristotle—or their genius—was wrong about a lot of things because he didn't employ these methods consistently, and he didn't—he didn't have the tools very often to have done so even if he wanted to. But in the 17th century, scientists are making tremendous advances, and these advances are based on close measurement, sort of reasonable, rational principles, logic, measurement, a lot of math, and not assuming anything, right, to be true, but really verifying. And these discoveries are improving people's lives—so particularly, let's say, in the field of medicine, but also in—in, let's say, engineering—people's lives are actually being lengthened and improved because of these scientific advances. And what happens is that as progress is made in the sciences and—in trickles down into society large and improves people's lives, the leading thinkers or, let's say, philosophers of the day—many of whom were scientists—in fact, that term philosopher is a little bit misleading today. We think of a philosopher as someone who is thinking very abstract, lofty thoughts, but in those days, philosophers and scientists were much sort of closer together. In fact, a—that's what we call a scientist would have been called a—would have been a natural philosopher—a philosopher who was interested in nature. Anyway, the philosophers of the day—many of whom are scientists—came to the conclusion—look, look at all the progress that we've made by being rational and logical; the progress that we made in the sciences. Imagine if we apply this kind of thinking and methodology not just to understanding nature, understanding the universe, but to everything—for example, in establishing a system of government. What if we tried to come up with the most logical, rational system of government rather than the one that we've just always done because that's tradition and it's God's will or whatever, right? So this is what I mean when I'm talking about the—the principles of the scientific method, which had gotten such tremendous results and continued to get such results in the 17th century, being applied more generally to the human situation in the 18th century. So the Enlightenment is a very optimistic kind of movement; it assumes that things can be made better, that progress is possible, and it was a time of extremely rapid progress. It kind of cracks me up sometimes when I—when I see sometimes people—in, let's say, condemning or criticizing, say, the Bill of Rights, and they say things like, "Well, in those—you know—certainly Thomas Jefferson or Madison or whoever couldn't possibly have imagined X, Y, or Z," like though they couldn't have imagined airplanes or the internet or whatever. And I always—I always think, "Well, why is this—do you actually know anything about this period of time?" Because there was a time of extremely rapid progress, and I think if you could go back to those times and ask, let's say, Thomas Jefferson, "Do you think in 200 years we will have flying machines?" You would say, "Well, I—at least I think"—you probably say...
Yeah, in fact, I would be surprised if it took that long, given the rate of progress that we've seen. Anything is possible, so it's a time of extremely rapid change, both—let's say—technological progress, but also societal change; societal upheaval, and it's it's often not pretty.
Also, this is a time—maybe one way to think of this period of time—from, let's say, roughly the mid-18th century up to the early mid-19th century; that is, let's say, roughly from 1750 all the way up to maybe 1850. Going no—if we're talking about that time span, we're going past the Classical era—but it's sort of like, you know, the way the way that we think of the 1960s; that's especially here in the United States. When you think of the 60s, you think of a tumultuous period; you think of the Vietnam War, the civil rights struggle; you think of, let's say, maybe the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. You think of—you might think of—the sort of the clash of generations, let's say, between the the generation that had fought and won World War II, who had hair like this, and their children, the hippies, who are taking drugs and rolling around in the mud and Woodstock and have long hair. Okay, so there's—and this is the kind of—there's the kind of thing that went on during this period of time, except that only being—instead of being only a decade—it's like a hundred-year period of intense upheaval, war, revolution, but also tremendous technological progress, scientific progress, and again it makes it difficult to to teach or to talk about, to even pick one place as a starting point. Anyway, to to tie it in with the book a little bit, the book talks about this this historical phenomenon and, in tandem, also talks about the art. So I'm going to try and kind of narrow it down a little bit from the general historical background to the arts, and then from there we'll move even more narrowly into music.
