Mozart's moment

Vienna, 1785: the city was pulsating with life. For five years now, Joseph II had been sole ruler over the Hapsburg Empire, whose capital city was turning into a prospering metropolis. Population growth was explosive, and the nobility with its love of lavish display helped boost the economy. Artists, intellectuals, citizens and the lower ranks of the aristocracy met in salons to discuss art and science, philosophy and politics. The Age of Enlightenment had dawned, and Vienna was at the forefront of the new spirit of optimism.

In the middle of it all: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. When he arrived in Vienna four years earlier, he rapidly ascertained that the flourishing city was »a marvellous place, and the best place in the world for my métier«, as he wrote to his father Leopold. After some frustrating years in the service of the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg, Mozart was more than ready to spread his wings in the Imperial capital – and he couldn't have chosen a better time to do so.

But how did it come about that Mozart encountered such ideal conditions? The roots of this development go back to the 17th century, when the first Europeans were starting to rethink their views on Man and his place in the world. The new movement gathered speed at the beginning of the 18th century, with progressive thinkers like Immanuel Kant and Voltaire talking of reason and religious tolerance, and insisting that all men are equal before the law. Kant adopted a saying coined by the Roman poet Horace and demanded »Sapere aude!« – Have the courage to make use of your own reason! Scholars adopted the practice of repeating experiments to prove their assumptions: modern science was born.

Parallel to these developments, the Church was gradually losing power. In a world where the critical examination of traditional beliefs was taking increasing hold, religious dogmas had ever greater trouble justifying their validity. Mathematician Georg Christoph Lichtenberg summed up the new mindset thus: »Everything should be doubted at least once, even if it's the sum that two times two equals four«. Even the absolute monarchs of the day could no longer appeal to the Grace of God as legitimacy for their rule. Rather, an enlightened prince saw himself, in the words of Frederick the Great, as »the first servant of the state« and in that capacity as responsible for the happiness of his subjects. This in turn ripped asunder the straitjacket of a life spent in humility, obedience and service to the Lord: the new age called for the right of the individual to life, freedom and happiness. The beneficiary of this radical change was first and foremost the middle class, whose growing work and income levels went hand-in-hand with greater social influence.

But it was not only the bourgeoisie who benefited: Enlightenment philosophy also brought solid power-political advantages to kings and princes. After all, a stronger and wealthier middle class almost automatically meant that the nobilty lost influence to the absolute ruler. And more than one European monarch took the new ideas on board and made them his own. Today, we are familiar with Frederick the Great and Catherine the Great as enlightened rulers – and mention must also be made of the »Reform emperor« Joseph II.

Born in 1741 as the son of Archduchess Maria Theresa, Joseph was already crowned Holy Roman Emperor in Frankfurt am Main in 1764 – albeit a title that was long since only that. It was of much greater political significance that he was established a year later as co-ruler of the Hapsburg Empire at his mother's side, and after her death in 1780 he became sole ruler over the Hapsburg dominions: henceforth, his decisions went unchallenged in the Archduchy of Austria, in the lands of the Bohemian crown, the Kingdom of Hungary and the Austrian Netherlands.

Very much a child of the Enlightenment, Joseph urged the implementation of reforms while Maria Theresa was still alive, but only after her death was he able to unleash the full furore of his Enlightenment fervour. And furore was the right term, it must be said, for the drastic changes that the Emperor imposed on his people. In the space of a few years, Joseph outlawed torture and serfdom, and established a new jurisdiction that applied to the nobility and commoners alike. Freedom of the press and free practice of religion for non-Catholics were introduced (to a certain extent). In addition, Joseph dissolved all monastic orders and secularised the monasteries, and the entire machinery of government and the education and health systems were restructured.

His declared aim was a strictly organised, centralistic state with German as its official language – a pretty ambitious plan in the multiracial Hapsburg state – featuring a lean and efficient administration with himself at its head. The reforms of the thrifty Emperor, who had little time for pomp and ceremony and preferred to appear in public dressed in a simple uniform, initially met with a positive reception.

