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The Musical Discourse of Servitude
Discussions - Part 2

White's Musical Servitude: Chapter 1, Habsburg Court Service

Continue from Part 1

William L. Hoffman wrote (March 11, 2021):
The entire 18th century in classical music was a struggle for the musician, sometimes functioning in the emerging dual role of composer and performer, seeking to break free of the bonds of servitude to authority dating to the Greco-Roman period, where the musician initially functioned as a household slave and only in the Renaissance attained the role of household servant and even elevated to biblical chief steward. The struggle to assert and emancipate one's self in order to achieve personal independence in the field of music became quite pronounced in the first half of the 18th century within the North Italian Baroque partimento (basso continuo realization) method (Wikipedia), says Irish musicologist Harry White in his The Musical Discourse of Servitude: Authority, Autonomy, and the Work-Concept in Fux, Bach and Handel.¹ His book examines for the first time the compositions of Johann Joseph Fux (Wikipedia) in relation to his contemporaries Bach and Handel. White contrasts musical "servility" and "freedom" in his analysis, with Fux tied to the prevailing servitude of the day's musical imagination, particularly the hegemonic Catholic flowering of North Italian partimento method across Europe, emboldening individuality and independence in composers. In contrast, both Bach and Handel represented a Protestant autonomy of musical discourse with Bach exhausting generic models in the Mass and Handel inventing a new genre in the English oratorio. "Peter Schaffer's Salieri [Wikipedia) was wiser than he knew to insist upon the simultaneous truth and falsehood of 'the musician as slave and servant' (to borrow a phrase from Tim Blanning)² in the eighteenth century," says White (Ibid.: 24). "Our quest to understand thus dual condition begins, as so many other musical journeys, in Vienna."

Musician as Slave, Servant

Blanning scours the backwaters of musical history, beginning with the mythological and symbolic characters where music is "one of tragedy's six essential components" in Aristotle's Poetics, "the others being plot, character, diction, thought and spectacle," he says (Ibid.: 7). Symbolic figures emerge in the High Renaissance in the sweet power of music, notably Orpheus, Apollo, King David, Pythagoras, Saint Cecilia, and Lady Music, says Blanning (Ibid.: 34), while individuals struggled to assert their unique humanity, beginning with composer Claudio Monteverdi in the employment of city-state, aristocracy, and church, institutions in which Bach within two centuries of distinct family members sought employment. Blanning's section, entitled "Handel, Haydn, and the Liberation of the Musician," shows the fundamental appeal of the provision of "income, security, control, and prestige," "requirements Monteverdi listed earlier," he says (Ibid.: 27). Liberating conditions in the 18th century included growing opportunities such as printing/publication, the public sphere, literacy, education, "the expansion of towns and the promotion of urban values, the rise of consumerism and the commercialisation of leisure, the proliferation of voluntary associations such as reading clubs, choral societies, and masonic lodges, the improvement of communications and postal services — all of these developments combined to create a new kind of cultural space into which musical entrepreneurs eagerly moved," Blanning observes (Ibid.: 19). "Status, purpose, places and spaces, technology, and liberation — these are the five categories I will explore to explain music's march to cultural supremacy," he says (Ibid.: 6). "What follows is an exercise in social, cultural, and political history, not musicology. . . ." To that end, Banning uses iconography of portrait to contrast the independent, affluent success of gentleman Handel with Bach the simple burgher (who in Leipzig beyond municipal employment in church and school received commissions for funerals, weddings, birthdays, and employments, as well as remuneration for teaching, performing, directing, and publishing). In his section, "Mozart, Beethoven, and the Perils of the Public Sphere," Blanning shows Mozart in Vienna as the great freelancer while Haydn remained under the patronage of the Esterházys, "powerful magnates in Maria Theresa's dominions," he says (Ibid.: 15).

"The Minstrelsy of Heaven: Servility, Freedom, Dynastic Style"

While it took the second half of the 18th century for classical music to shed completely the shackles of servitude and enable it to flourish north and west from Vienna, White in his first chapter, "The Minstrelsy of Heaven: Servility, Freedom and the Dynastic Style" at the Viennese Habsburg Court of the Holy Roman Empire (all three disintegrating!), shows "the stylistic imitation, textual governance, and generic intransigence as the principal attributes of music produced by the exactions of the imperial court," says White (Ibid. 71). He examines the "three principal agencies through which Fux's musical imagination formed itself" (Ibid.: 62): the demands of pervasive Roman Catholic imperial liturgy, the authority and refuge of the ideal Palestrina style, and the governance of Italian musical drama through the Da capo repeat aria — agencies which Bach mastered through the dominant Catholic Dresden Court, the stile antico of his later works, and the opera seria influence of the Da capo aria and ritornello form that dominates much of his vocal music — attributes that Handel apprenticed and exploited in varying degrees. Bach could be considered the bridge or canal through which the North Italian Baroque flowed, the "Culmination of an Era," as Karl Geiringer says,³ abetted by the Dresden Court. Handel, a veritable opportunist and entrepreneur with a glowing reputation, thrived, achieving his first biography, John Mainwaring’s Memoirs of the Life of the Late George Frederic Handel, a year after his death in 1759. Handel scholars, despite a wealth of documentation and first-hand accounts, still are trying to separate fact and fiction. A recent example is David Viker's study, The Mysteries, Myths, and Truths about Mr Handel (November 1, 2014; Grammophone Gramophone). Bach had to wait a half century before beginning to achieve similar stature. In essence, Bach's musical vocation was the church milieu and Handel's the theatrical world where each succeeded, making profound, lasting impacts, as shown in Joseph P. Swain's recent and welcomed monograph on both Bach and Handel.⁴

