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

increasingly to the Esterházy opera house.
At no other time in his life was Haydn called to write music of such intimacy as
this; music, quite literally, for an audience of one. In theory, this was the case with all
the music Haydn produced whilst at Esterháza. According to his contract he was
‘under permanent obligation to compose such pieces as his Serene Princely Highness
may command, and neither to communicate such new compositions to anyone, nor to
allow them to to be copied, but to retain them wholly for the exclusive use of his
Highness; nor shall he compose for any other person without the knowledge and
gracious permission [of his Highness].’ 22 There is nothing remarkable about this, nor
about any other aspect of Haydn’s thoroughly conventional contract. It would have
been within Prince Nicholas’ power to enforce this restriction, as August the Strong
(tragically) did with Jan Dismas Zelenka, and Frederick II did with Quantz. It seems
to us manifestly unjust that the music of a gifted composer should be the private
property of a single individual; this is the point where twenty-first-century attitudes
and assumptions (nineteenth- and twentieth-century ones as well) are farthest from
those of the eighteenth century. The palace, the estates, the opera house, the orchestra,
really were the personal possessions of Prince Nicholas Esterházy (an exceedingly
wealthy prince, even by eighteenth-century standards), and the laws, administration,
and taxation were very largely in his hands. However, precisely because so much
property and power was concentrated in the hands of one person, his private actions
and decisions formed the centre of the princedom’s public life; looking at it another
way, one could say that the private decisions he made were so freighted with their
consequences for his subjects, that he had no ‘private’ life at all. This completely
different understanding of the relationship between public and private spheres is what
makes it so hard for us to to imagine what court life was like.
Of course, during this period a major re-negotiation of these spheres was taking
22 Ibid., I, p.351.
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