Cantata on the death of Emperor Joseph II.

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Francisco de Goya : The enlightener
and the powers of darkness
( Desastres de la guerra , no. 72).

The cantata on the death of Emperor Joseph II (1741–1790) for solos , mixed choir and orchestra (WoO 87) is the first major work by Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827). The 19-year-old wrote it in Bonn , the residence of the Archbishop and Elector of Cologne . The text by the 21-year-old Severin Anton Averdonk (1768–1817) laments the death of the emperor as an enlightener and fighter against religious fanaticism .

Bonn's Illuminati

Bonn was one of the centers of the Illuminati Order . The members of the secret society there united in 1781 to form the Minervalkirche Stagira . They included two teachers by Beethoven, the Protestant court organist and prefect of the Minervalkirche Christian Gottlob Neefe and the court violinist Franz Anton Ries , but also the court horn player Nikolaus Simrock, who was a friend of Beethoven . Banned in its country of origin Bavaria in 1785 , the order  initially remained unmolested under Archbishop and Elector Max Franz of Austria-Lorraine - a brother of Joseph II. From the circle of the Bonn Illuminati, the still existing Reading and Recreation Society, or reading for short , was formed in 1787 .

Joseph II and fanaticism

With Joseph II the era of the Counter Reformation ended in the states of the House of Austria . After the emperor succeeded his mother Maria Theresa , he revoked her religious patent, which forbade all cults with the exception of the Roman Catholic . In 1781 he issued his tolerance patent , which allowed Lutherans , Reformed and Orthodox to practice their religion privately and granted them civil rights. Pope Pius VI traveled in vain to Vienna to have the edict withdrawn . In 1782 the tolerance patent for the Jews followed . Joseph also secularized all religious orders that were not devoted to education, nursing, or poor relief. From their assets he built up the religion fund , from which the pastors were paid. He also created numerous country parishes and purged the worship of superstition and useless pomp.

When the emperor entered the loss-making Turkish war and fell ill, there were revolt movements against his reforms, which culminated in the Brabant Revolution in October 1789 . Under Joseph's successors Leopold II and Franz II , Austria switched to the camp of political reaction.

In contrast, after the French Revolution, the entire property of the Church in France was declared a national property in November 1789 .

Joseph II and the music

Unlike in Amadeus by Peter Shaffer ( drama ) and Miloš Forman ( film ), Joseph II was a music connoisseur. The latter also applies to his brother Max Franz, who recognized and promoted Beethoven's genius, just as Joseph did that of Mozart . As a patron , the emperor influenced the development of European music, the center of which was his residence in Vienna. After initially promoting the Singspiel in German at the Burgtheater , which was under his personal direction , he later turned back to the Italian opera buffa . Only the best composers, librettists , singers, instrumentalists and works were good enough for him. In addition to Mozart, he appreciated Paisiello , Salieri and Martín y Soler . He loved instrumental works , kept up harmony music and played the cello regularly with some of his musicians.

Emergence

The 16-year-old Beethoven could have met Joseph II personally, as he traveled to Vienna in March 1787 to take composition lessons from Mozart. Because his mother was on her deathbed, he had to return to Bonn in May.

The emperor died on February 20, 1790 of tuberculosis that he contracted during the Turkish War. The news of this reached Bonn four days later. The harvest then organized a memorial service for March 19, in which the elector also took part. Here held Eulogius Schneider , a professor at the school and at the University of Bonn, a patriotic speech .

It was the future Jacobin tailor who proposed on February 28 that the celebration be enriched with the performance of a cantata based on Averdon's Ode to the deaths of Joseph and Elisa . The aforementioned text inspired its part of a published February 26, elegy , in the Schneider the dying emperor as follows sings:

According to Louis-Simon Boizot: Freedom shatters
ignorance and fanaticism with the scepter of reason , 1793–1795.

“Your poor strength was great ,
your creation was brilliant,
your heart was good, and wide, and great (...)

Oh! You have only felt
Hymen's sweet pleasure for a few hours ,
And what fatherly joy is.

And
when you come to the throne, you grabbed
fanaticism in the face of the Son of Hell ;
Ha! then the monster spat
sulfur vapor, and poison, and fire;
You did not completely defeat it. "

Beethoven, who was commissioned to write the composition, worked as a violist in the court orchestra and at the court theater , but also, like Averdonk, a student of Schneider. As noted in the files of the harvest under March 17, the cantata could finally “not be performed for several reasons”. Attached is: “Just like that, all other noise should be avoided as much as possible.” Obviously, the young musician had planned too much for the two and a half weeks available. The composition may not have been completed until mid-1790. The work also exceeded the capabilities of the court orchestra, which is why the plan for a performance in Mergentheim failed in 1791 . Possible reasons for avoiding "noise" are Joseph's aversion to personality cults and the endangerment of the spiritual states after the French Revolution.

text

Quirin Mark: Joseph II bid farewell to his confidants, 1790.
On the back wall portraits of Catherine II and Frederick II.
Hieronymus Löschenkohl :
Arrival of Joseph II in Elysium , 1790.

