Counterfactual Bach & Handel

[LeMartinPecheur]

Mrs LMP and I were listening to today's St J Passion and got talking about the differences between them and their religious works.

Conterfactual question: what do we reckon would have been the result if B and H had pursued each other's career paths - Bach bound for London via Italy and Handel staying in Germany??

Not necessarily just a musical question. For example: would Handel always have had entrepreneurial/ self-employed leanings?

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Difficult to say about Bach - would a devout Lutheran have the opportunity to write all the Church works in Protestant (CofE) London? Opportunities for Opera and concert Music-making under aristocratic patronage, perhaps? And, of course, he'd never have met Anna Magdalena, so half the works attributed to him would vanish

Could a composer survive as a self-employed entrepreneur anywhere else but 18th Century London? Mozart attempted it forty years after Bach's death without success, and Beethoven longed for a "safe" kappelmeister position seventy years later.

[richardfinegold]

Difficult to say about Bach - would a devout Lutheran have the opportunity to write all the Church works in Protestant (CofE) London? Opportunities for Opera and concert Music-making under aristocratic patronage, perhaps? And, of course, he'd never have met Anna Magdalena, so half the works attributed to him would vanish

Could a composer survive as a self-employed entrepreneur anywhere else but 18th Century London? Mozart attempted it forty years after Bach's death without success, and Beethoven longed for a "safe" kappelmeister position seventy years later.

Brahms longed for a stable Court Appointment decades after the death of Beethoven. How many Contemporary Composers crave the security of an Academic Teaching post currently? Composers have to eat as well.
Composers who were entrepreneurial needed to live in an environment where Music was valued and frequently performed in the home. There were a couple of generations of Composers in different countries who were able to supply that market. The harder part was juggling a career as a "respected serious Composer" who could write for the Concert Hall and the domestic market with equal facility. Mozart actually made a bundle of money doing just that, but met financial ruin when his market declined due to wartime considerations (and his own financial mismangement). Brahms and Dvorak both succeeded in both venues. There are many Composers whom we tend today to regard as "slight" or "salon" Composers because they did much better in the domestic market than the Concert Hall
(Clementi, Field, MacDowell, Hahn, etc).

[ahinton]

he'd never have met Anna Magdalena, so half the works attributed to him would vanish

!!!

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Indeed, rfg, but that moves away from the OP consideration of the "reversed" fortunes of Bach and Handel. My apologies for not making my point clear, but I was suggesting that in the early decades of the 18th Century, London was the only place where a composer could have succeeded as a "freelance" composer. Had Handel stayed in Germany (at a time before the market for a mass production of Music for middle-class consumption that you refer to hadn't yet taken hold) he couldn't have had the quasi-independent career he enjoyed in London.

[LeMartinPecheur]

The start of our lunchtime discussion today was (in my own head) thinking about Messiah vis-a-vis the St J Passion. Then I suggested to Mrs LMP that perhaps there's more in Messiah for the audience to go home singing and whistling, which might be at the root of his appeal to us unmusical English But is 'better chunes' an inherent difference, or something that H just picked up by his rather more strongly Italian training and his responses to the London market?

Mrs LMP then said that she thought JSB was a more spiritual composer in terms of his own personal faith. I wasn't too sure of this on at least two fronts.
1) Without checking, I'm thinking that Handel's record for practical charity, off a presumably Christian-faith root, is better documented than JSB's, even though by temperament he appears to have lacked some of the standard Christian virtues from time to time in his everyday life (threatening to throw sopranos out of windows, eg!).
2) While we know a lot about apparently theological number-systems buried in JSB's works, these might be just the workings of a very clever mind in a particular church-rooted job, without any reference to any personal faith.

OK, OK, I know I'm into all sorts of unanswerable questions and questionable assumptions, but isn't that what we do here??

