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Music and CultureMozart Out of SeasonThe Myth of Mozart, the RevolutionaryWilliam Weber

One of the most substantial intellectual products of the bicentennialof Mozart's death has been the revisionistic interpretation of the cir-cumstances surrounding his death. Scholars have called into questionthe long-held ideawe indeed should call it myth that he died aforgotten man, completely impoverished and scorned by the musicpublic.' If anything, they may have taken that a few steps too far,judging from recent articles by Julia Moore. As she suggests, Mozartnever built up a substantial estate such as was left by a number ofother composers in that time, his rival Antonio Salieri most promi-nent of all.2But one powerful myth does remain: that Mozart was a revolu-tionary. The idea has hung on, rarely challenged, that Le Nozze diFigaro prefigured the French Revolution in its attack upon the aristoc-racy and upon the Old Regime, which collapsed in 1789. Corollariesto this belief are that the middle class, armed with the ideas of theEn ligh tenm ent, marshalled the attack, w hich is embodied in Figaro'sspeech to Count Almaviva in the last act of Beaumarchais' play, LaFoUe Joume'e, ou Le Manage de Figaro. Anyone who has read the schol -arly literature on the French Revolution over the last three decadeswill realize how unacceptable such notions are to almost all thoseworking in the field.3 Just why the Revolution came about is a com-plicated question that has not been resolved, but the answer conven-tionally posed on the record jackets of Figaro is certainly not amongthe leading options. I do not wish simply to debunk the idea thatBeaumarchais or Mozart was a budding revolutionary, which would betoo negative and tedious a task. The problem most pertinent to stu-dents of Figaro is not the origins of the Revolution, but rather largersocial and cultural changes that were represented in the play and theopera, and that arose as well within the careers of the three authors(including librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte). The two works do show sig-nificant social tendencies at work, though we cannot assign them apart in the collapse of the Bourbon monarchy.

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The Myth of Mozart, the Revolutionary 35

A process of historical revisionism has evolved in the study of allthe European revolutions from the seventeenth through the nine-teenth centuries. The word "revolution" had usually been taken tomean a purposeful uprising of a popular movement against the rulingclass; "revolutionaries" were seen as both thinkers and planners, andwhat they did might end up reshaping society. But historians of thegreat Western revolutionschiefly the British Civil War, the Ameri-can Revolution, the French Revolutions of 1789 and 1830, and theMexican Revolution of 1911have found that what happened wasinstead quirky, unanticipated, lacking in ideological consistency, andproblematic regarding its impact. Some major figures even call theseevents accidental. When looked at closely, the origins of the revolu-tions have suggested confusion rather than purpose; what ultimatelycame about seems not to have been intended before the event. Wemust see that these revolutions did not constitute an overthrow ofgovernment or the social system, but rather amounted to a breakdownof authority due to a great variety of causes. What happened in therevolutions was a picking up of pieces of government in the midst ofintense, violent conflicts over the reestablishment of authority. Aprofound discontinuity between the new and the old regimes almostalways occurred. The extent to which a new political or social orderdeveloped is a controversial issue in all these cases, and the distinc-tion between the two types of change has become increasingly hardto draw.

We must be careful then in using the terms "revolution" and"revolutionary." We must not smuggle the characteristics of mid- andlate-twentieth-century revolutions back into a very different context.The people who took part in the debates in June and July 1789 foundthemselves in a political process the likes of which they had neverdreamed, and it was from the complete novelty of the event that itsextraordinary characteristics derived.The idea of Mozart as a revolutionary has come to predominanceonly in recent decades. Hermann Abert took the opposite viewpointin speaking of Figaro in his major biography of the composer publishedin 1921: "In sho rt, the primary factors are hum an , n ot social. Becauseof this, Mozart pays almost no attention to external trappings or sur-roundings. What intrigues him is the personality per se of the humanbeing, not the external circumstances and relationships which pro-duced it." 4 A more productive approach from that period, not boundto romantic visions of genius, is provided by Eric Blum, who investi-

gates the antecedents of the opera's characters in commedia del axle.