So they give some examples of how, let's say, in contrast to this, to the style of the Baroque period—excellent example, two examples actually—over here on page 158. Alright, so one is this painting of the Death of Socrates, which I'm not going to hold up to the camera; you can you can—it's a very very famous painting by the French painter Jacques-Louis David. [Music] First of all, just leaving aside the subject matter for a moment, if you look at the figures—I mean, first of all, I guess I shouldn't leave aside this subject matter—think of this, the choice of subject matter: ancient Greece. Alright, so that's sort of a statement of affinity, and choosing Socrates as a subject—I'll talk about that in a moment—but just look at the figures. Notice how most of these figures are posed; they are in sort of stable, static poses, rather than as we saw in the Baroque era. Remember, the thing that was characteristic of Baroque painting, Baroque sculpture, was that figures would tend to be in these sort of very contorted or twisted, and they're sort of in the middle of doing something; it's sort of like a snapshot of someone in action, giving me the illusion of motion and dynamism. We don't find that as much in the Classical style; in fact, this painting in particular maybe makes you think sort of more of the Renaissance style, right? And think of the Renaissance itself—well, what was being reborn? Well, the attitudes and the ideals of the ancient Greeks and Romans. So in some ways, the we can think of the Enlightenment as being sort of like a reverberation and echo of the previous Renaissance, or an outgrowth of it. Okay, so look again at this painting of the Death of Socrates, and and try and recall what was it that Socrates died of? What why was his death so significant? He, of course, drank hemlock; he was condemned to death by an Athenian court; he was convicted of corrupting the youth of Athens. And how did he corrupt the youth of Athens? Well, what did Socrates do? He was basically just a teacher, and he had a group of—sort of like—I was think of them as his disciples, and group of young men who they would just hang around Socrates, and they would sit down somewhere in the public square and have a discussion, and Socrates felt like, you know, any topic was open for discussion. And you may be familiar with, for example, this Socratic method of, let's say, teaching by asking a question, posing a question as a as a way of exploring people's assumptions and attitudes, and Socrates would kind of poke holes in your assumptions, right? And this is the way that he taught. Well, the authorities or the the powers that be in Athens didn't—they sort of felt threatened; their authority was threatened by people questioning certain assumptions or—and so this is why some of them found Socrates to be a threat, and this is why ultimately he was taken to court and prosecuted and sentenced to death. And apparently Socrates, you know, didn't really mind so much being sentenced to death, and he willingly drank this hemlock; you know, this is—he was allowed a relatively dignified method of death, which is to drink this poison. And maybe some of you are familiar with this very famous, perhaps apocryphal quote by Socrates: "The unexamined life is not worth living." And here he's kind of putting putting his money where his mouth is, you know: "If I cannot if I cannot question, examine, think about, speak about whatever I want, then I might as well take the hemlock."
Okay, so anyway, Socrates is is drinking the hemlock, and notice he's continuing to teach; he's he's got his students around him, and they're all in various poses of woe and grief, but Socrates doesn't see—notice he doesn't even look at the cup; he's looking instead at his students, and he's making some kind of a point, you know, and he's got his finger pointing kind of—disre—got like, "Oh yeah, I've got to drink this hemlock." And the hemlock, by the way—notice also the structure of this painting—the hemlock is in the exact center of the painting, as it's being handed from, you know, to to Socrates. Socrates himself is literally enlightened in this painting; he's bathed in light; the background is very dark, and that makes Socrates stand out even more. So he is literally and figuratively enlightened. Notice also his pose: so he's got one arm kind of up stretched like this, the other arm reaching for the hemlock, and he's bathed in light. What is this pose perhaps meant to remind you of? Well, it's probably meant to be to deliberately remind you of what's—a older religious art—where Christ is on the cross in much the same pose. I think Jacques-Louis David is making a point that that Socrates is sort of like is the heroic figure for us—us rational people, us enlightened people—in the in the same way that Jesus was for, let's say, a previous age, except that Socrates is not dying for your soul; he's dying for your—maybe for your mind, you know, or for your freedom to think and speak as you as you wish. So a similarly heroic martyr kind of figure, but a martyr for the mind, the intellect, rather than for the soul.
Okay, the other color plate that's on this page—page 158—is a Thomas Jefferson's house, which he designed himself, in Monticello. And this is an example of what I talked about. You notice it looks kind of similar to the White House; for you, it looks similar to a lot of buildings, let's say, in Washington D.C., or government buildings, or sometimes you see banks that have this kind of appearance, with this classical portico with the columns. And for Thomas Jefferson, this is more than just, "Oh, this is kind of a stylish house"; it's a statement of his affinity for the classical civilizations; it's sort of like he's staking his claim and saying, "Yep, this is this is me; this is who I am." Yes, he's a fan of of those values. Now, while we're on the subject of Jefferson—obviously a controversial figure today because of the fact that he owned slaves—and thus we can—I think we can point to him as being kind of a hypocrite, you know: "If you really believe that all men are created equal, why are you owning slaves?" And actually Jefferson himself was against slavery; he thought it was a he thought it was a bad thing, and yet he still owned slaves. It's a very complex question that I'm not really going to get into, but I will leave—I will say, however, though that although Jefferson may be a hypocrite—at least a himmat hypocrite knows what's right, let's say, and unfortunately doesn't act on it—but a lot of people just thought that slavery was the natural way of things. The Romans, the Greeks—they had slaves; slavery was more the rule than the exception in human history up to that point. So it's kind of—it's very easy for us today to point the figure at Jefferson and say, "Aha, hypocrite!" But he was, in most regards, far more enlightened than his contemporaries, and so certainly he wasn't perfect, but it's a little bit neither here nor there. The point is that this is an example of what we might call a Neoclassical style in architecture, which is happening right around the same time as the what we call the Classical style in music. In the case of architecture, there are again—there are models we can draw from; we could we can look at a Greek—at the ruins of an actual Greek or Roman building—and imitate that style. We don't have something similar in music, as I mentioned.
