A lady who’s a great expert in theology and also plays the piano very well has recently published an intriguing booklet on rhythm, in which among other entirely novel ideas the following passage occurs:

What a pity I’m not a theologian and a philosopher! If I were, I’m sure I’d understand all that—which must be splendid. However I do have my doubts about one of the points of the author’s doctrine. I have indeed often wept on hearing Beethoven’s works; it’s quite true that these tears are not prompted by the “sufferings of a God who died for us”, but I can put my hand on my heart without hesitation and swear they weren’t induced by the “eternal damnation of the Devil” either: I haven’t been friends with him for a long time.

(Castigat ridendo mores)

I detest hypocrisy, and nothing infuriates me like the placarding of proverbs with moral pretensions, particularly on a theatre curtain. The Opéra-Comique’s Latin motto claims that it refines our behaviour: “castigat” can have no other meaning. Isn’t that a stupid piece of lapidary hypocrisy? And even if it were true, who looks to theatres to perform this refining function? Imbeciles! Refine your repertoire, refine your singers’ voices, refine the style of your authors and composers, refine the taste of your public, refine the occupants of your boxes by admitting only pretty young women, and then your mission would be fulfilled—that’s all we ask. Anyway, just how wise is the wisdom of proverbs?

Embrace much, grasp little

This means one should occupy oneself with only a single task or enterprise— one should never have more than one vessel on the slipway or more than one iron in the fire or more than one regiment on the move. Caesar, who used to dictate three letters at a time in three different languages, was a fool; Napoleon, who found time to administer the Théâtre-Français while in Moscow, a dilettante. And husbands saddled with plump wives shouldn’t hug them, for in so doing they are indeed embracing much but grasping little.

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush

Following this proverb would discredit and destroy all commerce, no more and no less. It would destroy agriculture too, for if the farmer took heed of it he would hold on to his grain instead of using it to sow his fields, and we’d die of hunger.

Boredom brings its own remedy

A false neo-proverb. Every day I attend operas, cantatas, soirées and sonatas of excruciating boredom, and far from the boredom bringing its own remedy, when I leave at the end of the ordeal I feel I could happily strangle people I’d have greeted politely when I went in.

Only a dog will betray you

The naïveté of this is beneath criticism: everyone betrays you.

One must howl with the pack

A host of present-day singers have recognised the aptness of this aphorism; they find fault only with the way it is expressed, which they see as too long by half.

The manufacture of musical instruments is occasionally taken up very successfully by amateur craftsmen. They may even produce striking innovations in the field. Yet these men, as modest as they are ingenious, wouldn’t dream of sending their products to Universal Exhibitions; they seek for themselves neither patent rights nor gold medals nor even the lowest-rank ribbon of the Légion d’Honneur.

One of them paid a visit one day to his neighbour in the Provence countryside, Monsieur d’Ortigue, a well-known critic and distinguished musician. As he entered the living-room, he said “Ah, I see you have a piano.”

“Yes, a fine Érard.”

“I have one too.”

“An Érard?”

“No, it’s actually a piano of my own. I made it myself, using an entirely new system. If you’re interested in seeing it, I’ll have it loaded on to my cart tomorrow and bring it over.”

“Please do.”

The following day the rustic amateur arrives with his cart; the piano is brought in and the lid opened, and Monsieur d’Ortigue is very surprised to see that the keyboard consists exclusively of white keys.

“What about the black keys?”, he asks.

“The black keys? Oh, you mean for sharps and flats; all that nonsense belongs to the old-fashioned piano, I don’t use them on mine.”

A correspondent writes from Naples: “A Miserere by Mercadante was sung at St. Peter’s Church on March 27th, in the presence of His Eminence the Cardinal Archbishop and his suite, together with the staff of the Conservatoire. The performance was excellent, and His Eminence was kind enough to give repeated indications of his satisfaction. The work contains beauties of the highest order. The audience expressed its wish to hear the Redde mihi and the Benigne fac, Domine repeated.”

So did the audience shout “encore” and “da capo” like the first night claque in our theatres here? I’d be intrigued to know. How can you complain now about concerts during Lent, or about our young singers making their débuts in Paris churches? Ha! Wretched Catholic critics, your antipatriotism makes you blind; you can’t see that we’re little saints!