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characters.5 Blum suggests, for example, that Figaro had roots in theharlequin, and Don Curzio in Tartaglia.The phenomenon of revolution became a matter of general inter-est, both in academic life and in general political awareness, duringthe 1960s. The idea of the revolutionary who challenges the social,system and calls for its overthrow became a fascination as much inartistic as in social scientific thinking; classification of a figure as arevolutionary became a major category in the modern rhetoricalvocabulary. The idea took on such influence, in fact, that it has oftenbeen applied in contexts where appropriate circumstances did notapply.Volkmar Braunbehrens has an oddly contradictory point of view

on the question in his widely read Mozart in Vienna: 1781-1791. Heasserts that Figaro "expresses himself with such force that the entiresocial system is unmistakably called into question. Here the prerevolu-tionary tone is clearly perceptible." He claimslacking any sourcethat "the opera was obviously boycotted by the Viennese nobility."He speaks darkly of the emperor's initial banning of the Beaumarchaisplay and his early concerns about Mozart's project. Then, however,Braunbehrens turns right around and declares that "the elimination ofaristocratic privilege" was "a basic element of Josephine domesticpolicy" and that within this context the libretto was "hardly revolu-tionary."6 He nonetheless chides a historian for calling the emperor arevolutionary. The confusion is symptomatic of the problems in theconventional wisdom and, indeed, in the rhetorical overload of theword "revolutionary."One is particularly alarmed to discover a cultural historian, PaulRobinson, echoing these ideas. In Opera and Ideas (1986) he callsFigaro "an Enlightenment tract on reason"; he argues that the worksuggests the "protracted assault on the idea of aristocracy" made bythe Enlightenment, that one aria "documents Mozart's emotionalidentification with the political radicalism of the eighteenth century,"and that all this "captures . . . something of the spirit of the FrenchRevolution." When he then portrays Giaocchino Rossini's Barber ofSeville as a reaction against the Enlightenment, one begins wonderingwhat the word has come to mean.7It is testimony to the influence of the idea that it also appears inNeal Zaslaw's landmark book on Mozart's symphonies, a work that isone of the most important models of contextual analysis in musichistory. Zaslaw studies the symphonies in strict relationship to socialcontext, to the conventions found within genres and performinglocales; he starts from the presumption that one cannot understand


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what Mozart did without knowing the practices and the expectationsfor anyone composing in a musical genre in a given place. His discus-sion of the relations between music and published writings makes hismethods seem close to those of Roger Chartier and contributors toAnnaks.8But Zaslaw speaks in categorical terms on the question of Mozartand the Revolution. "Who," he asks "can doubt that many of thedaring ideas expressed in the librettos of Figaro and Don Giovanni arisefrom the concerns of the Enlightenment and the Age of Revolution?"He calls Beaumarchais's play "proto-revolutionary" and the AustrianMasonic lodges "subversive" organizations; Mozart supposedly had"rebellious thoughts" on the empire and the Church. A footnotenonetheless admits that Robert Darnton, the historian of the ancienregime, saw sexual rather than political issues arising over the play.All in all, Zaslaw concludes, the opera "is the French Revolution inaction, before the Revolution (to paraphrase Napoleon's remark aboutBeaumarchais's play)."9In the rush of the bicentennial conferences, scholars have for themost part given in to the temptation to make eulogies to Mozart therevolutionary. Papers and publications have kept repeating the idea; ithas become conventional wisdom.10 The idea has its critics, however.Fritz Noske was an early one, in 1969. He argues that "howeverclearly social tensions are expressed in the opera, they should not leadus to the conclusion that the composer intended to expose the oppres-sion of the lower classes by a ruthless aristocracy." The opera, hewrites, "contains no message; it does not propagate reform of thesocial order, let alone a revolution. Everyone who uses his eyes andears must admit that Mozart only registers the social climate, withouttaking sides. His Count is no monster, nor is Figaro the people'shero." 1 1 Noske makes some suggestive social comments, among themthe observation that the tension between Bartolo and Figaro wouldhave been understood as the rivalry over medical practice between thedoctor and the barber. Wye Allanbrook has also demurred on thenotion of Mozart as revolutionary. She argues that the opera does notattack the existing order; it is not "a revolutionary's manual." In hereyes Mozart "had no desire to obliterate class distinctions, because forhim the way to the most important truth lay through the surface ofthings as they are. . . . True freedom begins with carefully circum-scribed orders, true knowledge with the patience of the receptiveeye."12

I would not, however, wish to go quite as far as Noske or Allan-brook in dismissing the idea of a "message" in the role of Figaro.


