JOHANN JOACHIM QUANTZ

The history of composition, as in many lines of work, is rich with artists who are variously generalists or specialists. The former write for several kinds of performers and in several forms. Mozart, for example, wrote for voices and for instruments, operas, masses, symphonies, concertos, chamber music, piano sonatas, songs. Victoria, by contrast, wrote exclusively for choir, and only liturgical pieces. Chopin, similarly, wrote exclusively for the piano (alone or with orchestra), and he was a virtuoso performer of his own work. Equally specialized, in the eighteenth century, was the German flautist and composer, J. J. Quantz. At least, it is true that almost all his five hundred works are for flute, with orchestra or continuo, and he had a successful career as a player. However, he was also active as a conductor and, in his late years, as an author. His compositions do have a durable charm, and some of them remain, appealingly, in the flute repertoire. But as an author, he has a lasting importance in the history of musical performance.

Born in 1697 in Göttingen, he was precociously gifted as a child, studying several instruments, but eventually specializing in the flute. He became the pre-eminent flautist of his time, a renowned virtuoso, who gave concerts all over Europe. He refined the technique of flute-playing; he improved the physical structure of the instrument; he wrote a valuable handbook on flute-performance; and he composed extensively for the flute. Not all of his career, however, was narrowly and exclusively devoted to the flute: he was an esteemed conductor, and a capable organizer of concerts; in addition, he wrote about orchestral layout and interpretative concerns in a way that sheds much light on the performance practices of the period.

Quantz is chiefly remembered, however, at least by non-specialists, for his association with Frederick the Great. That monarch, whatever his other strengths and weaknesses, was a devoted lover of music, and an enthusiastic amateur of the flute. He played it well and, amid all his preoccupation with affairs of state, nothing gave him greater pleasure than to display his prowess as a performer in palace concerts at Potsdam. Recording had not yet been invented, so there is no way to know whether he was really good enough to get solo spots by sheer ability; a servile court would have applauded him anyway, just as servile judges awarded Nero a bunch of Olympic gold medals as a performer, artistically and athletically, with a pragmatic respect for the emperor’s self-promotion. Anyway, whatever the truth of that may be, Frederick certainly took the right steps to nourish his love of the flute in the best possible way. He hired Quantz as his teacher and as a composer-in-residence who would cater to his hobby by furnishing a constant supply of new pieces for the royal embouchure.

The job was a good one. It lasted for thirty-two years, at a comfortable salary, and it gave Quantz the financial security that artists have always needed. Two centuries earlier composers survived on what we nowadays call a “day job”, serving as choirmasters or singers in Roman Catholic cathedrals, and writing music on the side, much of it for use by their choirs. Similarly in Quantz’s time, Bach had to survive, in Lutheran Germany, as an employee of minor princes and of a town council. Two centuries later, in an age when royalty and religion are less inclined, or less able, to patronize music, composers have had to scrape by on meagre grants from arts councils, or else have supported themselves by doing other work and relegating their creative work to their spare time — the classic example is Charles Ives, who subsidized his composing by a successful career in the insurance business.

In the overall historical view, Western culture owes a large debt to the munificent patrons of the past. The great composers and painters and architects of the Renaissance could not have achieved what they did without commissions from church and crown. Their successors, in the Age of Enlightenment, depended equally on support by the wealthy. Whether these patrons were entirely altruistic is open to question: some of them, some of the time, may have been moved, in part, by vanity, by the desire to burnish their image as cultural icons — indeed, their need for recognition was so transparent that artists regularly paid tribute to it: painters would portray their patrons as kneeling figures among the kneeling saints in a religious panorama; and no less an artist than J. S. Bach did not think it beneath his dignity to write a fawning encomium as dedication of his “Musical Offering” to Frederick the Great, that mighty set of variations on a theme supplied by Frederick himself.

Frederick, however, though perhaps vainer about his own musical abilities than he should have been, does seem to have had a purer love of music than can be claimed for many contemporaneous patrons. Admittedly, in the case of Quantz, he exploited a minor talent to feed his own ego. But where Bach was concerned, he recognized a major talent when he saw it, a talent that dwarfed not only his own, but that of any other musician in the known world. “Old Bach has arrived!” he exclaimed with delight, on learning that the composer had come to Berlin; and he made Bach welcome in the Potsdam palace, showering him with admiration. Indeed, Frederick the so-called Great is chiefly remembered, at least by musicians, not for his own accomplishments as King of Prussia, but for his awe in the face of a true greatness far superior to his own.

