The Age of Voltaire

  Manners were strict, but laid no claim to Gallic grace or conversational charm. The nobles, shorn of political power, warmed themselves with uniforms and titles. “I have known,” wrote Lord Chesterfield in 1748, “many a letter returned unopened because one title in twenty had been omitted in the direction.”21 Oliver Goldsmith’s judgment was patriotically harsh: “Let the Germans have their due; if they are dull, no nation alive assumes a more laudable solemnity, or better understands the decorum of stupidity”;22 and Frederick the Great agreed with him.23 Eating continued to be a popular way of spending the day. Furniture took over the styles of carving and marquetry then flourishing in France, but there was nothing in France or England quite as jolly as the gaily colored ceramic stoves that roused the envy of Lady Mary Montagu.24 German gardens were Italianate, but German houses, with their half-timbered fronts, mullioned windows, and protective eaves, gave to German towns a colorful charm revealing a keen, however unformulated, aesthetic sense. And indeed it was a German, Alexander Baumgarten, who in his Aesthetic (1750) established the modern use of that term, and announced a theory of beauty and art as a part and problem of philosophy.

  III. GERMAN ART

  Pottery was here a major art, for in this period the Germans showed Europe how to make porcelain. Augustus the Strong hired Johann Friedrich Böttger to transmute base metals into gold; Böttger failed; but with Spinoza’s old friend Walter von Tschirnhaus he established a faïence factory in Dresden, and made experiments that at last succeeded in producing the first European hard-paste porcelain. In 1710 he moved the manufacture to Meissen, fourteen miles from Dresden, and there he continued to refine his methods and products till his death (1719). Meissen porcelain was painted in rich colors on a white background with delicate designs of flowers, birds, genre, landscapes, marine views, and exotic snatches from Oriental dress and life. Under Johann Joachim Kändler the process was further improved; sculpture in porcelain was added to painting under glaze; fantastic figurines preserved the persons of German folklore and comedy; and imaginative masterpieces like the “Swan Service” of Kändler and Eberlein showed that art could rival in brightness and smoothness the varied armory of woman. Soon all aristocratic Europe, even in France, was adorning its rooms with humorously satirical figures in Meissen porcelain. The town retained its leadership in the art till 1758, when it was sacked by the Prussian army in the Seven Years’ War.

  From Augsburg, Nuremberg, Bayreuth, and other centers the German potters poured into German homes a baroque profusion of ceramic products, from the loveliest faïence and porcelain to jolly jugs that made even beer drinking an aesthetic experience. Through most of the eighteenth century Germany led Europe not only in porcelain but in glass.25 Nor were the German ironworkers anywhere surpassed in this age; at Augsburg, Ebrach, and elsewhere they made wrought-iron gates rivaling those that Jean Lamour was raising at Nancy. The German goldsmiths were excelled only by the very best in Paris. German engravers (Knobelsdorff, Glume, Rugendas, Ridinger, Georg Kilian, Georg Schmidt) cut or burned exquisite designs into copper plates.26

  German painters in this period did not win the international renown still awarded to Watteau, Boucher, La Tour, and Chardin. It is part of our unavoidable parochialism that non-Germans are not acquainted with the paintings of Cosmas Asam, Balthasar Denner, Johann Fiedler, Johann Thiele, Johann Ziesenis, Georg de Marées; let us at least recite their names. Better known to us than these is a French artist domiciled in Germany, Antoine Pesne, who became court painter to Frederick William I and Frederick the Great. His masterpiece pictures Frederick as a still innocent child of three, with his six-year-old sister Wilhelmine;27 if this had been painted in Paris all the world would have heard of it.

