Imperial Entertainment: Music for the Holy Roman Emperors (original) (raw)
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One of the least studied aspects of the many festivities celebrating the 1622 canonization of Saints Ignatius of Loyola and Francis Xavier throughout the vast Habsburg empire was the role played by extravagantly orchestrated music. When Emperor Ferdinand II arrived in Regensburg to conduct the routine business of empire, he brought with him no fewer than fifty-nine musicians, most of whom played at the festal Mass for St. Francis Xavier attended by Ferdinand himself, the empress, and an assortment of Catholic princes. In 1653, in the same city, forty trumpeters accompanied the emperor in the Corpus Christi procession. Meetings of the imperial diet were subsequently treated to performances of a sacred opera, Philothea, composed by the Munich Jesuit Johannes Paullin. These represent but a tiny sampling of the House of Austria's elaborate and sustained involvement with music and musicians in the period 1500-1700. In his introduction, the Companion's editor declares an ambitious aim: "to redress the lack of scholarly surveys of Habsburg musical patronage by providing a detailed survey of music at the Habsburg courts during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, spanning the reigns of Emperor Maximilian I (r.1493-1519) through Emperor Leopold I (r.1658-1705)." Within such broad geographical and chronological limits, Weaver set himself the twin tasks encapsulated in the perilously oxymoronic term "detailed overview." It is a survey that must account for phenomena that range from Philip II's proscription of polyphony at the Escorial (one of many aspects of this monarch's music patronage to go unmentioned in Pablo L. Rodríguez's chapter) to the patronage of Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) following Ferdinand II's marriage to Eleonora Gonzaga in 1621. While the first chapter offers an overview of the entire volume, the remaining fifteen are grouped into parts under three inclusive subheadings: institutional
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In the autumn of 1790 Mozart undertook the penultimate journey of his life to participate in the coronation of Leopold II as Holy Roman Emperor in Frankfurt am Main. His attendance and performance at this significant imperial gathering were an investment designed to improve his fortunes. But Mozart's gamble failed. Though it was a key political event, and despite its significance as one of Mozart's final sojourns, not much more is known about the music of the Frankfurt coronation. This article offers a new understanding of Leopold II's imperial accession, positing the coronation as a vibrant context for music culture. Contrary to narratives that position Mozart's concert above all others, I argue that this was far from the case according to his contemporaries. During the coronation festivities the city hosted three theatre companies and many celebrated musicians, including Ludwig Fischer, Johann Hässler, Vincenzo Righini, Antonio Salieri and Georg Vogler, among others. Frankfurt was indeed filled with musicians who cooperated with and competed against one another in the hope of attracting substantial audiences comprised of the Empire's elite. Yet for Mozart, whose concert was poorly advertised and unfortunately timed, this competition proved too intense. By investigating the musical and political events of Leopold II's imperial coronation, I assert that Mozart's investment, which had the potential to alter his life forever, was unsuccessful in part because of a rumour that caused his desired audience to leave Frankfurt temporarily the very morning his performance took place. Available at: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/eighteenth-century-music/article/div-classtitlethe-imperial-coronation-of-leopold-ii-and-mozart-frankfurt-am-main-1790div/009452A17B3A7E5B79621FC2C7A6EDBF#fndtn-information
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Archduke Ferdinand of Inner Austria was not only the dedicatee of the anthology Parnassus Musicus Ferdinandaeus – in itself a rich document of the future Holy Roman Emperor’s wide-ranging musical connections – but his court in Graz also became – on account of his personal music interests and the opportunities provided by carefully planned family connections – a major hub of the leading musical trends of the first two decades of the seventeenth century. The paper provides an overview of this intricate web forming Ferdinand’s musical “Parnassus” in Graz.
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The Holy Roman Empire’s final decades were plagued with conflict. While the War of the Bavarian Succession (1778–79) destabilized from within, the Revolutionary Wars (1792–1802) posed a threat from abroad. Scholars have long considered the Empire’s kaleidoscopic constitution among its greatest weaknesses, for it could not possess the perceived power of a centralized nation-state and thus (allegedly) made its dissolution in 1806 all but inevitable. But by examining such works as Günther von Schwarzburg (1777), Heinrich der Löwe (1792), Der Retter Deutschlands (1797), and Achille (1801), I posit that there was nothing inevitable about the Empire’s fate in times of conflict leading up to and throughout the Coalition Wars against Revolutionary and Republican France. This paper ultimately argues that, despite claims to the contrary, the Empire understood itself as a complex nation that placed its collective past and present centre stage so as to help ensure its future.