Musical Culture and Social Ideology in Vienna circa 1800: Aristocratic Patronage and Bourgeois Reception of Joseph Haydn’s Oratorios

Central to the modern reception of Haydn’s The Creation and The Seasons is a sense of their humanist universality: to cite but a single example, Friedrich Blume asserted that “with the unique exception of The Magic Flute, there are simply no other works of the time in which the universal language spoke in such degree to all mankind.” Somewhat counterbalancing this notion, however, are the circumstances of the patronage of the oratorios by the aristocrats who constituted the Gesellschaft der Associierten Cavaliere. The expenditure of nearly 2,500 florins by just a single member of the Associierten, Prince Joseph on Schwarzenberg, provides an indication of the intensive involvement of the Austrian elite in these two projects. In this essay, I shall draw upon sociological theory to illuminate the striking and rather odd conjunction of aristocratic and bourgeois dimensions that characterizes these works and their place in modern musical culture. In particular, Norbert Elias’ The Civilizing Process and The Court Society will provide the theoretical framework for understanding the entanglement of interests of the two social classes. Elias’ conceptual categories of prestige consumption and aesthetic sensibility and his arguments concerning their transfer from aristocracy to bourgeois can help to clarify essential aspects of the bourgeois ideology that arose around the time of the oratorios’ first performances and which remains influential today, including the canonical status of a repertory taken to represent a high point of civilization and modernity. This sociological perspective permits a nuanced understanding of the complex societal transformations that occurred at the end of the eighteenth century and of their impact upon music; it is thus a mode of analysis which neither disregards the broad appeal of Haydn’s two late masterworks nor subsumes them neatly under a rubric of universality without consideration of their clear social dimensions.