Chapter 9Benevolent Machinery: Techniques of Sympathy in Early German Melodrama

Matthew Head

In truth, there is nothing enlarges the mind to every social and laudable purpose, so much as this delightful intercourse

with harmony. They who feel not this divine effect, are strangers to its noblest influence: for whatever pretensions

they may otherwise have to a relish or knowledge of its laws, without this criterion of the musical soul, all other

pretended signatures of genius we may look upon as counterfeit.

Charles Avison, An Essay on Musical Expression (1752)

This chapter sets melodrama in the perhaps unlikely context of later eighteenth-century benevolence, conceived as a continuum from sympathetic identification with the misfortunes of others, to practical and financial assistance for the (deserving) distressed. I say “perhaps unlikely” because benevolence does not figure in existing histories of melodrama, which are more concerned with what melodrama is than with what it does: with melodrama as a genre, rather than the cultural work undertaken by a theatrical technique. This emphasis is an understandable reaction to melodrama’s Cinderella status in the history of opera; to research melodrama as a genre is to shore up its identity, to invoke the Classical decorum of genre as a construct and so to lend the technique of orchestral music with spoken text a gravity denied it when treated as (variously) an experimental, hybrid, occasional, or even failed practice. Mozart’s professed fascination with the melodramas of Georg Benda (“I carry them about with me”), his emulation of them in the unfinished Zaide (1780), and his subsequent abandonment of the technique, leave a long shadow in the history of opera.1 The death blow for melodrama is delivered by the story of Mozart’s transformation of it. The idea that in Die Zauberflöte, Mozart transformed melodrama into extended orchestral prose accompanying Tamino’s spiritual Enlightenment at the gates of the Temple of Wisdom validates the technique for Romantic (even Wagnerian) aesthetics. As Parker and Abbate have it, “against the gradual emergence of Tamino’s enlightenment, Mozart has also plotted the emergence of music: from speech, to Melodram-like accompanied recitative, and then to fully fledged [orchestral] song.”2

Without dismissing that redemptive and developmental reading, this chapter explores melodrama in an earlier social context and through a hitherto unknown example by a forgotten composer: Gemälde der Natur, a monodrama with words and music by Maria Magdalena Kauth. This piece was performed and published in the wake of floods in Linz and was intended to raise funds (the title page informs us) “for the benefit of the unfortunate poor affected by the [flood] water” (see figure 1).3 Initially, the charitable purpose of this piece, its

1 “The piece I saw was Benda’s ‘Medea.’ He has composed another one, ‘Ariadne auf Naxos,’ and both are really excellent. You know that of all the Lutheran Kapellmeisters Benda has always been my favourite, and I like those two works of his so much that I carry them about with me. ... I think that most operatic recitatives should be treated in this way—and only sung occasionally, when the words can be perfectly expressed by the music.” Mozart letter to his father, Mannheim, 12 November 1778; in Emily Anderson, ed. and trans., The Letters of Mozart and His Family, 3rd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1997), 631.2 Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker, A History of Opera: The Last 400 Years (London: Allan Lane, 2012), 163.3 Das Gemälde der Natur in Form eines Monodram. Musik und Text verfertigt bey Gelegenheit der Wasserüberschwemmuing in Linz, und aufgeführt zum Besten der dasigen durchs Wasser unglücklich

short sermon-like text presenting a Christian idyll of nature and family, and performance in the public sphere, might be thought to distinguish it in kind from the models of Benda, those Shakespearian monologues for characters from Classical myth, produced for the Gotha court, and, however in thrall to the sublime of terror, involving a forensic dissection of their heroines’ states of mind. But gradually Kauth’s Gemälde der Natur changed my understanding of the pieces from which it appeared to differ. Specifically, its charitable mission and commemoration of natural disaster turn on (notions of) benevolent and sympathetic feeling endemic to the period, and targeted by the melodramatic technique. The mechanical element announced in my formulation ‘benevolent machinery’ seeks to recover a historical specificity, a theory that music-theatrical performances worked on the mind and body of the audience in direct and predictable ways: sensory stimuli, the theory predicted, set the nervous system in motion, caused sympathetic resonance, and triggered morally laudable identification. This identification was the engine of benevolent impulses and actions, opening out onto the period’s giddy optimism about charity, poor relief and doing good. Needless to say, I do not treat this theory of music’s effects, nor the culture of benevolence, as unproblematic, but I do attempt to bring them to light as contested Enlightenment ideals rather than dismiss them out of hand.

[INSERT FIGURE 1 AROUND HERE]Maria Magdalena’s Gemälde der Natur, published by subscription in 1789, the year of floods in Linz for which it was a fundraiserBenevolence (as specialists hardly need reminding) achieved peculiar centrality in the

self-imagining and practices of the later eighteenth century – the moment in which melodrama came into being. Dorinda Outram launches her finely illustrated Panorama of Enlightenment with nine archetypes of the period, among which features “the benevolent man.” In comments that go to the heart of this chapter, she observes that “benevolence was one of the central values of the Enlightenment. It was closely linked with ‘feeling’, that is, sympathy and compassion for the objects of benevolence.” Her chosen image, Jacques-Louis David’s “Belisarius asking for alms” (1781 or 1785), shows the eponymous military hero now blinded and reduced to begging. He is relieved by a Roman matron who places coins in his upturned helmet, the artist capturing a moment of emotional and financial release. The image highlights how the social work of charity did not end with giving alms. As Outram notes, “benevolence ... was a way of marking the distinctions in wealth and status between giver and recipient” – it articulated difference, including (as Outram is no doubt aware) gender difference.4 If David figures benevolence as “the perfect virtue of the middle class” (the Roman matron appears of middling rank), he also establishes equivalence between giving alms and fighting for one’s country, an equivalence that rests on shared ideas of selflessness and at least some notion of patriotism. The existence of a painting on this theme also highlights the role of artistic representation in regulating the meaning of benevolence. David’s didactic canvas enacts a discerning benevolence of its own: in its implicit advocacy for the welfare of returning military heroes, and its apparent conviction that the responsibility for their welfare falls, at least in part, to charitable women.

That conviction was widespread, Amanda Vickery reports of the English context, with gentlewomen participating “in a proliferation of charitable institutions through which [they] could garner a new kind of public standing and radiate something of that public spirit revered by their brothers.” In penetrating terms that highlight the transactional character of doing good – its benefit to both the benefactor and the beneficiary –Vickery observes that

gewordenen Armen wie auch gegenwärtig im Clavierauszug herausgegeben und Ihrer Koeniglichen Hoheit der Prinzessin Friedericke von Preussen Pröbstin zu Quedlinburg, allerunterthänigst zugeeignet von Maria Magdalena Kauth gebohrne Gräff (Berlin: n. Publ., 1789). 4 Dorinda Outram, Panorama of Enlightenment (London: Thames & Hudson, 2006), 19.

