The Pursuit of Glory, page 58
His grandfather, Ferdinand II, is usually assigned the blame (or credit, according to taste) for making the Habsburg Monarchy a militantly Catholic, counter-reformatory state, but it was also he who began a long tradition of musical patronage and practice. Among other things, he was responsible for the first performance of opera in the Monarchy, on the occasion of his forty-seventh birthday in 1625. In this he was encouraged by his second wife Eleonora Gonzaga, from the music-loving court of Mantua, a tradition continued by his son Ferdinand III (1637–57) who also composed, performed and encouraged music–and married another Gonzaga called Eleonora into the bargain. Leopold did not marry a Gonzaga (although one of his three wives was called Eleonora), but he did promote opera, most spectacularly when he married his first wife, the Infanta Margarita Teresa, the daughter of Philip IV of Spain immortalized in several Velasquez portraits, including Las Meninas. To celebrate their union, perhaps the most elaborate and extra vagant representational display ever staged was performed in Vienna in a specially constructed theatre variously estimated to hold between 1,500 and 5,000 spectators in the space today occupied by the Josephplatz. This was Il Pomo d’oro (the golden apple), with music by Antonio Cesti and a libretto by Francesco Sbarra, although Leopold wrote the music for part of Acts two and five. Well might one contemporary exclaim that ‘such a work has never been seen in the world before and perhaps the like of it will never be seen again’. Some idea of the scale of the enterprise, enough to make the director of even the best-endowed opera company blanch, can be gained from the cast list, which comprised more than fifty solo roles. To this army of performers, many of them hired from Italy at huge expense, must be added the costs of the special effects, the twenty-three elaborate stage-sets, and gorgeous costumes. Needless to say, the performance was carefully captured visually, engraved, reproduced and sent around Europe to advertise to those unlucky enough not to have been present just what unsurpassable magnificence they had missed. It is characteristic of representational culture that this eight-hour work, which had to be divided into two parts given on separate evenings, should have been performed only twice. As can be inferred from names of the characters, it was a heavily allegorical exercise, designed to celebrate the beauty of the new Empress and the greatness of both her husband and her new home. At its conclusion, flanked on stage by statues of Leopold and his bride and against a backdrop presenting ‘The Court of Austrian Glory’, Paris awards the eponymous golden apple to the Empress, because she combines the wisdom of Minerva, the beauty of Venus and the greatness of Juno.
Il Pomo d’oro was only the climax of a much longer series of celebrations. When the Infanta had arrived in Vienna, in December 1666, she was greeted by six weeks of festivities, including innumerable balls, banquets and plays, an elaborate equestrian ballet, several operas, and a ballet danced entirely by noble gentlemen of the court (Heinrich Schmelzer’s Twelve Ethiopian Beauties). Other highlights included a multimedia open-air extravaganza, part ballet and part tournament, called La contesa dell’aria e dell’acqua (the contest between air and water), with music by Bertali and Schmelzer, and a German-language ‘show’ (Schaustellung) entitled ‘Germany rejoices’ (Das frohlockende Deutschland). And Germany did rejoice: the writer Paul Winkler exclaimed after experiencing one of Leopold I’s festivities: ‘Vienna is the capital of the world, the throne of all the earth’. Later in Leopold’s long reign, there was a move towards competing head-on with Louis XIV with monumental structures, perhaps inspired by Austrian victories over the Turks and/or a growing resentment at French pretensions to cultural hegemony. In 1690 Fischer von Erlach built a great triumphal arch to celebrate the return to Vienna of Crown Prince Joseph, following his election as ‘King of the Romans’ (with automatic right of succession to the imperial title when his father died). The same architect also designed a new palace to be built at Schönbrunn, just outside Vienna. Had it been realized, it would have eclipsed Versailles in every respect, not least aesthetically.
