Page 126 - ESSENTIAL LISTENING TO MUSIC

Figure 7.4
A performance at the Burg- theater in Vienna in 1783. The nobility occupied the frontmost seats on the floor, but the area behind them was open to all. So, too, in the galleries, the aristoc- racy bought boxes low and close to the stage, while commoners occupied higher rungs, as well as the standing room in the fourth gallery. Ticket prices depended, then as now, on proximity to the performers.
scale for a subscription series (4 livres for boxes and 2 livres for the pit, roughly $200 and $100 in today’s money). Children under fifteen were admitted for half price. Thus, we can trace to the middle of the eighteenth century the monetizing of a shared musical experience. The “for profit” concert as we know it today dates from this time.
Public concerts sprang up in London, in the Vauxhall Gardens, the eighteenth-century equivalent of Disney World—which drew as many as 4,500 paying visitors daily. Here sym- phonies could be heard inside in the orchestra room or outside when the weather was good. When Leopold Mozart took his young son Wolfgang to concerts there in 1764, he was sur- prised to see that the audience was not segre-
gated by class. Likewise in Vienna, the Burgtheater (City Theater) opened in 1759 to any and all paying customers, as long as they were properly dressed and prop- erly behaved (Figure 7.4). Although the allure was music, the hall itself became a place for a leveling of social classes. As their numbers increased, members of the middle class began to compete with the aristocracy for control of high culture— to have a say in the kind of music to be heard.
Popular Opera Takes Center Stage
Social reform in the eighteenth century not only democratized the concert hall, it also affected those who went to the opera house and even the characters who populated the stage. A new musical genre, comic opera, appeared and soon drove the established opera seria (see Chapter 6) to the wings. Baroque opera seria had portrayed the deeds of heroic rulers and glorified the status quo, making it, in essence, an aristocratic art. By contrast, the new comic opera, called opera buffa
in Italy, exemplified social change and championed middle-class values. Comic opera made use of everyday characters and situations; it typically employed spoken dialogue and simple songs in place of recitatives and lengthy arias; and
it was liberally spiced with sight gags, bawdy humor, and social satire.
Even a “high-end” composer like Mozart embraced the more natu- ral, down-to-earth spirit of the comic style. Mozart was not always treated fairly by his noble employers, and several of his operas are rife with anti- aristocratic sentiment. In Don Giovanni (1787), for example, the villain is a leading nobleman of the town (see Chapter 9). In Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro, 1786), a barber (Figure 7.5) outsmarts a count and exposes him to public ridicule. So seriously did the king of France and the Holy Roman Emperor take the threat of such theatrical satire that they banned the play on
Figure 7.5
Bryn Terfel as the combative and cunning barber Figaro performs in an English National Opera production of The Marriage of Figaro. <
104 chapter seven introduction to the classical style: haydn and mozart
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