  One family garnered fame in three fields—painting, sculpture, and architecture. Cosmas Damian Asam, in the Church of St. Emmeram in Regensburg, pictured the assumption of St. Benedict into Paradise, giving him the help of a lofty launching pad. Cosmas joined his brother Egid in designing the interior of the Church of St. Nepomuk in Munich—architecture overlaid with sculpture in wildest baroque. Egid carved in stucco The Assumption of Mary for an abbey church at Rohr in Bavaria. A fine Italian hand showed in the imposing Neptune Fountain set up in Dresden by Lorenzo Mattielli; this was a famous feature in the splendor of the Saxon capital. Balthasar Permoser spoiled his sculptured Apotheosis of Prince Eugene28 with a confusion of symbolical figures; he decorated with a like extravagance the pavilion of the Dresden Zwinger; he achieved an almost Michelangelic dignity and force in the Apostles grouped around the pulpit of the Hofkirche in Dresden; and his linden-wood St. Ambrose in that church ranks near the top of European sculpture in the first half of the eighteenth century. Georg Ebenhecht imagined a slim German beauty in the lovely Bacchus and Ariadne that he carved for the park at Sanssouci. German parks and gardens abounded in sculpture; a connoisseur of baroque estimated that “there is a bigger proportion of good garden statues in Germany than in the whole of the rest of Europe put together.”29

  But it was only in architecture that German artists caught the eye of European artists in this age. Johann Balthasar Neumann left his mark in a dozen places. His masterpiece was the Residenz of the Prince-Bishop of Würzburg; others collaborated in the design and execution (1719–44), but his was the guiding hand. The Venetian Room and the Mirror Room, resplendent in their decoration, were shattered in the Second World War, but four rooms remain to attest the splendor of the interior; and the lordly staircase, known to all the art world for its ceiling frescoes by Tiepolo, was one of several such structures that helped to give Neumann his preeminence among the architects of his time. Quite different, but almost as fine, was the staircase he built for the episcopal palace in Bruchsal—another casualty of the national suicide. Perhaps more beautiful than either was the double staircase made by him for the Augustusburg at Brühl, near Cologne. Staircases were his passion; he lavished his art on still another in a monastery at Ebrach. Interrupting his ascents and descents, he built the Wallfahrtskirche (pilgrimage church) of Vierzehnheiligen on the Main; he decorated in ornate baroque the Paulinuskirche in Trier and the Kreuzbergkirche near Bonn; and to the cathedral at Würzburg he added a chapel whose exterior is as nearly perfect as baroque can be.

  Ecclesiastical architecture now specialized in massive monasteries. The Kloster Ettal, a Benedictine cloister which Emperor Louis of Bavaria founded in 1330 in a picturesque valley near Oberammergau, was restored in 1718 by Enrico Zuccalli, and was crowned with a graceful dome. The abbey church was destroyed by fire in 1744; it was rebuilt in 1752 by Josef Schmuzer; the interior was elaborately adorned in gold-and-white rococo style, with frescoes by Johann Zeiller and Martin Knoller; sumptuous side altars were added in 1757, and an organ celebrated for its handsome case. The most impressive of these prayerful monuments is the incredibly rich Klosterkirche, or cloister church, of the Benedictine monastery at Ottobeuren, southeast of Memmingen. Here Johann Michael Fischer organized the ensemble, Johann Christian contributed the gilt carvings, and Martin Hörmann provided the choir stalls—the pride of German wood carving in this century. Fischer worked intermittently on this enterprise from 1737 till his death in 1766.

  The ruling classes were as loath as the monks to wait for a heaven beyond the grave. Some stately town halls were erected, as at Lüneburg and Bamberg; but the major efforts of secular architecture were devoted to castles and palaces. Karlsruhe had, as Residenz of the Margrave of Baden-Durlach, a unique Schloss in the shape of a fan—the ribs radiating out from a garden handle into the city streets. This palace, like much of the city, was laid in ruins by the Second World War; the great Schloss Berlin, built by Andreas Schlüter and his successors (1699–1720), fell in the same tragedy; still another victim was the Schloss Monbijou, near the Spandau Gate of Berlin; the castle at Brühl, designed for the Archbishop of Cologne, was partly destroyed; the Schloss Bruchsal was a total loss. At Munich Josef Effner raised the Preysing Palace, and at Trier Johann Seitz housed the ruling Archbishop
in the Kurfürstliches Palais (Electoral Palace)—a model of modest beauty. For the Bishop-Elector of Mainz Maximilian von Welsch and Johann Dientzenhofer put up near Pommersfelden another great castle, the Schloss Weissenstein, in which Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt installed a famous double staircase where dignitaries could go up and down without collision.