In the event, a much more modest version was constructed, imposing certainly but overshadowed by its French rival in size if not in beauty. Yet the Habsburgs could claim to have won the battle of the palaces, not on account of the buildings they erected themselves but through what can be called ‘representation at one remove’. Right across the Habsburg Monarchy, and indeed the Holy Roman Empire, princes and prelates created imperial spaces within their own palaces. A prince Esterházy, an abbot of St Florian or a prince-bishop of Würzburg knew full well that their continued well-being depended on the continued well-being of the House of Habsburg. It is difficult to think of any French aristocratic hôtel built in the seventeenth or eighteenth century whose iconography is dominated by the Bourbon dynasty, but across the Rhine it is very easy to find examples of the Habsburgs being apotheosized. At St Florian near Linz, for example, it was the epochal victory over the Turks in 1683 that prompted the massive rebuilding programme that made the institution as much an imperial palace as an Augustinian monastery. In the room designated for imperial audiences, a ceiling fresco portrays the Habsburg Monarchy as the continuation of the four great empires of the past–Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome. In the Emperor’s Hall (Kaisersaal) another enormous fresco by Bartolomeo Altomonte celebrates ‘The Apotheosis of Charles VI’, who in the form of Jupiter stands on a red-white-red draped podium triumphant above a defeated Turk, while personifications of Austria and Hungary do homage. On a crudely quantitative basis, it is likely that, despite the personality-cult of Louis XIV at Versailles, collectively the Habsburgs could boast more iconographic references.
PALACES, COURTS AND POLITICS
Also collective was the great building-boom that took place in the wake of the defeat of the Turks and their subsequent expulsion from Hungary. Now that it was safe to build, the aristocrats of the Monarchy set to work with a will: in the half-century after 1683 around 300 palaces were constructed in and around Vienna. They gave visual expression to the alliance of dynasty and magnates which had emerged from the troubled times of the early and middle years of the seventeenth century. As Robert Evans has shown in his classic study The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy 1550–1700, the victors of that protracted agony were aristocrats with the political power and material resources to pick up the pieces of a crumbling society. When the dust settled, it was they who stood out head and shoulders above the debris. Both relatively and absolutely they had advanced their position in economy, society and the state at the expense of other social groups. But they could not have done it without the support of the Habsburg Emperor. It was he who had the international connections that made possible the defeat of their enemies, whether Turks, Protestants, burghers, lesser nobility or peasantry. Loyalty to dynasty and the Catholic Church was the price that had to be paid. In the course of just a century it was a deal that could elevate the Esterházys of Hungary, for example, from minor gentry to princes owning an estate the size of Wales.
The Esterházys built an enormous palace at Eisenstadt, a summer palace at Esterháza and, of course, another in Vienna. It was in the capital that they spent the winter, like most of their class, taking advantage of all the recreational possibilities that had developed as the court and its satellites expanded. By 1700 at the latest, Vienna was the undisputed premier playground of the nobility of both the Habsburg Monarchy and the Holy Roman Empire. Even princes and nobles whose main residences were in regional capitals such as Mainz or Darmstadt spent some time in Vienna on a regular basis. For, among many other things, it was the source of imperial patronage: to win a post or promotion at long-range was difficult, if not impossible. Proximity to the fount of fortune was all, so in 1711 Prince Schwarzenberg was prepared to pay an enormous sum to become Grand Master of the Horse (Oberstallmeister), despite its modest salary, because it guaranteed him regular access to the Emperor, especially when he was on the move. Offices could be supplemented by pensions, loans and outright gifts. In 1773 Maria Theresa gave away 9,000,000 gulden from the proceeds of land expropriated from the Jesuits. Such was the cost of maintaining an establishment in Vienna and generally keeping up with the Esterházys that supplementary income was badly needed. So ruler and magnates were bound together politically, economically, culturally and also confessionally (for an absolute requirement for access to the pump of patronage was Catholicism). Even the notoriously fractious Hungarian aristocrats were tamed by the ties that bound them to the Viennese court. As one hostile contemporary observed:
The proud Hungarians, who on their country estates were engaged in planning schemes of liberty, have been allured to court or to town. By the grant of dignities, titles and offers of marriage, and in other ways, every opportunity has been given to them of spending their money in splendour, of contracting debts, and of throwing themselves on the mercy of their sovereign when their estates have been sequestrated…Having thus converted the most powerful part of the Hungarian nobility into spendthrifts, debauchees and cowards, the Court has no longer occasion to fear a revolt.