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“the institutionalization of fashionable benevolence constructed altogether new arenas for the expression of female conviviality and officiousness.”5 In other words, benevolence was both pleasurable and granted status. Writing of the staged charity events of the bluestocking Elizabeth Montague, Elizabeth Eger speaks wryly of the payback delivered by good deeds:

Montagu perceived her acts of charity and assistance to the lower classes as a social duty, and perhaps also, more pragmatically, as a matter of good management. Moreover, there is a sense in which her charitable ambitions were inextricably linked to her act of self-fashioning as a woman of society, a bluestocking hostess with cultural and financial capital. Her benevolence was often extremely public, as can be seen in Fanny Burney’s description of her gift of an “annual breakfast in front of her new mansion, of roast beef and plum pudding, to all the chimney sweepers of the Metropolis.”.6

The Earl of Shaftesbury’s ideal of disinterested benevolence notwithstanding, few in the wake of Thomas Hobbes or Bernhard Mandeville – those notorious theorists of innate human selfishness – contended that charity was a one-way street. Future compensation aside, good deeds for David Hume writing in 1777 ensured “inward peace of mind, consciousness of integrity, a satisfactory review of our own conduct; these are circumstances, very requisite to happiness, and will be cherished and cultivated by every honest man, who feels the importance of them.”7 The pleasures of benevolence, far from a guilty secret, were part of its theorisation. The verdict of two art critics on such iconic images of benevolence as Gainsborough’s Cottage Girl with Dog and Pitcher (1785), Charity Relieving Distress (1784), and A Lady and her Children Relieving a Cottager (1781) are chillingly on target: “[such images] while eliciting sympathy, also reminded the public of its own capacity for carrying out good works, the existence of the poor being regarded as an enduring opportunity for philanthropy rather than a problem to be eradicated.”8

For women, this opportunity offered unassailable occasions for self-assertion, public agency, and authorship. In the German context, it is probably no coincidence that the first epistolary novel of sentiment published by a woman – Sophie von La Roche’s Die Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim (1771) – features a heroine whose exemplary womanhood is conveyed primarily through her benevolence.9 Following the eponymous heroine’s undoing – she suffers a sham marriage to a vicious rake – she lives out her days in charitable and educational projects for children, domestics, and families ruined by profligacy. In the words of her unflinching editor, James Lynn, “Sophie Sternheim delights in the reported joy of a poor family at the coins she has tossed at them from her passing coach, and we probably lose count of the number of times we are offered the sigh of hands bathed in the tears of grateful recipients of her kindness and instruction.”10 Rarely, Lynn implies, has benevolence weighed so heavily on a reader. True to pietistic conviction about the “the 5 Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven: Yale Nota Bene, 2003), 10.6 Elizabeth Eger, “Luxury, Industry and Charity: Bluestocking Culture Displayed,” in Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods, ed. Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 190-206, here 195.7 Cited from Carolyn D. Williams, “‘The Luxury of Doing Good:’ Benevolence, Sensibility, and the Royal Humane Society,” in Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Roy Porter and Marie Mulvey Roberts (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 77-107, here 85. Williams’s essay is also the source of my reference to Hobbes, Shaftesbury and Mandeville.8 Michael Rosenthal and Martin Myrone, ed., Gainsborough (London: Tate, 2002), 224.9 [Sophie von La Roche], Die Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim, trans. as The History of Lady Sophia Sternheim, ed. James Lynn (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1991). This edition is based on the contemporary translation by Joseph Collyer (d. 1776). 10 Editor’s introduction to La Roche, Lady Sophia Sternheim, ed. Lynn, xxii.

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regenerative and redemptive effects of living for others rather than oneself,” La Roche reportedly donated the profits of her novel to a bereaved friend.11

To begin to understand the broad diffusion of ideals of benevolence, it is useful to return to Outram’s gallery of archetypes. The figure of the “benevolent man” at once discloses and obscures the explanatory power of sympathy in the period’s self-imagining; benevolence seems to link rather than distinguish Outram’s period archetypes. “The Reader,” for example, pictured in candlelit communion with a well-thumbed book in David’s portrait of “Mme Buron” (1769), testifies, as Outram has it, to the centrality of reading in the transmission and internalisation of “the major works of the Enlightenment.”12 But silent and solitary reading also fostered imaginative absorption in, and sympathetic identification with, the trials, misfortunes, and moral triumphs of real and fictional characters that characterised the consumption of literature, painting and music in the “age” or “culture” of sensibility.13 “The Liberal Monarch,” who Outram illustrates with an image of Emperor Joseph II of Austria helping a farmer to plough a field, involves a related idea of sympathetic presence across a social gulf. Even Outram’s “Bureaucrat” – a perhaps unpromising archetype for today’s management-weary readers – looks out, in Goya’s portrait of the Spanish reforming minister Gaspar Jovellanos, as a figure both evincing and deserving of compassion. Not “the splendors” but “the cares” of office are conveyed in Jovellanos’s “quiet and reflective” pose.14 His implicit benevolence stimulates the viewer’s own fellow feeling, some notion of sympathy temporarily dissolving (even as it rhetorically validates) the gulf between artist, his subject, and the viewer.

Sympathy (Mitgefühl) was central to the now more familiar concept of sensibility (Empfindung and related words such as Empfindsamkeit). Sensibility, denoting “the receptivity of the senses,” and predicated on “the psychoperceptual scheme explained and systematized by Newton and Locke,” invested fellow feeling with elevated moral value, despite the mechanical basis of the underlying physiological theory of the sensitivity of the nerves.15 Formerly constrained by scholars as style categories within relatively autonomous histories of literature and music, sensibility is now understood in period terms as a human capacity to be moved, one that allowed the subject to enter into (often imaginary) relationships of feeling with nature, art, and others.16

This community-forming potential of sensibility has, though, perhaps been obscured by scholarly habits and disciplinary conventions. The venerable Marxist diagnosis of literary Empfindsamkeit as a bourgeois flight from the collective into private, politically impotent subjectivity in the twilight of feudalism has tended to inhibit study of sensibility as a binding

11 Ibid., xxv.12 Outram, Panorama of Enlightenment, 18.13 The classic study of sympathetic identification is Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and the Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980; reprint, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988). For an application to theatre history, see Stefano Castelvecchi, Sentimental Opera: Questions of Genre in the Age of Bourgeois Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 150-7, 178-9. The locution “age of sensibility” was coined by Northrop Frye, “Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility,” ELH 23/2 (June 1956), 144-52; G. J. Barker-Benfield argues for a “culture” in The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 14 Outram, Panorama of Enlightenment, 19-20.15 Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility, xvii.16 That earlier habit dies hard. James Webster’s expounds periodization based on formal features of music as a form of current knowledge; see his “The Eighteenth Century as a Music-Historical Period,” Eighteenth-Century Music 1 (2004), 46-60. Inevitably, sensibility appears as a short-lived phase in that formulation.