Monteverdi, Bach, Handel

Monteverdi (1567-1643, Wikipedia) was the master of creativity at the beginning of the Baroque, producing both monumental liturgical vesper music and dramatic operas, as well as poetic madrigals, observing the compositional tradition of Palestrina and "the solitary torment of a music" "worthy of free men" in "Monteverdi's recitative, his dramma per musica," says White (Ibid.: 25), in the Chapter 1, first section, "The Musical Apotheosis of Authority." "There is authority, a seamless firmament of dutiful governance, and there is autonomy, by which the musical imagination emancipates itself," he observes (Ibid.: 26). The struggle goes on in a current, postmodern bewilderment that can send Bach's final testament, the B-Minor Mass, to "limitless space as an aural [and indeed visual] icon of what we once were, and with no less gusto consigning Bach here on earth to the limbo of educational amnesia or bourgeois recreation," says White (Ibid.: 27). "With the sovereign exception of Bach and Handel, few other composers of the mid-eighteenth century make the leap, as it were, from general servitude to emancipated engagement of the aftermath or illuof critical commentary." The concepts of imaginative originality and individuality are found in "Monteverdi's musical humanism" as found in Gary Tomlinson's study of the development of the madrigal in the emergence of characteristic Baroque music,⁵ as well as in Monteverdi's Vespro della Beata Vergine (Vespers for the Blessed Virgin) of 1610 (Wikipedia).⁶ As a compendium of wide-ranging styles and genres, the Marian vespers collection is a forerunner of Bach's Missa tota, which also relies on borrowed materials and whose purpose also is still debated. During the early 18th century, individuating works struggled to be established, impeded by "the apparent recession of authorship in favor of sheer volume of production" and as "ancillary to the expression of an extra-musical idea sufficiently conservative to dispense with imagination except as the efficient exemplar of a received style," says White (Ibid.: 28). "When a composer such as Bach intervenes against the idea of received style, the result is a striking exception to the general rule." The general "understanding of music as a servile utterance was long in place by the seventeenth century."

Vienna Imperial Court Authority

"The exertion of this claim [of authority] on music at the imperial court in Vienna is the subject of this chapter," says Whitte (Ibid.: 28). "As a nexus of musical servitude," particularly between 1700 and 1750, the Habsburg court can scarcely be surpassed," he says (Ibid.: 29), given that its entire musical production everywhere "was dedicated with undeviating zeal to the glories of absolutism and its spiritual authority" of Roman Catholicism "deeply inflected by Counter-Reformation ideals little altered in well over a century." It was in Vienna that the "contest between freedom and servility was decided through the agency of music." While a cultural "blend of Italian savoir-faire and German purposefulness underpinned this contest here and elsewhere, the court's musical apparatus "was subordinate at every turn to imperial propaganda and religious authority," White finds (Ibid.: 30). Throughout the reign of three consecutive emperors — Leopold I (1658-1705), sons Joseph I (1705-11) and Charles VI (1711-40) — which coincided with the court tenure of Johann Joseph Fux (1698-1741), "the intimacy between court protocol and musical expression had no serious rival except in France." This sovereign dominance also extended to Bach, when his "fulsome obsequiousness when addressing Frederick the Great of Prussia or any number of lesser mortals provides abundant evidence of the same extravagant deference far from the environs of the Habsburg court," says White (Ibid.: 31). Despite increasing wars and other major challenges, music continued to take "pride of place," he says (Ibid.: 32f) "which the Habsburg dynasty had fostered for almost a century before Charles VI came to the throne" in 1711, promoting Italian music. "The Italian complexion of this musical governance throughout the reign of Charles VI is attested by the cumulative impact of the emperor's own initiatives across the whole spectrum of public life in the imperial city," says White (Ibid.: 34). "After decades of war, siege, and pestilence, the sheer opulence of the Astro-Italian Baroque under Charles VI (Wikipedia) adorned 'the Minstrelsy of Heaven' as never before," he says (Ibid.: 35). During Leopold's long reign in the second half of the 17th century, the Sepolcro⁷ had become "the one musical genre which Vienna could claim as its own," he observes (Ibid.: 37) in the Chapter 1 section, "Musical Culture and the Servile Imagination." Under Charles VI, besides Fux and Antonio Caldara, Francesco Bartolomeo Conti (Wikipedia),⁸ served the court (1713-32). While in Vienna both liturgical and profane works flourished, the former often were continually repeated while the latter operas and dramatic entertainments usually received only "one or two performances," White notes (Ibid,.: 39f).