A glamorous court could also be an instrument of foreign policy. This was demonstrated by the Elector of Saxony Frederick Augustus when he secured election as King of Poland in 1697, taking the title of Augustus II. It was one thing to get elected in Poland, quite another to hold on to the prize. In his election campaign, Augustus had been supported by Austria and Russia but had been opposed by a substantial group of Polish nobles supported and financed by France. To make good his claim he now needed to present himself as a King worthy of the name and thus dispel the notion that he was just a middling German prince imposed by foreign powers. In pursuit of regal status, Augustus now created ‘the most dazzling court in Europe’, which was the authoritative verdict of the peripatetic Baron Pöllnitz in 1729. It boasted the best balls, pageants, opera and hunting to be found anywhere in the Empire outside Vienna. Augustus employed the best portrait-painter (Louis Silvestre) to paint both wife and mistresses, the best jeweller (Johann Melchior Dinglinger), the best porcelain designer (Johann Joachim Kaendler), the best sculptor (Balthasar Permoser), the best architect (Mathhäus Daniel Pöppelmann), the best singer (Faustina) and the best composer (Johann Adolf Hasse). Some idea of Dresden’s fabled beauty can be gained from Bernardo Bellotto’s justly celebrated views.
This cultural climbing did pay dividends. The clearest sign that Augustus had thrust his way into the premier league of European sovereigns came in 1719 when his son and heir, Frederick Augustus, was married to the Habsburg Archduchess Maria Josepha, daughter of the late Emperor Joseph I. To celebrate the occasion, Augustus unleashed the full panoply of his court. Two years of preparations, which involved among other things the extension of the ‘Zwinger’, as the great representational arena next to the Electoral palace was known, and the construction of the largest opera-house north of the Alps, reached a climax with a full month of festivities to greet the bride and bridegroom on their return from Vienna. The ceremonies can be followed with some precision, for Augustus was careful to have each one recorded in word and image and then broadcast to the world by brochure and engraving. Moreover, the marriage paid a recurring dividend for succeeding generations of the dynasty. His son succeeded him as King of Poland and, of his grandchildren, Maria Amalia married Charles III of Spain; Maria Anna married Maximilian III Joseph, Elector of Bavaria; Josepha married the Dauphin of France, and thus was the mother of Louis XVI; Albert married Maria Christina, daughter of the Empress Maria Theresa, and later became Governor of the Austrian Netherlands; Clemens Wenzeslaus became Prince-Bishop of Freising, Regensburg and Augsburg and Archbishop-Elector of Trier; and Kunigunde became Princess-Abbess of Thorn and Essen (where she could seek spiritual consolation for having been jilted by Joseph II). This list alone should be sufficient to remind us that dynastic politics supported by representational court culture could bring concrete material benefits.
Augustus II, whose sobriquet ‘the strong’ derived from his fabled strength and even more fabulous sexual potency, was not alone. His near contemporary Duke Ernst Augustus of Brunswick-Lüneburg (1629–98) undoubtedly strengthened his case for promotion to the Electoral college of the Holy Roman Empire by developing a court of suitable grandeur at Herrenhausen. He eventually became the first Elector of Hanover in 1692. Keeping one step ahead of him in the imperial hierarchy was the Elector of Brandenburg, Frederick III (1688–1713) who, after creating a court fit for a king, became the first ‘King in Prussia’ in 1701. Of course the Guelphs and Hohenzollerns gained their promotion mainly as a result of helping Leopold I politically and militarily, but the expansion of the court was an integral part of this process and not just a symptom.