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Although Mozart was no revolutionary, he did have a kind of musicaland social agenda.The historiography of the French Revolution is a vast subject,having had a bicentennial just before that of Mozart.13 Let us explorethe revisionistic interpretation briefly and then turn to Beaumarchais,his play, and Da Ponte's libretto. The problem that led to disillusion-ment with the old interpretation was that, upon closer inspection,both the bourgeoisie and the nobility proved quite different from whathad long been said of them. In the 1950s, Alfred Cobban raised theoriginal question about who constituted the revolutionary middleclass, since he found few capitalists or businessmen of any sort activein French politics. Instead, he found lawyers and mid-level civil ser-vants leading the political debate, and few benefits for capitalism orindustry emerging from it. This did not seem to be a very "bourgeois"revolution; its ideas indeed looked back to traditional rural notions ofjustice and equity.14

Nor can we call the French nobility unusually closed or rigid inits admission of new blood. Thanks to the sale of noble offices by themonarchy, the French nobility admitted far more practicing business-men into its rahks than did the British. If anything, it was in Britainthat one found a narrow, closed aristocracy, and in France that a titlewas beginning to be equated with wealth. 15 The supposedly "feudal-patriarchal" Count AlmavivaBraunbehrens's wordsno longerseems necessarily typical of the noblesse of the time; France containeda variety of quite different strands of nobility. What makes the countseem out of date is that by the 1780s the great majority of the mostwealthy and influential noble families spent little time on their estatesand thereby lost the close relationships with their servants such as aredepicted in the play and the libretto. Most who did spend time on theestates were minor notables who could not have gained the high postof ambassador to Britain such as the count brags about. One couldargue that Beaumarchais drew an improbable social type such as thisfor the very reason that it was outdated.Th ere has also been a confusion in the no tion of Figaro as"proto-revolutionary." Was his supposed revolt against the nobility,the crown, or the state, or all the above? The principal opponents ofthe crown were by tradition aristocratic members of the thirteen parle-ments, who at points had had a nervous alliance with some of thephilosophes. That Beaumarchais hardly mentions the monarchy issignificant; for all his eagerness for controversy, Beaumarchais avoidedthe whole constitutional question of royal authority and limited theplay's social horizons to a country estate.


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Where were the philosophiesindeed what is called theEnlightenmentin all this? Historians now use the term "Enlighten-ment" much more sparingly than in the past, since they have discov-ered such variety and internal ten sions among its different com pon entsthat the old assumptions attached to it do not square with their newknowledge. Most important of all, it is now agreed that by about 1770the major philosophes, whether dead or not, had become elevatedinto a pantheon of great men and in so doing lost their status as radi-cals. Their political principles had at any rate been quite inconsistent;some had favored absolutist monarchy for its ability to do good works,and some had skirted the issue.One is therefore hard pressed to prove that the Enlightenmentbrought about the French Revolution. Keith Baker has sketched outan argument by which certain influences might at some point be dis-cerned, but only after beginning from a revisionist perspective andmaking a multitude of qualifications of the problems involved in find-ing long-term origins.16 The fact is that most historians see the Revo-lution as evolving from the convergence of a variety of contingencies,the sum of which made French politics change into drastically newdirections. Indeed, if anyone was providing intellectual leadership inthose difficult times, it was noblemen, not "prerevolutionary" radicalbourgeois. Most of these gentlemen had been in the company of thephilosophesthey tended to admire Voltaire a great dealbut theynecessarily had their own ideas, since neither Voltaire's nor Rousseau'sprovided much explicit guidance.

