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Take
this job and....set it to music
great
composers and their employers
In 1894 a
61 year old Johannes Brahms got an attractive job
offer from the Hamburg Philharmonic. This very
respectable organization decided to honor Hamburg's
famous son with the post of musical director of the
orchestra. Brahms, by then one of the most famous
composers in Europe--possibly the most highly
regarded composer without argument, once Wagner died
in 1872--could have been elated that such a
prestigious organization had given him the reins to
their premiere music making body and asked him to
exercise control in shaping its future. He wasn't,
however, and explained himself in a letter to the
Philharmonic. There was a small problem with the
offer. Brahms had applied for the job--32 years
earlier--and been turned down. Then five years
later--again a rejection. By now he had spent over
three decades in Vienna and he was not particularly
interested.
It was a job Brahms had clearly
wanted, but in 1862 and 67 he was still a
controversial local composer. Why choose him when
the Philharmonic Society could have a glamorous
foreigner like Julius Stockhausen? Brahms was on
his way up, and didn't have the reputation he
acquired later. He wasn't BRAHMS yet, in other
words.
Instead Brahms
wrote a letter in which he suggested that if he had
gotten the job when he had applied for it they would
be celebrating many fine years together, but that
now he was too old and that they should be looking
for an energetic younger man. It was an age old
variation on "now that I've got the reputation I
don't need/want the job I couldn't get when I wanted
it because I didn't have the reputation."
If that kind of
thinking got in Brahms's way, you can only imagine
the trouble a 19-year old Bach was going to have.
Applying for the position of church organist, he was
awarded the post--and then a small problem
developed. A royal personnage's relative wanted the
job and Bach was "unhired." Bach, the victim of
nepotism? Sure enough. Many years later one of
Bach's sons was applying for a position at the same
church. Bach himself wrote a recommendation letter
to the committee, suggesting that maybe one way to
right a previous wrong would be to hire his kid for
the job he should have gotten in the first place.
Bach, with 20
children to look after, could play that game too.
Bach, at least,
held down a full-time job. Have you been in the
position of applying for your first full-time job
only to be told that you can't be hired because
you've never held a full-time job before? This page
won't exactly be a pick-me-up. Some of these
composers never held jobs of the full-time variety
at all.
Schubert was one of
them. He once applied to be a schoolteacher but was
turned down. Most writers on Schubert agree his
temperament wouldn't have suited him was this
position. Still, can you imagine Schubert teaching
your 4th grade music class? The whole episode does
have the misfortune of looking like a world-class
chef applying for a job at a McDonald's--and not
getting the position. (What if he started adding
oregano to the French fries?!)
Schubert also
applied for a position as a Kapellmeister--that is,
head musician at the court of the prince. This was a
pretty big deal. In fact, you might have heard of
the guy he wanted to replace--Antonio Salieri.
Salieri may be known to us mostly as a punching bag
in the movie Amadeus, but he knew how to write
music. Schubert studied with him for a while.
But this was a
bureaucratic position, after all. They couldn't make
it easy.
Schubert had to
wait eight months while the committee made up their
minds. At long last, they decided to take the cheap
way out and eliminate the position altogether.
Instead of hiring someone, they simply added duties
to the job description of the deputy Kapellmeister,
with a slight increase in salary. I'll bet he was
pleased.
Does this sound
like the sort of thing you've ever run across in the
business world?
Mozart went begging
for a job once. Eager to get out of Salzburg and
away from an archduke whom he couldn't stand, he
tried to flatter his way into a position with the
Elector of Munich, who he met in the hallway.
Actually it was a "narrow little room his
highness had to pass through on his way to hear Mass
before hunting." (!) Mozart relates the story in a
letter (Sept. 29-30th 1777). The elector brushed him
off, telling him that "unfortunately" there was no
vacancy at the time. Mozart wouldn't take no for an
answer, whereupon the Elector repeated his
statement, and left.
Mozart wasn't the
only fellow unhappy with his job. The problem with
having one is that some person or group of persons
will always dictate to you how you are to do it. The
alternative, unemployment, can also be a bit of a
problem. But there is one fellow who managed to get
around both obstacles.
His name was
Charles Ives. His father had convinced him that his
music making would be "freer...bolder" if he wasn't
beholden to anybody, including the general public,
which was not likely to encourage his innovations.
So he composed on evenings and weekends, and worked
in the insurance industry. He was quite good at it,
too, and became very wealthy, giving the lie to the
idea that all musicians are impractical when it
comes to business.
Ives managed to
avoid a lot of the problems that come with trying to
make a living as a musician, but this route also had
a price--professional isolation. He also had to face
the outright disgust of the few musicians to whom he
showed his works. Remember, he could be as radical
as he wanted to be--and he was plenty
groundbreaking. Still, in the 20th century, many
composers were trying very new things and winning
the wrath of the public as well as other composers.
Colleagues can be just as nasty as anybody else. But
if you've had work experience, you may have already
found that out!
