Johann Mattheson's Pièces de clavecin and Das neu-eröffnete Orchestre

Mattheson's Universal Style in Theory and Practice

Margaret Seares

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351561600
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

A prolific music theorist and critic as well as an established composer, Johannes Mattheson remains surprisingly understudied. In this important study, Margaret Seares places Mattheson's Pi's de clavecin (1714) in the context of his work as a public intellectual who encouraged German musicians and their musical public to eschew what he saw as the hidebound traditions of the past, and instead embrace a universalism of style and expression derived from contemporary currents in music of the leading European nations. Beginning with the early non-musical writings by Mattheson, Seares places them in the context of the cosmopolitan city-state of Hamburg, before moving to a detailed study of his first major musical treatise Das neu-er ffnete Orchestre of 1713, in which he espoused his views about the musics of the past and present and, in particular, the characteristics of the musics of Germany, Italy, France and England. This latter section of the treatise, Part III, is edited and translated into English in the book's appendix - the first such translation available. Seares then moves on to an evaluation of the Pi's de clavecin as a work in which Mattheson reflects in musical terms the themes of modernism (in the sense ofa mode) and universalism that are such a strong part of his writings of the period, and a work that represents an important precursor for the keyboard suites of Johann Sebastian Bach and Georg Frideric Handel.

1

The Formative Years Leading up to Das neu-eröffnete Orchestre and the Pièces de clavecin

HAMBURG AND THE EARLY YEARS

Johann Mattheson is almost unique among pre-nineteenth-century composers and musicians in that he left for posterity a detailed autobiography in the form of the third-person entry on ‘Mattheson’ in his Grundlage einer Ehren-Pforte.¹ That entry was to become the source of all modern biographies of the renowned theorist/composer, the best and most detailed of which are those by Beekman Cannon in Johann Mattheson: Spectator in Music, George Buelow in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians² and Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen and Klaus Pietschmann in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart.³ In so saying, it should be noted that Vera Viehöver has argued that the Ehren-Pforte should not be read as an autobiography or biography as such, but rather as a strategically devised compendium representing relationships that were important, in one way or another, to Mattheson.⁴ She argues that, therefore, it does not represent the type of objective, clinically researched autobiography that readers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have come to expect.

The entries by Buelow and Hinrichsen in the respective dictionaries mentioned above make a further comprehensive biography of Mattheson superfluous here. Instead, the first part of this chapter will focus upon aspects of the environment of Mattheson’s earlier years(1681–1714) which have relevance for his development as a writer and composer.

Mattheson was born in Hamburg on 28 September 1681. Hamburg at this time was undoubtedly one of the most cosmopolitan cities of what we now call Germany, due to its importance as a major international trading centre. The city’s wealth had been built upon its role as an intermediary in trade between Spain, Portugal and the Baltic and, later, trade with France and England.⁵ And unlike most imperial cities and princely states in other parts of Germany, Hamburg had emerged relatively unscathed from the Thirty Years War and continued to prosper. In the words of Eda Sagarra:

Hamburg’s European importance contrasted with the fate of the majority of German towns in this period [c.1648–1806] … . Not only was it virtually untouched by the war, its population growth unaffected by subsequent epidemics, but it continued to expand and to be able to defend its prosperity over the next centuries against all comers, except Napoleon. In Hamburg the burgher was master; no noble might reside within its territory. To be a citizen imposed a variety of duties – e.g. to bear arms and to contribute to the maintenance of various charitable organizations, hospitals, almshouses, orphanages, etc., which were all under the authority of the city government. But one enjoyed substantial privileges, too, and to be a citizen of Hamburg in the seventeenth century was probably, for Germans, the best guarantee of dying in one’s bed … . A free imperial city … its citizens felt closer to Amsterdam, to its former Hanseatic trading partners in Lübeck, Danzig and Reval, than to inland towns.⁶

Sagarra also points out that the merchants of Hamburg, unlike those from many other German towns, sent their sons away to school or to travel, where they encountered other young men on their travels in Europe,⁷ and where their perspectives were broadened.