Musical Liturgy: Mass Ordinary, Proper; Marian Devotions

In White's Chapter 1, section "The Imperative of Italy: Understanding the Dynastic Style," the Habsburg Dynasty music flourished under Charles VI with Fux and Caldara. The "new emperor now had the best of both worlds: [Fux] a native public servant of the very first rank, unwavering in his dedication to the emperor's own cult of absolutism and religious orthodoxy, and [Caldara] a brilliant Italian contemporary capable of supplying the court with as much musical pomp and circumstance as it might desire" (Ibid,.: 44). The "complex and elaborate liturgy" with its "musical demands were formidable," he says (Ibid.: 45), with "the extreme musical prominence attached to the Mass and office (together with countless Marian devotions and litanies" (Ibid.: 46). Three factors guided music in the "absolute condition of liturgical servitude": "textual governance, the rubric of imitation, and the generic intransigence of compositional technique," says White (Ibid.: 46f). These observed the rigid prescription of the Mass ordinary (Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei) and Mass proper (Introit, Gradual, Tract, Offertory and Communion), as well as the Marian vesper (Psalms 110, Dixit Dominus; Psalm 113, Laudate pueri; Psalm 122, Laetatus sum; Psalm 127, Nisi Dominus; and Psalm 147, Lauda Jerusalem). "This governance privileged an alignment between musical style and liturgical function which remained absolute," he says (Ibid.: 49f): modal counterpoint of renaissance polyphony for the penitential seasons (Advent and Lent); concerted idiom mid- to late 17th century and present day (modern or mixed style), immediate and axiomatic, for ordinary time; and this idiom augmented with trumpets and drums for high feasts and pontifical Masses. The result is an "anthologizing impulse" which embraces the "gothic grandeur of the Chant, the Roman smoothness of high renaissance counterpoint, the concertato diction and vocabulary of Leopold's venerable chapel masters, and the sovereign modernity and operatic flourish of the late Baroque style. These elements initially are found in Monteverdi's 1610 Vespro della Beata Vergine.

"Blest and Unblest Sirens"

The best of both musical worlds of Fux and Caldara at the Habsburg Court in the first half of the 18th century was a study in servility and freedom, in contrasted in "Fux's steady progress through the ranks of [the impeccably loyalty of] imperial service with the glitter and prestige of Caldara's [dazzling international] career before he was appointed to Vienna" in 1716 (Wikipedia), White observes in his Chapter 1 section, "Blest and Unblest Sirens" (Ibid.: 52f). Caladara's star shone brightest in Rome during 1708 when "he was in the company of several illustrious composers including Corelli, Pasquini, Allesandro and Domenco Scarlatti, and Handel."⁹ Meanwhile, Austrian home-grown "Fux was more intimately bound to Habsburg patronage than any other composer or musician in the eighteenth century," says White (Ibid.: 53). Under the auspices of Charles VI, Caldara was the more prolific in the field of the profane oratorio or Passion, with "at least forty staged secular-dramatic works," he relates (Ibid.: 54), and "twenty-three oratorios. In the same period, Fux set nine secular-dramatic libretti and nine oratorios," with seven of these presented as Sepolcri at the court chapel "(usually on Good Friday or the Tuesday of Holy Week)." Fux dominated the domain of imperial liturgical music as Kapellmeister and Caldara as vice-Kapellmeister followed with his "rapid assimilation of Fux's own technique," says White (Ibid.: 55). "The auditory fabric of the imperial service during the heyday of Charles's reign may in fact have owed as much to Caldara's prolific and fluent emulations as it did to Fux's exemplars, notably during pontifical and other high feasts." Caldara's Masses are featin White's study, last chapter, "Steps to Parnassus: Fux, Caldara, and Bach," he says (Ibid.: 56).

"Under the 'Yoke of Servile Pomp'"

In his final section of Chapter 1, "Under the 'Yoke of Servile Pomp'," White compares Caldara to Fux in their compositional practice that is "so deeply indentured to the sounding form of the Roman Catholic liturgy (or the monstrous flattery of princes, when it was not in the throes of doctrinal servitude)" which "was not the exclusive preserve of Habsburg Vienna" (Ibid.: 58). Meanwhile, the "striking difference between Roman Catholic conservatism and Protestant innovation in the musical imagination of the eighteenth century" "illuminates the passage from servitude to autonomy in which the musical subject (and, ultimately the musical work) struggle to assert itself. The music written for princes and prelates was destined to lapse into silence as absolutism waned in the glare and upheaval of the Enlightenment and revolution in France." Caldara "obliged his art to the demands of a liturgical regimen which was as prescriptive as it was immense," White concludes (Ibid.: 59). "The chief steward of this regimen was Johann Joseph Fux. Under his prodigious guidance, the Minstrelsy of Heaven was a dense-layered. historically alert and corporately achieved tapestry of sound in which the individual musical imagination was at best incidental to the remorseless tide of liturgical observance which washed over the imperial household and its entourage from day to day and from year to year, and which correspondingly required a vast musical correlative answerable to its political and spiritual absolutism alike." But, "like the elder son in the Gospel parable [Prodigal Son], Fux was the truer servant."