Okay, so again, you should read all this stuff; I'm just trying to flesh it out a little bit. I'm not going to I'm not going to go over absolutely everything in the book, but the historic the history of this period is important to know; you can't really understand the music nearly as well if you don't understand the historical era that produced it. One thing I will go into a little bit more detail on now is how the role of the composer undergoes a shift during this period. So although there are many many composers, we are only going to study three; we're going to study the three that are by far the greatest of this time period, and those are Franz Joseph Haydn, the oldest of the three, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and, of course, Ludwig van Beethoven. And so Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, in that order from oldest to youngest, are the three—you are kind of head and shoulders above the rest. Now, remember that in the Baroque era, the the role of the composer—this was actually a question on our last test—the role of the composer was essentially that of a high-class servant, because most composers worked on the staff as, let's say, court composer to some wealthy, powerful nobleman, of like a king or a Duke or what-have-you. That was kind of like the best that you could hope for. Actually, there were some musicians who were Church musicians; J.S. Bach, for example—the last 27 years of his life was the music director at a Lutheran Church—that was actually a position that had less prestige than, let's say, working for a Duke or a count or a king.
Now, as we move into the Classical era, we're going to see a transition from that sort of model of career to that to a different model, which is that of the freelance composer, who is basically in business for himself. In fact, we can we can kind of plot this change if we look at the careers of these three composers: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven. Haydn was the oldest of the three, born 1732—happens to be the same year that George Washington was born. Haydn, being born 1732, well, that would mean he's sort of coming up age right around 1750, which is the the problematic date from the beginning of the Classical period. Well, Haydn had the kind of typical career that we might see a Baroque composer—for most of his life, Haydn worked as a music director for a very wealthy Hungarian noble family, the Esterházy family. Now, he worked for the Esterházys for 30 years as a court composer, court music director, providing music for this family. The Esterházys had a number of different residences, including an enormous palace out in the countryside, which had its own built-in concert hall and opera house, and Haydn was basically a servant, and he was told what kind of music to create; you know, he had—yet assignments—he couldn't just kind of do whatever he wanted; he had to compose music that was in the style that his boss preferred, and he had to compose the kinds of pieces that his boss wanted. So if his boss said, "You know, I'd like to have an opera next month," then Haydn had to get to work on an opera. Now, Haydn was actually content to have the—in fact, he felt himself pretty fortunate to have this kind of position, and he he did retire after about 30 years serving this family, and in his retirement he had kind of a second career as a freelance composer, but he was only able to do that because he had put in his dues, that paid his dues, and put in his time for 30 years.
The next composer we would look at, chronologically, Mozart, was born into a musical family; his father was a court musician, and Mozart served in the court of the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg and played violin in the court orchestra. Now, Mozart's career is a little different because, as you may know, he was a phenomenal child prodigy, and he constantly toured as kind of a Boy Wonder, musical genius, touring from one city to the next pretty much continuously from about the time he was 8 or 9 until he was about 15, right? And when he started to become a young man rather than a little kid, his father thought, "Well, the best thing for you is just to have some kind of a position, like like what I have." But Mozart kind of chafed at this for a number of reasons; he didn't like being treated as a servant; after all, he was treated as a superstar when he was a child; people would fawn over him, but now that he was an adult, he had to settle for being merely another member of the staff of some high-and-mighty Prince. This kind of rubbed him the wrong way, and in that sense he he was, you know, being being a generation younger than Haydn, he's more—we might say—more a product of the Enlightenment, in that he keenly felt this kind of class division in a way that Haydn probably did not; that Haydn probably took it more for granted—like, "That's just the way the world is; what are you going to do?" But Mozart is of a younger generation. Anyway, Mozart finally had enough—or maybe his boss, the Archbishop, had enough of Mozart; actually, they mutually—there's a lot of dislike there; Mozart was actually fired by the Archbishop for insubordination, and he was physically kicked out of the Archbishop's presence—literally kicked out into the street—and Mozart then decided, "Well, you know what? I didn't like working for that guy anyway; I'm gonna set up shop for myself as an independent freelance composer; I'll compose my own music; I'll arrange my own concerts; I'll hire—let's say, if I'm doing an orchestral concert—I'll hire the musicians myself and rehearse them, and I'll sell tickets." And so he became—he tried to establish himself as more or less a freelance composer, and for reasons he was kind of unsuccessful at this—at least financially unsuccessful; obviously he was successful in that he composed some of the greatest music ever written; he was successful as a composer, but not as a businessman really. And there are many different reasons why this is the case, and we can talk about them a little bit later when we talk about Mozart more specifically, but I would say that Mozart attempted to forge a career for himself as a freelance composer but was largely unsuccessful, at least judging by the fact that when he died he was deeply in debt. And so that was his situation.
