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

a servant or an employee. His Bach/Handel soirées were journeys of musical
exploration for its own sake. The music was the focus of attention, not a background
for polite conversation: ‘He exerted all his influence in the cause of music, even so
subordinate an end as to enforce silence and attention during musical performances.
Whenever a whispered conversation arose among the audience, his excellency would
rise up from his seat in the first row, draw himself up to his full majestic height,
measure the offenders with a long, serious look, and then very slowly resume his seat.’
As one might imagine: ‘The proceeding never failed of its effect.’ 27 Although chiefly
known today as a pioneer of ‘early music’ Swieten cannot be accurately characterised
simply as a traditionalist or conservative (like, say, J. C. Pepusch, or Kirnberger, or
Leopold II). 28 Rather, he was one of the first to see that the music of the past was part
of the same story as that of the present, and that each had excellences of its own. This
historicising view of the present meant that he was prepared to accept the possibility
that certain contemporary composers might well be the classics of the future: ‘I have
gone back to the times when it was thought necessary before practising an art to study
it thoroughly and systematically. In such study I find nourishment for my mind and
heart, and support when any fresh proof of the degeneracy of the art threatens to cast
me down. My chief comforters are Handel and the Bachs, and with them the few
masters of our own day who tread firmly in the footsteps of the truly great and good,
and either give promise of reaching the same goal, or have already attained to it. In this
27 Otto Jahn, The life of Mozart, tr. P. Townsend (London: Novello, Ewer & Co., 1891) vol. II, pp.384-
5. Any history of the concert as an institution will show how far ahead of his time in this respect the
Baron was. See also E. Olleson, ‘Gottfried van Swieten: Patron of Haydn and Mozart’, Proceedings
of the Royal Musical Association 89 (1962-63), 63-74. Olleson’s article, together with some
additional material, can be found online at http://www.mozartforum.com/Contemporary%
20Pages/Van_Sweiten_Contemp.htm (accessed 30 September 2006).
28 Preoccupation with the past can be the consequence of a conservative temperament, looking back to
a golden age in preference to the dismal present; but it may also be a form of radicalism (a word
which, appropriately enough in this context, comes from ‘radix’: root). In this case the past thus
apostrophised is always at some remove from the present and its immediate antecedents. Thus the
twentieth-century pioneers of the ‘early music’ movement began by flying in the face of
contemporary assumptions about performance practice and reaching back beyond the nineteenth
century for new approaches and techniques. In Swieten’s case, the requisite distance was achieved
by bypassing the native Viennese contrapuntal tradition (Fux, Monn, Gassmann, etc) in favour of a
specifically North German orientation (J. S. Bach, C. P. E. Bach, Handel).
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