  Frederick the Great capped the secular architecture of Germany in the eighteenth century by commissioning Georg von Knobelsdorff and others to build at Potsdam (sixteen miles out of Berlin), on a design laid out by the King himself, three palaces that in their ensemble almost rivaled Versailles: the Stadtschloss, or State House (1745–51), the Neues Palais (1755), and Frederick’s summer residence, which he spelled “Schloss Sanssouci.” From the River Havel a broad avenue of gently rising steps led in five stages through a terraced park to this “Castle without Care,” whose mullioned windows and central dome took some hints from Dresden’s Zwinger Palace. One wing contained an extensive art gallery; under the dome ran a circle of handsome Corinthian columns; and a Bibliothek adorned with rococo scrollwork and gleaming with glass-enclosed books offered a retreat from politics and generals. It was chiefly in Sanssouci that Voltaire met his match in the philosopher-king who could govern a state, defy the church, design a building, sketch a portrait, write passable poetry and excellent history, win a war against half of Europe, compose music, conduct an orchestra, and play the flute.

  IV. GERMAN MUSIC

  From the birth of Handel and Bach in 1685 to the death of Brahms in 1897 German music was supreme; at any time in those 212 years the greatest living composer, except in opera, was a German.30 Two musical forms, the oratorio and the fugue, attained their highest development in the work of Germans in the first half of the eighteenth century; and some would add that the Roman Catholic Mass received its final expression at the hands of a German Protestant. The age of painting ended; the age of music began.

  Music was part of the religion, as religion was so great a part of music, in every German home. There was hardly a family, except in the poorest class, that could not sing part song, hardly an individual who could not play one or more instruments. Hundreds of amateur groups called Liebhaber performed cantatas that professional singers now consider discouragingly difficult.31 Manuals of music were as popular as the Bible. Music was taught with reading and writing in the common schools. Musical criticism was further advanced than in any other country but Italy, and the leading musical critic of the century was a German.

  Johann Mattheson was probably more famous and unpopular among German musicians than any German composer. His vanity clouded his achievements. He knew the classical and the modern literary languages, he wrote on law and politics, he played the organ and the harpsichord so well that he could turn down a dozen invitations to exalted posts. He was an elegant dancer, an accomplished man of the world. He was an expert fencer, who nearly killed Handel in a duel. He sang successfully in the Hamburg Opera; composed operas, cantatas, Passions, oratorios, sonatas, and suites; and developed the cantata form before Bach. For nine years he served as Kapellmeister for the Duke of Holstein; then, becoming deaf, he resigned himself to writing. He published eighty-eight books, eight of them on music, and added a treatise on tobacco. He founded and edited (1722–25) Critica musica, the earliest known critical discussion of past and current compositions, and compiled a biographical dictionary of contemporary musicians. He died at eighty-three (1764), having powerfully stimulated the musical world.

  Musical instruments were in continuous evolution and change, but the organ was still their unchallenged chief. Usually it had three or four manuals or keyboards, plus a pedal board of two and a half octaves, plus a variety of stops that could imitate almost any other instrument. No finer organs have been built than those made by Andreas Silbermann of Strasbourg and Gottfried Silbermann of Freiberg. But string instruments were mounting in popularity. The clavichord (that is, key and string) used a manual of keys to manipulate levers armed with little “tangents” of brass to strike the strings; this instrument was already three centuries old, perhaps more. In the harpsichord (which the French called clavecin, and the Italians clavi-or gravicembalo) the strings were plucked by a tongue of quill or leather attached to levers moved by (usually) a double manual of keys, aided by two pedals and three or four stops. The term clavier was applied in Germany to any keyboard instrument—clavichord, harpsichord, or piano—and to the manuals of an organ. The harpsichord was essentially a harp in which the fingers plucked the strings through the media of keys, levers, and plectra. It produced sounds of a delicate charm, but since the plectrum rebounded as soon as it had struck the string, this instrument had no means of holding a note or varying its intensity. To get two degrees of tone it had to resort to a double manual—the upper one for piano (soft), the lower for forte (loud). The pianoforte grew out of efforts to overcome these limitations.