Beethoven, on the other hand, is perhaps the first major composer to have never worked—at least as an adult—to have never worked as a court composer, never been anyone's employee. Beethoven was maybe the first successful freelance composer; from the time of his really his early 20s, his adulthood, he never had to work as anyone's employee. Now, he did receive money from the nobility, but it wasn't with strings attached; it wasn't like, "I want you to write this piece"; it was more that—first of all, actually, the nobility in Vienna—we'll talk about Vienna in a little while as well—Vienna is the modern-day capital of Austria, but it's the city in Europe where all three of these composers lived and worked for at least some part of their career. In fact, Beethoven spent really his entire adult life in Vienna, and the nobility of Vienna actually paid Beethoven but didn't ask necessarily for anything in return; they just wanted to keep him in Vienna, and so they kind of pooled some money between themselves just to give him a stipend so he wouldn't be tempted to move someplace else, because they admired his music so much. Beethoven was definitely a product of the Enlightenment; he had he had these notions that we associate with the time—of, for example—that the nobility really aren't any better than you and you and me. In fact, Beethoven's attitude was, "If anything, I'm better than them because I have talent; I have genius. If you're a prince, it's just because your father was a prince, but what I am—you know, I I I could actually do something; I have I have I have genius; I can create something; I'm not I'm not what I am just because of who my father was." Um, so Beethoven was a successful freelance composer who never had to work as anyone's employee during his adult life, and when Beethoven died he was pretty well-off, and tens of thousands came to his funeral, and he did not die penniless and in debt the way that Mozart did. So he was financially as well as artistically successful. So after Beethoven, the idea of the court composer really kind of goes away, and and the reason for this is that, first of all, the the times are changing, and composers—creative people generally—of the newer generations, let's say, of Mozart—born in 1756—or Beethoven—born in 1770—these younger generations don't like the idea of being someone's employee as a creative person, as an artist; they want to be free to do whatever they want and not have to please some nobleman who thinks he's better than they are. But also the nobility itself increasingly is not interested in having their own private orchestra, you know, in their own private composer to give private concerts on the grounds of their palace; it's really just unnecessary. First of all, it's expensive, right? To to maintain an entire orchestra and a composer and all those musical instruments and to have your own, you know, opera house or your own concert hall—it's expensive, and it's really just—uh—nice-to-have. Because for that money, what you could do—if you're a music lover, let's say you're a wealthy nobleman and you're a music lover—what you could do is just buy a second house in the city, and during the concert season you can just go to concerts; in fact, you could probably have your own luxury box in the Opera House that's reserved just for you; you could have your own reserved seat; you could have season tickets, and you could go to go to public concerts. There's just no need anymore for these kind of private concerts, and also these kind of these conspicuous displays of wealth—having tremendous huge palaces with hundreds of servants—that's the kind of thing that causes resentment; in fact, that's the kind of thing that maybe can get you killed, if we're talking about France during the Revolution. So the nobility—depending on where you are in Europe—the nobility realize that, you know—think—they can feel this resentment in the air from the middle and lower classes, and many of them are wise enough not to want to make things worse, so they don't have, you know, conspicuous displays of bling as much as they used to, and they are downsized, and in fact, in many cases—let's say, in France—the estates of these very nobility were basically abolished for a while, and the estates of the nobility were confiscated. So the situation is different depending on where you are in Europe, but but everywhere there was there was this feeling of tension between the classes, the different classes of people. And remember, of course, Europe has been—and to some extent kind of continues to be—much more class-conscious than the United States. Again, the United States—isn't—this country is a product of the Enlightenment, and ideally, I think we don't think of ourselves in this country as being upper-class or lower-class; everybody tends to think of themselves as middle-class; you know, probably something like 80% of people identify as middle-class, and we don't really have a notion of a lower class, an upper-class—maybe a working-class and middle-class—but we are a much less class-conscious society, and so it's maybe harder for us to understand, being here in America and being 200-something years removed from the events that the book is talking about.
Okay, so I think I'll wrap it up here; this lecture is probably already going on a bit too long. Next time I will talk a bit more specifically about musical things rather than historical things, and so we'll see you then.