Something else that
isn't easy to do--changing jobs. This can be
particularly difficult if your boss happens to
be the king of something. Georg Frideric Handel
didn't know that when he left his boss in Hanover
his lowly Elector of a supervisor had king in his
destiny. Handel decided to leave Hanover in the
Germanies and seek his fortune in England, a country
that loved manufacturing musical instruments but
wouldn't dirty itself making music on them. This
paved the way for foreign musicians, mostly from
Germany, to become rich and revered. Handel was on
his own, taking the financial risks from his
operatic productions himself. His entrepreneurial
approach eventually made him a wealthy man, but he
had to change course when Italian opera went out of
fashion and his productions suffered poor box
office. Oratorio proved to be the answer (Opera
without costumes! What a cost-cutter! Except for the
part about hiring a chorus to do a lot of the
singing). Meanwhile, Handel's old boss had a strange
twist of fortune as well. The King of England died,
and through a strange order of succession, his
cousin, the Elector of Hanover became king of
England. I'd like to have seen Handel's face when he
read that in the paper! Handel hadn't
exactly gotten permission to leave Hanover, so he
had to play nice with his old boss, and wrote him
some really attractive Water Music so he could take
his boat on the Thames and listen to music. It
appears to have patched things up with the king.
One employer who
was not so easy to forgive was the Duke of
Weimar. Bach tried to take another job, and the duke
threw him in jail for a month for breach of
contract.
Bach
had a long and difficult working relationship with
several of his employers. I've written another article about something that happened while
he was at his first church in Arnstadt. Bach's
difficulties at various churches may be part of the
reason he left the church to go work for a duke, and
then a prince for a while. Unfortunately, a problem
eventually developed in Cothen as well. It wasn't
that his boss wasn't hospitable--Bach may have
enjoyed his stay in Cothen more than anywhere else
during his lifetime. The prince was a music lover,
and didn't mind spending money to get the best
instruments and the best people to lay them.
Opportunities for musical stimulation were not
wanting.
But eventually, the prince
remarried. His wife was not particularly interested
in things musical. Bach called her an "amusa"
(without a muse), or one without musical feeling. It
didn't matter if she had some dude named Bach right
there among the musicians--music was worthless to
her, and therefore so was Bach. Soon after, Bach
went packing, to Leipzig, a town where he would
spend the remaining 27 years of his life (and get
into controversies with more church authorities).
That's
the difficulty of a working relationship. It may go
well for a while, but if a new Pharaoh ascends the
throne things could take a turn for the worse.
Ahh,
office politics. Bach was never exactly blessed with
the gift of tact, which might have made things a bit
easier for him. In fact, in some cases it could have
made things less dangerous.
Maybe
that's why Charles Widor never made a really big deal
about his working conditions. At least, I haven't read
that he did. I only came across this bit on the
internet the other day, so I don't know much about it.
Widor
is considered one of the greatest organists who ever
lived. He worked in a massive French Cathedral (St.
Sulpice) and turned out a number of ambitious organ
works, including a symphony whose last movement is
the now famous "Toccata" that us organists like to
butcher at Easter. He was hired in a bit of a hurry,
apparently, given only the title of "Temporary
Organist" and, in his 63 years there, never got the
title of permanent organist (titular organist,
actually). But, you know, "all flesh is like
grass..."
Most
of the composers we've been discussing worked for
princes or dukes or some other bigshot. The musicians
themselves were considered servants, and not very high
up on the social ladder. The staggering genius of
these individuals didn't matter; they were musicians
and therefore they were peons. Fortunately, we have
evidence to suggest that some of their employers
valued them and took care of them. And some didn't.
Still,
if you have a grievance with a prince or a duke,
things will go well with you if you are able to broach
the subject delicately, and with a full awareness of
your position.
One
fellow certainly deserves to be recognized in that
capacity. His name was Josquin and he died in 1521. He
is regarded as one of the earliest "great" composers.
Martin Luther admired him greatly as a "master of the
notes." We know very little about Josquin's life
(about the only thing he left behind besides his music
is some graffiti in the choir loft at his church) but
I think we can all appreciate the problem he once
faced--not getting paid.
That's
right--his employer stiffed him. Josquin wrote him a
piece of music and didn't get a cent for it. Now
Beethoven once dashed off a silly cannon about the
virtues of getting paid when someone conveniently
forgot about his fee (the manuscript is in the Peabody
library in Baltimore, MD), but Josquin needed to tread
carefully because his employer was royalty and
democracy wasn't even a gleam in John Locke's eye yet.
So
Josquin wrote something else. It was a piece for
choir, and the biblical text he chose was this: "Lord,
remember thy promise to thy servant."
Nice touch, isn't
it? And his employer got the hint.
A more famous
example of this kind of diplomacy involved Joseph
Haydn. Haydn, a Kapellmeister (literally headmaster,
but in this case leader of the musicians) worked for
a prince. This prince had a summer home out in the
marshes where he like to go fox hunting. One year he
got so enchanted with his hunting that it looked
like he wasn't going to return to his winter home.
This was a big
problem for the musicians. Far be it for a prince to
spend a summer without his entire retinue of
musicians--his private orchestra. Everyone in his
employ came with him. This did not, however, include
the musician's wives and children. So for as long as
the prince felt like staying around, nobody in his
orchestra got to see their family. This was starting
to seem rude.
Haydn couldn't just
come out and say "Let's go home, already!" and they
didn't have musician's unions to petition, so he had
to find a subtle and--you guessed it--musical way of
dropping the hint. That hint is the final movement
of a piece which became known as the "Farewell"
Symphony, a piece in which all the musicians start
out playing together, and then, one by one, they
stop playing, put out their candles (no lights on
their music stands, remember!) and leave the room
until only two violins are left playing.
It worked. The
prince broke camp and went home for the winter.
Haydn stood up for his men, and did it gently enough
that the prince wasn't embarrassed or angered.
Haydn
had "people skills" which is a much better guarantee
of success than mere music-making, at any level.
Now, if he'd only been into computers, he could have
made the big bucks.
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