Consort Suites and Dance Music by Town Musicians in German-Speaking Europe, 1648–1700

Michael Robertson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317161790
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

This companion volume to The Courtly Consort Suite in German-Speaking Europe surveys an area of music neglected by modern scholars: the consort suites and dance music by musicians working in the seventeenth-century German towns. Conditions of work in the German towns are examined in detail, as are the problems posed by the many untrained travelling players who were often little more than beggars. The central part of the book explores the organisation, content and assembly of town suites into carefully ordered printed collections, which refutes the concept of the so-called 'classical' suite. The differences between court and town suites are dealt with alongside the often-ignored variation suite from the later decades of the seventeenth century and the separate suite-writing traditions of Leipzig and Hamburg. While the seventeenth-century keyboard suite has received a good deal of attention from modern scholars, its often symbiotic relationship with the consort suite has been ignored. This book aims to redress the balance and to deal with one very important but often ignored aspect of seventeenth-century notation: the use of blackened notes, which are rarely notated in a meaningful way in modern editions, with important implications for performance.

1 Towns and town musicians Governance, status and performance

DOI: 10.4324/9781315573519-1

‘In this year 1618 the most horrific comet appeared …, it remained for thirty days in the sky, just as war in Germany too lasted thirty years, and thus each day means a year, as the experience of it has unfortunately and sufficiently proven.’¹ This extract from the journal of Joachim Rese, a German small-town official, is not alone in viewing the comet as a portent of the Thirty Years War,² and a time of ‘misery, fear, distress, and heartrending suffering among all the people’.³

Albeit in terms of classical antiquity, Hieronymus Kromayer, professor of rhetoric in mid-seventeenth-century Leipzig, saw the war as a ‘happy catastrophe’,⁴ though the extent of this catastrophe and its aftermath has been a source of ‘long and often heated debate among historians’.⁵ But there is little doubt that many parts of the German lands suffered very badly in the conflict. In the end, it seems that Germany ‘lost some 40 per cent of its rural and 33 per cent of its urban population’, substantial figures by any consideration.⁶ To add to this disaster, the plague returned to western and southern areas in the 1630s and by 1650, as a result of war and pestilence, the population of Germany had fallen, for the first time, below that of France.⁷

But there was also regeneration in the second half of the century: Schwäbisch Hall, for instance, which had suffered particularly badly at the hands of Bavarian, French and Swedish occupying forces, had all but returned to its pre-war levels of prosperity by the 1680s.⁸ And urban renewal was certainly not limited to this area of the German lands. While the accounts of foreign travellers cannot always be considered reliable, there is a persuasive similarity to their observations that contradicts the worst portraits of widespread urban poverty.⁹

According to Claude Jordan de Colombier’s 1698 Voyages historiques de l’Europe,

Cette Ville est trés-recommandable par sa grandeur, qui a trois grandes lieuës de France de circuit; elle est ceinte de trois murailles de pierre de taille, flanquées de 183. Tours, & d’un Fossé large & profond: Sa Bibliotheque est remplie d’un grand nombre de Livres & Manuscrits trés-rares; son Arsenal est garni de tout ce qui peut servir à sa défense. Il y a de trés-belles Eglises.

(This town [Nuremberg] is to be highly recommended for its grandeur, and has a circumference of three French leagues. It is enclosed by three cut-stone walls, flanked by 183 towers and a large and deep moat. Its library is filled with a great number of very rare books and manuscripts, and its arsenal is provided with everything necessary for defence. There are some very fine churches.)¹⁰

Colombier’s observations are confirmed by De Blainville, a widely travelled Spanish diplomat. Writing in 1705, the latter judged Nuremberg to be ‘twice as large as Francfort, and the Commerce carried on renders it very rich and populous … The streets of this Town are large, open, well paved’.¹¹ A similar portrait of flourishing town life is presented nearly fifty years earlier in Priorato’s The History of the Sacred and Royal Majesty of Christina Alessandra Queen of Swedland. The entry for 20 October 1655 reads:

Auspurge is one of the fairest, most noble and famous Cities of Germany, seated in a very pleasant plain, abundantly watered with streams which make the ground most fertile. The structures are great and magnificent, the streets large and long, and the traffique very great. ’Tis replenisht with Merchants, and opulent Citizens, the Town-house is one of the most beautifullest Fabriques of Germany, and the rest are noble and majestick.¹²

In contrast to this relative prosperity, there was a sharp and apparently widespread decline in urban population. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu found some streets in the Nuremberg of 1716 to be ‘wretchedly thin of inhabitants’ even if she saw other towns in the same light as De Blainville: ‘well built and full of people’.¹³ Given that Lady Mary was writing in the immediate aftermath of the War of the Spanish Succession, another conflict that took its toll of the German lands, her comments do seem to be accurate. In 1622, Nuremberg had 40,000 inhabitants but, by 1800, only 27,000.¹⁴ And other travellers agreed with her. William Carr was an English diplomat and traveller; his ‘Remarks’, an account of his travels across much of Europe, were published in 1688.¹⁵ Like De Blainville in Nuremberg, he found the streets of Cologne to be ‘very large’ but was struck by the comparatively sparse population; ‘The streets are so thin of people, that one may pass some of them and not meet ten men or women, unless it be Church men or Religious sisters’.¹⁶ Carr also found Cologne to be ‘much decayed within these hundred years … the houses dayly fall to ruine’. But he saw the reasons for this as being religious rather than economic and put it down to the influence of the Jesuits who ‘had so great influence upon the Magistrates, that they banish all Protestants’.¹⁷ This seems a rather confused or simply biased view, especially as the 1648 Peace of Westphalia ‘dictated that in biconfessional cities … all properties and buildings – such as churches, cloisters, hospitals and schools – would be restored to both Catholics and Protestants based upon whichever confession had owned them in 1624’.¹⁸ But it does seem that the terms of the Peace were not always observed, and there appears to have been a degree of re-Catholicisation across some areas of the German lands that supports De Blainville’s observation.¹⁹