I begin by describing how I came to choose this subject and to jot down points, which turned out to number fourteen—you may well think of a few more. I was leafing through a thick up-to-date guide to recordings and my eye fell on the entry for the Symphonie fantastique. I learned there that it was “by that wayward composer Berlioz.” I leafed through further but failed to find the Bruckner Sixth as being “by that neurotic composer”—you know how he used go obsessively to the morgue in Vienna to look at corpses. Nor was Siegfried Idyll “by that insolvent and adulterous composer Richard Wagner.”

In short, Berlioz is still given special treatment. That is my Point One, recently confirmed by the London Daily Telegraph. A splendid half-page article by our incomparable David Cairns about Colin Davis’s Berlioz concerts at the Barbican was given a headline that refers to “the Maverick Frenchman’s Music.” What is to be noted is that the labeling is automatic, traditional, absent-minded, and it is usually contrary to fact. So far from being wayward, Berlioz steered an uncommonly straight course in his musical conceiving and composing. Read his earliest critiques or listen to his earliest cantatas for the Rome Prize and you find his mature work clearly prefigured. There are in his life no “periods,” no mid-career Revelation causing a change of style.

What then contributes to the persistent use of epithets dating from his lifetime? Tags, mostly unfriendly, are stuck on every artist when his vision is new, but once he is dead enough to cease being a threat, every journalist devises a couple of complimentary clichés that show his insight, scholarship, and taste. This turnaround is standard even for the most minor talents, and quite properly so; it is part of the informative role of the newspaper reviewer, the writer of program notes, and the compiler of guidebooks. Musicologists and academics pass more complex judgments, mixing praise and criticism, but they take pains to argue their points of disapproval, which others can argue against. This debate goes on in the secrecy of learned journals and does not affect the public’s ready-made and favorable opinions.

A certain king of Spain, believing himself a great music-lover, liked to play Boccherini quartets; but he could never keep up with the tempo. One day when he’d fallen even further behind the others than usual, they, put out by the confusion produced by the royal bow being three or four bars late, made as if to stop. “Go on, go on,” cried the enthusiastic monarch, “I’ll catch up with you!”

To Monsieur Monnais, Academician at Large

I got up “with the rising sun, hale and hearty, full of fun”, just like the financier in Les Prétendus, that masterpiece of grotesque flannel which eclipsed Iphigenia in Tauris at the box-office, bringing Lemoine (for Lemoine it was who composed Les Prétendus) more money than all of Gluck’s operas put together. Further proof that one day succeeds another just like the day before.

So I feel up to writing you a whole string of nonsense. It all comes from the extravagant dream to which I was treated by our friend Queen Mab. I dreamt I had six hundred million francs, and between evening and morning, by means of irresistible arguments, I had engaged the services of all the talented singers and instrumentalists in the whole of Paris, London and Vienna, including Jenny Lind and Pischek, for my own personal gratification. The result was that all the opera houses in those three capitals had to close immediately.

You were the general in command of my musical forces; we understood each other wonderfully well. We had a magnificent theatre and a splendid concert hall, where, twice a month only, masterpieces were performed exactly as their authors wrote them, with hitherto unheard-of fidelity, pomp, grandeur and inspiration. We picked the audiences ourselves, and not for anything in the world would we have let in any of the cretins of whom there are so many. One of them, who for the sake of his self-respect had bribed an usher and sneaked himself into a box for 50,000 francs, was spotted by the performers just as the first act of Alceste was about to start, and forced to leave to a chorus of jeers. You were hopping mad; I felt sorry for the poor chap, feeling his humiliation was excessive, and it would have been simpler to get four stewards to remove him without so much fuss.

And we spoke Dr. Johnson’s English, and had Shakespeare’s plays performed in our theatre, without corrections or cuts, by Brooke, Macready and the leading actors of the three kingdoms; and we were dizzy with admiration.

