by Will Durant
The nobles and many bourgeois joined the clergy in resisting these measures. Their hostility was not appeased by the futile efforts that Joseph made to reopen the Scheldt to oceanic commerce; Holland refused to permit it, and France, despite the pleas of Marie Antoinette, joined in the refusal. In January, 1787, the Estates of Brabant notified Joseph that changes in the existing constitution of the province could not be made without the consent of the Estates; in effect they informed him that his rule in the Austrian Netherlands must be a constitutional, not an absolute, monarchy. He ignored the declaration, and ordered the enforcement of his decrees. The Estates refused to vote taxes unless attention was paid to their remonstrances. Agitation flared into such widespread violence that Maria Christina promised annulment of the hated reforms (May 31, 1787).
Where was the Emperor during this turmoil? He was flirting diplomatically with Catherine II, believing that an entente with Russia would isolate Prussia and strengthen Austria against the Turks. Even before the death of his mother Joseph had visited the Czarina at Mogilev (June 7, 1780), and thence he had gone on to Moscow and St. Petersburg. In May, 1781, Austria and Russia signed an alliance that pledged each to come to the aid of the other in case of attack.
Thinking that this agreement would immobilize the septuagenarian Frederick, Joseph again (1784) offered the Austrian Netherlands to Elector Charles Theodore in exchange for Bavaria. The Elector was tempted, but Frederick roused all his energies to foil the plan. He stirred up revolt against the Emperor in Hungary and Belgium; he induced the Duke of Zweibrücken—heir to Bavaria—to oppose the exchange; he sent agents to convince the German princes that their independence was threatened by Austrian expansion; and he succeeded in organizing (July 23, 1785) Prussia, Saxony, Hanover, Brunswick, Mainz, Hesse-Cassel, Baden, Saxe-Weimar, Gotha, Mecklenburg, Ansbach, and Anhalt into a Fürstenbund, or League of Princes, pledged to resist any expansion of Austria at the expense of a German state. Joseph again appealed to his sister at Versailles; Marie Antoinette used her charm on Louis XVI to win his support for her brother; Vergennes, foreign minister, cautioned Louis against consent; Joseph confessed himself defeated by the old fox who had been the idol of his youth. When, in August, 1786, he received news of Frederick’s death, he expressed a double grief: “As a soldier I regret the passing of a great man who has been epoch-making in the art of war. As a citizen I regret that his death has come thirty years too late.”78
Now the Emperor’s only hope of extending his realm lay in joining Catherine in a campaign to divide between them the European possessions of Turkey. When the Empress of Russia set out in January, 1787, to visit and awe her new conquests in the south, she invited Joseph to meet her en route and accompany her to the Crimea. He went, but did not at once agree to her proposal for a united crusade. “What I want,” he said, “is Silesia, and war with Turkey will not give me that.”79 Nevertheless, when Turkey declared war against Russia (August 15, 1787) Joseph’s hand was forced; his alliance with Catherine required him to help her in a “defensive” war; besides, now that Turkey was so critically engaged, Austria had a chance to regain Serbia and Bosnia, perhaps even a port on the Black Sea. So, in February, 1788, Joseph sent his soldiers to war, and told them to take Belgrade.
But meanwhile the Swedes seized the opportunity to send a force against St. Petersburg. Catherine summoned troops from the south to defend her capital. The Turks, relieved of Russian pressure, concentrated their power against the Austrians. Joseph, going to lead his army, saw it weakened by apathy, desertion, and disease; he ordered a retreat, and returned to Vienna in despair and disgrace. He turned over the command to Laudon, a hero of the Seven Years’ War; the old Marshal redeemed Austrian arms by capturing Belgrade (1789). Sweden’s sortie against Russia having failed, Catherine’s soldiers swarmed backward to the south, and survived in slightly superior number in competitive holocausts with the Turks. Joseph was rejoicing in the prospect of long-awaited martial glory when Prussia, England, Sweden, and Holland, fearing Russian aggrandizement, intervened to help the Turks. Suddenly Joseph found nearly all of Protestant Europe united and arming against him. Once more he appealed to France, but France, in 1789, was busy with revolution. Prussia, under Frederick William II, signed an alliance with Turkey (January, 1790), and sent agents to foment revolt against the Emperor in Hungary and the Austrian Netherlands.