Bach’s visit to Berlin was not a long one. But his reception there must have been gratifying. It stood in sharp contrast to his difficulties in Leipzig, where the town councillors were for ever putting petty stumbling-blocks in his path professionally, smugly unaware that their employee was the greatest composer ever to have written a note. Potsdam was a two-day relief from such demeaning squabbles, and the king’s effusive compliments were a well-deserved salve to his often wounded dignity. Curiously, it is not on record how Quantz reacted to Bach’s brief incursion into his established territory. But it is pleasant to think that perhaps this flute virtuoso, meeting that organ virtuoso, perceived more than just a peer as a performer: perceived rather a creative genius of such colossal power as to render his own creative work quite puny by comparison.

Whatever Quantz did think at the time will never be known. But as time went by, his work was far outstripped by Bach’s, his fame far outlasted. Posterity long ago decided their respective worth. But before posterity could deliver its verdict, Quantz did in fact outlive Bach. Bach’s work, astonishingly, fell into obscurity after his death in 1750. Quantz continued plugging away in Berlin for another twenty-three years, secure in royal favour and nourished by regular performances of his work. He died in 1773.

Quantz was almost the last composer to have enjoyed that kind of secure support from a patron. The last and most famous one, of course, was Haydn, who spent much of his career as artistic protégé of the Esterhazy family. His younger contemporary, Mozart, had constantly to scrabble for commissions wherever he could find them, and died in poverty. From then on, although the tradition of patronage did not entirely die out, at least on a per occasion basis, composers had to subject themselves increasingly to the dictates of the box-office. Populism took over, and the most successful composers, in terms of pay and performances, were those who churned out hits for the opera-house. On the side, of course, they also composed a body of serious music, of lasting value. But throughout the nineteenth century, and into the twentieth, only major talent could survive on the proceeds of composing for the concert-hall: from Beethoven to Elgar, audiences ruled the musical world and, for the most part, their taste operated on a high enough plane for good work to flourish — always provided, of course, that it was not too avant-garde.

Nowadays, the situation is depressingly different. Musical taste, over recent years, has progressively declined. Pop music, which used to have a certain ephemeral and cliché-ridden charm, has now sunk into the mindless bog of soft rock (hard rock has a genuine vitality, but it’s a pity that its energy is not coupled with genuine compositional skill). The nearest most people come to an experience remotely similar to that of our great-grandparents’ experience of Tchaikovsky and Dvořák is the Broadway musical comedy, that apparatus of hollow sentiment and shopworn vocabulary, and its dreadful successor, the mega-musical, with its reliance on glamour, glitz, and gallons of derivative schmaltz. Meanwhile, serious composers soldier on, getting by hand-to-mouth in a world that offers lucrative rewards to stockbrokers and bankers, who move money around to their own profit without ever creating anything, not even a nail or a hammer, while insisting that the iron law of supply and demand be the sole arbiter of reward for those who do actually make things, be they loaves of bread or string quartets. Fortunately, there are activists who insist that bakers enjoy fair wages and good working conditions, whatever the vagaries of the market-place. And there are also those who understand that man cannot live by bread alone and who, accordingly, perceive the string quartet as one strand, among many, in the tapestry of civilization, meriting support from public funds. There are, in consequence, examples of high-minded state subsidy still to be found, available to composers and other artists. These pockets of enlightenment, however, are commoner in Europe than in North America. In the United States the prevailing climate places much more emphasis on the private sector than on the public treasury. And in Canada, while there are arts councils dispensing largess at all three levels of government, their decisions are hopelessly mired in the rut of political correctness.

Quantz would have understood. In a culture where power rested exclusively with the well-born, and lesser mortals had to be safely subservient, he always knew what side his bread was buttered on. Bach, by contrast, was ruled only by artistic conscience: if this conflicted with the bourgeois prejudices of Leipzig’s administrators, he was willing to do battle. He did not always win. But history in the end has come down on his side.