“Jewishness”

In his introduction to the recent English translation of Meyerbeer’s diaries, Robert Letellier describes Berlioz as an “unassailable hero of modern musical political correctness.” For Letellier the remark is sarcastic, made when in the course of a passionate plea for the reexamination of Meyerbeer’s place in music history, he lumps Berlioz with Heine, Schumann, and Wagner, as villains responsible for a century of denigration, neglect, and misunderstanding of Meyerbeer’s work. Berlioz is described as contemptuous of Meyerbeer and is castigated—solely on the grounds of a much-quoted reference to Meyerbeer’s “snake-like flexibility”—for having contributed to his reputation of untrustworthiness. Although I agree with many of Letellier’s remarks, on this point, to which I shall return, I think he does Berlioz an injustice.

On a number of levels Meyerbeer was a significant figure in Berlioz’s “present.” Their relationship is treated in most secondary literature on Berlioz, and the two most recent biographies of Berlioz, by Peter Bloom and David Cairns, both have interesting things to say on the topic. What I shall do here is look at critical writings on Meyerbeer during the July Monarchy and compare Berlioz’s writings with those of some of his fellow critics while focusing on the issue of “Meyerbeer as Jew.” Although there is little hard evidence of anti-Jewishness openly directed against Meyerbeer, the criticism of his work finds a curious and striking echo in the later anti- Semitic stereotypes of the Jewish character of art. I shall conclude with a reexamination of Berlioz’s relationship to Meyerbeer.

Meyerbeer’s “Jewishness” has not been widely seen as a crucial issue in discussions of the reception of his music in Paris during the 1830s, although later in the century, when anti-Semitic sentiments are openly and strongly voiced, it does becomes an important concern. Diana Hallman’s recent sociocultural analysis of Halévy’s opera La Juive has shown how the opera and its reception were enmeshed with contemporary views of the place of Jews in French society, suggesting that anti-Semitism did indeed play a role.

Berlioz memorably frames his Memoirs with two versions of the same quotation, one in French, one in English: the grim passage from Macbeth dismissing life as a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Despite the announced gloom, readers of the Memoirs soon discover that this particular tale of sound and fury—told, to be sure, not by an idiot but a master storyteller—is balanced by frequent patches of light and a constant leavening of humor. The gloom of the epigraph coincides not so much with the book as with its preface. So well does the epigraph match the preface, indeed, and so lastingly did Shakespeare haunt Berlioz’s imagination, that the passage from Macbeth is likely to have been present in his mind, if not on paper, from the start.

In the preface, that start is identified with a precise date and place: London, 21 March 1848, barely a month after the revolution that had ousted King Louis-Philippe and established the Second French Republic. Refugees, among them many artists, were flocking to England—the image in the preface is of seabirds coming to shore before a storm—where Berlioz had preceded them by several months. It was as though political events were amplifying his private exile, the year before, when he had left Paris to recoup the financial disaster of his Damnation de Faust. That had been a life-changing blow. Until then Berlioz had trusted the French concert public, on the whole—the public that had acclaimed his works faithfully, even when government taxes drained his profits and the musical establishment continued to rebuff or even sabotage him. But when “his” public did not turn out for La Damnation, in December 1846, it hit him like a betrayal— an et tu, Brute. It also sealed his disenchantment with democratic regimes. If a constitutional monarchy was ineffectual in providing for music, as he rather unfairly concluded, what chance would there be under an even more extreme form of democracy, a republic?

Thus the Memoirs were begun in response to a crisis, according to a reflex that had become habitual: writing, during the previous two decades, had been his one dependable source of income.

I remember seeing Monsieur Étienne at the Opéra one evening when they were playing a terrible thing called The Nightingale, with music by Monsieur Lebrun (some said Mme. Lebrun) and a “poem” concocted by this same Monsieur Étienne. The illustrious Academician was at the front of the balcony boxes and was attracting the attention of the whole house by the ineffable joy he evidently felt at hearing his own verses sung. When it came to this fine passage in the magistrate’s aria:

Monsieur Étienne let out such a peal of laughter that I felt myself go quite red and walked out, much saddened.

That was the last time I managed to see almost the whole of this celebrated work, in which the nightingale sang with such gusto you could have sworn you were hearing a flute concerto played by Tulou. This fine piece should be revived; I’m sure many people would enjoy it.

as good old La Fontaine said.