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force in an emerging public sphere.17 But sensibility was always about relationships – no less so when it appeared to take refuge in interiority. As Annette Richards has explored, “solitude” was sometimes recommended to young German artists, and appears as a literary and musical topos in the 1770s and 1780s.18 The idea, though, was more dialectical than Richards concedes: arguably the point was to make being alone a collective experience based around shared feelings. The solitary person entered passionately into a relationship with nature and with his/her own interiority, eventually communicating experiences with others in the first person, and so making the private public, and the solitary collective. Solitude itself tended to involve passionate attachments to others, an ultimately unattainable beloved (in Werther’s case) or, for young ladies at music, a clavichord, apostrophised in songs “to my clavichord” as a communicative, if mechanical, second Self.19

In traditional music histories, the construct of empfindsamer Styl (“sensitive style”), associated with the keyboard music of C.P.E. Bach, has also tended to foreclose discussion of sensibility, because of its formalistic conviction that sensibility resides in the score as something to be analysed like a fugue. The putative style proves difficult to displace, however, persisting in no less authoritative a venue as The New Grove Dictionary, notwithstanding Darrell Berg’s demonstration that the adjective empfindsam was barely, if ever, used to describe musical materials in the eighteenth century, but only referred to human experience.20

Indeed, not one style but music more broadly was privileged in the culture of sensibility for its power, as Heinrich Christoph Koch put it, “[to] awaken noble feelings” and foster “noble resolutions” – the later formulation hinting at the social work of feeling:

Music is a fine art which has the intention of awakening noble feelings [Empfindungen] in us. Feelings lie dormant in man’s nature and are properly aroused only by certain natural causes. ... Feelings bring about resolutions: pleasure prompts us to seek certain possession of the good which produced it, and fear causes us to take measures to prevent the dreaded misfortune from befalling us. ... Thus if the fine arts make use of their special power to have the feelings they arouse inspire noble resolutions, to affect the education and ennoblement of the heart, then they serve their highest purpose and show themselves in their proper worth.”21

17 Distancing himself from such analysis – in which sensibility is more an obstacle than a binding force in the emergence of a bourgeois public sphere – Gerhard Sauder documents the importance of “harmony, sympathy, compassion, and sincerity”; see Sauder, Empfindsamkeit: Voraussetzungen und Elemente (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1974), cited in Jochen Barkhausen, Die Vernunft des Sentimentalismus: Untersuchungen zur Entstehung der Empfindsamkeit und empfindsamen Komödie (Tübingen: G. Narr, 1983), 85. 18 Annette Richards, The Free Fantasia and the Musical Picturesque (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), chapter 5 (“Sentiment undone: solitude and the clavichord cult”), 145-82.19 On songs “An mein Klavier,” see J.W. Smeed, “‘Süssertönendes Klavier:’ Tributes to the Early Piano in Poetry and Song,” Music and Letters 66/3 (July 1985), 228-40; Richards, The Free Fantasia, 155-71; and Matthew Head, Sovereign Feminine: Music and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 52-3. 20 Darrell Berg, “Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach und die ‘empfindsame Weise,’” in Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach und die europäische Musikkultur des mittleren 18. Jahrhunderts, ed. Hans Joachim Marx (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997), 93-105.21 Heinrich Christoph Koch, Introductory Essay on Composition, vol. 2, part 1 (1787), in Aesthetics and the Art of Musical Composition in the German Enlightenment, trans. and ed. Nancy Kovaleff Baker and Thomas Christensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 144. On music’s elevated place in the culture of sensibility, see Matthew Head, “Fantasia; Sensibility,” in The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory, ed. Danuta Mirka, www.oxfordhandbooks.com, 1-30.

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Koch’s confidence about music as a force of good probably reflected its widespread charitable use. Charles Burney, embarking on his European tours in June 1770, validated the art through “the humane and important purposes to which it has been applied ... in order to open the purses of the affluent for the support of the distressed.” In Burney’s witty formulation, the fabled power of music over the passions, and the body, is mediated in modern Britain through charitable donation: “many an orphan is cherished by its [music’s] influence. The pangs of child-birth are softened and rendered less dangerous and dreadful by the effects of its power. It helps, perhaps, to stop the ravages of a disease which attacks the very source of life.”22 Tugging on heart- and purse-strings, music found validation under the sign of charity. Morally controversial in themselves, music and money were rendered unassailable as (curiously equivalent) currencies of benevolence. In the annals of the Viennese Tonkünstler-Societät (Society for Composers), founded by Florian Gassmann in 1771, the history of the then emerging “imaginary museum of musical works” was linked to the “sovereign” value of charity, fund raising concerts at Easter and Christmas (for the families of deceased musicians) including massed performances of Haydn’s oratorios.23 In Hamburg, C.P.E. Bach directed charity concerts in 1776 and 1777, organised by the Society of Musical Amateurs and the city’s Masonic lodges respectively. Looking ahead to the now celebrated concerts of 1785-86 for the “Medizinische Armeninstitute” (“Medical Society for the Poor”) – celebrated in part because they included the Credo of J. S. Bach’s B-Minor Mass – these earlier benevolent occasions included Handel’s Messiah (in Klopstock’s translation) and Bach’s oratorio Die Israeliten in der Wüste.24

As Koch’s locution suggests, however, music was directed in the first instance not to practical benevolence so much as to enhancing social and ethical passions. This ethical theory of music can seem insubstantial but proceeds systematically; it is based on the premise that virtue is regulated by the heart and arises not from “cold reason” (so styled) but from character as a dominant arrangement of feelings and sensations. The article “sentiment” (Empfindung) from Sulzer’s General Theory of the Fine Arts (1771-74) – a standard encyclopaedia of the period to which Koch refers – gives a more detailed account. Sulzer distinguishes sentiment from pleasing or displeasing sensations: “taken in a moral sense, sentiment is a feeling that through constant repetition and reinforcement, becomes the cause of certain inner and external actions.” Sentiments (and here the term evades translation) are feelings for or towards others that motivate behaviour: Sulzer’s examples are “honor, integrity, humanity, patriotism, etc.” (Later in the same article he adds “justice and

22 Charles Burney, The Present State of Music in France and Italy: or, The Journal of a Tour through those Countries (London: T. Becket, 1771), 4-5. Charity is a large and under-researched area of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century musical practice, better known today in English than in German contexts. See Denis Arnold, “Charity Music in Eighteenth-Century Dublin,” The Galpin Society Journal 21 (1968), 162-74; and Nicholas Temperley, “Croft and The Charity Hymn,” The Musical Times 119/1624 (June 1978), 539-41.23 Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). The notion of charity as the “sovereign” value of the period is from Sarah Lloyd, “Pleasing Spectacles and Elegant Dinners: Conviviality, Benevolence, and Charity Anniversaries in Eighteenth-Century London,” Journal of British Studies 41/1 (January 2002), 23-57. The intersection of charity and the rise of a musical canon is noted by William Weber, with reference to Handel commemoration concerts, in The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-Century England: A Study in Canon, Ritual, and Ideology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).24 Barbara Wiermann, ed., Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: Dokumente zu Leben und Wirken aus der zZeitgenössischen Hamburgischen Presse (1767-1790), Leipziger Beiträge zur Bach-Forschung 4 (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2000), 449-50 and 469-70. The concerts of 1776 and 1777 are noted in Hans-Günter Ottenberg, C.P.E. Bach, trans. Philip J. Whitmore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 123.