Choir

"Dead! Dead! Dead!
Dead, it moans through the dreary night.
Rock, cry it again!
And you waves of the sea,
howl through your depths:
Joseph the great is dead!
Joseph, the father of immortal deeds, is dead!
Oh dead! Dead! Dead! "

Recitative

"A monster, his name is fanaticism ,
rose from the depths of hell,
stretched between earth and sun,
and night fell!"

aria

"There came Joseph, with God's strength
tore the raging monster away,
away between earth and heaven,
and stepped on his head."

Aria with choir

"The people climbed up to the light,
the earth turned more happily around the sun,
and the sun warmed with rays of the godhead."

recitative

“He sleeps, discharged from the worries of his worlds.
The night is quiet, only a shivering breeze
blows like the breath of the grave on my cheek.
Whose immortal soul you are, breeze,
woe quieter! Here Joseph lies
in the grave and slumbers in peaceful sleep '
against the day of vengeance, when you,
happy grave, give birth to him to eternal crowns.

Aria (repeat: choir)

"Here slumbers his quiet peace of
the great sufferer who
broke no rose
below without a wound, who under his full heart bore
the well-being of humanity in pain
until the end of his life."

To the text

Nightfall symbolizes the death of the monarch, but also the revenge of fanaticism on the Enlightenment , which was to be expected under Joseph's successors. Averdonk could refer to Voltaire when he called fanaticism a monster. Its aim is the elimination of reason, while the Enlightenment wants to spread light (knowledge). With the sun the "deity" is meant as the origin of light. “With God's strength” means that God gave strength to the emperor. The librettist also equates fanaticism with the devil . He compares Joseph II as a dragon slayer with the Archangel Michael and Saint George , just as he puts him with the epithet "the great" alongside the other two well-known rulers of the time, Catherine the Great and Frederick the Great . The “immortal deeds” that earned Joseph the honorary title of “father” refer to his reforms in the ecclesiastical field. He is called the “great tolerator” because of his tolerance (in German: “Duldung”).

Averdonk attributes the emperor's reforms to his “full heart”, not to philosophical reasoning. In addition to “light”, they would also have brought “happiness” (prosperity) and “warmth” (brotherhood) to people. The “Day of Retribution” and the “Eternal Crowns” can be interpreted both religiously ( Last Judgment , Bliss ) and politically (expropriation of the Church, fame). Joseph's opposition to his reforms caused pain. The statement that he “didn't break a rose without a wound down here” alludes to the fact that he had lost his two wives. The “shuddering breeze” that threatens to disturb the calm of the deceased is likely to mean the secluded soul of his foster daughter Elisabeth von Württemberg , who had preceded him in death.

To the music

For his orchestral treatment, Beethoven oriented himself on operas by Benda , Gluck , Dittersdorf , Paisiello and Mozart , the scores of which he was able to inspect in the archives of the court theater.

The cantata is structured symmetrically with an opening chorus in C minor and a final chorus, which is an unchanged repetition of the opening chorus. Within the choirs there are two pairs of sentences with the sequence recitative-aria and the aria con coro “People rose to light” as the center. Beethoven used the oboe melody at the beginning of the aria later in his opera Fidelio for Leonore's aria “O God! What a moment! "

Beethoven's claim to exhaust the vocal and orchestral possibilities of the music as much as possible within the conventional composition is expressed, among other things, in the changes between orchestra and solo instruments, choir parts and the soloist quartet as well as purely instrumental and a cappella parts.

effect

In the same year Beethoven composed a cantata on the elevation of Leopold II to emperor (WoO 88), but it was also never performed. One of the two works is said to have prompted Haydn to offer to teach Beethoven. In 1792 he moved to Vienna.

When the Josephs cantata was rediscovered in 1884, Brahms said to the music critic Hanslick : “It is everything and definitely Beethoven. Even if there was no name on the title page, you couldn't guess any other. "