ENDNOTES

¹ Harry White, The Musical Discourse of Servitude: Authority, Autonomy and the Work-Concept in Fux, Bach, and Handel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020); Amazon.com: "Look inside"; discussion, http://bach-cantatas.com/Books/B0223.htm.
² Tim Blanning, "The Musician as Slave and Servant," in The Triumph of Music: The Rise of Composers, Musicians and Their Art (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008); Amazon.com, Harvard University Press.
³ Karl Geiringer, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Culmination of an Era, in Collaboration with Rene Geiringer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966); Amazon.com: "Look inside"; discussion, http://www.bach-cantatas.com/Topics/Bach-Biography.htm: paragraph beginning "The first original, substantial. . . ."
⁴ Joseph P. Swain, Listening to Bach and Handel: A Comparative Study (Hillsdale NY: Pendragon Press, 2018), Amazon.com; discussions, http://www.bach-cantatas.com/Other/Handel-Gen4.htm.
⁵ Gary Tomlinson, Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Amazon.com, Google Books.
⁶ See Denis Arnold, "Sacred Music," in Claudio Monteverdi, The New Grove Italian Baroque Masters (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980: 55-60), Amazon.com.
⁷ Music of Leopold I, a Good Friday Passion oratorio Sepolcro, "The Sacrifice of Abraham," is reviewed in Johan van Veen's cuurrent musica Dei donum, Musica Dei Donum; an aria from Fux's Sepocrol, La Deposizione dalla croce (The Deposition from the Cross), K 300), is discussed in Chapter 2.
⁸ Conti's sacred cantata, Languet anima mea amore tu (My soul languishes for love of you), Bach performed in Weimar, Köthen, and Leipzig between 1716 and 1724 (https://www.bach-cantatas.com/Other/Conti-Languet-anima.htm).
⁹ The convergence at Easter 1708 in Rome at the Palace of Cardinal Ottoboni involved Handel's oratorio, "La Resurrezione" (YouTube), and Allesandro Scarlatti's Passion Oratorio, both conduced by Corelli, see "Easter Oratorio Italian Tradition," in Easter Oratorio, BWV 249, Part Two, http://www.bach-cantatas.com/Vocal/BWV249-Gen5.htm.

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To Come White's The Musical Discourse of Servitude, Chapter 2, "The Virtuoso of Submissiveness: Fux and the Concept of Authority," Comparison of Fux and Bach Da capo arias.

White Chapter 2: Authority, Italian Oratorio, Da Capo Arias

William L. Hoffman wrote (March 26, 2021):
Northern Italian Baroque and earlier High Renaissance influences on Johann Joseph Fux, the Habsburg Court Kapellmeister (1715-41), and his subsequent impact on other composers, notably in the Da capo aria in Bach's sacred cantatas, is the subject of Harry White's Chapter 2, "The Virtuoso of Submissiveness: Fux and the Concept of Authority," in White's seminal study, The Musical Discourse of Servitude.¹ This chapter explores the musical "three-fold concept of authority" impacting Fux (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Joseph_Fux), affirms White (Ibid.: 109): imperial liturgy, Palestrina counterpoint, and the Italian Da capo aria form. These three allegiances reveal "such an imaginative distance between his stile antico Masses and the dramma per musica of his oratorio arias," he concludes (Ibid.: 108). A unique Viennese sub-genre, the Sepolcro Passion oratorio, a large-scale liturgical setting, developed from allegorical personages to biblical characters (see below, "Fux Oratorio, Bach Cantata Genres, Poets").

"The supplicating tone of 'At a solemn music'," says White in his opening section of Chapter 2, "Undisturbed Song" (Ibid: 60), "likewise expresses a fundamentally devotional reading of poetry and music which is no less germane to the aesthetic and practice of music at the imperial court." Satan's preparation for the decisive Battle in Heaven, with his reflections on "Servility with Freedom to contend" in John Milton's Paradise Lost (VI: 169) was the dominant influence in White's initial perspective on "Authority, Autonomy and the Work-Concept in Fux, Bach, and Handel" (Ibid.: 25). Now, Milton's poem "At a Solemn Music" (1645), takes center stage with its "high-raised fantasy" (line 5, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58141/at-a-solemn-music) here "of Fux himself which prevails," says White (Ibid.: 61). Milton's poem, as White observes (Ibid.: 60f), is a "striking contrast to the indictments of celestial sloth which Paradise Lost affords." Now, Milton's "untroubled apostrophe of the relations between voice and verse," suggests that "pious aspirations represent a religious idealism in regard to music," which is quite appropriate to 18th centuryVienna. "Its understanding of earthly music as an answering echo, consummately obedient before the Fall to the 'pure consent' of Heaven, summons the voice of Fux himself" in his 1725 treatise on counterpoint, Gradus ad Parnassum (Wikipedia). Harmony offered in God's praise "should conform to all the rigour of the rules, attaining perfection" "and should be supplied with all suitable means of exciting devotion," says Fux.²