Where, then, was Beaumarchais in all this? His career is admi-rable proof of the skeptical viewpoint, since it suggests how far a skill-ful opportunist might move up the social scale in that age. The son ofa watchmaker, he initially worked seriously in his father's trademaking pieces for Madame Pompadourand eventually became highlyplaced at court and well connected in the intellectual community. Hegained support in getting Figaro on stage from the highest noble fami-lies, most prominently from several of the princes of the blood; theDuchess of Bourbon supposedly helped to distribute tickets to thepremiere.17 The cabal that formed at court in his favor also includedthe secretary of state of the Royal House, the baron de Breteuil, and aleading female member of the Polignac family; even the queen put ina word for him at some point.1 8 As is true today, the intellectualupper classes devoured the social criticism directed at them, at least ifit was done with a certain literary panache, along lines of discoursethey themselves had defined. Typical of the age, Beaumarchais movedabout in his political alliances. During the early 1770s he was linked


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to the parliamentary opposition in a court case against a judge namedGoezman, but in the years immediately before the Revolution, hesided with the supporters of the king in a case against the Mesmeritebanker Kornmann.19

What Norman Hampson said recently of Morellet applies equallyto Beaumarchais: "His career does nothing to lend credence to the oldview that, under the ancien rdgime, a frustrated bourgeoisie was impa-tient to shake off its 'feudal chains.' Social mobility posed few prob-lems for Morellet as he moved from Lyon shopkeeping to becoming aminor intellectual celebrity and the friend of nobles and ministers.The society in which he moved seemed scarcely less egalitarian thanthat of the present day, and it was probably more international in itsoutlook." 20That the characters in Figaro formed part of a long and compli-cated set of theatrical traditions should make one wary of attributingrevolutionary meaning to these texts. Sexual rivalry between a peasantand an aristocrat or a monarch was a standard plot line, and referenceto social and political tensions in a politically unthreatening fashionhad been common in the theater. Some scholars have traced the char-acters in Figaro back to the commedia del arte tradition; others havelinked them with similar plays in eighteenth-century France.21

Another of Figaro's origins lay in the work of Lope de Vega, theplaywright who shaped the Spanish theater during the late sixteenthand early seventeenth centuries. Beaumarchais was probably influ-enced by him, since he spent time in Spain. 22 A considerable numberof the Spaniard's most successful plays were on the subject of the droitde seigneur, the feudal right of a lord to sleep with a woman on hislands before her wedding. Such a plot typically depicts an aristocratattempting to take a peasant girl on her wedding bed, only to befoiled by a stalwart agent of the king sent to uphold public morality.The plays at least approach Le M anage de Figaro in portraying thearistocrat in derogatory terms, and in some cases the plots eveninvolve his being killed by the peasant fiance". Beaumarchais and deVega are both much harsher toward the nobleman than Voltaire, theproud agriculturalist whose 1761 play Le Droit du seigneur presents himin a much more positive light.Beaumarchais did invest a much stronger meaning in the socialcriticism that came with the comic tradition than did de Vega or anyof die eighteenth-century French playwrights. As Sara Maza has putit, "Figaro demystified the world of his- masters instead of confirmingit."

23But ultimately, the language in the play seems closer to thecomic tradition and moral slurs against the nobility than to the party-driven attacks made upon the class once the Revolution began. The



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The Myth 0/Mozart, the Revolutionary 41

play's ideological content is essentially traditional, if unusually bluntand forceful in its expression. Servants were indeed to disappear asmajor figures in social comedies in the nineteenth century.24In the case of Mozart, a penetrating critique of identifying himwith the Enlightenment has been made by Derek Beales.25 Author ofa major study of Joseph II, Beales finds the intellectual and politicaltendencies in Austria of the time so riddled with contradictions thathe is unwilling to use the term in that context. The anticlericalismthat arose in eighteenth-century France, and that lay at the heart ofwhat we call the Enlightenment, was far less virulent or consistent inAustria. Aristocrats read and appreciated works by Fontenelle andVoltaire but opposed Joseph's elimination of monasteries. Joseph him-self was reluctant to suppress the Jesuits and created new parisheswhile closing down the monasteries. Just as Beales has many doubtsabout calling Joseph an enlightened despot, so he suggests that theTitus in La clemenza di Tito is best seen as "pre-enlightened." Clem-ency was a long-standing legal measure often used by autocratic rulersthat came under attack by figures of the French and Italian Enlighten-ment who wanted to rationalize punishment.By the same token, Beales shows how Austrian Freemasonrydrew many of its members from quite unenlightened lay and clericalmembers of the church. "In the 1780s," he concludes, "it was clearlypossible to be both a Mason and a pillar of the Catholic Establish-ment . "2 6 As Dorothy Koenigsberger indicates, the intellectual originsof Freemasonry are better seen in an extension of late medieval her-metic thinking than in the Enlightenment. 27 All in all, Beales cau-tions us that there are few clues about Mozart's politics in his lettersand suggests that Mozart learned to adapt politically, as most musi-cians had to do, to survive professionally. Beales concludes:

So far as we know, he had no greater problem of political adjustment.His name has not been found on police lists of potentially dangerouspersons. It is a mistake to treat all Masons as radical and equally sus-pect to the authorities. There is no reason to think that in Mozart'scase Masonic affiliation and association with Joseph's policies wentwith the sort of political commitment that would have caused him toconspire against Francis II's regime. More likely, his ideas, like thoseof most Freemasons and Josephists, were a pot-pourri of Catholicismand Enlightenment, of the traditional and the progressive, whose in-gredients could easily be adjusted according to the developing politicalsituation and die changing tastes of the ruler.28Yet, if neither Beaumarchais nor Mozart had a revolutionaryagenda, I would nonetheless argue that they did share what we might


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call crudely a careerist agenda. Both of them were working to expandthe intellectual and artistic scale of the genres within which they wereworking. They were attempting to enlarge or deepen the possibilitiesopen to them within the theater world: the playwright to speak morebluntly about moral problems of the time, and the composer to turnan opera from a pasticcio to an integral work on a large musical scale.They were both deeply ambitious men in their creative activity. Butthey were also bound to the conventions of their fields, and neithertended toward eccentricity; they worked within the conventions oftheir time. As such they found deep meaning in the demand foropportunity and freedom with which they could invest Figaro, andthey indeed visibly identified with him. He provided them the meansby which to articulate their ambitions in a socially acceptable fashion.It is in this respect that I disagree with Noske in denying that Mozarthad any message; Noske restricts the meaning of Figaro's words toomuch.

While this was not a revolutionary message, it was one thatworked for change in the ability of professionals to define the worldsin which they worked. What we are talking about here related closelyto the kind of careerism that was going on in a wide variety of profes-sions in the time. We cannot call it a rise of the middle class, sinceartisans and aristocrats were involved in it too. It was a highly entre-preneurial tendency, a matter of looking for means by which an artistwith ideas could set the terms of his work, and that required a gooddeal of opportunism. Mozart, in leaving Salzburg and turning downother court positions, was by definition an entrepreneur. Beaumarchaishad even greater variety and worldliness in his activities. Rene"Pomeau summed up his career in the preface to his pithy study: "Iwould propose to consider not simply Beaumarchais the author, butalso Beaumarchais the watchsmith, the courtesan, the man of busi-ness, the secret political agent, the promotor of philanthropic-speculative enterprises, or more often than one might suspect, purelyphilanthropic (in the sense that it loses lots of money); and that wenot forget, from one end of his life to another, Beaumarchais theindefatigable lover."29 We shall return to the last question shortly.The idea of careerism applies to Figaro specifically, since duringthe late eighteenth century servants such as he were undergoing majorchanges in their roles and in their relations with employers. Researchon servants in France has found that during the century there was atendency for them to become much more independent of their mas-ters, the men changing positions frequently and becoming minor busi-nessmen with projects both legal and illegal. The comic theater



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recorded this change vividly, although interestingly enough, afterabout 1760 most playwrights (Diderot, for example) ceased to do so,since they wished to speak moral truths that did not square with theopportunism of the servants.30 The careers of Beaumarchais and Mo-zart fit the pattern of the entrepreneurial servant; both were attempt-ing to forge a more independent form of professional patronage.Let us not forget, however, that it was not at all new for musi-cians and writers to manipulate their roles as servants to obtain highconnections. It had been common for high-ranking musicians to serveas ambassadors or political agents for their monarchs. Sixteenth-century musicians in the English Chapel Royal (William Byrd, forexample) often had substantial businesses granted royal monopolies.The difference in the eighteenth century was the sharper intel-lectual independence involved, and that is why Figaro did have asocial message. Through Figaro's words challenging the count, Beau-marchais, Da Ponte, and Mozart were asserting their right to self-determination as artistic professionals. It was a rhetorical act; to speakwith a slick kind of rudeness about the most traditional of the nation'selites was to assert one's primacy in one's field and in the society ingeneral. That is why even though Da Ponte removed some of thesharper phrases in the original play, it did not really make much dif-ference. The play had been published and read all over Europeandpeople loved it, the intellectual nobility particularly. Even at that,Figaro's lines in the cavatina in act 1 reflects a purposeful forth right-ness that smacks of the new professionalism:

