Musical Pot-Boilers
Even the greatest composers sometimes are obliged to write a work, not from inspiration, but from some ulterior motive—to stock an empty cupboard; to gain a position; or to curry favor with an important patron; and such works form a larger repertoire than the average musician would dream of. A story is told of Ockeghem that Louis XI had half promised him a certain advancement, but when it was hinted at generally replied, "Laissez-moi faire," or "Leave it to me." Finally the composer jogged his memory by sending him a Mass, beginning, "La, sol, mi fa, re," suggesting the accustomed words and this succeeded in landing the fish it was cast for—the earliest recorded pot-boiler!
Bach was less successful in gaining the advantage that he sought for in writing his B Minor Mass. His object in beginning this greatest of all choral works was to win the favor of the Roman Catholic ruler of Saxony; and a letter exists in which he presents the Kyrie and the Gloria of the work to King Friedrich August with the following words:
"I lay before your kingly Majesty this trifling proof of the science which I have been able to acquire in music, with the very humble petition that you will be pleased to regard it, not according to the meanness of the composition but with a gracious eye, as well befits your Majesty's world-famed clemency, and condescend to take me under your Majesty's most mighty protection."
Three years after he was made Court-composer to King August III; though it does not seem to have bettered his position or income to any degree. But the B Minor Mass is far removed from the uninspired list of pot-boilers, and it was finished with a magnitude which made it impossible to use in the Catholic service of the mass.
One can detect Handel in a similar case of composing a work with a definite pecuniary object in view. This was his so-called Water Music, Handel's most important purely instrumental composition. He was in the service of George, Elector of Hanover, when he begged for a furlough to visit England, which was granted. But he became such a favorite at the court of Queen Anne, that he did not return. His dismay when, at the death of the queen, the Hanoverian Elector became King of England may well be imagined. Various attempts to obtain forgiveness for the truant failed. At last, when the king was making an excursion on the river Thames, a barge followed the royal boat discoursing excellent music. When the king asked who had composed this music for his excursion, Baron Kielmansegg told him that it was his old servant Handel who was most contrite for his past offence. The king was in a good mood; he sent for the composer and thereafter gave him his patronage.
Mozart's Flute Concerto
If all pot-boilers were of the character of Bach's B Minor Mass or Handel's Water Music one would prize the school most highly, and the noddings of Homer, the emergency pieces of some other great masters, sustain the high level. Mozart wrote a distinct pot-boiler when he composed his concerto for flute and harp. He rather disliked the flute, and even in his opera of the Magic Fluie made little use of it, and in his day the harp was such a diatonic instrument that few composers wrote for it. But when Mozart was in Paris in 1778, Baron Crimm recommended him to the Duc de Guines. The duke was a passionate flute-player, and his daughter was a good performer upon the harp. Mozart taught the young lady composition, but complained distressedly to his father about her lack of ideas. During this time he hoped to win favor from the duke by writing him a concerto in which both he and his daughter might appear as artists. The result was the above-named concerto. Unfortunately Mozart, as far as recorded, never received anything for the work, and had some trouble in collecting even for the lessons he had given; so this composition, so vastly above the average merit of pot-boilers, was not pecuniarily remunerative. Mozart seems to have been a believer in the old conundrum, "What sounds worse than a flute?" "Two flutes!" for he wrote some letters to his father complaining of the instrument. But we must remember that the Boehm flute had not then been invented, and the old flute seldom strayed far from the key of D major without getting out of tune.
When Quantz Climbed Up the Chimney
Since I am speaking of flute compositions I may add that Quantz wrote a large quantity of flute music, for Frederick the Great, about 300 concertos and some 200 sonatas, which were ground out to order to please the royal flute-player. He had taught Frederick the flute in secret, when he was crown-prince, in defiance of the old king's orders, and once, when that king came to the room in the wing of the palace of Potsdam where the secret lessons were going on, they saved his life by climbing up the chimney with flutes and music, and hiding there just as the tyrant father entered. When Frederick was king he made it up to Quantz by helping him much more than Graun, who was also under his protection and much the greater composer. Several of Quantz's pot-boilers still exist, monuments of an amazing fertility to order.
Whether Haydn's twelve English symphonies belong to the pot-boiler class may be doubted, yet they were certainly manufactured to Solomon's order. That astute musician and manager had seized upon Haydn the moment that his patron prince died and the Esterhazy orchestra was dispersed, brought him to London in 1751 and again in 1794, and contracted for six symphonies at each visit. But with the promise of an excellent orchestra, an admiring and aristocratic audience, as well as a substantial hororarium, I cannot think that pecuniary advantage was the chief incentive in the production of these works, which were the best symphonies that Haydn ever wrote, and first and last he wrote almost one hundred and fifty such works.
Masterpieces at Twenty Cents Apiece
With Schubert, even the works that he composed from financial necessity can scarcely be called pot-boilers, for he was incessantly impelled to composition, whether there was a recompense in sight or not. Yet he used some of them definitely as pot-boilers. Thus, for example, he would often dedicate a song with a view of a pecuniary return. In this manner he dedicated the Wanderer's Night Song to Ladislaw Pyrker and gladly accepted twelve ducats as a quid pro quo. At the end of his career he was thankful to sell some of his songs at twenty cents apiece. The reader can imagine what those twenty-cent manuscripts would be worth to the autograph collector to-day.
