Music in European Capitals: The Galant Style 1720-1780 (review)

Abstract

HISTORICAL AND ANALYTICAL STUDIES Music in European Capitals: The Galant Style 1720-1780. By Daniel Heartz. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003. [xxiv, 1078. ISBN 0-393-05080-7. $100.] Music examples, color plates, illustrations, bibliography, index. With his Music in European Capitals, Daniel Heartz has completed the second volume of a trilogy on the music of the eighteenth century. (The first, Haydn, Mozart, and the Viennese School, 1740-1780, appeared from W. W. Norton in 1995.) As he observes in his preface, this book invited a rethinking of musicology's traditional conception of the eighteenth century, particularly the fixation on Bach and Handel (p. xxi) that has prevented a full and fair consideration of the emerging galant style in the early part of the century. Heartz provides precisely that consideration, covering not only the usual suspects (e.g. Giovanni Battista Sammartini, Johann Stamitz, etc.) but also composers such as Antonio Vivaldi and Jean-Philippe Rameau, who normally figure only in accounts of the late baroque. It is a welcome rethinking, and his interpretation, along with his treatment of many musicians passed over in traditional historical narratives (e.g. Pietro Antonio Locatelli, Ignaz Holzbauer, Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges) make this volume a valuable contribution to the literature on the eighteenth century. Even without Vienna and post-1780 music, Heartz faced a formidable task in organizing the 1,078 pages of text in this volume. He opted to concentrate on capital (p. xxii) rather than on countries, a decision that allows him to give the reader a close look at the inner workings of important musical centers. His organizational scheme has a symmetry and balance quite appropriate for the book's subject. Chapters 1 and 9 contain sketches of eighteenth-century galant figures: Jean-Antoine Watteau, Farinelli, Pietro Metastasio, and Charles Burney in Prologue: Rococo Idylls; and Johann Christian Bach, Giovanni Paisiello, and Luigi Boccherini in the last, entitled Three Apostles of the Galant Style. In between are seven chapters devoted to Naples, Venice, Dresden and Berlin, Stuttgart and Mannheim, Paris, Opera-Comique, and Gluck at the Opera. Though his reasons for choosing this plan are sensible and completely defensible, some things inevitably do not fit. Sammartini, for example, who 'must figure in any discussion of eighteenth-century music, chose inconveniently to live somewhere besides Naples or Venice. Heartz gets around the problem by including a segment on Sammarlini of Milan and the Symphony in the middle of the chapter on Venice. He also selects three of the century's many expatriate composers for his apostles of the galant style, which allows him to cover London, St. Petersburg, and Madrid. Other commercial cities, like Hamburg and Amsterdam, are omitted from consideration entirely because, bereft of opera, they lacked the prime driving force of musical modernity (p. xxii). That rationale signals the book's orientation. In orienting himself toward opera, Hearts takes a position not unlike that of Carl Dahlhaus, who argued not only that the institutional and aesthetic predominance of vocal music should be acknowledged, but also that it was historically inappropriate to consider eighteenth-century composition only in relation to the instrumental music of the first Viennese school (Carl Dahlhaus, ed., Neues Handbuch der Musikwissenschaft, Bd. 5, Die Musik des 18. Jahrhunderts [Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 1985], 50-56). Heartz follows through on his convictions and-drawing upon his own distinguished research-gives ample consideration to vocal music. The table of contents lists thirty-six different operas as chapter subheadings, and the discussion of each can run to significant lengths: Paisiello's Il barbiere di Siviglia gets a twelve-page musical description. Heartz also shows a slight bias toward music in Paris-again reflecting his own research interests-both in the amount of space devoted to it (288 pages, as opposed to 300 for four German cities and 228 for two Italian ones) and in the boosterism that pervades the descriptions of some French composers (e. …