Hungary welcomed these machinations, for it was in open rebellion against Joseph’s edicts of conscription, taxation, language change, and religious reform. In 1786 Emerich Malongei called upon the Hungarians to elect their own king. In 1788 Remigius Franyó organized a plot to make Frederick William king of Hungary; Counts Esterházy and Károlyi betrayed the plot to the Emperor, and Franyó was sentenced to sixty years’ imprisonment. In 1789 the Hungarian Estates appealed to Prussia to free Hungary from Austria. When news of the French Revolution reached Hungary the country rang with cries for independence. Joseph, who felt death in his veins, had no more strength to maintain his stand. His brother Leopold urged him to yield. In January, 1790, he announced:
We have decided to restore the administration of the Kingdom [of Hungary] … to the status of 1780. … We instituted [the reforms] out of zeal for the common good, and in the hope that you, taught by experience, would find them pleasing. Now we have convinced ourselves that you prefer the old order. … But it is our will that our Edict of Toleration, … as well as that concerning the serfs, their treatment and their relation to the seigneurs, remain in force.80
In February the crown of St. Stephen was carried back to Buda, and was acclaimed with public rejoicing at every stop on the way. The revolt died down.
The revolt in the Austrian Netherlands went full course, for there it felt the heat of the revolutionary movement in neighboring France. Joseph refused to confirm the promise his sister had given to the Estates of Brabant that the reforms they resented would be annulled; he ordered their enforcement, and bade his soldiers fire upon any crowds resisting them. It was so done; six rioters were killed in Brussels (January 22, 1788), an unknown number in Antwerp and Louvain. A Brussels lawyer, Henri van den Noot, summoned the people to arm themselves and enroll as volunteers in an army of independence. The appeal was actively supported by the clergy; an anomalous inspiration was added by news that the Bastille had fallen; soon ten thousand “Patriots,” ably led, were in the field. On October 24 a manifesto of “the Brabantine people” announced the deposition of Joseph II as their ruler. On October 26 a force of Patriots defeated the Austrian soldiery. Town after town was occupied by the insurgents. On January 11, 1790, the seven provinces declared their independence, and proclaimed the Republic of the United States of Belgium, taking the name of the Belgic tribes that had troubled Caesar eighteen centuries before. England, Holland, and Prussia were happy to recognize the new government. Joseph appealed to France for help, but France herself was busy deposing her King. All the old world that Joseph had known seemed to be falling apart. And death was calling him.
VII. ATRA MORS
The bitterness of those final months was complete. Hungary and Belgium were in revolt, the Turks were advancing, his army was mutinous, his own people, the Austrians, who once had loved him, had turned against him as the violator of their sacred customs and beliefs. The priests denounced him as an infidel, the nobles hated him for freeing their serfs, the peasants cried out for more land; the urban poor were near starvation; all classes cursed the high taxes and prices caused by the war. On January 30, 1790, in full surrender, Joseph rescinded all reforms decreed since the death of Maria Theresa, except the abolition of serfdom.
Why had he failed? He had accepted in full faith and generous trust the thesis of the philosophes that a monarch of good education and good will would be the best instrument of enlightenment and reform. He had a good education, but his good will was tarnished by love of power, and ultimately his eagerness to be a conqueror overcame his zeal for putting philosophy on the throne. He lacked the philosopher’s capacity for do
ubt; he took for granted the wisdom of his means as well as of his ends. He tried to reform too many evils at once, and too hurriedly; the people could not absorb the bewildering multiplicity of his decrees. He commanded faster than he could convince; he sought to achieve in a decade what required a century of education and economic change. Basically it was the people who failed him. They were too deeply rooted in their privileges and prejudices, in their customs and creeds, to give him the understanding and support without which, in such challenging reforms, his absolutism was impotent. They preferred their churches, priests, and tithes to his taxes, spies, and wars. They could not put their trust in a man who laughed at their beloved legends, badgered their bishops, and humiliated their Pope.
