- Johann Mattheson’s Pièces de clavecin and Das neu-eröffnete Orchestre by Margaret Seares
In this insightful monograph, Margaret Seares juxtaposes two works by the prolific author and composer Johann Mattheson (1681–1764) that were published in 1713/14—a time when both the theory and practice of music were facing great currents of change. As the book’s subtitle makes clear (‘Mattheson’s Universal Style in Theory and Practice’), Seares’s monograph is itself rooted in the theory/practice dichotomy represented respectively by Mattheson’s Das neu-eröffnete Orchestre (a treatise grounded in music criticism) and his Pièces de clavecin (a collection of twelve keyboard suites). By carefully placing these keyboard suites within the context of the theory and criticism advanced by the Orchestre, Seares succeeds in showing how the collection is, in a sense, a musical analogue to the treatise: ‘Mattheson the polemicist in music, rather than text, is therefore the focus of this book’ (p. xi).
The study begins with a biographical and environmental sketch of Mattheson’s formative years leading up to the publication of the Orchestre and the Pièces de clavecin. Drawing heavily on Mattheson’s own account of his youth and education as chronicled in his Grundlage einer Ehren-Pforte (1740), Seares highlights how from an early age his upbringing and education set Mattheson on a path towards becoming one of Germany’s greatest progressive musical thinkers and protagonists for galanterie in the early eighteenth century. It is clear that the cosmopolitan character of Hamburg, where Mattheson lived his entire life, played no small role in fashioning his views and aesthetic sensibilities. Indeed, it was in the context of Hamburg’s erudite Kaffeehaus culture that Mattheson first emerged as a public intellectual and polemicist through his role as the editor/compiler of Der Vernünfftler, a moral weekly largely based on those produced in England.
The next two chapters are dedicated to the two publications by Mattheson that form the core of the study. Seares first introduces Das neu-eröffnete Orchestre as a whole and connects some of the work’s overarching concepts to those set forth in the preceding chapter. Foremost amongst these is the notion advanced by Mattheson in Part III of the treatise that aesthetic judgement—more so than rational, academic judgement—should be the basis of musical discourse and criticism. Given the more elementary nature of the first two parts of the treatise (on the meaning of musical signs and symbols and on the principles of composition and counterpoint respectively), Seares focuses primarily on this third part of the work, and on its first chapter in particular: ‘concerning the difference between contemporary Italian, French, English, and German music’. Drawing on this source text, she presents us with a thoughtful exploration of Mattheson’s slightly confusing conception of aesthetic judgement—something Claude Palisca referred to as the author’s ‘nonsystem’ of musical style. Although this ‘nonsystem’ is rooted primarily in an awareness of the traits of different national styles, Mattheson also invokes the earlier taxonomic framework advanced by Athanasius Kircher, which distinguishes church music from theatre music, and instrumental works from vocal ones.
Seares’s chapter on the Pièces de clavecin is essentially an account of the work’s publication history. The fact that Mattheson had his Pièces de clavecin engraved and published in London reflects, in and of itself, a penchant for cosmopolitanism that extends beyond purely aesthetic matters to encompass even the production and marketing of his works. As Mattheson himself states, ‘He who desires a universal reputation must, at least in his profession, be universal’ (p. 53). On the other hand, Mattheson’s devotion to German music and his compatriot musicians also is evident, given that he had his London publisher print a German edition of the collection under the title Harmonisches Denckmahl for distribution in the German lands. This kind of apparent dualism—appealing to the virtues of foreign musical style...