Try to deceive me, I'll do the same thing;Two play at that game, yes, Sir, believe me;I'll put a spoke in your wheel if I can.Essential to the significance of a work such as Figaro is that this

success came about within a special metropolitan context. Historianstend to forget how recently Paris and London had become metropoli-tan centers in the modern fashion, arguably only after the turn of theeighteenth century and by certain standards not until nearly its end.The concentration of the most wealthy and powerful members of theupper classes in national capitals brought a new factor into societythat exerted a major influence in its own right. A new way of lifeevolved that opened up a multitude of possibilities for ambitiouspeople in many fields.The sense of the public that historians have been studying

recently was basically a metropolitan phenomenon, and the acts ofself-assertion made by Beaumarchais, Da Ponte, and Mozart were


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closely related to th at developm ent . Th e self-defining professionalartist could come about only within an urban context where theirprofessions and a highly educated public were con cen trated . Indeed ,it is significant t ha t the three m en spanned the th ree major m etro-polises, since Da Ponte had learned the theatrical trade in London.Through that experience he contributed a shrewd sense of how somevery delicate issues, which had been broached in Paris and followedclosely in London, would play in Vienna. Though Vienna was at thevery least fifty years behind the other two cities in this development,its increasingly close cultural links with Paris meant that it couldparticipate with the other two in a major artistic event such as thepremiere of Le Nozze di Figaro.

The issue of sexual morality in the two works also grew out ofthe new metropolitan way of life of the upper classes. Cissie Fairchildshas argued that aristocratic gentlemen turned from servants to prosti-tutes and then to theatrical employees for sexual favors as family lifebecame more private, insulated from the servants, and as they spentincreasing amounts of time in the cities. It is not yet clear how far wecan go with this interesting thesis, since work on Parisian servantsdoes not entirely support it.31 But it is, nonetheless, abundantly clearthat by the 1740s a very public world had opened up in the Paristheaters, whereby gentlemen competed for leading dancers, singers,and actors.32 By the 1780s the droit de seigneur, like the social type ofthe count, was becoming an outdated issue, but for that reason it wasa powerful vehicle for theatrical treatment.At the same time, the sexual lives of the upper classes becameincreasingly public in pamphlets and periodicals in both cities thatcited or suggested names with reckless abandon. The play and theopera, in reality, refer to the highly public, indeed theatrical, displayof sexual immorality among the upper classes that was becomingincreasingly well known in Parisian society. There was nothing new,of course, about gossip surrounding the prostitution and extramaritalaffairs of the rich. But to a certain extent, sexual licence had becomea kind of self-conscious privilege that the upper-most classes couldenjoy as a part of their social stations. Though there is still only lim-ited research on this score, it is increasingly thought that during theseventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Church and the statecracked down on rituals and festivals among the popular classes thatinvolved sexual freedom as well as drinking and the reversal of socialroles by the rich and the poor. For that reason, the increasingly publicdisplay of sexual licence by the rich in the national capitals had apowerful social meaning in the society at large.