Fux's Masses, Oratorios; Zalenka, Lotti Influences on Bach

White's critique "is design to deepen the intimacy between servitude and autonomy in the European musical imagination" during the first half of the 18th century (Ibid.: 61). This intimacy is particularly found in two Fux genres, the Mass (liturgical) and the Italian oratorio with its opera seria pairing of narrative recitative and interpretive Da capo aria with unified Affekt, "which bring the composer into the imaginative orbit of Bach and Handel, respectively and very differently." In the second section of Chapter 2, "The archives of Remembrance," White (Ibid.: 62) explores "the substantive behavior and meaning of Fux's compositional practice." The musical subject "invariably defers to an extra-musical governance (which is primarily liturgical) and to the jurisdiction of generic and structural prototypes (which are fundamentally Italian)." As Fux's "surviving works plainly attest," his office of church composer "represents the primary context in which Fux's imagination functions and flourishes."³ The ongoing Fux monumental edition, a Gesamtausgabe (Complete Works Edition) "is a record of compliance, obedience and imaginative servitude," says White (Ibid.: 63). Among Fux's vocal works are 102 Masses, numerous vespers, and 118 motets, as well as 13 oratorios and 21 secular dramatic works, says White (Ibid.: 64).⁴ White calculates 654 works attributed to Fux, including 464 classified as sacred, with the following composer's works comparisons: Antonio Caldara, c.3,400; Bach, BWV 1175; and Handel, c.600. Virtually all Fux's vocal works survive only as imperial court copies as well as further dissemination in nearby sacred venues while there is virtually no detailed chronology of his works "except in the case of the oratorios and sacred secular-dramatic works," says White (Ibid.: 65-67). "Music formally attributed to Fux," says White (Ibid.: 67), includes Palestrina motets and Corelli instrumental technique absorbed into Fux's instrumental works. The key bridge composer between Fux and Bach is Czech Jan Dismas Zalenka (1679-1745, Wikipedia),⁵ who was trained under Fux (c.1716-19) and spent his professional life in Dresden. Fux's influence on Zalenka "is of less significance than the affinities in compositional technique which Zalenka and J. S. Bach share," says White (Ibid.: 68). Most of the Latin church music influences on Bach came from the Dresden Court, which he first visited in. 1719, with Palestrina Masses "a part of the staple repertory," says John Butt.⁶ In the 1740s, Bach also was influenced by progressive Neapolitan school writing in the Credo section of extended Masses. Within Fux's liturgical music with its plethora of full Masses, motets and numerous vesper settings, are a number of shorter pieces such as Miserere, Marian antiphons, Introits and communions, showing "his overwhelming commitment to church music," says White (Ibid.: 64). Zalenka also composed a wealth of "liturgical Gebrauchsmusik [utility music] to serve the almost insatiable demands of the Dresden Catholic Church," he observes (Ibid.: 68). Fux's 24 polyphonic settings of the vesper Psalm 109, Dixit Dominus," represents "a frequency that might even strain 'liturgical Gebrauchsmusik' as a term sufficient to explain Fux's compositional practice, just as it exceeds by far any instance of multiple settings (beyond the ordinary of the Mass and the Magnificat) by his avowed mentor, Palestrina," says White (Ibid.: 70). Another Italian composer who interacted with the Dresden Court was the Venetian Antonio Lotti (1667-1740, Wikipedia), whose Missa Sapientiae (YouTube), survives in copies owned by Zalenka, Bach and Handel, says Wikipedia (Zalenka, Ibid.). Bach adapted sacred Latin works of Lotti "for church services in Leipzig," says Alberto Basso in an article on Lotti,⁷ including a Sanctus (lost), and two works formerly attributed to Lotti, "Magnificat in C major," BWV Anh. 30 (YouTube, BCW, Bach Digital) and "Kyrie–Gloria Mass" for double choir, BWV Anh. 167 (YouTube, BCW, Bach Digital). Meanwhile, "in the aftermath of Jan Dismas Zalenka's studies with Fux, the influence of Frescobaldi's Fiori musicale (1635) [motets influenced Bach, BCW] exerts an even greater influence than that of Palestrina," says White (Ibid.: Footnote 49: 80).

Fux's Prior, Later Influences

In the next section, "Agencies of Authority: Toward a Typology of Musical Servitude," White describes the impact of the "imperative of Italy [that] cast a long shadow" at the Viennese court (Ibid.: 71). This servitude class governed the principal attributes of the music — stylistic imitation, textual governance, and generic intransigence — "which in Fux's case can be more narrowly identified as an imaginative ideal respectively vested in Palestrina, the demands of the imperial liturgy, and the subordination of musical drama to the jurisdiction of Italian (especially Roman and Venetian) exemplars established in Vienna ca. 1700." This "was a symbolic as well an an aesthetic attachment," especially in Fux's Gradus ad Parnassum, an artistic credo, where Fux emulated rather than merely imitated Palestrina, "his Roman mentor" in his liturgical music for Mass and office, White says (Ibid.: 72). Fux's Missa Canonica (Messe di San Carlos, IMSLP "the vocal correlative" of late 17th and early 18th century instrumental collections and contrapuntal anthologies" including Bach's Musical Offering and the Art of Fugue (explored in White's Chapter 3), White observes (Ibid.: 73). The implicit vocal Mass parallels between Fux and Bach are explored in White's Chapter 5, "Steps to Parnassus: Fux, Caldara, and Bach." Fux's Gebrauchsmusik for Charles VI represents a "fundamentally servile condition of expression" that is "the secular humanism of dramma per musica [opera seria], but reconfigured by the court poets in Vienna as the defining apparatus of imperil propaganda and dogmatic veneration which they applied with equal fervor and submissive zeal to secular and sacred dramatic genres alike," says White (Ibid.: 75f), including "operatic aria and duet in the Masses and large-scale liturgical settings" (i.e. Sepolcri), says White (Ibid.: Footnote 41: 76). This "conservatism of poetic diction" was "the international stock-in-trade of opera and oratorio across Europe, and their cultivation in Vienna brought Fux into the orbit of his European contemporaries as his liturgical music never quite could," says White (Ibid.: 76). His use of "modern Italian operatic discourse" provided "a considerable degree of relief from the stylistic heterogeneity and promiscuity of his liturgical settings" and "a degree of formal jurisdiction and stability of discourse." The "recitatives, vocal ensembles, and (above all else) the arias of his biblical and passion oratorios" "answer a longing for musical form." His oratorios are "evidence of a new modelof Italian sovereignty, one that completes the typology [class] of servitude identified here, but which also represents a degree of emancipation from it." Meanwhile, the "Da capo aria as a governing model in the solo sections of Fux's Masses⁸ and other liturgical settings further testifies to the liberating impact of the form itself throughout some of his oeuvre," bringing the "emancipating but much rarer agencies of modal counterpoint and the formal closure of the Da capo aria," he says (Ibid. 77).

