Conference Agenda

In the years following the 1781 premiere of Idomeneo in Munich, Mozart attempted to bring what he called his “grand opera” to the stage in Vienna. Though mostly unsuccessful, these efforts led to a shift in focus from the theater to the concert, as selected arias from Idomeneo were performed in concert in the 1780s leading to a semi-staged production in 1786. Not until the premiere of La clemenza di Tito in 1791 would Mozart return to composing new opera seria for the stage. During this time, however, Mozart also composed numerous concert arias on seria texts.

The concert arias are often seen as exercises for the young composer or experiments for the mature composer, privileging the fully staged operatic works that are seen as the full flowering of compositional technique in opera seria. On the surface, this chronology of composing concert arias on seria texts in between Idomeneo and Tito might suggest that these arias act as a bridge of stylistic development from one opera to the other. A close examination of these arias in comparison with arias from these two operas proves otherwise.

In this paper, I analyze selected concert arias from this period of the 1780s and compare them to arias in Idomeneo and Tito that use the same formal type. My analysis shows that, whereas the opera arias take a similar approach, the concert arias are much more unusual or surprising in the ways in which they realize these forms. Furthermore, Mozart uses compositional techniques such as modal mixture and obbligato instrumental solos—also found in the opera arias—but which in the concert arias have different, striking effects. The unique nature of the concert aria as self-contained and separated from a larger musical and dramatic context—in contrast to opera arias—allowed Mozart an outlet in the seria genre that is on a separate compositional trajectory, rather than one that draws a direct line from Idomeneo to Tito. In light of this, I argue that the concert aria may be viewed as a distinct and separate genre rather than one subordinate to fully staged opera.

Les Paysans changés en grenouilles—the sixth of twelve symphonies composed by Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf between 1781 and 1786 based on Ovid's Metamorphoses—recounts the story of the goddess Latona and the Lycians. Rudely denied water by Lycian labourers, Latona—exhausted and parched, carrying her newborn twins Apollo and Diana—turned the Lycians into frogs. Rendered musically in the fourth movement of the symphony, the croaking frogs were a source of much critical consternation. These symphonies are most often discussed in relation to unfolding squabbles over so-called "program" music, the disputed reputation of tone-painting and directly mimetic representations, and aesthetic visions of musical autonomy that began to crystallize in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This paper asks instead how renewed critical attention to the concept of metamorphosis in the eighteenth century—both mythic and newly empirical in natural history—may offer new ways to understand these symphonies, and by extension, the ways in which eighteenth-century musicians thought about form and processes of sonic forming.

I argue that natural-historical conceptions of metamorphosis subvert the relationship between style and form upon which musicology has long depended. Theorizers of style since the nineteenth century have typically inscribed a sharp distinction between nature and culture: style is the contingent, local bearing of universal natural tendencies. In this scheme, tendencies often appear as formal types—the unchanging paradigms that underlie a kaleidoscopic variety of stylistic expressions. Yet Goethe, in his Metamorphosis of Plants (1790)—a treatise in which flowers audibly declaim their metamorphosis to observant human onlookers—suggests otherwise. The Goethean conception of metamorphosis explicitly confounds the stylistic and the formal: the supposed blind determinism of nature and the human caprice of culture. This paper takes up the Goethean valences of the Dittersdorf symphonies to retrieve an eighteenth-century understanding of style as a continuous process of making and remaking that is always material and relational. As a rupture in the taxonomic projects of eighteenth-century natural philosophy, metamorphosis emerges, I argue, as a distinctively musical concept, registering in its undecidable principle of form-style, the labile ontological models of sound.

From a modern perspective, Boccherini’s chamber music stands in the late eighteenth-century European musical panorama as una perla rara. But how do historians classify and compare this pearl of a repertory? Is it Baroque in its search of meraviglia and loyal engagement with the bizarre? Galant in its spontaneity? Empfindsam in its sharp inclination towards mournful affects and innovative harmonic language? Recent scholarship, especially Elizabeth Le Guin’s work, shows how the Spanish-based Boccherini engages a variety of expressive and aesthetic nuances of the time, from the sublime beauty to the grotesque, operating on the margins of galant and Classic conventions, with frequent excursions outside of the realm of good taste. These historians rightfully draw Boccherini into the broader European soundscape.

In this paper, I seek to locate Boccherini in the cultural environment of late eighteenth-century Madrid, paying special attention to how the rise of the grotesque and other alternative aesthetics played a role in the creation of specific string quartets and quintets. I show the lively interconnection and exchange between musicians and Spanish authors, painters, and actors of the same period. I reveal the creative force of the grotesque, its subversive character, and its ability to rupture conventions of beauty and classicism are in full evidence in the works analyzed. While the importance of this alternative Iberian aesthetic is widely acknowledged in the literary and visual arts disciplines, for music historians, its significance remains largely undervalued. My presentation identifies the existence of the musical grotesque and its relationship to literary and visual trends in compositions produced around the Spanish court in Madrid during the late eighteenth century, focusing on composer Luigi Boccherini (1743–1805), whose compositional techniques frequently depart from neoclassic aesthetic conventions and display musical elements that parallel the grotesque in other artistic fields. By doing so, I challenge current music historiographies that date the emergence of the grotesque decades later, already in the nineteenth century. I argue instead that musical expressions of the grotesque – like their counterparts in other artistic disciplines – must also be situated within the complex intellectual, political, and cultural climate of the Spanish Enlightenment.

While Johann Sebastian Bach might not have originally intended the Goldberg Variations to represent anything other than clever permutations of tones, twentieth and twenty-first-century theatrical quotations offer new intertextual meanings through extra-musical associations. Through analyses of three theatrical works by Dieter Kühn (1974), George Tabori (1991), and Stanley Walden (2016) that range in genre from the Hörspiel, to the Play, to the Musical, this essay exposes layers of meaning conveyed through conflations of biographical and musical material when placed in new theatrical contexts. In particular, it shows how Bach’s Goldberg Variations add layers of meaning to twentieth century sociological and political situations addressed in the theatrical works; these include protests of working conditions for the poor and critical commentary about the suffering produced by the Holocaust. In this way, music that had been composed in the eighteenth century assumes new meaning for twentieth and twenty-first century audiences grappling with crumbling political structures, the value of human life, and the role of art during difficult times.

In Tabori’s Die Goldberg-Variationen, the theme of repeated tragedy and suffering becomes comic through unlikely mishaps that destroy the director’s vision for a perfect play. Yet double meanings emerge and assume a tragic tone as variations on biblical stories of suffering in the distant past are conflated with Bach’s musical variations and layered onto allusions to cruel behavior and suffering during the recent past as embodied in the character of Goldberg, a Holocaust survivor. In Walden’s Musical that was based on Tabori’s play, these layers of historical meaning are re-created musically as pieces from diverse time periods are superimposed. Music becomes an obvious form of protest against injustices in Kühn’s Goldberg Variationen, where it gives voice to the voiceless. Allusions to Bach’s Goldberg Variations and historical details are used to represent the plight of unfair labor practices for the working class in the present. Through these intertextual readings, the essay not only conveys new knowledge about lesser-known theatrical works, but also considers how these position Bach as a human in real world situations and approach his score through a deconstructionist lens.