The Opéra regulars who knew Mme. Lebrun would certainly be delighted to receive such a favour. She was such an energetic person, especially in her conversation. Her nightingale was first cousin to Gresset’s parrot. F and B were her two favourite consonants. I still blush to recall the compliment she paid me in the church of St.-Roch when my first Mass was performed. After an “O Salutaris” which was quite plain in every respect, Mme. Lebrun came to shake my hand and said in a ringing voice: “My dear boy, there were certainly no flies on that f***ing “O Salutaris” of yours; I’ll be damned if any of those little b*****s in the Conservatoire’s counterpoint classes could come up with anything half so well strung together and so jolly religious.” It was a vote in my favour, since Mme. Lebrun’s opinion was held in great respect at the time.

And how splendidly she used to descend from Heaven as Diana at the dénouement of Iphigenia in Aulis and Iphigenia in Tauris—for in both Gluck’s masterpieces the plot is resolved by the intervention of Diana.

The sources for Mozart's biography

The principal source for Mozart's biography is the family correspondence (MBA), comprising a large collection of letters from Mozart, his father Leopold, mother, sister Nannerl and wife Constanze. They are marvellously informative but also problematic, in that they are a patchy record of Mozart's life, fullest for those times when, still based in Salzburg, he was travelling and he and his father were writing home. They are much thinner for his final decade in Vienna (1781–91) when the bulk of his great work was written; letters sent to him were not preserved, and letters from him vary in number (only four survive for 1786). The fact that a substantial proportion of the surviving letters from between 1788 and 1790 are to his fellow mason and banker Michael Puchberg requesting loans may have given biographers an exaggerated sense of his financial difficulties and professional distress in those years. The information contained in Mozart's letters was only gradually exploited by biographers. His sister Nannerl consulted some of them in order to answer the queries of his obituarist Friedrich Schlichtegroll. The majority were entrusted by Nannerl to Constanze and her second husband Georg Nikolaus von Nissen, and a heavily (and tendentiously) edited selection was printed in the Nissen biography of 1828. They were deposited in the Salzburg Dommusikverein und Mozarteum in the 1840s and 1850s where scholars could consult them. The majority but not all were made readily available in the editions by Ludwig Schiedermair in 1914 and Emily Anderson in 1938; the definitive seven-volume German edition was issued between 1962 and 1975.

For the eighteenth-century traveller, Salzburg could be a paradise. Off the beaten track and set at the foot of the Alps, it boasted natural beauties and a rich history: the city owed its post-Roman origin to the founding of the abbey of St Peter by St Rupert of Worms in 696 and of the cathedral by St Virgil in 774. In 1278 Rudolph of Habsburg made the archbishops of Salzburg imperial princes and during centuries of relative peace (except for the Peasants' War of 1525–6) the power and prestige of the court increased until it was the most important and influential archdiocese and sacred state in German-speaking Europe. By 1700, half a century before Mozart's birth, its boundaries stretched north and west into what is now Bavaria and east and south as far as Wiener Neustadt and Graz.

What the anonymous visitor to Salzburg praised so highly was the mechanical clock tower facing what is now the Mozartplatz. Constructed in the early eighteenth century, it was renovated in the 1750s to include music by the Kapellmeister Johann Ernst Eberlin and the court violinist Leopold Mozart. The works were published in 1759 by Lotter of Augsburg, together with a lengthy description of the Salzburg fortress, a short history of the city, and a charming, engraved cityscape. More than a music print, it was a souvenir for the sophisticated tourist, a memento of pleasant hours spent near the banks of the river Salzach or roaming the numerous churches, open squares and fountains that gave Salzburg its nickname, ‘the German Rome’.

If the name of Mozart is a touchstone for innate, absolute musicality, probably no genre has done more to accomplish this than the composer's keyboard sonatas. Collectively associated with such attributes as simplicity and naturalness of material, modesty of tone and facility of technique, they encapsulate the reception not only of Mozart but of a whole ‘Classical style’. This state of affairs has been encouraged by the tendency to view the keyboard as a ‘neutral’ medium, one useful for theoretical demonstrations in the classroom, in which Mozart is, as it were, a model pupil. It has certainly also been encouraged by the works' very wide exposure as piano teaching material. Both cases help to determine, and continually reinforce, the centrality of this repertory to the canon of Western music.