Fux's Da Capo Aria: Emancipation, Correspondences

In White's next section, "Fux the Submissive," he finds the prevailing "Venetian and Roman exemplars of massive homophonic declamation and a long-habituated recourse to madrigalian counterpoint" in liturgical music at the imperial court" "and its satellites (notably Salzburg and Dresden)" were an anachronism in the face of secular music elsewhere. Beyond this, the "formal and tonal jurisdictions of the Da capo aria (which are exclusive governances in his oratorios)" "emancipate Fux's imagination from the less congenial exemplars" of earlier liturgical music and "provide instead a stability of contemporary discourse which acts as a correlative to the continuities of the stile antico," he comments (Ibid.: 79). Among the examples White cites in Fux's Gradus are equal voices in stile antico and others in "freer a capella" style with supporting instruments involving "more freedom of modulation and singing, and of structure" (Ibid.: 79f). Following various Mass examples of both styles, White concludes (Ibid.: 84f) that Fux's "complex servitude" reveals "to such an extreme degree" "a vital perspective on the relationship between servitude and autonomy (and the continuity of discourse between them)" in his liturgical music which, nonetheless, "does not exhaust or completely account for the nature of his own musical practice" (Ibid.: 85).

In his next section of Chapter 2, "The Chalice of Innermost Meaning," White examines the prominence of the Da capo aria (Wikipedia) in Fux's sacred dramatic music (his oratorios) and its correspondences to Bach. In Fux's Gradus, Part 2, Musica Pratica, there is "a cautious endorsement" of the aria, "confined by the abiding imperatives of obedience and authority," he observes (Ibid.: 85). The Gradus passage is a dialogue response of Master Aloysius to his student Josephus (Fux himself) seeking advice about composing arias, so that music, like clothing, "is to be adapted to the age, with an enthusiasm for "novelty and originality." The repeat aria in its "international currency" "as an agent of musical discourse connects Fux to the music of his peers as does no other model of compositional technique," says White (Ibid.: 86), so prominent in "late Baroque musical thought." Its "overwhelming ubiquity" throughout early 18th century Europe" with "its centrifugal power (especially in relation to the ritornello principle, the trio sonata and the concerto) far transcends the operatic fulcrum from which it emerged," lasting almost 80 years from 1680 to 1760, traversing "political, cultural, and religious affiliation," in at least three European languages, Italian, German, and English," he says (Ibid.: 87f). As "an imaginative governance" and model of extra-liturgical church musical thought, "the Da capo aria establishes a continuity of discourse between Fux and his contemporaries of sufficient moment and durability to probe the difference between stylistic servitude and imaginative autonomy within the same region of musical utterance," he observes (Ibid.: 86f). The nature of Fux's own musical imagination is understood when considered with selective Bach arias. A strong connection between Fux and Bach is found in evidence linking the two, beginning with Bach's ownership of Gradus and its influence on Bach students Lorenz Mizler and Friedrich Marpurg, says White (Ibid.: 87).⁹

Comparison: Three Fux, Bach Da Capo Arias

White in the next, most substantial section, "Harmonious Sisters, voice and Verse," examines the Da capo aria practice of Fux and Bach¹⁰ and compares specific textual affinities in three Da capo arias each by Fux and Bach, respectively, "to illustrate the continuity as well as the distinction between servitude and autonomy as agents of musical discourse," which continues in Chapter 3, "The Steward of Unmeaning Art: Bach and the Musical Subject." Fux's later Baroque Italian oratorios "show a close, stylistic relationship to contemporary opera, says White in an article.¹¹ Fux "brought to perfection a local and well-defined version of Italian oratorio. He infused the genre with a coherent and highly effective sense of musical drama and in so doing, he created a form recognizably independent of similar achievements in Rome, is also manifestly indebted to those achievements and to those of his immediate predecessors in Vienna." Further, the "texts of Fux's oratorios reflect the conventional, poetic, and dramatic changes which took place in the Viennese oratorio in the eighteenth century." Where Caldara extensively utilized the texts of Apostolo Zeno (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostolo_Zeno) and Pietro Metastasio (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pietro_Metastasio), Fux used "much more modest but nevertheless consistent collaborations with Pietro Pariati (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pietro_Pariati) and Giovanni Pasquini (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Claudio_Pasquini) in the enterprise of glorifying the emperor and his household in the theater (alongside his formidable contribution to Italian oratorio and sacred biblical drama in the imperial chapel," White observes (Ibid.: 55).

