The Virtuoso of Submissiveness

This chapter turns to Fux’s engagement with the imperial liturgy and his vigilant custodianship of its received musical traditions. It argues that the principal reception history of Fux as a composer, vested in the ongoing Complete Edition of his works (Gesamtausgabe) inadequately comprehends his actual significance because it privileges his compositions as self-standing musical works. By deconstructing this reception history we can distinguish between Fux’s habitual obedience to the dynastic style (which resulted in a large but blandly-achieved corpus of liturgical music) and two agents of musical refuge which satisfied (by contrast) the composer’s longing for musical form. The first of these is Palestrina and the “stile antico,” through which Fux achieved a much finer corpus of sacred works. The second is the Da capo aria as a model of tonal discourse through which Fux discovered an alternative to the restless changes of texture and technique demanded by the imperial liturgy. Both agents draw Fux into the orbit of Bach. This chapter closes with a comparative analysis of three Da capo arias by each composer. This analysis affirms that the intimacy between musical servitude and imaginative autonomy is of no less significance than the difference between them.

Introduction

The introduction to this book establishes the concept of liturgical and musical servitude at the imperial court in Vienna in the first half of the eighteenth century as a theory of culture that privileges music as the apotheosis of political and religious authority. It identifies Fux as the principal steward of a North Italian compositional practice adapted towards this end, and it argues that this practice draws Fux into the orbit of his near-contemporaries, Bach and Handel, both of whom depended on Italian models of musical discourse for much of their careers. The relationship between musical servitude and imaginative autonomy which thus arises throughout the book is framed within a discursive space shared by all three composers.

Conclusion

The conclusion to this book revisits the work-concept in the light of the arguments represented here in relation to servitude and autonomy as underlying agents in a continuous axis of musical thought. It is this axis that conjoins Fux, Bach, and Handel. The servility of Fux’s musical discourse consequently gains in historical understanding and significance, and so too does the imaginative autonomy discerned in the late works of Bach and Handel. The nature of the European musical imagination in the first half of the eighteenth century is thereby more sharply defined

“A Darkness Which Might be Felt”

This chapter considers Handel’s invention of the English oratorio in relation to its Italian antecedents and seeks to demonstrate how Samson (1743) in particular reimagines the Italian oratorio as an English genre. Samson’s engagement with and emancipation from the ordinances of Italian opera and oratorio connect Handel to Fux, whose biblical oratorio La fede sacrilega nella morte del Precursore, San Giovanni Battista (1714) is examined in detail in order to define the axis that lies between generic servitude (in this work) and imaginative autonomy (in Samson). The comparative analysis of both works is contextualized by an appraisal of Handel’s reputation as an “entertainer,” a reputation which has eclipsed his radical transformation of genre and his liberation of English dramatic music from the servitude of Italian opera, an enslavement of which his contemporaries had long complained.

The Minstrelsy of Heaven

This chapter examines music as the embodiment of authority in Habsburg Vienna during the reign of Charles VI (1711–40). It explores the structure, liturgical regimen, and stylistic governances of the imperial Kapelle (“music chapel”) as a corporate entity which systematically promoted music as a carefully regulated expression of dynastic authority. It contextualizes this authority through an appraisal of the emperor’s own conception of musical discourse (in which Italian compositional practice was pre-eminent) and of the composers, poets, singers, and instrumentalists who gave it expression. It characterizes the imperial Kapelle as an “imperial noise factory” in which industrious compliance was of far greater account than imaginative freedom. It also countenances the “dynastic style” of Viennese liturgical music as a preoccupation which supervened the agency of individual talent. Lastly, the chapter introduces Fux and his deputy Antonio Caldara in a reading which (not uncritically) privileges Fux as the “truer servant” of the dynastic style.

Steps to Parnassus

In this final chapter, the progression from servitude to autonomy in the European musical imagination is traced through the agency of Fux’s Mass settings for the imperial court to the singular achievement of Bach’s Mass in B Minor (BWV 232). Between these extremes lie the Mass settings of Fux’s deputy, Antonio Caldara, three of which establish a mid-way point between Fux’s dutiful (and unsatisfactory) adherence to the dynastic style (an adherence nevertheless redeemed by the composure and thematic integrity of his far fewer stile antico settings) and the exceptional autonomy of BWV 232, in which the emancipation of the musical subject is fully realized. Two of the Caldara settings, the Missa Sanctorum Cosmae et Damiani and the Missa Matris Dolorosae, moreover, share compelling structural and expressive affinities with BWV 232 which (for the first time) contextualize the autonomy of Bach’s setting. The “either/or” understanding of compositional servitude in relation to imaginative autonomy is thus moderated in favor of both concepts. Likewise the relations between the authority concept and the work-concept in Fux and Bach are fortified.

The Steward of Unmeaning Art

Two principal themes are engaged in this chapter: the recent history of Bach reception in which the composer’s autonomy is drastically reconfigured, and the nature of Bach’s pursuit of the musical subject as a primary signature of that autonomy nevertheless. The first of these themes, which takes its cue from Charles Burney’s reading of Bach in 1789, entails a reading of Susan McClary, Lydia Goehr, Richard Taruskin, and John Butt, in which Bach is (respectively) deconstructed in terms of contemporary political discourse, denied the autonomy of a work-based practice, construed as a dogmatic agent of anti-Enlightenment beliefs and identified as the fountainhead of an ultimately inhumane musical and cultural absolutism, and reconstructed as a composer of works that passionately mediate between his world and ours. This reading establishes a context for the second theme, in which Bach’s emancipation of the musical subject from “the very church composer against whose office his music rebelled” (Adorno) is identified by means of his late instrumental collections.