Through all those exacting years since 1765 his body had rebelled against his will. His stomach could not digest his pace; repeatedly and in vain it cautioned him to rest. The Prince de Ligne warned him that he was killing himself; he knew it, but “what can I do?” he said; “I am killing myself because I cannot rouse up others to work.”81 His lungs were bad, his voice was feeble and hollow; he had varicose veins, running eyes, erysipelas, hemorrhoids … He exposed himself to all kinds of weather in the war with the Turks; like thousands of his troops he contracted quartan fever. Sometimes he could hardly breathe; “my heart palpitates at the slightest movement.”82 In the spring of 1789 he began to vomit blood—“almost three ounces at once,” he wrote to Leopold. In June he had violent pains in the kidneys. “I observe the strictest diet; I eat neither meat nor vegetables nor dairy products; soup and rice are my nourishment.”83 He developed an anal abscess; this and his hemorrhoids had to be lanced. He developed dropsy. He summoned Leopold to come and take over the government. “I do not regret leaving the throne,” he said; “all that grieves me is to have so few people happy.”84 To the Prince de Ligne he wrote: “Your country has killed me. The taking of Ghent was my agony; the loss of Brussels is my death. … Go to the Low Countries; bring them back to their sovereign. If you cannot do this, stay there. Do not sacrifice your interests to me. You have children.”85 He made his will, leaving generous gifts to his servants, and to “the five ladies who bore my society.”86 He composed his own epitaph: “Here lies Joseph, who could succeed in nothing.”87 He received with resignation the last sacrament of the Catholic Church. He begged for death, and on February 20, 1790, it was given him. He was forty-eight years old. Vienna rejoiced at his passing, and Hungary gave thanks to God.
Was he a failure? In war, unquestionably. Despite Laudon’s victories Leopold II (1790-92) found it advisable to make peace with Turkey (August 4, 1791) on the basis of the status quo ante. Unable to pacify the Hungarian barons, Leopold revoked the grant of freedom to the serfs. In Bohemia and Austria most of the reforms were preserved. The toleration edicts were not repealed; the closed monasteries were not restored; the Church remained subject to the laws of the state. The economic legislation had freed and stimulated commerce and industry. Austria passed without violent revolution from a medieval to a modern state, and shared in the diverse cultural vitality of the nineteenth century.
“Deeply convinced of the integrity of my intentions,” Joseph had written to Kaunitz, “I hope that when I am dead posterity—more favorable, more impartial, and therefore juster than my contemporaries—will examine my actions and goals before judging me.”88 It has taken posterity a long time to do this, but it has learned at last, while deploring his autocracy and haste, to recognize in him the bravest and most thoroughgoing, as well as the least judicious, of the “enlightened despots.” After the reaction under Metternich had passed away, the reforms of Joseph II were one by one restored, and the revolutionaries of 1848 laid a wreath of grateful acknowledgment upon his tomb.
CHAPTER XIV
Music Reformed
WE do not readily think of the embattled Joseph II as a musician. Yet we are told that he received a “thorough musical education,” had a fine bass voice, heard a concert almost daily, and was “a skillful player from score” on the violoncello, the viola, and the clavier.1 Many nobles were musicians, many more were patrons of music. The middle classes followed suit; every household had a harpsichord; everyone learned to play some instrument. Trios and quartets were performed in the streets; open-air concerts were given in the parks and, on St. John’s Day, from illuminated boats on the Danube Canal. Opera flourished at the court and in the National Opera Theater founded by Joseph II in 1778.
Vienna rose to its early-nineteenth-century sovereignty as the musical capital of Europe because in the late eighteenth century it brought together the rival musical traditions of Germany and Italy. From Germany came polyphony, from Italy melody. From Germany came the Singspiel—a mixture of comic drama, spoken dialogue, incidental music, and popular songs; from Italy came opera buff a; at Vienna the two forms coalesced, as in Mozart’s The Abduction -from the Seraglio. Generally the Italian influence overcame the German in Vienna; Italy conquered Austria with arias, as Austria conquered North Italy with arms. In Vienna opera seria was chiefly Italian until Gluck came, and Gluck was formed on Italian music.
I. CHRISTOPH WILLIBALD GLUCK: 1714-87
He was born at Erasbach, in the Upper Palatinate, to a Catholic forester who in 1717 moved the family to Neuschloss in Bohemia. In the Jesuit school at Komotau Christoph received instruction in religion, Latin, the classics, singing, violin, organ, and harpsichord. Moving to Prague in 1732, he took lessons on the violoncello, and supported himself by singing in churches, playing the violin at dances, and giving concerts in nearby towns.