White's comparisons of Fux and Bach Da capo arias in Chapter 2 (88ff) involve two Fux oratorios, John the Baptist (La fede sacrilega nella morte del Precursor S. Giovanni Battista) and the Sepolcro Passion oratorio, La Deposizione dalla croce di Gesù Cristo Salvator nostro:

1. Nautical simile arias (Ibid.: 89-94) in Fux's King Herod's alto aria, "Fra due nembi e fra due venti" (Between two clouds and two winds; trans. Harry White) in the 1714 John the Baptist oratorio (K291), with Bach's bass aria "Gleichwie die wilden Meereswellen" (Just as the wild waves of the sea [Psalm 124: 4-5], trans. Francis Browne) in 1724 Trinity +8 Cantata 178, "Wo Gott der Herr nicht bei uns hält" (If the Lord God does not stay with us, Psalm 124:1);
2. Obbligato hope/despair arias (Ibid. 94-99), Fux's "Se pura più nel core" (If purer in heart), Nicodemo's bass trio aria with bassoon, in the 1728 Sepolcro¹¹ (Passion) oratorio, La Deposizione dalla croce di Gesù Cristo Salvator nostro (The Deposition from the Cross of Jesus Christ, Our Savior), K 300), and Bach's soprano trio aria with oboe d'amore, "Valet will ich dir geben" (Farewell I shall bid to you) in 1723 Trinity +16 Cantata 95, "Christus, der ist mein Leben" (Christ is my life); and
3. Arias of preoccupation with sin (Ibid.: 99-108), Fux's Mary Magdalena continuo aria, "Di lagrime amare" (Of bitter tears) from the same Fux Passion oratorio, and Bach's opening alto aria, "Widerstehe doch der Sünde" (Stand firm against sin), from the 1714 Weimar Cantata 54 for Trinity +7.

Fux Oratorio, Bach Cantata Genres, Poets

Each of Fux's two oratorios cited above has a libretto by his two favorite poets, Pietro Pariati and Giovanni Pasquini. The John the Baptist Oratorio, La fede sacrilega nella morte del Precursor S. Giovanni Battista (Sacrilegious faith in the death of the Precursor St. John the Baptist) is a text of Pariati, author of one of seven Fux oratorios, including five Passions .¹² The Herod maritime aria, "Fra due nembi e fra due venti,"¹³ is found in a recording with text and White translation, Musical Discourse, Ibid: 91). The Sepolcro (Passion) oratorio,¹⁴ an exclusively Viennese sub-genre, has a libretto by Pasquini; Nicodemo's alto aria, "Se pura più nel core" (Oxford University Press) is found on YouTube (YouTube); The Mary Magdalena soprano aria, "Di lagrime amare" music Oxford Universirty Press.

In the nautical arias described in White (Ibid.: 89-94), Herod compares his moral dilemma to a stormy sea, while the Bach chorale Cantata 178/3 aria compares Christ's ship threatened by waves with the soul imperiled by evil (music, TouTube) in a paraphrase of Psalm 124:4-5 (King James Bible Online), the librettist possibly Leipzig Superintendent Salomon Deyling, who in 1724 preached the gospel at the St. Nikolaus Church following Cantata 178 premiere (discussion BCW). In the first of the Fux Passion oratorio arias, Nicodemo "meditates upon the obstruction of his own sinfulness," says White (Ibid.: 94f), beginning in hope and ending in despair. Beginning in despair and ending in hope, the Bach pure-hymn aria, BWV 95/3 (YouTube), "contemplates an impassioned and angry farewell to the world" and the "refuge of heaven," says White (Ibid.: 95), text by Valerius Herberger BCW). Cantata 95 is a 1723 hybrid proto chorale cantata with effective use of multiple hymns under a single theme, “Death and Dying” (BCW). In the opera seria pairing style of declamatory recitative and interpretive aria, the chorale is introduced by "an impassioned recitative," "Nun, falsche Welt!" (Now, false world!; White, Ibid.: 98; YouTube), text (BCW: "2 Recitativo S"). The incipit "Fasche Welt" also opens soprano solo aria 52, "Falsche Welt, dir trau ich nicht!" (False world, I do not trust you!) for the 23rd Sunday after Trinity 1726 (BCW). The preoccupation with sin also dominates the Mary Magdalena aria in the Fux Passion as well as the Bach alto aria BWV 54/1 (YouTube; both texts and White's translations, Ibid.: 100, aria discussion 99-108), 1711 text Georg Christian Lehms (BCW). The Lehms alto aria also was parodied in Bach's St. Mark Passion, BWV 247, with a Picander text, "Falsche Welt, dein schmeichelnd Küssen" (False World, thy poisonous kisses; text Emmanuel Music: No. 19; recording, YouTube). In 1731, Bach parodied the BWV 247/19 text from the 1714 Cantata 54/1 text with the same text Affect, reaching back as he would in 1733 during the Missa: Kyrie-Gloria, BWV 2321 contrafactum, to the Cantata 12 opening chorus, "Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen, for the Crucifix movement.

Bach Catholic, Poetic Influences

The year 1731 was a watershed for Bach. Having ceased weekly composition of sacred cantatas, in 1729 he had turned to directing the Collegium musicum while turning to selective parody of major vocal works, beginning with his final St. Mark Passion. Bach also began exploring the art of contrafactum with his Missa: Kyrie-Gloria, BWV 232¹ for the Dresden Court in 1733, where he found a wealth of Catholic Masses and oratorios, many derived from Vienna. He also began exploring German poetic Passion oratorios of Telemann, Handel, and Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel. Meanwhile, six Fux Sepolocro Passion oratorios are extant, the last being La Deposizione dalla croce di Gesù Cristo Salvator nostro of 1728 (White Fux Sepolcro monograph (Ibid: 169, Passion discussion 194-210 Amazon.com"Look inside."

