Europe: A History (137 page)

Most importantly, each of the city’s four main historic centres had recently been enclosed, embellished, and united into a harmonious whole. Hradčany, Prague’s ancient Castle Hill on the left bank of the Vltava, containing St Vitus’ Cathedral (1344) and the Vladislavský Sàl (1502) of the Jagiellons, had been surrounded in 1753–75 by the high walls of Pacassi’s imposing offices. The
Malá strana
or Lesser City, at the foot of Hradčany, was adorned by a new episcopal palace (1765). The ancient
Karlův Most
or Charles Bridge (1357) which links the city’s two sides, had been adorned along its 660–m length by a stunning series of religious and historical statues, the streets of the old city on the right bank, still dominated by the
Týnsky chrám
and the City Hall, had been revitalized by much renovation. They were enlivened, as always, by the hourly spectacle of the city clock where Christ and the apostles led a procession brought up in the rear by Death, the Turk, the miser, the fool, and the cock, and by the chimes of the Loretto carillon (1694). The Charter of United Prague had been granted by the Emperor Joseph II as recently as 1784.

The aristocrats whose residences graced the city and whose patronage ruled its music were the principal beneficiaries of Habsburg rule. They were largely drawn from German families who had benefited from the sequestrations of the native Czech nobility in the course of the Thirty Years War. The wealth of their estates in the prosperous Bohemian countryside supported the glitter of their life in
town. By Mozart’s time the majority of Czechs had been reduced to a headless, peasant nation, though a number of middle-class people, like the Dušeks, lived on the margins of Czech and German society.

The contrasts between rich and poor were extreme. During his first visit to Prague in 1771, when a sixth of Prague’s population had died from famine, the Emperor Joseph II had been shocked:

How shameful are the cases which have occurred in this year’s famine. People have actually died, and have taken the last sacrament in the street … In this city, where there is a rich Archbishop, a large cathedral chapter, so many abbeys and three Jesuit palaces … there is not a single proven case where any of these took in even one of the miserable wretches who were lying in front of their doors.
⁵¹

Joseph II had no patience for the fossilized complacency of the Catholic Church. The Jesuit Order had been disbanded in the previous decade; and when he attained sole rule in 1780 he unleashed a flood of reforming decrees that threatened to undermine the most sacred pillars of the social order. Serfs were emancipated. Religious toleration was extended to Uniates, Orthodox, Protestants and Jews. Children under nine were forbidden to work. Civil marriage and divorce were permitted. Capital punishment was abolished. Freemasonry flourished. Wealth which derived from the secularization of ecclesiastical property was reflected in a spate of imperial and aristocratic architectural extravagance.

Prague’s large Jewish community were sharing in the surge of prosperity. They had put the last of numerous expulsions behind them in 1744–5, and in the 1780s were reaping the fruits of the imperial
Toleranzpatent
. The Jewish quarter, renamed Jozefov in the Emperor’s honour, shared in the city’s extensive renovation. The medieval Old-New Synagogue and the Klaus Synagogue were both rebuilt. On the Jewish town hall, one modern clock showed the time in Latin numerals whilst another below it did so in Hebrew numerals. Prague’s Jews were destined at a later date to supply the most dynamic element of Viennese Jewry.

Prague’s freemasons, too, basked in the glow of imperial tolerance. They welcomed Mozart, who was a member of the Grand Lodge of Austria in Vienna, as one of their own. They represented the strong reaction that was running against the suffocating hold of the Catholic Church over all intellectual and cultural affairs.

Mozart thrived in the relaxed social climate of the 1780s, which the growth of the
opera buffa
reflected. He struck a neutral stance towards the morals of his day. But the Rake’s ‘Reward’ is too melodramatic to be taken seriously, and the message of his next collaboration with Da Ponte,
Cosí fan tutte
(All the Women Are At It) was judged by some to be scandalously permissive. Lines about ‘the gaping bottom of every sweet-watered vale’ were not open to too many interpretations. Lorenzo Da Ponte himself, a converted Jew, had earned a reputation not far removed from that of his friend and fellow Venetian, Giovanni Casanova di Seingalt (1725–98). After a lifetime of spying, lechery, and fleeing from justice, Casanova was passing his final years as librarian to the Count Waldstein at Dux
(Duchcov) in northern Bohemia. He is known to have visited his publisher in Prague on 24 October 1787, and it is quite likely that he stayed on for
Don Giovanni’s
première. Some critics were to suggest that he was the model for the Don.

Gross libertinism had always been a strong undercurrent in the eighteenth century.
⁵²
But given the official puritanism of Catholic Austria, it was no mean step to make sexual seduction the theme of public entertainment. It offended the moral guardians of Josephine Prague no less than it offends the guardians of feminist correctness today. Don Giovanni, after all, like Casanova, was a cynical philanderer for whom women were mere objects of desire. Casanova’s own words are not irrelevant:

The man who loves … rates the pleasure which he is sure to give the loved object more highly than the pleasure which the object can give him in fruition. Hence, he is eager to satisfy her. Woman, whose great preoccupation is her own interest, cannot but rate the pleasure she will herself feel more highly than the pleasure she will give. Hence, she procrastinates…
⁵³

One of Mozart’s greatest qualities, however, was to place himself above the passions of the world around him. His scores were blithe or sublime by turns, even when he was oppressed by the most agonizing pains of ill health, poverty, and bad fortune. His music, though composed in the world, was not of it. Though he was highly travelled, having spent twenty years touring the courts of Europe, there is not the slightest trace of the politics of his day.