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uprighteousness” and “freedom” to the list.)25 When not a matter of sensation alone, “feeling” was invested with what can seem exorbitant moral significance because behaviour is seen to flow from it.

These over-arching beliefs are writ small in a favoured topos of the culture of sensibility: opening one’s heart to others. No doubt, there was a religious backdrop to this ideal. In his article on sentiment, Sulzer referred approvingly to the poet Bodmer’s representation of “Noah’s overwhelming fear of God and his consequent guiltlessness and divine soul.” In offering this praise, Sulzer was not (only) affirming the primacy of feeling for God, as a component of faith, but figures Noah’s “overwhelming fear” as itself “divine.” Thus feeling becomes the basis not only of a relationship with God but of merging and exchange with another. Indeed, Sulzer listed a series of such exchanges through feeling: “every sensible person could identify with” Noah’s “overwhelming fear of God;” Bodmer, too, “opens his own heart,” and, in doing so, “we can see for ourselves the most vivid effects of these feelings, and we can open our own heart to his so that it may be moved by the same feelings and inflamed by the same fire.”26 Today, this ideal of a subjective merging with others through the common currency of feeling is discussed primarily in relation to the iconic figure of (female) virtue in distress – popularised in literary and theatrical contexts by Samuel Richardson’s novels Pamela and Clarissa – an emphasis not without basis in the period. Referring to Alceste, probably in the five-act German-language version by Anton Schweitzer and Christoph Wieland for the Weimar court (1771), Koch confessed, not without pride, to feeling love and shedding tears for the suffering, virtuous heroine:

We see Alceste between anguish and hope; we see her form her noble resolution having heard the utterance of the oracle. She comes dear to us, we love her. In brief, after the most tender parting from her husband and her children, we see her finally die. We shed many tears over her.27

Koch’s tears suggest not only his intimacy and sympathy with Alceste, the opening of his heart to sympathy, but his endorsement of her character and conduct. The moral beauty of her sentiments was rewarded with identification, and the critic’s weeping approvingly mirrored Alceste’s own -- that “tender parting from her husband and her children. Koch’s tears are evaluative and binding. The earliest German melodramas were born of this context. Indeed, Alceste was a pioneering work in the history of German theatre and opera, essentially an opera seria in German with an expanded role for accompanied recitatives, reflecting the local preoccupation with the boundaries between music and speech. This was not Schweitzer’s only theatrical innovation in the early 1770s. In 1772 the Weimar court’s theatrical troupe, directed by Abel Seyler, premiered his Pgymalion, a translation of Rousseau’s founding text. This, the first known German melodrama, is lost; but if Georg Benda’s surviving scores are anything to go by Schweitzer would have drawn heavily on those accompanied recitatives for his orchestral writing. (A contemporary review of Pgymalion praised the “transitions from the violent to tender,” a remark suggestive of the metrical and modulatory licences of orchestrated recitative.)28 Benda was Schweitzer’s colleague and rival in Gotha (to which Seyler’s troupe defected following the catastrophic fire of 1774). Rivalry is suggested by Benda’s setting of Johann Christoph Brandes’s libretto

25 Johann Georg Sulzer, “Sentiment [Empfindung],” Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (1771-74), trans. Christensen in Aesthetics and the Art of Musical Composition, 27-32, here 28 and 31. 26 Sulzer, “Sentiment,” trans. Christensen in Aesthetics and the Art of Musical Composition, 31.27 Koch, Introductory Essay on Composition, trans. Baker in Aesthetics and the Art of Musical Composition, 150.28 Gustav Friedrich Wilhelm Grossmann in Magazin zur Geschichte des Deutschen Theaters [1773], ed. J.J.A. von Hagen, cited in Thomas Bauman, North German Opera in the Age of Goethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 102.

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Ariadne auf Naxos – a melodrama that Schweitzer was apparently working on when his score was destroyed in the Weimar blaze.29 Even composing a melodrama mediated relationships.

The Greek mythological character Ariadne was a venerable subject of theatrical representation within the genre of tragedy, but substantial alteration to her customary characterisation as morally flawed demi-goddess was needed to render her a subject of sympathetic identification, a character who could resonate with pathetic scenes of female distress emerging in middle-class drama and opera.30 Brandes – writing for his wife, the celebrated actress Charlotte – focused on a single sympathy-rousing “moment” in Ariadne’s story: her realisation that Theseus, her mortal lover, has abandoned her. In this way, Brandes condenses the entire myth into a set piece within the culture of sensibility: a scene of farewell. First, as Ariadne lies sleeping, Theseus struggles with his decision to abandon the women who has saved his life and sacrificed everything (her family, her homeland) to be with him. Then Ariadne wakes into a blushing morning, the beautiful landscape conveying her experience of love. The spotlight falls, forensically, on her thoughts and feelings. With covert didacticism, she models sympathetic concern in her anxious fantasies that absent Theseus has fallen foul of ravening beasts. With dreadful inevitability, it dawns on her that she is alone – a moment of realisation given extraordinary emotional emphasis by both playwright and composer. The history of her relationship with Theseus is neatly contained as reminiscence, and here Ariadne discloses (as if, like Pamela, writing an intimate letter), “how this breast thrilled! How it heaved, full of love and sympathy” – a somatisation of feeling worthy of a sentimental heroine.31 The anticlassical way in which Ariadne internalises landscape as a vocabulary of feeling, together with her movement between dreaming sleep, daydream and fantasy, memory, the regretful recollection and solitary communion with her distant mother, and her descent (it is implied) into a madness (in which the Classical underworld appears through sublime nature) internalise the theatrical, rendering melodrama an intensive technique for knowing – and, crucially being empathetically engaged with – the sufferings of another. Performing the limits of language to represent extreme sensibility, Ariadne’s speech dissolves into ungrammatical exclamations as she approaches the edge of the cliff: “‘My strength – the storm – overwhelming – gods – help! – help! – Theseus! – gods! – Theseus!’ [She is struck by lightning. She screams, and leaps from the rock into the sea].”32

A few years after the premiere, by which time Ariadne was widely performed and translated, the Berlin Kapellmeister Johann Friedrich Reichardt – a chief exponent of sensibility as a mode of musical criticism and a subscriber to the published score of Kauth’s Gemälde, turned his lightly theoretical attention to the vogue of suffering heroines (and heroes) in the pages of his Musikalischer und Künstler-Almanach auf das Jahr 1783. Under the heading of Empfindsamkeit (a “quickness” and “easiness” to be moved that differs from “mawkish sentimentality:” Empfindelei because it is unfeigned), Reichardt – focusing on suffering heroines in particular – explored the artistic circumstances in which audiences are willing to “set selfishness aside.”33 Indeed, art has advantages (he reassured his readers),

29 Thomas Bauman, “Schweitzer, Anton,” OxfordMusicOnline, accessed 5 July 2014.30 On Gotter’s reworking of Medea as more mother than witch, see Jason Geary, The Politics of Appropriation: German Romantic Music and the Ancient Greek Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 108. 31 My translation based on the dual language (French and German) version with music for keyboard published by Leipzig: Schwickert, n.d., at http://imslp.org/wiki/File:PMLP132583-benda-ariadne_ger.pdf32 Ibid.33[Johann Friedrich Reichardt], Musikalischer und Künstler-Almanach auf das Jahr 1783 (Alethinopel: n. publ., c.1783), 101-34, here 122 and 101 respectively; my translation.