Yet there is another strand of reception that suggests anxiety about this very image of the sonatas, one that tends to imply that better Mozart can be found in other instrumental genres, including those in which the piano features either as soloist or in an ensemble. Within the output for solo piano alone, there is undoubtedly much that is more colourful, dramatic and elaborate than the governing image would suggest, including some of the sonatas themselves. In this context the pedagogical explanation has often been invoked. Thus the discourse of the sonatas precisely reflects the original teaching purposes the works were meant to serve, and more broadly the amateur market for such works at the time, considerations that have retained their relevance up to the present.

In a memorable scene from Peter Shaffer's Amadeus, Salieri is introduced to Mozart's music through a performance of the Adagio from the Serenade for Winds in B flat major, K.361. It causes him to swoon: ‘It seemed to me that I had heard a voice of God,’ Salieri exclaims in a mixture of admiration and bitterness, ‘and that it issued from a creature whose own voice I had also heard – and it was the voice of an obscene child!’ (Act 1, scene 5). Although Shaffer's play takes many poetic liberties with historical facts, this remark reflects much of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century reception of Mozart: a child prodigy (or idiot savant) who never grew up, yet wrote inspired, virtually perfect music. This comment put in the fictional Salieri's mouth also makes clear that Mozart's melodic gift is not limited to vocal music; indeed, for Shaffer you are as likely to hear the ‘voice of God’ in one of his secular instrumental works as in Mozart's sacred vocal music.

In fact, vocal music was of great importance to Mozart, and he was a gifted composer for the human voice. In the hierarchy of music before 1800, vocal genres – opera, oratorio and cantatas – reigned supreme, while even the loftier forms of orchestral music – symphonies and concertos – took a subordinate place. The main problem was summed up in Fontanelle's oft-repeated question: how could a sonata express an Affekt or emotion without words to guide the performer and listener? Vocal music and professional singers enjoyed a prestige that simply was not yet available to instrumental music.

Mozart was a prolific composer of orchestral music, writing numerous symphonies, divertimenti, serenades and cassations in the 1760s and 1770s, and six remarkable symphonies while based in Vienna in the 1780s. Although his contribution to the orchestral literature is predictably diverse, the genres in which he works are not as musically distinct in practical terms as nomenclature would seem to suggest. Divertimento, serenade and cassation each carried slightly different connotations in eighteenth-century Europe – according to the theorist Heinrich Christoph Koch the cassation was specifically designed for performance ‘in the evenings, outdoors, or on public streets’, for example – but Mozart uses the terms more or less interchangeably. Many of Mozart's Salzburg symphonies, too, are closely linked to his serenade and operatic overture repertories, the symphonies K.45, 87, 120, 135, 161/163, 121 and 102 either deriving from or being transformed into the overtures to Mozart's operas La finta semplice, Mitridate re di Ponto, Ascanio in Alba, Lucio Silla, Il sogno di Scipione, La finta giardiniera and Il re pastore respectively, and the cassation K.100 and the serenades K.204, 250 and 320 all reappearing in symphonic versions by Mozart or his father Leopold.

Irrespective of generic context, Mozart was acutely sensitive to matters of instrumentation and instrumental effect where orchestral writing was concerned. His meticulous attitude towards the spacing of chords in the wind section is evident not only in adjustments he makes to his own manuscripts, but also in amendments to the work of his pupil Thomas Attwood. Even in his very earliest compositions, Mozart is attuned to issues of orchestration, asking Nannerl to ‘remind me to give the horn something worthwhile to do’ in a symphony written in London in 1764. Throughout his life, in fact, Mozart reacts to orchestral colours and effects he witnesses at home and abroad. After experiencing the famed Mannheim orchestra first-hand in 1778, Mozart laments to his father: ‘Ah, if only we had clarinets too [in Salzburg]! You cannot imagine the glorious effect of a symphony with flutes, oboes and clarinets.’