Gottfried van Swieten

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Gottfried van Swieten

Gottfried Freiherr van Swieten (born October 29, 1733 in Leiden ; † March 29, 1803 in Vienna ) was a diplomat in the service of the Habsburg monarchy . He was a patron of several composers of classical music , including Joseph Haydn , Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven .

Life

Gottfried van Swieten spent a large part of his childhood in Holland. His father, the doctor Gerard van Swieten , gained a high reputation for raising the standards in medical research and teaching and in 1745 became the personal doctor of the Empress Maria Theresa . He moved to Vienna with his family and was later elevated to the status of hereditary baron. Gottfried was educated here at a Jesuit school for civil service and worked (after a brief period in the civil service) in two professions: as a diplomat for Austria he was in Brussels from 1755 to 1757 , from 1760 to 1763 in Paris , as the Austrian envoy from 1763 to 1764 in Warsaw and finally from 1770 to 1777 in Berlin . After his return to Vienna, he worked as prefect of the imperial court library until the end of his life . In addition, until the beginning of December 1791 he was "President of the Court Commission for Study and Book Censorship", and consequently a senior state official.

Van Swieten had a keen interest in music; he composed a number of operas and symphonies himself , which, however, are not of great quality and are rarely performed nowadays. Joseph Haydn found his symphonies "as stiff as himself". Swieten belongs to the Enlightenment circle; This includes his involvement in the closure of almost 1,000 Austrian monasteries by Joseph II.

His influence on classical composers

Mozart

Van Swieten introduced Mozart to the works of Johann Sebastian Bach and Georg Friedrich Händel when, around 1782/83, the manuscripts that he had collected during his long stay in Berlin were presented to the public at the regular Sunday concerts in the grand hall of the Vienna Court Library provided. Mozart, Haydn and Vanhal played an active part in the concerts. The encounter with the compositions of the greatest composers of the Baroque era made a deep impression on Mozart and had a great influence on his later compositions. Van Swieten is considered to be Mozart's patron .

In the later 1780s van Swieten organized the Society of Associates , a gathering of aristocrats interested in music. Thanks to financial support from this group, van Swieten was able to continue the interest in baroque music that he shared with Mozart. The society commissioned Mozart to revise four Handel compositions for performance in contemporary taste. Of these, Mozart's arrangement of Handel's oratorio Messiah , which contains new passages for flutes , clarinets , bassoons , horns and trombones, and others for the kettledrum , is best known. The Messiah was performed several times under the auspices of the Society in 1789.

When Mozart died in 1791, van Swieten organized the third class funeral for him, which was common at the time. Later he organized the first performance of the Mozart Requiem completed by Süßmayr after Eybler in the Vienna Jahn Hall as a benefit concert for Constanze and the two surviving children of the marriage.

Haydn

Van Swieten was Haydn's close collaborator in the two oratorios The Creation (1798) and The Seasons (1801). He made the selection himself and made the translation of the source material, which came from John Milton and James Thomson respectively , from English into German, and often got rather awkward translations back into English in order to adapt the text to the rhythm of Haydn's music; both oratorios were initially published in two languages.

He also made suggestions to Haydn as to how various passages of the libretto should be musically set. One example is the moving episode in creation in which God commands the newly created animals to be fertile and to multiply. Van Swieten's description of Gen 1.27 f. EU is:

Be fruitful all,
multiply!
Inhabitants of the air, multiply, and sing on every branch!
Multiply, you flood dwellers,
And fill every depth!
Be fruitful, grow, and multiply!
Rejoice in your God!

Be fruitful all
and multiply.
Dwellers of the air, multiply and sing on every branch.
Multiply, ye dwellers of the tides,
and fill every deep.
Be fruitful, grow, multiply,
and rejoice in your God!

Haydn's music stems from a suggestion from Van Swieten that the words should be sung by a bass soloist along with an unadorned bass line. As usual, however, he only partially followed the suggestion, and after some thought added a rich layer of four-part harmonies for cellos and violas to the bass line - crucial to the final result.

The premieres of The Creation and The Seasons also took place under the auspices of the Society of Associates , which also provided financial guarantees that Haydn needed for his long-term projects.

Beethoven

Van Swieten was one of the Viennese aristocrats whose financial support made Beethoven's early career possible. It is conceivable, however, that van Swieten's promotion of the young talent also had something to do with the fact that at the beginning of his career Beethoven often performed the preludes and fugues from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier in the Viennese salons, which he still knew from Bonn.

In 1795 Gottfried van Swieten was one of the subscribers to Beethoven's Piano Trios op.1 . He bought three copies. Beethoven's first symphony is dedicated to van Swieten.

Other connections

During his time in Berlin, van Swieten supported Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach , from whom he ordered six symphonies. One of C. P. E. Bach's most famous compositions, the third movement of the sonatas for connoisseurs and lovers , is dedicated to van Swieten. After Bach's move to Hamburg , van Swieten visited him there again.

Johann Nikolaus Forkel , the first Bach biographer, also dedicated his book to van Swieten.

literature

Web links

Commons : Gottfried van Swieten  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The first performance of the then fragmentary work, organized and paid for by Schikaneder , took place liturgically in the days after Mozart's funeral as part of a requiem for his soul celebrated in the Michaelerkirche in Vienna, which is responsible for the court musicians.
predecessor Office successor
Nicholas I Joseph Esterházy de Galantha Imperial envoy to Poland
1763–1764 		Florimond Claude by Mercy-Argenteau
Josef Nugent von Westenrath Imperial envoy to Prussia
1770–1777 		Johann Ludwig von Cobenzl
personal data
SURNAME Swieten, Gottfried van
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Swieten, Gottfried Freiherr van (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Diplomat in the service of the Habsburg Monarchy
DATE OF BIRTH October 29, 1733
PLACE OF BIRTH Suffer
DATE OF DEATH March 29, 1803
Place of death Vienna