‘Classical’ Musicians Were Scrappy, Hassled, and Hungry

Carol Reynolds

Classical Music. Ah, hah! There’s a label that causes trouble. What does it mean?  Most people would answer “the music of Mozart and Beethoven, Bach and Brahms…those ‘classical’ guys.” But what does that mean?
 
Those guys wouldn’t know what to do with the label “Classical Music.” They couldn’t have envisioned their music still being around centuries into the future.

Immortality? That was the least of their concerns. They were scrappy, hassled men who struggled to get their newest sounds into the mainstream. They needed a paycheck, a hot meal, and a roof over the family’s head. Their job security was frequently zero.  
 
Success and survival for a composer were synonymous. Either a composer had commissions and a patron’s favor, or he didn’t. There was no middle ground, at least not until the 19th century, when increasing numbers of composers circumvented the patronage system and took their works directly to audiences in the relatively new “public concerts.”

We have to pull the powdered wigs off these guys, and try to see them as they were: Talented, highly trained artistic craftsmen, hunched over their desks late at night, running their hands through their [short!] hair and chewing their fingernails to the bone, desperate to get music completed and copied, or to receive a letter of endorsement from some duke to whom they’d sent a new work.
 
Socially speaking, composers were upper-class servants. Look at the constricted language Beethoven had to use in a letter from 1823, in which he was simply trying to find out how King George IV had responded to his gift of a score of Wellington’s Victory: 

In thus presuming, herewith, to submit my most obedient prayer to Your Majesty, I venture at the same time to supplement it with a second [letter]. . . . For many years the undersigned cherished the sweet wish that Your Majesty would graciously make known the receipt of his work to him; but he has not been able to boast of this happiness. . . .

In other words, “Hey, King George, what about that piece I sent you?”
 
New music is always a product of its era. And all of the music we call “classical” today was new at one point, the ink still drying on the page. Would the present age inspire those impassioned notes Beethoven scrawled on paper? So if “classical” is a misleading description, how did it come to be attached to this music? And what was the musical world really like when Mozart hurried down the cobblestone streets of Vienna, late to rehearsals?  We’ll take up those questions in our next post…

Carol Reynolds, aka Professor Carol, a former music history professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, has launched a new company, Silver Age Music. Her latest product is a multimedia course: “Discovering Music: 300 Years of Interaction in Western Music, Art, History, & Culture.” Prof. Carol now lives on a ranch, raises goats, and writes and lectures on classical music (to humans).