literature

Web links

References and comments

  1. The Minerval churches were called Minerva after the goddess of wisdom . Stagira was the birthplace of the philosopher Aristotle .
  2. Later designation: Habsburg-Lothringen .
  3. ^ Alfred Becker: Christian Gottlob Neefe and the Bonner Illuminati ( Bonner Contributions to Library and Book Studies 21), Bouvier , Bonn 1969; Richard van Dülmen : The Illuminati Secret Society (...) Frommann-Holzboog , Stuttgart - Bad Cannstatt 1975, ISBN 3 7728 0430 6 , pp. 61 f., 95, 249 f., 306–308, 447, 449 f.
  4. Cf. Max Braubach : Maria Theresa's youngest son Max Franz (…) Herold, Vienna / Munich 1961, pp. 246–255.
  5. ^ The emergence of Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio (1782) was the most notable success of these efforts.
  6. In Mozart and Salieri von Puschkin (verse drama) and Rimski-Korsakow ( opera ) the relationship between the two composers is grotesquely recorded. Beethoven later became a student of Salieri.
  7. Cf. Derek Beales: Joseph II. Volume 1, Cambridge 1987, pp. 80, 232-234, 316 f .; Volume 2, Cambridge 2009, pp. 455-476, 684 f.
  8. Founded in 1786, a stronghold of the Enlightenment. Cf. Max Braubach: Maria Theresa's youngest son Max Franz (…) Herold, Vienna / Munich 1961, p. 177 f.
  9. Patriotic speech about Joseph II. In the highest presence S (an) r Elector (ichen) Highness of Cologne before the Litterarian Society in Bonn on March 19, 1790. delivered by D (r.) Eulogius Schneider Professor of Fine Sciences and the Greek Language. Johann Friedrich Abshoven, Bonn / Heinrich Joseph Simonis, Cologne 1790 ( digitized versionhttp://vorlage_digitalisat.test/1%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fdigital.slub-dresden.de%2Fwerkansicht%2Fdlf%2F12786%2F1%2F~GB%3D~IA%3D~MDZ%3D%0A~SZ% 3D ~ double-sided% 3D ~ LT% 3D ~ PUR% 3D ).
  10. At about the same time as the speech on Joseph II, he published a hymn of praise to the destruction of the Bastille . See poems by Eulogius Schneider, Andräische Buchhandlung, Frankfurt 1790 ( digitizedhttp: //vorlage_digitalisat.test/1%3D~GB%3Du_NJAAAAMAAJ%26printsec%3Dfrontcover%26dq%3Dinauthor%3A%2522Eulogius%2BSchneider%2522%26hl%3Dde%26sa%3DXA%26ved%3D0ahUKEwjx16%26ved%3D0ahUKED6%3DXAvD%3D0ahUKEwjx16%26sa%3DXAvDon%3DXJemD6%3DXAv16%3DXJemD6 26f% 3Dfalse ~ IA% 3D ~ MDZ% 3D% 0A ~ SZ% 3D ~ double-sided% 3D ~ LT% 3D ~ PUR% 3D version), pp. 245–247.
  11. Ed. Eulogius Schneider. Bonn 1790. Elise refers to Joseph's foster daughter Elisabeth von Württemberg , the wife of the later Emperor Franz II who died on February 18 in childbed .
  12. ^ Elegy to the dying Emperor Joseph II by Eulogius Schneider Professor in Bonn. February 26, 1790. Johann Friedrich Abshoven, Bonn 1790 ( digitized versionhttp: //vorlage_digitalisat.test/1%3D~GB%3DuRdVAAAAcAAJ%26pg%3DPP11%26dq%3Dfanatismus%26hl%3Dde%26sa%3DX%26ved%3D0ahUKEwjY0K6EiezSAchVNF8AKHZnIA23%ChVNF8AKHZnIA23%26%Cfalon MDZ% ​​3D% 0A ~ SZ% 3D ~ double-sided% 3D ~ LT% 3D ~ PUR% 3D ). The last line alludes to the uprising movements mentioned.
  13. Ernst Herttrich: Critical Report. NGA X, Volume 1: Cantatas, 1996, p. 319
  14. ^ Administrative center of the Teutonic Order , headed by Elector Max Franz as German Master .
  15. Under Napoleon's direction , they were divided among the secular princes in 1803.
  16. "Tel est le fanatisme: c'est un monstre (...) Il ose se dire le fils de la religion, il se cache sous sa robe, et, dès qu'on veut le réprimer, il crie: Au secours, on égorge ma mère! ”( Œuvres complètes de Voltaire. Nouvelle édition, Volume 27, Paris 1879, p. 412.)
  17. See the corresponding terms in English ( enlightenment ), French ( les Lumières ) or Italian ( illuminismo ).
  18. The beloved but lesbian Isabella of Parma (1741–1763) and the unloved Maria Josepha of Bavaria (1739–1767).
  19. 1767–1790, wife of the future Emperor Franz II.
  20. ^ The coronation of Leopold II took place on October 9th in Frankfurt am Main .
  21. ^ Franz Gerhard Wegeler , Ferdinand Ries : Biographical Notes on Ludwig van Beethoven ( Coblenz 1838), ed. v. Alfred Christlieb Kalischer , Berlin / Leipzig 1906 ( digitized versionhttp: //vorlage_digitalisat.test/1%3Dhttps%3A%2F%2Farchive.org%2Fstream%2Fbiographischeno00kaligoog%23page%2Fn51%2Fmode%2F1up~GB%3D~IA%3D~MDZ%3D%0A~SZ%3D~ double-sided% 3D ~ LT% 3D ~ PUR% 3D ), p. 20 f.
  22. Alexander Wheelock Thayer : Ludwig van Beethoven's Life, Volume 1, ed. v. Hugo Riemann , Leipzig 1907, p. 299.