But as Joseph continued to interfere in his subjects' lives, their displeasure grew. The aristocracy felt neglected, while the areas of the Empire where German was not spoken rebelled against the curtailment of their political and linguistic autonomy. The Pope feared for his influence. And when the Emperor's zeal for reform degenerated into a mad need to control the tiniest details of people's lives, he lost all credibility with his subjects: the tolerance of even Joseph's keenest fans came to an end when they were required to economise with re-usable coffins at funerals, and to light only a certain number of candles in church. Thus many of his reforms were only temporary in nature: towards the end of his life, the now embittered Emperor was forced to rescind many of them, while his successor, Leopold II, quashed some of the remaining reforms after his accession to power in 1790. Nonetheless, it's fair to say that Joseph had initiated a dynamic of social change, albeit somewhat brutally, that was to have a lasting effect on his

This dynamic was of prime importance for Mozart when he decided to move to Vienna in 1781. The Imperial capital profited directly from Joseph II's reforms, and the economic and cultural upswing was evident all over the city. Thus the introduction of freedom of the press in 1782 led to a flood of new publications: from newspapers through philosophical tracts and satires to fiction of every kind, suddenly reading material was available at affordable prices. And for those who still couldn't afford it, so-called »reading cabinets« sprang up, the predecessors of modern lending libraries. The multicultural metropolis with its many keen readers became home to an unprecedented discussion culture: never before had Hapsburg society known such an open spirit as in Vienna at the height of the Josephine reforms.

Public concerts began to flourish as well. Hitherto, musical entertainment had long been reserved for churches and the palaces of the nobility, but all of a sudden there were concert halls that anyone could go to. At the same time, domestic music-making likewise came into vogue. These new developments provided the freelance musician Mozart with lots of scope: he gave piano lessons to aristocratic young ladies, composed chamber music to be played at home and also appeared in public as a pianist – often playing his own works. And as a composer in particular, he profited greatly from the new mood of optimism in the city on the Danube. After he had already daringly questioned the conventions of Italian opera with »Idomeneo« in 1781, a year later there followed »Die Entführung aus dem Serail«, which made Mozart a household name in Vienna over night.

With the first performance of »Le nozze di Figaro« (The Marriage of Figaro) in 1786, the young man from Salzburg scored another bull's eye. The story was politically controversial: a smart servant couple lead their skirt-chasing aristocratic employer up the proverbial garden path and end up making a proper fool of him. And the opera was such a hit that the Emperor found himself obliged to limit the number of encores by official decree to ensure that the performance would be over at some point.

Mozart set new standards in the realm of opera, and this was even truer of the piano concerto. In the years 1785 and 1786, at the height of Vienna's cultural heyday under Joseph II, Mozart wrote his pioneering contributions to the genre, the works known today as his »symphonic« piano concertos: the D minor concerto K. 466, K. 467 in C major, the A major concerto K. 488 and K. 491 in C minor. The four works have in common the redefinition of the relationship between the orchestra and the soloist: hitherto, a piano concerto had served solely as a vehicle to highlight the soloist's virtuosity, while the orchestra was only there to provide accompaniment.

In the Mozart concertos, however, the soloist and the orchestra are on an equal footing. And the structure of the compositions is likewise new: the individual movements of solo concertos had generally been fairly independent of one another in musical terms in the past, but now Mozart forged motivic and thematic connections that stretch over the whole work. With these innovations he was already anticipating the piano concertos of the future, particularly those by Beethoven and Brahms. And in chamber music, too, Mozart opened new doors.

As was the case in the above-mentioned piano concertos, Mozart places all four instruments on an equal footing in his Piano Quartet in E flat, K. 493, which he wrote in 1786. Even before democracy gradually took hold in Europe, the ideal of equality was already to the fore in the music of Mozart's Viennese years. Without the zealous reforms enacted by Joseph II, without the freedom of the press and the declining importance of the Church, Mozart would not have been able to evolve the self-confidence to give up his secure position in Salzburg and go his own way as an artist. In which case the history of music would look very different indeed! 

Text: Juliane Weigel-Krämer
English translation: Clive Williams