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because we can suspend any real concern over our own safety and enter more fully into the sufferings of others. In an uncharacteristically dialectical moment, Reichardt discovered that “self-love always mixes with the impulse to pity.”34 Emphasising that “virtue in distress” (“leidende Unschuld”) pulls most strongly on the heartstrings, he figured imaginative identification with “the unfortunate” not as a vicarious thrill at another’s suffering but as ethically elevated sympathy:

Our hearts go out most to the unfortunate, the harassed, and particularly the virtuous in distress. Among all human feelings none is stronger – by virtue of [our innate] selfishness [Eigenliebe] – than the feeling of sympathy [des Mitleids]. No sooner do we see someone suffering, than our attention is roused, our imagination puts us with them in the same situation, it is us, [and] as if we took their place; we feel their pains, we tremble for the danger they face, our heart beats with their hopes, we feel happy at their rescue.35

In so far as Reichardt explains the point in this essay, the ethical value of imaginative identification arises from the psychological origins of that identification not (as Classical poetics might predict) from an intensification of theatrical catharsis: we enter into the suffering of others through “the drives of benevolence, love and friendship” (“Treiebn des Wohlwollens, der Liebe und Freundschaft”).36 Reichardt advises, though, that there are limits to our sympathy. The representation of physical agony always disgusts, and the fledgling artist should seek to portray “the sensitive soul, according to a certain ideal of greatness or virtue.” Sympathy is not freely given, then, but is extended conditionally to the spiritual (in this context meaning “mental”) suffering of virtuous characters – particularly women. In other words, benevolence is part of an ethical economy: it can be withheld as well as granted, and it constitutes a gift (of validation) in which not all suffering is equal.

Notwithstanding her mythic and antique grandeur, the “new” Ariadne of Brandes’s libretto fulfils the conditions required by eighteenth-century sympathy through her recognisably bourgeois femininity – beautiful and constant, she suffers for love alone. Benda’s score, that punctuates the spoken text, also mediates Ariadne’s elevated social standing and effects of “artless” immediacy and realism associated at this time with bourgeois characters. Many musical conventions endemic to the utterance of the high-born or mythological characters of opera seria are abandoned – conventions concerned with unity, closed form, ceremonial framing, and rhetorical repetition, which signified elevated status and authority. While basing his technique on the harmonically advanced medium of orchestrated recitative, associated with the mental turmoil of heroes and heroines, Benda shifts the focus of representation onto Ariadne’s subjectivity, the music a soundtrack of her “sensitive soul,” unfolding in something like real time.37

Conceptualisations of the “soul” (often a synonym for mind) and of how to represent it changed rapidly in this period; Benda’s technique is specific to his German context and the 1770s. Arguably, the basic premise is that neither words nor music are adequate to represent sensibility, mind, or soul. The privileged third term – belonging to both but also to neither – was the human voice: the sole authentic medium of human presence and subjectivity. (Music historians, who have long dwelt on the aesthetic “problem” of instrumental music in the later eighteenth century – that is, the complaint that music alone aroused feelings but could not tell the audience what the feelings concerned – may take comfort in contemporary complaints

34 [Reichardt], Musikalischer und Künstler-Almanach,102.35 Ibid., 101.36 Ibid., 106.37 For an overview of the function of music in melodrama, see Sarah Hibberd and Nanette Nielsen, “Music in Melodrama: ‘the Burden of Ineffable Expression?’” Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Film 29/2 (Winter 2002), 30-9.

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about writing as an incomplete, because silent, record of the “soul”). Melodrama is a technique that seeks the third term. Benda’s music is first and foremost tailored around the grammar and rhetorical tone of Ariadne’s speech – acting as a sonorous grammar, marking the breaks, continuities, and inflections of prose clauses and sentences, commas, questions and exclamations. The implication is that Ariadne’s utterance is the stuff of her “soul,” her passionate declamation a truth unto itself (not a wordy linguistic code offering, within the limits of written language, a glimpse of invisible interiority). In more extended melodic passages accompanying not declamation but gesture and acting, Benda employs music to make sensibility audible, to make feeling sound forth. To do so, he employs recognisable “types” of material with strong, affective, bodily but also narrative connotations – materials associated with (for example) love, farewell, heroism, tears, indignation, anguish, and sleep. These signs, though as conventional as words, were experienced through their vocally-inspired instrumental performance as natural and transparent seeming to convey knowledge of Ariadne’s sensibility without mediation. This beautiful illusion of the immediacy of voice – speaking, singing, or simulated instrumentally – is a defining feature of music as a trope and aesthetic ideal in the culture of sensibility; without it, melodrama in this early phase makes little sense.

Though employing a somewhat different music-theatrical technique, one that seeks to paint images in the mind’s eye, Kauth’s Gemälde resonates with the birth of melodrama in the culture of sensibility. The story of the piece begins soon after midday on 28 January 1789 with the sudden (if anticipated) breaking of ice on the thickly-frozen Danube, which ran through Linz. Not just the harsh winter but the sudden warming made the ice flows particularly damaging. The resulting floods hit the pages of the next issue of the Wiener Zeitung:

From Linz, it is reported that the ice of the Danube broke between 1pm and 2pm on 28 January, and the bridge was instantly washed away. So little ice remained by evening that the river could be crossed by boat. But next day, the ice-flows increased again, and the river was so swollen that it overflowed the banks, and on the 30th already penetrated the town’s upper water gates. Similar reports come from all river areas. In sum, the sudden breaking of the thickly frozen rivers caused considerable damage to pasture, bridges, mills, and ships.38

As the journalist implies, floods were all too common and Linz was not uniquely affected. (Indeed, 1789 was not the worst year of the decade, with wide-spread flooding in 1784 and 1786.) But flood commemoration, as Kauth may have known, was part of the city’s identity: Linz is distinguished as the site of the first permanent high-water record, from 1501, a marble plaque recording the peak of flood water.39 That still-surviving plaque, in which “Linz” and “the past” are constituted through the memory of natural disaster, chimes with Rousseau’s hypothesis that “man becomes social because of needs arising from shortages and natural disasters.”40 Unfortunately, Kauth’s own identity is barely known beyond her few

38 Anon., ‘Inländische Begebenheiten,’ Wiener Zeitung 10 (Wednesday, 4 February 1789): 265-7. 39 Roman Sandgruber, ‘Hochwasser in Oberösterreich,’ in Oberösterreichische Nachrichten 16 August 2008, http://www.ooegeschichte.at/themen/wir-oberoesterreicher/wir-oberoesterreicher/hochwasser-in-oberoesterreich/ accessed 10 June 2014. Today, research into historical floods affecting conurbations along the Danube is pursued in the names of both local history and global warming. For an example of the local-history angle, see Johann Eggerstorfer, ‘Hochwasser 2013 – ein Jahrhunderthochwasser?’ in Gemeindenachrichten: Aschach an der Donau [a local government newsletter] November 2013 (Aschach: Oliver Grünseis, 2013), 9-10. Aschach, which lies 14 miles north-west of Linz, was also affected by the floods of 1789. 40 Rousseau, cited from Karol Berger, Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 152.