Every clever boy in Bohemia gravitated to Prague, and some still cleverer found a way to Vienna. Gluck’s way was to secure a place in the orchestra of Prince Ferdinand von Lobkowitz. In Vienna he heard Italian operas, and felt the magnetism of Italy. Prince Francesco Melzi liked his playing, and invited him to Milan (1737). Gluck studied composition under Sammartini, and became devoted to Italian styles. His early operas (1741-45) followed Italian methods, and he conducted their premières in Italy. These successes won him an invitation to compose and produce an opera for the Haymarket Theatre in London.
There he presented La caduta de’ giganti (1746). It was dismissed with faint praise, and gruff old Handel said that Gluck knew “no more counterpoint than mein cook”;2 but the cook was a good basso and Gluck’s fame was not to rest on counterpoint. Burney met Gluck, and described him as “of a temper as fierce as Handel’s. … He was horribly scarred by smallpox, … and he had an ugly scowl.”3 Perhaps to balance his budget Gluck announced to the public that he would give “a concerto on twenty-six drinking glasses tuned [by filling them to different levels] with spring water, accompanied with the whole band [orchestra], being a new instrument of his own invention, upon which he performs whatever may be done on a violin or harpsichord.” Such a “glass harmonica,” or “musical glasses,” had been introduced in Dublin two years before. Gluck evoked the notes by stroking the rims of the glasses with moistened fingers. The performance (April 23, 1746) appealed to the curious, and was repeated a week later.
Saddened with this success, Gluck left London December 26 for Paris. There he studied the operas of Rameau, who had moved toward reform by integrating the music and the ballet with the action. In September he conducted operas at Hamburg, had a liaison with an Italian singer, and contracted syphilis. He recovered so slowly that when he went to Copenhagen (November 24) he was unable to conduct. He returned to Vienna, and married Marianne Pergia (September 15, 1750), daughter of a rich merchant. Her dowry made him financially secure; he took a house in Vienna, and disappeared into a long rest.
In September, 1754, Count Marcello Durazzo engaged him as Kapellmeister at two thousand florins per year to compose for the court. Durazzo had tired of conventional Italian opera, and collaborated with Gluck in a musical drama, L’innocenza giustificata, in which the story was no mere scaffolding for music, and the music no mere assemblage of arias, but the music reflected the action, and the arias—even the choruses—en
tered with some logic into the plot. The première (December 8, 1755) was therefore the herald and first product of the reform that history associates with Gluck’s name. We have seen elsewhere the contributions made by Benedetto Marcello, Jommelli, and Traëtta to this development, and the appeal made by Rousseau, Voltaire and the Encyclopedists for a closer union of drama and music. Metastasio had helped by proudly insisting that the music should be servant to the poetry.4 Winckelmann’s passion for restoring Greek ideals in art may have affected Gluck, and composers knew that Italian opera had begun as an attempt to revive the classic drama, in which the music was subordinated to the play. Meanwhile Jean-Georges Noverre (1760) pleaded for an elevation of the ballet from mere rhythmic prancing to dramatic pantomimes that would express “the passions, manners, customs, ceremonies, and costumes of all the peoples on earth.”5 By the mysterious alchemy of genius Gluck wove all these elements into a new operatic form.
One secret of success is to seize a propitious chance. What was it that brought Gluck to abandon the librettos of Metastasio and take Raniero da Calzabigi as the poet for Orfeo ed Euridice? The two men had been born in the same year, 1714, but far apart—Calzabigi in Livorno. After some adventures in love and finance he came to Paris, published there an edition of Metastasio’s Poesie drammatiche (1755), and prefaced it with a “Dissertazione” expressing his hope for a new kind of opera—“a delightful whole resulting from the interplay of a large chorus, the dance, and a scenic action where poetry and music are united in a masterly way.”6 Moving to Vienna, he interested Durazzo with his ideas on opera; the Count invited him to write a libretto; Calzabigi composed Orfeo ed Euridice; Durazzo offered the poem to Gluck, who saw in the simple and unified plot a theme that could elicit all his powers.