Franklin Kopitsch, in his seminal work on the history and intellectual life of Hamburg in the early years of the German Enlightenment, has noted that nowhere else in Germany was there such a wealth of international connections, relationships and influence, and therefore the potential for individuals to show initiative on behalf of the common good.⁸ And Gloria Flaherty has pointed out that trade and the spirit of innovation in Hamburg extended beyond the level of mere merchandise and spilled over into the artistic sphere:

The city’s artistic life was also affected by an unexpected kind of import-export trade. Poems, plays, oratorios and operas (as well as poets, scholars, performers, and composers) were exported north to Denmark, east to the Baltic states andRussia, west to England, and even south to Vienna. On the import side of the ledger were French theatrical works, Italian operas, and English prose poetry.⁹

While Hamburg may have stood out amongst German towns at this time, a letter written by Johann Kaspar Riesbeck in 1739 under the heading ‘Letters of a travelling salesman’ shows that living in the city was nonetheless a variable experience, depending on social class:

The first sight of the inside of the imperial and Hanseatic city Hamburg is quite disgusting and repulsive. Most of the streets are narrow, airless and black, and the common people who swarm through them are coarse, wild and generally not very clean. However, as soon as one is acquainted with some of the better houses, one gets a better impression of the city. In the houses of the richer merchants calm, cleanliness, and splendour, even to the point of wastefulness, are the rule. The people of Hamburg are the first Protestants I have seen who have remained German-Catholic as concerns eating and drinking. Their food is better even than in Vienna, Graz, Prague and Munich; and perhaps nowhere else in the world do people attach so much importance to sensuous taste as here.¹⁰

Mattheson’s own education reflected the values of the new, fashionable society of Hamburg. His parents sent him to the Johannischule – described in the Ehren-Pforte as ‘die berühmte hiesige Johannischule’¹¹ [locally renowned Johannischule] – where he was taught Latin, Greek and music, amongst other subjects. According to the Ehren-Pforte he also received lessons in dancing, drawing and calculation/calculus (presumably outside the school) and, as part of what he rather quaintly describes as the ‘growing-up process’ (‘heranwachsenden Krafften’), he also had lessons in fencing and riding.¹² This broad education has relevance for Mattheson’s future role as protagonist for galanterie: Dirk Rose has pointed out, in his work on the poet Christian Friedrich, Mattheson’s older contemporary and a significant figure in the advancement of galant literature, that music and dancing were part of the education in the knightly academies in Germany at this time, thus laying the foundations for entry into the galant world of both action and discourse.¹³ As Rose says at the beginning of his study, ‘Ohne galante Conduite keine galante Literature’ (Without galant conduct/behaviour there is no galant literature).¹⁴

Of his musical education, as opposed to his musical experiences, Mattheson says comparatively little, most of this being contained in the first paragraph of page 188 of the Ehren-Pforte:

Im siebenden Jahr seines Alters machte man mit ihm den Anfang zur Musik, mittelst getreuer Anweisung eines hauptehrlichen und geschickten Mannes, der Johann Nicolaus Hanff hiess, und vorhin Hochfürstl. Capelldirector des Bischoffs von Lübeck zu Eutin gewesen war; beym Eingange der Capelle aber Organist au Dom in Schleswig wurde. Dieser unterrichtete ihn vier Jahr auf dem Clavier und in der Setzkunst; ein andrer, Nahmens Woldag, zu gleicher Zeit, in der Singekunst; dabey er denn auch … auf der Gambe, Violine, Flöte und Hoboe … seine Ubungen hatte.¹⁵

[In his seventh year his parents gave him his first introduction to music by way of the loyal instruction from an esteemed man, called Johann Nicolaus Hanff, recently the director of the princely chapel of the Bishops of Lübeck and Eutin; before entry into the Chapel he had been organist at the Cathedral in Schleswig. He instructed him [Mattheson] for four years on the keyboard, and in composition; another person, called Woldag, at the same time instructed him in singing; at this time he also had practice in the gamba, violin, flute and oboe.]

On the next page he makes passing reference to the music masters, Brunmüller, Prätorius and Kerner who taught him composition in the traditional strict style of church music, which he describes using the adjective ‘vorlängst’ (‘long-ago’) in a slightly pejorative fashion: ‘schon vorlängst Kirchenstücke’.¹⁶ He explains the church style to mean fugue and counterpoint, and quickly goes on to express the view that his real musical education took place in the o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Music Examples
• Preface
• 1 The Formative Years Leading up to Das neu-eröffnete Orchestre and the Pièces de clavecin
• 2 Mattheson’s Das neu-eröffnete Orchestre of 17131
• 3 Les Pièces de clavecin/ Harmonisches Denckmahl
• 4 Mattheson’s German Heritage
• 5 Music à la Mode: Mattheson’s Response to the Music of his Italian and French Contemporaries
• 6 Mattheson and ‘Universalism’
• 7 Mattheson’s Dance Movements: An Amalgam of Styles
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Translation into English of Part III, Chapter 1 (pp. 200–231) of Das neu-eröffnete Orchestre
• Bibliography
• Index