Exploring Classical Music at its Source
6 min read
My parents did ideal by me with music. My father led me to piano classes when I was 6, and my mom was an avid record collector who loved to purchase documents of all varieties: preferred songs, classical, jazz, calypso, even rock and roll. So, I grew up with a terrific richness of new music, which has furnished me with infinite satisfaction, enrichment and convenience. When songs arrives on, it can instantly adjust the way you come to feel.
At some level I woke up to the odd realization that the good composers who made classical new music lived in a planet the place the only way you could listen to songs was if a musician was taking part in. New music was not a thing you could receive at the contact of a button on an digital device. How vastly various that world must have been! It is a strain for my imaginative schools to even try to consider what it would have been like to dwell in the environment that produced that legacy of elegant tunes.
But if I want to test to get some comprehending of daily life in the 18th and 19th generations, it appears new music would be a superior way to achieve entry. As part of my life time fascination with songs, I booked a tour into the coronary heart of classical music. It took me by way of lots of of the musical facilities of Europe, including Prague, Salzburg and Budapest. Every single of these metropolitan areas has loaded musical historical past. Budapest, Hungary, was the property of Franz Liszt, Bela Bartok and Gustav Mahler, a central level of European lifestyle and politics for generations. Salzburg was an impartial point out and not yet aspect of Austria when Mozart was born there in 1756. And Prague was one of the most superb musical facilities of Europe. It was a property away from home for Mozart, who wrote a symphony expressly for the town, as properly as the house of composers Dvorak and Smetana. But the unchallenged emphasize of the vacation, when it comes to tunes, was Vienna.
These days, classical new music is all over the place. There are fine orchestras in all the big cities, and tunes is usually obtainable electronically. But at its beginning, classical audio was a phenomenon of Europe. It unfold promptly by means of the continent by way of the rivers that had been the highways of the occasions, particularly the Danube, as immortalized by Johann Strauss. There is rich musical historical past and custom to be identified in all the wonderful cities of Europe, and even in smaller villages. But that historical past is most concentrated in Central Europe, and the coronary heart is Vienna. There is no a lot more of a musical city than Vienna.
Songs is in the air in Vienna as nowhere else. You can really feel that historic legacy almost everywhere. Though the New York subway clangs with a jarring, dissonant sound, Vienna’s subway, the world’s first, hums with gentle harmonic chimes. Musicians of astonishing ability execute on the streets. Almost everywhere you go the people today, who are the soul of the residing town, appear to proclaim with out phrases: This is Vienna, “the centre of the planet.” Vienna has a perception of self-sufficiency that helps make the Viennese appear to be oblivious to the actuality that there is a globe past, or any need to have for one.
Just about every art kind starts by borrowing from a preceding artwork variety, and the classical songs of Vienna had its roots in the Italian Baroque. The earth owes a good credit card debt to the Habsburg dynasty that ruled most of Europe from 1278 to 1918. They ended up autocrats, but they have been also musicians and lavish patrons of music. They laid the foundations for classical music.
It started 100 a long time just before Haydn, when Leopold I brought Italian musicians to the court. Leopold staged operas in the open air that were attended by thousands. Leopold was himself a composer of sacred tunes and oratorios, some of which are nevertheless performed these days. Joseph II, the emperor throughout Mozart’s time and the brother of Marie Antionette, was Leopold’s great-grandson. He was also an able musician who performed music each individual day.
The Habsburg emperors retained their possess orchestras, and the noble course imitated them by preserving their individual orchestras, producing Vienna a excellent middle for musicians to discover perform. The musical culture of Vienna ongoing to improve and marinate, influenced by the cultures of the many ethnic teams that were being drawn to Vienna.
I frequented historical web-sites and saw performances in lots of cities alongside the way, but the experiences that ended up etched most deeply into my memory were being browsing some of the houses of the great composers in Vienna. A person of the most intriguing sites was the Mozart Figaro Dwelling, exactly where he composed “The Marriage of Figaro.” Mozart lived there with his household from 1784 to 1787.
It was the place he composed the 6 string quartets he dedicated to Joseph Haydn, and “Papa” Haydn arrived and noticed three of them performed there. There’s a legend that when Beethoven very first arrived to Vienna at age 17, from Bonn, Germany, he met Mozart in that property, and played piano for him. In accordance to the tale, Mozart was impressed by Beethoven’s improvisatory abilities and reported, “Watch this youthful man he will nevertheless make a sound in the earth.”
If that story is correct, that condominium saw the presence of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven. But the story of Beethoven can not be verified, and pretty much right away right after Beethoven arrived in Vienna, his mother died and he was pressured to return to Bonn. It would be 5 many years prior to he could return and restart his career.
Johannes Brahms also visited that condominium when the violin virtuoso Julius Epstein lived there, 80 decades soon after Mozart. So, the location is thick with musical vibrations and heritage. Now it’s a museum, so you can stand where all these great composers were and soak up it all.
You will come across 23 carat gold leaf on partitions and ceilings, an ornate gilded stove and a crystal chandelier, showing that Mozart was a abundant male when he lived there. Historians are not positive why he fell into economical difficulty, but he was a gambler and liked to dwell the lush lifestyle.
I visited the small apartment where Schubert was born and lived with his schoolteacher father and mom and four siblings. I saw in which he was born in the kitchen area and kept around the stove. Schubert’s father wanted him to be a schoolteacher, but his musical expertise acquired him admission to the Vienna Boys Choir. He tried staying a teacher, but could not stand it. He essential to compose all the time. He composed 1,000 operates, which includes 600 music, lots of of which were common for the duration of his time. But his symphonies have been destined only for the drawer of his writing desk in the course of his life time.
There is a portrait in the apartment of Therese Grob, whom he wanted to marry. But he was not rich adequate, so alternatively she married a baker. Schubert died at age 31 of typhus.
The most persuasive of the composers’ houses was Beethoven’s Heiligenstadt residence, a single of 80 flats exactly where Beethoven lived for the duration of his 35 several years in Vienna. It was in a vintner’s property when Beethoven lived there in the summer months of 1802. You can glance out the window wherever Beethoven stood when he was 32 a long time outdated and observed a bell tolling but could not hear it. It was there that he wrote the letter to his brothers that grew to become acknowledged as “The Heiligenstadt Testament.”
“What a humiliation,” he wrote, “when 1 stood beside me and heard a flute in the length and I listened to practically nothing, or another person listened to the shepherd singing and all over again I heard absolutely nothing. This kind of incidents brought me to the verge of despair, but minor extra and I would have set an stop to my lifestyle. Only art it was that withheld me. Ah, it seemed unattainable to go away the entire world till I experienced created all that I felt referred to as on me to produce.”
It’s crushingly tragic, but Beethoven did his very best get the job done following that. Standing in that home can deliver you pretty close to his tragedy, as effectively as his outstanding triumph about it.
Only in Vienna can you have ordeals such as this.
Your humble reporter,
A. Colin Treadwell