  In or before 1709 Bartolommeo Cristofori made at Florence four gravicembali col piano e forte—“clavichords with soft and loud.” In these the plucking plectrum was replaced by a little leather hammer whose contact with the string could be continued by keeping the key depressed, while the loudness of the note could be determined by the force with which the finger struck the key. In 1711 Scipione di Maffei described the new instrument in his Giornale dei letterati d’Italia; in 1725 this essay appeared at Dresden in a German version; in 1726 Gottfried Silbermann, inspired by this translation,32 built two pianofortes on Cristofori’s principles. About 1733 he showed an improved model to Johann Sebastian Bach, who pronounced it too weak in the upper register, and requiring too heavy a touch. Silbermann admitted these defects and labored to remove them. He succeeded so well that Frederick the Great bought fifteen of his pianofortes. Bach played one of these when he visited Frederick in 1747; he liked it, but judged himself too old to adopt the new instrument; he continued through his remaining three years to prefer the organ and the harpsichord.

  The orchestra was used mainly in the service of opera or choir; music was seldom composed for it alone except in the form of overtures. Oboes and bassoons were more numerous than in our orchestras today; the woodwinds dominated the strings. Public concerts were as yet rare in Germany; music was almost entirely confined to the church, the opera, the home, or the streets. Semipublic concerts of chamber music were given in Leipzig from 1743 in the homes of prosperous merchants; larger and larger quarters were taken, the performers were increased to sixteen, and in 1746 a Leipzig directory announced that “on Thursdays a Collegium Musicum, under the direction of the worshipful Company of Merchants and other persons, is held from five to eight o’clock at the Three Swans [an inn]”; these concerts, it added, “are fashionably frequented, and are admired with much attention.”33 From this Collegium Musicum evolved in 1781 the Grosses Konzert in the Leipzig Gewandhaus (Drapers’ Hall)—the oldest concert series now in existence.

  Only a small minority of musical compositions were written for instruments alone; but some of these productions shared in developing the symphony. At Mannheim a school of composers and performers—many of them from Austria, Italy, or Bohemia—took a leading part in this development. There the Elector Palatine Charles Theodore (r. 1733–99), a patron of all the arts, gathered an orchestra that was generally reputed to be the best in Europe. For that group Johann Stamitz, a virtuoso of the violin, composed true symphonies: orchestral compositions divided into three or more movements, of which at least the first followed “sonata form”—exposition of contrasted themes, their “free elaboration,” and their recapitulation. Following the lead of Neapolitan composers, the new form took normally the sequence of fast, slow, and fast movements—allegro, andante, allegro; and from the dance it sometimes added a minuet. So the age of polyphonic music, based on one motif and culminating in J. S. Bach, passed into the symphonic age of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.

  The human voice remained the most magical of instruments. Karl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Karl Heinrich Graun, and others put to music the passi
onate love poems of Johann Christian Günther; and Johann Ernst Bach of Weimar found inspiration for several fine lieder in the poetry of Christian Gellert. Opera flourished in Germany now, but it was predominantly Italian in form, importing its compositions and singers from Italy. Every major court had its opera hall, usually open only to the elite. Hamburg, controlled by its merchants, was an exception: it offered German opera, opened the performances to the paying public, and recruited its divas from the market place. In Hamburg Reinhard Keiser ruled the Gänsemarkt (Goosemarket) Theater for forty years. During his reign he composed 116 operas, mostly Italian in text and style, but some of them German. For in 1728 Mattheson’s Musikalischer Patriot raised a battle cry against the Italian invaders: “Out, barbarians! [Fuori barbari!] Let the [operatic] calling be forbidden to the aliens who encompass us from east to west; let them be sent back again across their savage Alps to purify themselves in the furnace of Etna!”34 But the lure of Italian voices and melodies proved irresistible. Even in Hamburg the rage for Neapolitan operas stifled native productions. Keiser surrendered and moved to Copenhagen; the Hamburg theater closed in 1739 after sixty years of existence; and when it reopened in 1741 it was frankly devoted to Italian opera. When Frederick restored opera to Berlin (1742), he chose German composers but Italian performers. “A German singer!” he exclaimed. “I would as soon hear my horse neigh.”35