Schubert was too unbusinesslike to make his pot-boilers count financially. He lived with a coterie of Bohemians, whose ways would have delighted Henri Murger. It was a happy-go-lucky sort of Commune. Hats, coats, and cash were generally held in common, although of the latter there was seldom more than a negligible quantity. In one of the periods when the treasury was at the lowest ebb, Schubert sold some eighty songs "to Diabelli, the publisher, for eight hundred florins. The Wanderer was one of the set, and this one alone netted the publisher over 30,000 florins. But eight hundred florins in the Bohemian circle was unheard-of wealth. Schubert's friends, then, all went to hear Paganini in concert at five dollars per ticket! It is needless to say that they were soon upon the usual famine basis again.
Beethoven seems to have held himself sternly aloof from writing pot-boilers. The nearest he came to composing one was when, in 1823, the Handel and Haydn Society, of Boston, sent him an order to write an oratorio for their chorus. There is no record of this order in the Handel and Haydn records, but it is absolutely certain that it was given, probably personally, by some of the members. The following memorandum in one of Beethoven's note-books shows what he thought about pot-boilers:
"The oratorio for Boston. I cannot write what I should best like to write, but that which the pressing need of money obliges me to write. This is not saying that I write only for money."
Fortunately he gave up the idea. One can only surmise what the Handel and Haydn Society would have done with a Beethoven oratorio in 1823.
One would imagine that the author and composer of the Marseillaise, the universal song of Liberty, would be very far removed from writing anything like a potboiler, but exactly the reverse is true. After the restoration of the Bourbons, and during the subsequent political changes in France, he composed Royalist, Legitimist, and Imperialist songs, turning like a weathercock to whichever party was in power. But we may well assume that the Marseillaise came from his heart (he received no pay at the time for it) while the later effusions were inspired by an empty pocketbook. The best tribute to the power of an inspired song such as the Marseillaise was the left-handed compliment paid to the composer-author by Klopstock, the German, who, when introduced to Rouget de l'lsle, refused to shake hands with him and exclaimed: "Monster, your music has killed fifty thousand Germans!"
Wagner's American Pot-Boiler
In Wagner's early career one can find the clearest type of pot-boilers. Most pathetic are the pieces by whirh he tried to keep his head above water in the days of poverty in Paris. He began setting French poems to music, in the hope that they might be sung in concert and make him known. He was finally reduced to sending some of these to the publisher of "Europa," a society journal in Stuttgart, which paid the sum of from three to four dollars for an accepted song, and the chansons L'Attente, Mignonne and Dors, Mon Enfant were thus published. At this time Wagner also set a German version of a French patriotic subject, Heine's Two Grenadiers, but this fell flat, and it is not one of his worthy works. Yet it is interesting to note that both he and Schumann, neither of whom knew of the other setting, both ended their compositions with the Marseillaise as the most fitting climax to the military picture.
But in these works at least Wagner was not lowering his gifts, since he indulged a certain freedom of expression. His other Parisian pot boilers were much more like drudgery and slavery. This was the arranging of popular melodies and transcriptions from operas for the piano, and even for the cornet, for the house of Schlesinger. Fancy Wagner making a piano score of Donizetti's La Favorita!
These direful days ended with the Dresden production of his Rienzi, but Wagner composed a very different pot-boiler after prosperity had come to him, and he was recognized as the chief composer of his epoch. It was at about the time that his Triology was approaching its first performance in Bayreuth that the American Centennial Commission engaged him to write a march for the opening of the great exhibition in Philadelphia. This was a very different matter from the Parisian efforts at barring out the wolf at the door. Theodore Thomas instigated the request, and the sum demanded for this work was five thousand dollars. Spite of all this it was definitely a pot-boiler, a work which was entirely inspired by the sum to be paid for it. Wagner himself once said: "Do you know the best thing in the Centennial March? The money I received for it!" He had nothing to guide him, nothing to turn his thoughts into American channels. He himself says that finally the remembrance of some beautiful American women that he had met turned into the graceful triplet figure which plays a prominent part in the work. But of Liberty, of winning freedom through sacrifice, of Pilgrim, Puritan, or western pioneer, there is not a suggestion in the work. It remains a very expensive and totally uninspired pot-boiler.
Joachim Raff must be added to the list of those who wrote many pot-boilers. Miserably poor in his younger days he was obliged to grind out every kind of popular music for the remuneration it would bring. He acquired so fatal a facility at this that it certainly lowered his talent at times and made him a mere routinier. One rather odd fact about his early works may here be mentioned for the benefit of teachers. He was unable to afford a good metronome, using an old and imperfect one instead. This had a beat somewhat slower than it should have been. As a consequence many of Raff's early compositions have their metronome marks too fast.
Foster's Humble Surroundings
Our chief American folk-song composer, Stephen C. Foster, wrote many a pot-boiler during his days in New York. His chum and coadjutor, George Cooper, has told me of his often seeking to excite his muse by riding up and down Broadway in one of the five-cent busses. Cooper often furnished the words for Foster's songs, and they sometimes, when funds ran low, would sit together in a corner grocery and Cooper dash off some rhymes on a bit of wrapping paper, while Foster sat by until something to his satisfaction was evolved. Then in a very short time the tune and its simple accompaniment was made, the pair would start off to a publisher and the song would be sold within the hour and the financial panic relieved.
It will be seen from this discursive essay that many composers have at times written without waiting for actual inspiration. With some, as with Schubert, the inspiration was seemingly always present, and I can imagine his twenty-cent songs worth more than Wagner's five-thousand-dollar march. Some of the pot-boilers may lake rank even with the more inspired art works. Such works must exist so long as the privations of a composer's career exist. There would be no musical pot-boilers if Beethoven's wish as written to Hofmeister in 1801 could but be realized.
"There ought to be only one large Art-warehouse in the world, to which the artist could carry his Art-works and from which he could carry away whatever he needed. As it is, the artist must be half a tradesman."