Fux Three-Fold Authority: Liturgy, Counterpoint, Da Capo Aria

In his final section of the second chapter, "In First Obedience," White draws a broad contrast between Fux's stile antico traditional Masses and the progressive dramma per musica of his oratorios: one representing an explicit model of religious as well as musical authority, and the other affording a correlative degree of formal (and fundamentally) tonal engagement in which word-tone relationships are no less prescribed and exact" (Ibid.: 108). In "the greater part of Fux's work," "the servitude of liturgical adherence so strikingly prevails" with "a dynastic style" "intimately disclosed in Fux's Mass settings. To contemplate these settings in relation to Bach's singular response to the Latin ordinary is to countenance not only the distinction between the obligations of a corporate style and the vast meditation which BWV 232 comprises, but also the fundamental transition from musical servitude to autonomy which takes places within the boundaries if a single genre before 1750. It is this transition — and thereby a critical comprehension of Fux's music for the liturgy — which predominates in the last chapter of this book." The three-fold concept of authority [liturgy, counterpoint, Da capo aria], however, encourages a different reading of Fux's significance as a composer, not least in relation to Bach. This concept endures as a consideration (albeit differently) in the reading of Bach which follows in Chapter 3. There, too, the question of reception history is striking."

ENDNOTES

¹ Harry White, The Musical Discourse of Servitude: Authority, Autonomy and the Work-Concept in Fux, Bach, and Handel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020: 60ff); Amazon.com: "Look inside"; discussion, BCW.
² See Fux, "On the Ecclesiastical Style," in Gradus ad Parnassum, trans. and ed. Susan Wollenberg in Music Analysis II (1992: 217); also found in Bach's musical library, BCW.
³ Fux's works were catalogued by Ludwig Ritter von Köchel (1800-77, Wikipdia), who also catalogued Mozart's works, with a 2016, Vol. 1, "Fully Revised New Edition" updated by Thomas Hockradner, A Thematic Register of the Works of Johann Joseph Fux: A Fully Revised New Edition of the Registers of Ludwig Ritter von Köchel (1872), Vol. I (Frankfurt Rights) includes theoretical and pedagogical works as well as spiritual and secular dramatic works and also instrumental compositions; Harry White's review of Hochradner's first volume is found at Cambidge University Press; Hochradner supersedes the Fux Sämtliche Werke (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1959-2014), https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/166469.
⁴ See Fux Online, www.fux-online.at (https://fux-online.at/cms_seite.php), provides an overview of his works, https://fux-online.at/cms_seite.php?content=0&menu=2&lang=E.
⁵ See Janice Stockigt, Jan Dismas Zalenka: A Bohemian Musician at the Court of Dresden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001: 135), cited in White Footnote 21: 68); Amazon.com: "Look inside."
⁶ See John Butt, "The musical genre of the mass Ordinary," in Bach: Mass in B Minor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991: 1f); Zalenka "replaced mass sections absent from manuscripts at his disposal the parodies of the existing movements and sometimes even with pastiches of his own in Palestrina's style," says Butt, a practice which Bach also pursued in his adaptations of Latin. Church music (Wikipedia).
⁷ See Alberto Basso, "Antonio Lotti," in Oxford Composer Companions: J. S. Bach (OCC: JSB) ed. Malcolm Boyd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999: 271); Amazon.com.
⁸ In comparison, hear Fux's Missa Corporis Christi, YouTube, an example of Fux writing "against then grain of his fundamental instincts as a composer (which were to emulate Palestrina) and instead submitted his imagination to the majestic torpor and mediocrity of trumpets, drums and everything in between," says White (Ibid.: 75).
⁹ See "J.S. Bach Connection," in Johann Joseph Fux (Composer, Music Theorist) biography, BCW); source, OCC: JSB, "Fux, Johann Joseph: 184f).
¹⁰ Fux, Bach Da-Capo arias: within Fux's 10 oratorios (1714-28) are 150 such arias (White Ibid.: Footnote 58: 88), and "the same number in his secular dramatic works (19 operas, see "Secular compositions," Fux Wikipedia, Ibid.) while Bach composed 700 arias with repeat elements (Urform), with 170 in strict Da capo; da capo return design also is found extensively in Bach oratorio choruses (BWV 11, 244, 245, 248, 249, drammi per musica (205-207, 213-15), and a range of instrumental works (concertos, keyboard, and suites), see partial source "da capo" OCC: JSB: 130.
¹¹ Harry White, "The Sepolcro Oratorios of Fux: An assessment," in Johann Joseph Fux and the Music of the Austro-Italian Baroque, essays ed. Harry White (London: Routledge, 1992); Amazon.com: "Look inside," "Contents," Chapter 10: 213).
¹² See Susan Wollenberg, "Vienna under Joseph I and Charles VI" (1711-40), in The Late Baroque: From the 1680s to 1740, ed. George J. Buelow Music and Society (Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993: 343), Amazon.com.
¹³Aria "Fra due nembi e fra due venti": music, Oxford University Press; recording, Discogs.com: track 1-11-2; YouTube.
¹⁴ Fux Sepolcro, IMSLP; "Se pura più nel core" text (White Musical Discourse, Ibid.: 95), "Di lagrime amare" text (Ibid.: 100); White monograph, Good Reads; recording, Amazon.com.

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To Come: White Chapter 3, "The Steward of Unmeaning Art: Bach and the Musical Subject," sections dealing with Bach and the New Musicology, Restoring Bach, Autonomy and Adherence, and "Virtues of the Late Bach.

Continue on Part 3