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publications, and I relegate my inconclusive reflections on her biography to the nether world of the extended note.41

Gemälde, although appearing to offer a version of the events it commemorates, ultimately offers a generic storm narrative, one musically familiar today from Haydn’s Die Jahrzeiten, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, and numerous operatic recreations, or in literature from Klopstock’s ode Frühlingsfeier. Beautiful nature is disturbed by a thunderstorm that terrifies formerly contented peasants. (Kauth offers additional detail: a father is rescued from the surging river and revived by the tearful embraces of his loving wife and children, in a proof of the power of sensibility even over life and death.) After the sublime thrills of the storm, the earlier state of calm is restored, in Beethoven’s telling with a hymn of

41 A report in the Intelligenz Blatt of Frankfurt am Main (7 November 1764) describes a child prodigy in concert, one “Maria Magdalena Graff.” See Maria Belli-Gontard, Leben in Frankfurt am Main: Auszüge der Frag- und Anzeigungs-Nachrichten (des Intelligenz-Blattes) von ihrer Entstehung an im Jahre 1722 bis 1821 (Offenbach am Main: F. Krähe, 1850), also cited in Hanna Bergmann and Jannis Wichmann, “Kauth, Maria Magdalena,” Sophie Drinker Institute, directed by Freie Hoffmann,http://www.sophie-drinker-institut.de/cms/index.php?page=kauth-maria-magdalena. On the title page of two publications, Kauth gave her maiden name as “Graeff” and “Gräff,” a close enough match with the above report for plausibility. Something of Kauth’s context can be reconstructed from the title pages of these two publications. In this regard, not Gemälde but the later Danses des Muses: Consistant en 3. Menuets 3. Angloises & 3. Allemandes à plusieurs Instruments (J. J. Hummel: Berlin and Amsterdam, [ca 1791]) proves a richer source. This commemorative publication is dedicated to two noble couples on the occasion of their marriages in Berlin (which, taking place in late 1790 and 1791 provide the earliest date of this undated publication). Such dedication ordinarily required royal permission; it is reasonable to assume that Kauth was known to or in some way connected with (one or more of) the dedicatees. They were: “Son altesse royale Msgr. Le Duc de York Evêque d’Osnabruck” (that is, Prince Frederick Duke of York and Albany, second son of George III of Great Britain) and his bride (and first cousin) “S. A. R. Madame la Princesse Fréderique de Prusse” (that is Princess Frederica Charlotte of Prussia, daughter of Frederick William II and his first wife Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick-Lüneberg); “Son Altesse Seren. Msgr. Le Prince heréditaire D’Orange” (William I, born Willem Frederik Prins van Orange-Nassau) and his bride “S. A. R. Madame la Princesse Guillelmine de Prusse” (being his first cousin, the Prussian Princess Friederike Luise Wilhelmine). Among this rather intricate network of Prussian, Dutch, and Hannoverian aristocracy, one name – “Princesse Fréderique de Prusse” – is familiar from the title page of Gemälde, which (published two years earlier) bares a dedication to the then unmarried “Prinzessin Friedericke von Preussen, Pröbstin zu Quedlinburg” (that is, she was a member of the female order of the Abbey of Quedlinburg, in the Harz mountains of today’s Anhalt-Saxony). It would appear, then, that Kauth’s connection was with this particular royal personage (who also subscribed to Gemälde, the work dedicated to her alone). On both title pages, Kauth styles herself a married woman and omits any mention of a court position (which would usually be mentioned on composer’s title pages). It seems unlikely that she was a court or church musician (which would have meant, to all intents and purposes, being a professional singer). How then did she become musically connected with German nobility? One possibility, which returns us to the spelling of her maiden name, is that she was the daughter of a court musician whose talents were recognised, and even used, by young female nobility (who, for reasons of decorum, sometimes had a preference for a female music teacher). The surname “Gräff” (as she spelled it – or Graff in the Intelligenz Blatt) recalls a family of German musicians of the period, headed by Johann Graf (also spelled Graff), a violinist and Kapellmeister from 1739 until his death in 1750 at the court of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt. The best known of his musical sons was Christian Ernst, who was employed by Prince William V of Orange at the Dutch court in the Hague from 1766 to 1790. William V of Orange was the father of one of the dedicatees of Kauth’s Danses des Muses (William I, born Willem Frederik Prins van Orange-Nassau). Although the differing spellings of the last name (Gräff versus Graf(f)) rule out certainty, I would speculate that Kauth was born to this family, and that she may have been the daughter (or much younger sister) of Christian Ernst Graf (1723-1801). The connection with him specifically is suggested by more than just his

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thanksgiving, and in Kauth’s case with injunctions to alleviate the suffering of the afflicted. That injunction exemplifies the inflated, tautological language of sensibility: “The sorrowful fate of the unlucky victims fills compassionate hearts with pity. / They collect in a great circle to comfort the misery of their fellows. / And every kind tear the compassionate wipe from the cheeks of the wretched, pours a balsam into their hearts.” This scene of sympathy links community, feeling, virtue, faith, and benevolence in a “great circle,” allowing little space for resistance.

Kauth’s narrator is initially omniscient but increasingly involved, a narrative technique that models, even compels sympathetic identification. She begins (like the waking Ariadne) by admiring nature, although Kauth’s speaker is emphatic in her praise of landscape as a divine construct:

With what marvellous beauty is the golden Sun resplendent in majestic radiance in the immense expanse. / Nature is everywhere in solemn silence. / Only the magical song of the nightingale lulls the soul with sweet feelings. / Who does not recognise in this the all-powerful architect of Nature?42

The rhetorical question affirms shared belief in the manner of a liturgy. To this end, the narrator colonises perception, insinuating ways of seeing and hearing so that community-forming conviction about nature as a divine construct is linked to the apparent immediacy of visual and auditory experience – the sun’s “majestic radiance,” the nightingale’s sweet, lulling melody. The rewards of this colonisation of the subject are not just those of belonging in the abstract (“who does not recognise”), but of sharing intoxicating sensations of the “immense,” “solemn,” and “magical.” That said, Kauth’s text is not uniquely sanctimonious. Sensibility, often described today as a “cult” or “religion,” drew manifestly on Christian beliefs, patterns of feeling, and techniques of persuasion.43 Benevolence was, in other words, never purely secular. Kauth highlights the intersections of faith and sensibility on her title page. Her dedication to “Princess Frederica of Prussia, Prioress of Quedlinburg” summons female, royal, and ecclesiastical authority: Quedlinburg was an order of female nobility whose Abbess sat directly on the council of the Holy Roman Empire and did not answer to any local religious authority.44