The general picture, then, is one of uncertain economic recovery, and, if not as disastrous a picture as modern historians have suggested, not all towns and cities seem to have been ‘great and magnificent’. The situation was not helped by a lack of political stability. Even after the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which marked the official end of the war, ‘the half century which began in the later 1660s saw inter-state struggles which changed the political face of Europe more, and more lastingly, than any since the reign of the Emperor Charles V five generations earlier’.²⁰ But one factor, more than any other, lay at the heart of the indifferent economy: the often-exorbitant levels of taxation in the towns.

During the Thirty Years War, the structure of taxation had changed from direct to indirect; more importantly, the levels of taxation were ‘totally unprecedented’.²¹ And the accumulated debt at the end of the war prevented a return to the lower levels enjoyed prior to 1618. This was apparent to De Blainville when he also spent time in Cologne; he commented on the ‘exorbitant Contributions’ that the Elector levied ‘every Day from this City’.²² Even so, the situation was not uniformly bad. De Blainville praised the Elector at ‘Coblentz’ (Koblenz), who ‘contents himself with a very moderate Revenue, rather than overwhelm them with Taxes’,²³ and Carr commented on ‘Francfort’ (Frankfurt am Main), where ‘the government is easy to the people, they not being taxed as other cities are’.²⁴ Of course, geographically well-placed towns and cities were able to benefit from foreign trading. Carr also noted that ‘the citie [Frankfurt] is populous and frequented by all sorts of Merchants, from most parts of Europe, & part of Asia also, becaus of the two great faires that are yearly kept there’.²⁵ The ‘great faires’ were trade fairs and, as Carr observed, it was foreign trade that enabled stronger economic recovery in places such as Frankfurt, Leipzig and Hamburg.

The governance of the towns presented an equally diverse state of affairs. Fifty-one Reichsstädte (imperial towns or cities) were recognised in the 1648 Peace. They were ‘territorially independent estates … directly subject to the Empire and not to other territorial states’ and, as such, paid direct taxes to the Empire in return for its protection.²⁶ But protection did not guarantee prosperity; in fact, rather the opposite. The promotion by the territorial states of rural industry, privileged monopolies and toll barriers all ‘undoubtedly drew some commerce and industry away from the imperial cities’.²⁷ In any case, not all towns were able to afford such ‘protection’ and there was an extraordinarily wide range of sovereignty and jurisdiction.²⁸ In addition to the Riechsstädte, there were the Landstädte, towns and cities that fell under the jurisdiction of individual territorial princes. Some towns were entirely autonomous, independent of princely or imperial authority, but this did not stop some princes and dukes from attempting to change the situation. Braunschweig, for example, only managed to retain its independence from the ducal court of Braunschweig-Lüneburg-Wolfenbüttel by military action. But the independence was temporary; the town was eventually subsumed into royal ‘protection’ in 1671.²⁹

For those towns that did manage to avoid direct royal interference, the governing officials were members of the so-called ‘Inner Councils’. Membership of these was made up of one or more Bürgermeister, and members ‘usually held office for life or for a very long time’.³⁰ And if a burgher moved away from the town of his appointment, citizenship in his new home had to be purchased ‘for cash or by marriage, or a mixture of both’.³¹

The Inner Council could be comparatively large; De Blainville noted that ‘Cologne is governed by its Chapter and by its Magistrates, consisting of two Burgo-masters and 49 Councellors’.³² This resulted in a good deal of independence in the day-to-day affairs of the towns though, even here, royal influence could still be felt. De Blainville observed that the Elector of Cologne ‘nominates a Magistrate who is Judge in Criminal Causes’³³ and the royal courts were still called on to appoint mediators in disputes between the citizenry and municipal governing bodies.³⁴

An important function of the Inner Council lay in the appointing of civic posts, and this included the town musicians. So it is hardly surprising that the latter sought the approval and patronage of their civic masters. And such patronage was forthcoming from the Honoratioren or ‘honourable families’ that formed the highest social levels of town society.³⁵ The conspicuous wealth of the richest members of this social group was exhibited not only in impressive houses with elaborate gardens, but in a willingness to provide ‘s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of music examples
• List of abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 Towns and town musicians: Governance, status and performance
• 2 Dances, collections and national styles
• 3 The aftermath of war: 1648–59
• 4 Concepts of careful organisation: 1660–75
• 5 A time of decline: 1676–1700
• 6 Leipzig
• 7 Hamburg
• 8 Keyboard suites by town composers
• 9 Note blackening and mensural notation
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Bibliography
• Index