The success of Louis XIV in establishing French political hegemony, albeit only temporarily, and French cultural hegemony, which proved rather more durable, together with the contemporary success of the Hapsburgs in consolidating the great-power status of their Monarchy and the achievements of their contemporaries in Saxony, Hanover and Prussia, all suggest that representational court culture was a sound investment. But it could also be dysfunctional. In the Duchy of Württemberg, for example, in the 1670s and 1680s the Regent Friedrich Karl transformed the traditional household from a homely if rather crude ‘beer and skittles’ operation into a high-gloss and high-cost court. The French provenance of this transformation was not in doubt, as life at court was remodelled according to the precepts of Versailles. The unruly drinking bouts favoured in the past were replaced by opera, ballets and balls. At a ‘Divertissement à la française’ staged by the Regent in 1684, for example, the eight-year-old Duke Eberhard Ludwig was obliged to imitate Louis XIV by dancing the role of Cupid. Württembergers attending the Duchy’s first salon, introduced by Friedrich Karl’s prime minister, the French-educated Baron von Forster-Dambenoy, were expected to speak French and be able to talk about the latest French fashions.
The cultural complex developed in Württemberg the second half of the seventeenth century cannot have been aimed at the disciplining of the nobles, for the good reason that the Duchy had none to discipline. The nobles of the region had established independence from ducal authority in the sixteenth century by making good their claim to be ‘Imperial Knights’. In other words, they acknowledged only the Holy Roman Emperor as their sovereign, were not subject to the Duke of Württemberg and were not represented in the Duchy’s Estates. The latter consisted of two houses, one comprising the fourteen Protestant abbots of the secularized monasteries and the other the representatives of sixty towns. Far from being overawed or seduced by the lavish court unfolded by Friedrich Karl and his successors, the Württemberg burghers were horrified and alienated. As the Regent was also seeking to ally with France to create a standing army, an association was made between Francophilia, despotism and profligacy every bit as acute as in Stuart England. In 1681, for example, the Estates campaigned for the dismissal of a French governess and a French dancing master, employed to instruct the young Duke, on the grounds that they were likely to corrupt their charge with ‘loose French morals’, ‘lascivious French ways’, ‘conversation punctuated with obscene and evil jokes’ and ‘a style of manners that placed topics of erotic love at the centre of polite discourse’.
As this disapproving but excited obsession with sexuality suggests, a further similarity with contemporary England was the religious flavour of the clash between prince and parliament. The Lutheranism of the Estates’ deputies, which was being given an increasingly Puritanical edge by the burgeoning Pietist movement, was utterly at odds with the secular hedonism of the Regent’s court and what his critics called his ‘mocking of the very premises of a legitimate, Christian, German-oriented, non-Machiavellian polity’. For his part, Friedrich Karl took the high ground of absolutism, denouncing the Estates for ‘shocking expressions touching his gloire’. It was he, however, who lost the struggle, being deposed as Regent in 1693 by the Emperor Leopold I. His fate showed that it was the burghers of Stuttgart, Tübingen and the other towns whose co-operation, or at least acquiescence, was most needed, but they were just the people most alienated by the ‘loose and lascivious’ French culture of the court and correspondingly more determined to resist its political dimension. As so often in early modern Europe, political opposition supported by religious conviction proved especially tenacious. Unlike the aristocratic targets of Louis XIV’s representational culture, the Württembergers did not roll over to have their stomachs stroked. They remained upright, usually seeking co-operation rather than confrontation and often obliged to make concessions, but stubbornly resisting attempts to emasculate the ancient liberties and traditional constitution.
A more serious lesson in the dangers of over-indulgence in court culture was provided by the fate of Saxony. While Augustus the Strong was scattering money in all directions, his northern neighbour, the grim Frederick William I of Prussia (1713–40), was hoarding every penny he could lay his hands on. He effectively closed down his father’s court, disbanding the orchestra and derisively appointing his court dwarf as President of the Berlin Academy. Augustus is reputed to have told Frederick William: ‘When Your Majesty collects a ducat, you just add it to your treasure, while I prefer to spend it, so that it comes back to me threefold.’ This may have been sound economics and could also have been supported by the parable of the talents, but it did not help Augustus’s son and heir, who succeeded as Augustus III in 1733, when he had to face a challenge from Frederick William’s son, who succeeded as Frederick II in 1740.