Having affirmed nature as a divine artifice, and music (the nightingale’s song) as a natural part of it, Kauth (perhaps with her charitable mission in mind) avoids theological difficulties, describing the gathering and breaking storm in the morally neutral, emotion-based terms of the sublime of nature (as influentially theorised by Edmund Burke):

But why does the dear, artless singer of the skies fall silent? / What dark clouds arise on the horizon? / Whirlwinds whip through the sky / distant roles of thunder in fearful drumming, / cloudbursts never seen before flood the land and spread terror in nature all about! / The floods fall down in great rivers, / the dark clouds draw dreadfully near to the earth / and Just Heaven bursts them on the peak of the mountains.

employment by Prince William V of Orange. He also dedicated his Op. 8 to the bride of William I (who of course appears on Kauth’s title page for the Danses des Muses). Christian Ernst, like Kauth, published with Hummel in Berlin and Amsterdam. (In passing, I would suggest that the unsubstantiated reference in Gerber Lexicon to a young Hummel playing a keyboard concerto by Kauth is probably a mistake; the Danses des Muses – despite its title-page reference “à plusieurs Instruments” – was published as solo keyboard music by Hummel). See Ernst Ludwig Gerber, Neues historisch-biographisches Lexicon der Tonkünstler [1812-14], 3 vols., ed. Othmar Wessely (Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1966), vol. 2, 23-4. 42 The original German is available in the score, appended to this chapter. The translation is my own.43 See Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility, 262-8.44 A formal history of Quedlinburg is available in Peter Kasper, Das Reichsstift Quedlinburg (936 1810): Konzept – Zeitbezug – Systemwechsel (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2013).

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The reference to “Just Heaven” is admittedly ambiguous, but could be read as warding off (rather than invoking) the idea of retribution (the mountains, after all, were already there, not introduced to wreak havoc on low lying land).

Here Kauth appears to follow a common line of thinking about natural disasters, one that regarded them as local misfortunes arising from natural processes that are necessary (if not fully understood) and even salutary. This intricate intellectual territory was addressed by contemporary theologians under the rubric of Hydrotheologie – the theology of water (specifically of floods caused by raging seas and surging rivers).45 It seems that then, as now, natural disasters were subject to multiple interpretations, invested with fluctuating levels of belief: as mechanistic “facts” of nature, simply misfortunes, events of sublime grandeur, God’s punishment or warning, subjects of research, reminders of the biblical flood, management challenges for town and agricultural planning, and occasions for authorship, representation, sympathy, and doing good. That seems like an impossible collection of attitudes, but the scientific, theological, and aesthetic relationships with natural disasters were often harmoniously combined. As Richard Will observes of the extremely influential Reflections on the Works of God in the Realm of Nature (1772) by Christoph Christian Sturm, “storms provide the means for God not only to water the earth and rid the air of vapors but also to frighten sinners.”46

At the heart of Gemälde is a prayer for deliverance: for God’s benevolence and thus sympathy on a divine scale. This mise en abyme links the divine and the human, analogising God’s mercy to human charity and, in thematising the imploring tone of the piece as a whole, lending the entire performance the quality of religious supplication. As the storm sweeps peasants away, as mothers and children cry out, the narrator – crossing over into the fiction – implores God for assistance and becomes one of the afflicted:

The sun appears pale through the water-logged veil of the sky, to the frightened victims who flee the storm / a woman’s anguished cry / how her children whimper / the flood snatches wife from husband, children from their father, / their sole aid, their sole happiness, is taken by the wild waves / Oh God! Righteous God – Oh save them, the dear ones, and us. / Look down on your creation, merciful God on High, they grovel at your feet. / Oh hurry, hear our pleas, send us a deliverer.

The prayer is answered: a “brave-hearted” rescuer appears. Abandoning himself to the water, he rescues not only a husband but sympathy itself from possible charges of feminine weakness. The focus narrows to the favored sentimental tableau of a family, as the husband’s lifeless body is miraculously revived by love. Benevolence echoes recursively through the text and its context. “Blissful feelings” repay the hero for his deed, while God signs his canvas with a rainbow:

There, a mighty soul appears from lowly huts / braves foaming waves to save fellow men. / Here such a deliverer brings the stiff body of the husband, and lays it in the arms of his inconsolable wife, who helplessly stretches out her wounded hands helplessly after him / presses [her husband to ] her bosom / to bring him back to life through the joyful babble of the children. / The brave-hearted rescuer beholds this scene tenderly; a thousand times repaid with blissful feelings, he flings himself anew

45 For example, Johann Albrecht Fabricius, Hydrotheologie; Oder, Versuch Durch Aufmerksame Betrachtung Der Eigenschaften, Reichen Austheilung Und Bewegung Der Wasser (Hamburg: König und Richter, 1734). See also Manfred Jakubowski-Tiessen, “Gotteszorn und Meereswüten: Deutungen von Sturmfluten vom 16. bis 19. Jahrhundert,” in Naturkatastrophen. Beiträge zu ihrer Deutung, Wahrnehmung und Darstellung in Text und Bild von der Antike bis ins 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Grieter Droh, Michael Kempe and Franz Mauelshagen (Tübingen: Narr, 2003) 101-118. 46 Richard Will, The Characteristic Symphony in the Age of Haydn and Beethoven (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 180-1.

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into the wild hurricane / and God’s blessing escorts him, and holds the nobleman above the waves. / Thanks be to You, Almighty! Now the end of the devastation is in sight. The brightly colored rainbow appears in quiet grandeur as a flourish in the shimmering radiance of the sun.

The technique of this passage is insinuating: the crucial phase of action is located within the mind’s eye of the spectator/auditor. This device potentially enhances the realism of answered prayers and miracles which, rather than being acted out on stage, appear like visions within the subjectivity of the audience. The gestural language – the wife’s outstretched hands – is internalised.

This mode of representation-through-suggestion also characterises the music of Gemälde. Without making a categorical distinction, one notices a shift away from the “utterance” model of earlier melodramas – in which the score resembles an extended orchestrated recitative – to composing with topics in a series of extended thematic passages. In part this reflects the date of composition – Kauth seems to have known some Haydn and Mozart. But the omniscient narrator throws the emphasis away from the representation of a character’s subjectivity – his or her voice – and onto the task of pulling on the heart- and purse-strings of the audience. Ariadne auf Naxos is different: not because it is a melodrama (rather than a monodrama) – Theseus leaves early in the piece, after his monologue and, some spirit voices and stage trumpets aside, Ariadne is the sole character; but because there is no voice other than that of the fiction. Gemälde, on the other hand, as Kauth’s locution hints, is a “portrait of nature, in the form of a monodrama;” the speaker possesses the authority of a preacher, and the subjective intensity that Benda and Brandes attribute to Ariadne is redirected towards (in the first instance) the visual imagination of the audience.