[richardfinegold]

Indeed, rfg, but that moves away from the OP consideration of the "reversed" fortunes of Bach and Handel. My apologies for not making my point clear, but I was suggesting that in the early decades of the 18th Century, London was the only place where a composer could have succeeded as a "freelance" composer. Had Handel stayed in Germany (at a time before the market for a mass production of Music for middle-class consumption that you refer to hadn't yet taken hold) he couldn't have had the quasi-independent career he enjoyed in London.

Well, with respect to the early decades of the 18th Century, didn't Telemann make a go of it from Hamburg? I think he initiated some sort of subscription series for his own works

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Well, with respect to the early decades of the 18th Century, didn't Telemann make a go of it from Hamburg? I think he initiated some sort of subscription series for his own works

Yes - and was <ahem> instrumental in getting his own Music published - I think the same is true of some Italian Baroque composers at the beginnings of the Music publishing business. But Telemann always worked with the safety net of his Hamburg post & salary - Handel (like Beethoven later) had invaluable support from individual rich patrons, but was able to finance himself from the profits of public performances and a shrewd business sense - way beyond that of Telemann (whose audiences were smaller, if only because the population was smaller than Handel's in London). In short, he wouldn't have been as rich if his career had, like Bach's, been entirely in Germany.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

And the absence of having to support a family would have helped.

[doversoul1]

As for being independent, Charles Avison (1707-1770) managed pretty well up in Newcastle. Admittedly, he remained regional but I don’t think that bothered him much, as he was apparently a very wealthy man when he died. I don’t think Vivaldi had long term patrons either. An orphanage wasn’t exactly a rich patron. Writing operas was, I think, more business than serving a patron in his case.

It’s hard to picture Bach living amongst the patrons and the audience Handel had, but was this the consequence and not their innate characters? Musically, I’m sure they’d have done just as wonderfully, since both seem to have been very much adept at meeting any demand put on them. On the other hand, Handel obviously thought going to Italy was essential but Bach didn’t (or maybe he wanted to but couldn’t?), which sort of suggests their different interest and intentions at the start of their careers, which may not have worked so well if their locations had been reverse.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Wasn't Avison (like Telemann and Bach) employed all his life as an Organist, dovers?

[MickyD]

Yes, he was - in fact, he began at St John's and then also picked up a second position at St Nicholas' (which is now the cathedral in Newcastle). He organised a lot of subscription concerts too, which seem to do him rather well.

[doversoul1]

Wasn't Avison (like Telemann and Bach) employed all his life as an Organist, dovers?

He was. I suppose what I meant was that Avison wasn’t composing to meet the demand of powerful patrons and rich supporters. Instead, he seems to have had a very active music business which (this is just my guess) included composing music. Also, wasn’t Avison (just) an organist and not a music director which Telemann and Bach were?

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

He was. I suppose what I meant was that Avison wasn’t composing to meet the demand of powerful patrons and rich supporters. Instead, he seems to have had a very active music business which (this is just my guess) included composing music.

Yes, you're right - "independent" isn't the right word for either circumstance; composers at this time could only write what they wanted if they had the security of (and the duties) of another job with a regular income (much the same as rfg mentions with those contemporary composers who have "day jobs", which most of them can't "give up"). If those duties proved too irksome, they then had to rely upon the whims of wealthy patrons - and the income from events attractive to the growing middle-class audience. I don't think that such opportunities were as readily available to a composer in "Germany" (because of the individual states and the smaller populations of the major cities) as they were to Handel in London. So, if Handel had not moved from Hanover, his career and output would have been completely different from what he actually did achieve.

(Tallis & Byrd's income from their publishing monopoly must have brought some welcome funds into their coffers, I would imagine?)

[MickyD]

An excellent and enjoyable survey of musical patronage through the ages is to be found in the late Christopher Hogwood's book 'Music at Court', originally published by the Folio Society, and which now can seemingly be found at the ridiculous price of a penny on Amazon! Well worth reading.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Music-at-Court-Christopher-Hogwood/dp/B0006D15LO/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1427703244&sr=1-1&keywords=Music+at+court