In 1787 Europe was approaching the climacteric of its development over the previous two centuries. This was the year when the republican Constitution of the USA was signed, to the horror of Europe’s monarchies, and when the American dollar began to circulate. In Britain, under the ministry of the Younger Pitt, world-wide imperial concerns were under discussion with the launching both of the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General of British India, and of the Association for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. In Russia, the Empress Catherine had just embarked on the latest of her campaigns against the Turks—to which end, in her new province of Crimea, she entertained her ally, the Emperor Joseph, Mozart’s patron. In the Netherlands, the Stadholder William V had been expelled, and his wife taken hostage by the republican ‘Patriot’ party. As Mozart prepared to set out for Prague, the Prussian army was setting out for Holland to restore the Stadholder. The Vatican was fighting the secular tide: Pius VI (r. 1775–99) had been barred from sending a nuncio to Munich, and had been refused the customary feudal homage by the King of Naples. In Florence he was faced by a Grand Duke who had introduced Gallican rules into the Tuscan Church. In France, by the time that
Don Giovanni
was performed, both the Assembly of Notables and the Parlement of Paris had been convened and dis missed. The King of France had been convinced of the country’s impending bank ruptcy, and had resolved to summon the Estates-General, initially for July 1792.
Other events, of great importance for the future, took place virtually unnoticed. The first practical steamboat was demonstrated. In August, Horace Saussure made the first ascent of Mont Blanc. Man was mastering Nature.

With hindsight, the historian can see that Mozart’s music was playing out many of the most doomed and decrepit elements of the Ancien Régime. No one knew at the time, but Joseph II was the penultimate occupant of the Holy Roman Empire. Doge Paolo Renier (r. 1779–89) was the 125th in the line of 126 doges of Venice. Bohemia’s neighbour, Poland, had already entered the last decade of the last reign of its 51 sovereign kings and princes. Pope Pius VI was destined to die in a French revolutionary dungeon.

In the creative arts, as always, the traditional vied with the innovative. 1787 saw Jeremy Bentham’s
Defence of Usury
, Goethe’s
Iphigenie
in verse, and Schiller’s
Don Carlos
. Fragonard, David, and Goya were at their easels, alongside Reynolds, Gainsborough, Stubbs, and Romney. Mozart’s musical contemporaries included Haydn, Cherubini, and C. P. E. Bach.

Of course, it could be said that
Don Giovanni
was conceived as a brilliant, intuitive allegory of the judgement which awaited a corrupt and dissolute continent. If so, there is no such hint either in Mozart’s correspondence or in the work itself. People had no awareness of impending catastrophe, least of all in France. The Marquis de Condorcet, for example, one of the most radical
philosophes
of the day, was certain of only one thing, that monarchy was impregnable.
⁵⁴
An intelligent young Frenchwoman with musical inclinations recorded her impressions of Paris in that same era:

The musical gatherings [at the Hotel de Rochechouart] were very distinguished. They were held once a week… but there were rehearsals as well. Mme Montgeroux, a famous pianist of the day, played the piano; an Italian singer from the Opera sang the tenor parts; Mandini, another Italian, sang the bass; Mme de Richelieu was the prima donna; I sang the contralto, M de Duras the baritone; the choruses were sung by other good amateurs. Viotti accompanied us on the violin. We executed the most difficult finales in this way. Everyone took the greatest pains, and Viotti was excessively severe… I doubt if there exists anywhere the ease, harmony, good manners, and absence of all pretension which was to be found then in all the great houses of Paris…

Amid all these pleasures, we were drawing near to the month of May 1789, laughing and dancing our way to the precipice. Thinking people were content to talk of abolishing all the abuses. France, they said, was about to be reborn. The word ‘revolution’ was never uttered.
⁵⁵

^*
1 July 1690 (Old Style) = 11 July 1690 (New Style). Owing to confusion over the changed calendar, or perhaps over the Protestants’ second victory of July 1690 at Aughrim, ‘The Boyne’ has come to be celebrated traditionally in Northern Ireland as a national holiday held on 12 July.

REVOLUTIO

A Continent in Turmoil c.1770–1815

T
HERE
is a universal quality about the French Revolution which does not pertain to any of Europe’s many other convulsions. Indeed, this was the event which gave the word ‘Revolution’ its full, modern meaning: that is, no mere political upheaval, but the complete overthrow of a system of government together with its social, economic and cultural foundations. Nowadays the history books are filled with ‘revolutions’. There have been attempts, for example, to turn England’s Civil War into the ‘English Revolution’, and still more attempts to upgrade the Russian Revolution into the third round of a universal series. There’s the Roman Revolution, the Scientific Revolution, the Military Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the American Revolution, even, in recent years, the Sexual Revolution. Not all of them deserve the title.

But in 1789 there was reason to believe that changes were taking place which would affect people far beyond France and far beyond mere politics. Paris was the capital of a dominant power, and the centre of an international culture. The revolutionaries had inherited the Enlightenment’s belief in the universal abstraction of man. They felt that they were acting on behalf of all people everywhere, pitting themselves against universal tyranny. Their most noble monument was not some parochial pronouncement on the rights of the French but a ringing declaration on the Rights of Man (see below). ‘Sooner or later,’ Mirabeau told the National Assembly,