From an analytical point of view, the score deploys music in a few different ways. It conveys the sensibility, the affect and sensation of what the narrator describes; it imitates the sounds of the natural world (the nightingale and the storm); and occasionally it punctuates the narrator’s exclamations in the manner of orchestral recitative. For example, the opening worship of the bright sun in its infinite realm is conveyed musically through a symphonic style, in a majestic E-flat major, forte, and in doubled octaves, with the emphatic dotted rhythms of the march, and a melody that outlines the tonic chord. The nightingale’s song is imitated through a lulling melody, in the soprano range, softly slurred, quiet, and supported by a gentle rocking accompaniment. The storm, conventionally enough, abandons the vocal model and proceeds in agitated scales and arpeggios, in a purely instrumental idiom threatening human annihilation. Only the moment of prayer, as a moment of speech within the fiction, calls forth the gestures of recitative. It seems unlikely, however, that these apparently different functions of music were meant to be recognised as such. Rather, music is a trigger and affective tint for the internal, visual mode of “seeing” that Kauth suggests with her paradoxical title of “portraits.”47

That title relates to a theory of musical painting that was close to hand. A Berlin subscriber to Gemälde was Johann Jakob Engel, a writer and professor of philosophy who nine years earlier in 1780 had published a treatise – Über die musikalische Malerey (On Painting in Music) – dedicated to Reichardt, the Berlin Kapellmeister. With this title Engel alluded to the musical representation of things through synecdoche (some part of them, such

47 Music as a component of mental imagery is discussed more fully in Deirdre Loughridge, “Haydn's Creation as an Optical Entertainment,” The Journal of Musicology 27/1 (Winter 2010), 9-54. As Thomas Betzwieser explores in chapter 7 of this volume, there was no fixed role for music in early melodramas. Discussing Peter von Winter’s music for Lenardo und Blondine, he shows that the score sometimes describes the gestures and movements of the actors, movements of the body that – like music – were taken as natural signs of internal passions. In other passages, however, music calms and mediates the extremes and contrasts of sentiment conveyed by passionate speech.

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as the sounds of a storm), resemblance (a lion’s roar, he suggests, citing Benda’s Ariadne auf Naxos), and analogy (a quick physical movement depicted in rapid notes).48 But these conceits – recalling an earlier poetics of music – concede pride of place to a different device: the representation not of things but of the effect they have on us; as Engel has it, “the composer still paints when he imitates not a part or a property of the object itself, but the impression that this object tends to make on the soul. Imitation in music obtains its broadest range by this means. ... For the impression of a delicate color bears some resemblance to the impression of a gentle tone on the soul”.49 The concept of musical painting, in other words, was a metaphor for arousing sensibility (subjective responsiveness) and, more abstractly, for the sensations awakened by perception. In this scheme, music (like its ideal listener) is always “absorbed” in and absorbing something else, as if it too were transported sympathetically beyond itself. Engel’s theory, one of the fullest accounts of musical meaning, and listening, in the period, is far removed from today’s semiotic theory, which invites listeners to hear musical topics, primarily, as signifying nothing but the musical category to which they belong.50

Kauth’s Gemälde, a sort of theatre for the blind, was probably not listened to so much as experienced: as a melding of words, voice, instrumental music, and mental imagery.51 For some the music may have proved powerfully moving. Reichardt (a subscriber) modelled the empfindsam experience of music for readers of his travel journal of 1774. Writing of a performance of Handel’s Judas Maccabaeus, he marvelled (somewhat didactically) at the somatic effects of “magical sounds” and “mighty harmonies” that “fill souls ... with the fear of approaching thunder ... cause bones to tremble .. blood to freeze in terror” – only for “celestial harmonies [to] return to soothe souls, and sweet, melodious songs pour peace and rapture into their hearts and fill their eyes with tears of the sweetest and noblest joy.” For less empfindsam listeners, Kauth’s orchestral interludes may just have measured time for reflection on the narrator’s maxims and exhortations, in the manner of (say) Haydn’s Die sieben letzten Worte unseres Erlösers am Kreuze (1785/86), a series of seven adagio orchestral meditations on the last utterances of Christ (gleaned from the gospels) with an introduction and concluding earthquake, commissioned for the Good Friday service of Cádiz Cathedral. (Arguably, Kauth’s technique is similarly liturgical, linking the use of music in early melodrama to that in church for purposes of meditation on doctrine.) Of course, what listeners were thinking in these solemn moments can only be guessed at. Inevitably music failed to control listeners’ feelings and ideas to the extent and with the uniformity that Engel’s sentimental but also mechanical theory predicted.52

48 Johann Jakob Engel, Über die musikalische Malerey [1780], in Strunk’s Source Readings in Music History, rev. ed., vol. 5, The Late Eighteenth Century, ed. Wye Jamison Allanbrook (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 220-31. The reference to the lion’s roar appears at 221.49 Engel, “Musical Painting,” in Strunk’s Source Readings, vol. 5, 222.50 That reductio ad absurdum was not recommended by the originator of the theory of topics, Leonard Ratner; see his Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style (New York: Schirmer, 1980), ch. 2, 9-30), which refers topics primarily to “ideas of expression” and (more lightly) to social rank and cultural themes. It was, however, pursued under the guise of a development of Ratner’s theory by V. Kofi Agawu in Playing with Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). 51 See William Weber, “Did People Listen in the Eighteenth Century,” Early Music 25/4 (November 1997), 678-91.52 “All representations of the passions in the soul are inseparably bound up with certain corresponding movements in the nervous system ... But it is not just that these corresponding natural vibrations arise in the body when the representations of the passions have already been stimulated in the soul; these representations also arise in the soul if the related vibrations are already produced in the body. The action is reciprocal: the same path that runs from the soul into the body runs back from the body into

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There were complexities in the discourse of benevolence that seem self-evident today but that were conspicuously absent in the intellectual discourse of the time and place. An apologetic literature on the pleasure taken in the suffering of others reveals little awareness of the power of guilt to motivate benevolence. Good deeds, in period theorisations, arise from (Christian) duty, from sympathy, or even self-interest, while the pleasures of terror afford a salutary excitation of the nervous system, and a thrilling awareness of one’s own good fortune.53 These differences in the moral order render the benevolent intentions of the melodramatic technique historically specific, equivocal, even strange. Similarly, the royal and ecclesiastical backing for Kauth’s authorship, and the sledgehammer blows of the spoken text of Gemälde, caution us, amidst the flurry of historical recovery, and all the talk of feeling, that the danger of a technique like melodrama, which seeks total knowledge of and control over subjectivity, is that it may achieve its goal. But music like that of Kauth or Benda cannot impose: it can only invite and measure subjectivity. It is less music than charity itself: sustaining the social order, articulating social difference, establishing relationships of dependence and obligation, promising redemption, and offering a moral insurance policy in a world in which inequality was divinely ordained and righteously defended. In such a context, music was neither the problem nor the solution, even as it offered a fleeting sense of sympathetic community, rousing, as Engel put it, “instinctive sympathy” between “beasts of the same species.”54

the soul.” Engel, “Musical Painting,” in Strunk’s Source Readings, vol. 5, 224.53 For a brilliant way into these issues, see Emma J. Clery, “’The Pleasure of Terror:’ Paradox in Edumund Burke’s Theory of the Sublime,” in Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Porter and Roberts, ch. 8, 164-81. 54 Ibid.

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