J. S. BACH Jonathan Berkahn - Victoria University - Victoria ...

CHAPTER 3
CLASSICAL STYLE, CLASSICAL IDEOLOGY, AND
THE INSTRUMENTAL FUGUES OF JOSEPH HAYDN
THE VIENNESE TRADITION
Throughout the first half of the eighteenth century, St Leopold’s day (14 November)
was celebrated by the imperial court at Klosterneuburg, just outside Vienna. Always
performed during this celebration was a setting of the Vespers that had been composed
by the Emperor Leopold I (1640-1705). 1 This tradition may serve as a symbol of the
integration of music and court life at Vienna: the way in which a particular piece, for a
particular place and a particular time, existed by virtue of its de tempore function in
the yearly cycle of minutely prescribed feasts and observances according to which
court time was regulated. Two crucial ideas would soon shatter this dense network of
relationships: the capitalist development of music as a transferable commodity, and the
cultured bourgeois notion of absolute music for its own sake. Joseph Haydn would be
at the forefront of both developments; but when he first came to Vienna in 1740, the
centrality of court and cathedral could be taken for granted. 2
There was little about Vienna’s musical establishment at this time to suggest
that the city was about to become one of the leading centres of stylistic innovation.
Even by contemporary European standards the ritual of the imperial court was
unusually dazzling, heavy, and inflexible, and this was well expressed by Fux’s rich
but conservative style. J. J. Quantz’s description of his Constanza e Fortezza (1723)
1 S. Wollenberg, ‘Vienna under Joseph I and Charles VI’, Music and society: the late Baroque era,
ed. G. Buelow (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1994), p.331-2; H. V. F. Somerset, ‘The Habsburg
emperors as musicians’, Music & Letters 30 (1949), 204-215.
2 Court and church were to retain their status in Vienna longer than anywhere else in Europe.
Significantly, however, the musicians we now regard as being most important (Haydn, Mozart, and
Beethoven) operated around the periphery of these institutions.
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