Top 10 Composers: The Vienna Four By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

January 10, 2011, 12:04 pm

Top 10 Composers: The Vienna Four By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

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For any attempt to determine the top 10 classical composers in history, like the one we embarked on in the Arts & Leisure section on Sunday, the Viennese Classical period presents a special challenge. If such a list is to be at all diverse and comprehensive, how could 4 of the 10 slots go to composers — Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert — who worked in Vienna during, say, the 75 years from 1750 to 1825? What on earth was going on there to foster such achievement?

The only Vienna native of the four was Schubert. Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809), the son of a wheelwright, was born in lower Austria. But by the age of 8 he was a choirboy at St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna. He was booted out of the choir when his voice changed in his late teens, and he became a freelance composer, performer and teacher. So during his childhood and young adult years, Haydn was immersed in the greatest music of Germanic culture.

At 29 he went to work for Prince Paul Esterhazy, who died in 1762 and was succeeded by his brother Nikolaus, a passionate music lover. Haydn spent nearly 30 years presiding over the musical activities at the prince’s palace 30 miles outside Vienna as well as at the summer residence over the border in Hungary. Still, during these decades Haydn was a regular visitor to Vienna, where he presented his works, soaked up musical life, made friends (with Mozart, among others) and joined a Masonic lodge. In 1790, the prince having died, Haydn moved back to Vienna, a beloved master (Papa Haydn) and popular composer.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791), though born in Salzburg, spent extended periods of his childhood as a prodigy on tour throughout Europe. The arduous trips undermined his health and nearly killed him a couple of times. When these ventures failed to produce a patron or coveted position, Leopold Mozart compelled his son to buckle down and settle in Salzburg. But Wolfgang, itching to get to the big city, made his break at 25 and lived in Vienna until his death, through periods of triumph and exasperation, writing his greatest works during his last, heady decade.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) was born in Bonn, Germany, the son of a drunken, abusive court singer. He tried to escape to Vienna at 16 but had to return to stabilize the family when his mother’s health deteriorated. Six years later he was back in Vienna, and he never left. He soon became a towering figure there, his path-breaking works both intriguing and baffling listeners, including his former teacher Haydn.

Franz Schubert (1797-1828) was born in Vienna to an impoverished schoolteacher and briefly became a teacher, until he threw himself into music and lived as a struggling freelance composer at a time when the patronage system was breaking down. Still, Schubert had a support system of friends and musicians who adored him and were sure they had a genius in their midst.

So what was going on in Vienna to make it such a hotbed of musical creativity? Do not presume that cultural life was especially enlightened or that the average Viennese music lover was uncommonly sophisticated. As Harvey Sachs points out in his recent book, “The Ninth: Beethoven and the World in 1824,” terms like “crossover,” “kitsch” and “dumbing down” could easily have been applied to the Vienna of Beethoven’s day, and the typical citizen “clamored to hear the forebears of today’s virtuoso firebrands, schlock-mongers and half-pop, half-serious opera singers.”

Yet clearly there were musically astute listeners, as well as informed monarchs and patrons, who got what was going on. Haydn is often called the father of the symphony as it came to be known. I’d throw in the father of the string quartet and the piano sonata. Haydn was a pioneer in figuring out how to write a sizable multimovement instrumental piece that sounded organized and whole, an entity. The system of sophisticated tonal harmony had developed to the point where a genius like Haydn could figure out how to process themes and manipulate key areas to dramatic effect throughout the many sections of a long work. Moreover, Haydn was the first great master of what is called motivic development, in which bits and pieces of music — a few notes, a melodic twist, a rhythmic gesture — become the building blocks for an entire symphony in several movements.

Haydn passed this technique on to his recalcitrant student Beethoven, who, for all his notions of having invented himself, was deeply indebted to Haydn. Beethoven took the technique of motivic development even further. If you were going to make a case for Beethoven as the greatest composer in history, you would base it on his ability to make a long work, like the “Eroica” Symphony, seem like a musical monument in motion. For all the episodic shifts and turns of this piece, as it plows through four dramatically contrasting movements, most of the music is generated from a handful of motifs that you hear at the beginning.

Then, in his late phase, Beethoven entered a realm that transcended eras and periods. By then completely deaf, Beethoven touched the mystical. Every time I play the first piece from the Six Bagatelles (Op. 126), Beethoven’s last work for piano, I am stunned all over again. This seemingly modest little piece (as its title implies), just a single page of music, with its deceptively simple melody, is wondrous strange, almost cosmic.

Next Post Coming Soon: Vienna Four Part 2, Mozart and Schubert

Over the next two weeks Anthony Tommasini is exploring the qualities that make a classical composer great, maybe even the best of all time. Watch videos here and read previous posts here and share your thoughts in the comments field. Mr. Tommasini’s final list will be posted on Jan. 21.