One needn’t be Sherlock Holmes to observe that musical cultures move around. Yesterday’s hot-tamale locale is today’s cold potato, as the creative energy leaps about, like lightning, from place to place over time. No Mozarts or Beethovens walk the streets of Vienna today; no Stravinskys and Ravels enliven the Paris ballet season; no corps of industrious kapellmeisters enhance daily life in Saxony. Idealistic young men hammering out nationalistic screeds and rough-hewn compositions are not to be found gathered around St. Petersburg kitchen tables, and one could knock on Paris doors in vain to find a Rossinian salon where Chopin and Liszt hold court while Georges Sand sprawls languidly in a wingback armchair.
For a while each of those cities was positively teeming with musical energy. City of musicians! exults Salieri in Milos Forman’s film Amadeus, as he tells his life story to the hapless young priest assigned to hear the would-be suicide’s confession. Naturally Salieri left his Italian village for Vienna; it was the hub, the center, the Grosse Apfel. Under Maria Theresa, then her son Joseph II, Hapsburg realms positively teemed with music from memorable to forgettable. Even nowadays we’re digging through the leftover piles of manuscripts. Just recently I picked up a copy of six symphonies by Antonio Brioschi, a well-regarded composer of the era whose posthumous star has gutted to extinction. Yet Brioschi’s stuff is playable, listenable, and intriguing in its way. Brioschi’s symphonies are at least as worthy as those by Christian Cannabich, Adalbert Gyrowetz, Josef Myslivecek, Antonio Rosetti, Karl Ordoñez, and Johann Baptist Vanhal, among other Enlightenment lumina. Consider that Vanhal regularly played chamber music with Mozart. These guys weren’t pipsqueaks; they were sluggers, stars, celebrities. Their fame has been scorched to ash by the triple suns of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven—but elsewhere, and elsewhen, any one of them just might have been the chapter-heading biggie.
Other eras, other towns—Paris, St. Petersburg, Venice, Bologna, Berlin, London, New York. The list goes on. Why one, and not the other? Why Vienna for so long? Why not Vienna today?
The answer is as simple as it is uncomfortable, which is that you get what you pay for. Austria under the Hapsburgs treasured music and laid an economic path to comfort for those with musical gifts and training. A Joseph Haydn, born to a working-class wheelwright in a sleepy border town, could rise to become kapellmeister to the plutocratic Esterházy clan; a Leopold Mozart, second-rate creatively but first-rate overall, could raise his two children in bourgeois comfort while serving the ecclesiastical court in Salzburg. Dwellers in palaces, villas, castles, monasteries, theaters, townhouses, and salons: they all had music, and they all bought it by the yard. Composers flourished, as did the singers in the opera houses and churches. Even the runty instrumentalists, in those days huddled near the bottom of the professional food chain, could scrape out a steady if meager living. In Hapsburg Europe, musical talent was a ticket out of the gutter.
Imagine Beethoven born, not in Bonn in 1770, but in Philadelphia in 1830. It is unlikely that he would have gone into music—there being no music to go into. No gifted and ambitious man would have chosen music for a career in 19th century America; music was women’s work, fit only for home and hearth, practiced by wives whose bailiwick was rigidly confined to providing the accoutrements of civilized family life. That attitude remained in force for at least a century, if not longer. Nor has it disappeared altogether; to this day the lion’s share of American piano teachers are housewives in far-flung suburbia. America has failed to develop a compelling concert/serious/classical music because America neither respects nor pays for it. The United States does well enough with performance, supporting as it does numerous first-class music schools and a solid collection of world-class orchestras, opera companies, and ballet troupes.
But there was a valid creative force in American music. Starved in the concert hall, it found nourishment elsewhere. Marvelous new music came pouring out of American composers from about 1920 through 1960. But it wasn’t concert-hall music: it came from the musical theater, from Broadway. That was a rich garden indeed, in the days when new shows by Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Rodgers & Hart & then Hammerstein, the Gershwins, Harold Arlen, and Lerner & Loewe lit up 42nd Street and created a core repertory of songs that remain treasured, performed, and—most importantly—purchased. The theater, eventually abetted then co-opted by Hollywood, provided a sustaining environment where musicians could breathe, eat, and drink. The best of the bunch became downright affluent; in some cases—Irving Berlin, Richard Rodgers—downright wealthy. Where new music flourished, performers followed; Broadway orchestras were a reliable source of income for several generations of New York musicians, rehearsal accompanists were in demand, arrangers and orchestrators were lined up and, provided they were clever and competent, everybody had all the work they could handle. Set designers, choreographers, directors; chorines, dancers, leads, ingenues and soubrettes and juveniles and comics; jobs, jobs, and more jobs. The latest Rodgers & Hart or Gershwin delight, swiftly picked up by crooners and chanteuses, flashing from Boston to Bombay via radio and phonograph records, acquired fans and ASCAP royalties every mile of the way. Not just artistic coups, but also economic phenomena: from Alexander’s Ragtime Band in 1911 to Hello, Dolly in the 1960s, American songs paid rent, bought groceries, settled medical bills, invested in stocks, and put kids through college.
The Broadway world provided more than money. It was a refuge for two maligned and outcast groups: Jews and homosexuals. The roll-call of the major Broadway composers and lyricists leans heavily Jewish (Berlin, Rodgers, Kern, Gershwin, Arlen) seasoned with a fair sprinkling of gay men (Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart). The lushly fertile garden was also a safety zone, and the shows grew in profusion, most of them little more than convenient hatracks for the songs: Mountain Greenery, Manhattan, Where or When, My Funny Valentine, Embraceable You, I Got Rhythm, Night and Day, and so forth and so on, song after song. The occasional coherent plot, whether drama or comedy, slipped through the cracks: Show Boat, For Thee I Sing, The Boys from Syracuse. By the 1940s hatracks had given way to fully integrated musical theater: Oklahoma!, Carousel, Brigadoon, Kiss Me Kate. Nevertheless, the shows still lived or died on their songs: People Will Say We’re In Love, If I Loved You, Almost Like Being in Love, So In Love.
Even the concert-hall world enjoyed a few byproducts of the rich harvest: Rhapsody in Blue, the signature American concert work of the 1920s, came from a Broadway guy, not a symphonist trained at Yale or in France. In the 1950s, while “serious” American music was siphoning off its paltry trickle of relevance in cloistered academic navel contemplation, people the world over were snapping up songs from South Pacific, The King and I, My Fair Lady, West Side Story, and The Sound of Music. Not to mention the newfangled tunes such as Rock Around the Clock and Blue Suede Shoes. Broadway and Hollywood offered composers a shot at commercial and artistic success, while the “classical” world offered little save genteel poverty as an infertile tenured professor excreting his yearly quota of inscrutable rabbit droppings. Only the performers had a reasonable outlet—those wonderful American orchestras with their fat recording contracts.
The moral: you want the arts to flourish, open your pocketbook. As long as a career in music means a life spent scrabbling for crumbs and grasping any opportunity—however trifling—that comes along, while getting by (at best) in genteel poverty, the best and brightest will seek fulfillment elsewhere. That they have done just that is unmistakable: observe the state of creative “classical” American composition today. It’s not a pretty sight. No ruined garden ever is.