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In his extensive preface to the published edition of the play,Beaumarchais made clear that sexual morality was the main focus ofthe work. He wrote that he wished "to fix public opinion on what onemight understand by these words: What is theatrical decency?" Heattacked the tendency of "over-sophisticated connoisseurs" to affect a"hypocrisy of decency in regard to the relaxation of morals." Heannounced his goal: "these vices, these abuses, these things that neverchange, but are disguised in a thousand forms under the mask of thedominant morals; to tear the mask away and to show them in fullview, that is the noble task of anyone who dedicates himself to thetheater."3 3It is in this regard that the play and the opera differ the mostsignificantly. Even though Da Ponte eliminated the strongest phrasescritical of the nobility from the play, enough remained that the operawas equally notorious along these lines. But he did temper the eroticsensibility of the libretto in ways that made a great deal of difference.In the play, the count is a flagrant libertine, his words resonating withthe mood of competitive seduction that permeated the life of the Paristheaters, making him one of the least sympathetic characters in therepertory of the time. In Da Ponte's version, and particularly inMozart's setting, the count seems subject to temptation rather thantending toward sexual aggression; his character is sympathetic to us ina brilliantly ambiguous fashion. They clearly did not think thatVienna was ready for the libertinism of the Parisian upper classes.Th e idea of Beaum archais and M ozart as protorev olutionaries is ared herring, and I think we have to be very careful in relating eitherof them in categorical terms to the Enlightenment. But each of themhad a serious agenda as an artist who wished to set the agenda ofactivity in his respective fieldmoral controversy in the one, and thedevelopment of large-scale musical structures in the other. They bothbelieved deeply in Figaro as the theatrical epitome of their own profes-sional daring.NotesThis article was first presented at the conference "Mozart: Text and Context," held atthe William Andrews Clark Memorial Library of the University of California, LosAngeles, in April 1992.1. H. C. Robbins Landon, 179 /: Mozart's Last Year (London: Macmillan, 1988).2. Julia Moore, "Mozart in the Marketplace," Journal of the Royal Musical Association114 (1989):18-42; review article in Journal of M usicdogkal Research 12 (1992):83-109; and "Mozart and Salieri: Their Finances," Mozart Bicentenary Conference, forth-coming.


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3. For the historiography of the subject, see William Doyle, Th e Origins of the FrenchRevolution, 2d ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), ch. 1; Lynn Hunt, Poli-tics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1984), ch. 1; Jack R. Censer, "Com mencing the Third C entury of Deb ate,"American Historical Review 94 (1989): 1309-25; and Sarah Maza, "Politics, Cultureand the Origins of the French Revolution," Journal of Modem History 61 (1989):704-23.4- Quoted by Fritz Noske in "Social Tensions in Le Nozze di Figaro," Music andLetters 50 (1969): 45.5. Eric Blum, "The Literary Ancestry of Figaro," Musical Quarterly 13 (1927):528-39 .6. Volkmar Braun behrens, Mozart in Vienna: 1781-1791, trans. Timothy Bell (NewYork: Grove-W eidenfeld, 1989), 210- 11 , 283, 441.7. Paul Robin son, Opera and Ideas: From Mozart to Strauss (Ithaca: Cornell Univer-sity Press, 1986), 15, 40, 38.8. Roger Cha ttier, Cultural History: Between Practices an d Representations, trans.Lydia G. Cochrane (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). See further discussion ofthis histonographical problem in William Weber, "Beyond Zeitgeist: Recent Work inMusic History," Journal of Modem H istory 66 (1994): 1-25.9. Neal Zaslaw, Mozart's Symphonies: Context, Performance Practice, Reception(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 526, 527, 532.10. For another example of the conventional wisdom, see Michelle Biget, Muskjue etRevolution francaise: la longue durie (Besancon: Diffusion, 1989).11. Noske, 61.12. Wye Allanbrook, Rhythmic Gesture m Mozart: Le Nozze di Figaro an d Don Gio-vanni (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 94-13. See note 3.14. Alfred Cobban, "The Myth of the French Revolution" in Aspects of the FrenchRevolution (London: Brazillier, 1968).15. On the French nobility, see Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret, The French Nobility inthe Eighteenth Century: From Feudalism to Enlightenment, trans. William Doyle (Cam-bridge: Cam bridge University Press, 198 5). On the English nobility, see Joh n C an-non, Aristocratic Century: The Peerage of Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1984), and, on critiques of the nobility, Paul Langford,Public Life and the Propertied Englishman, 1689-1798 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1991), especially ch. 8, "Personal Nobility." For an updated analysis of class structurein the revolution, see Timothy Tackett, "Nobles and the Third Estate in the Revolu-tionary Dynamics of the National Assembly," American Historical Review 94 (1989):271-301.16. Keith Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture mthe Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and "On theProblem of the Ideological Origins of the French Revolution," in Modem European


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Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives, ed. Dominick LaCapra andSteven Kaplan (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982): 197-219.17. 27 Apr. 1784. [Louis Petit de Bachaumont et aL] Mfrnones secrets pour servh aI'histoire de la ripublique de s lettres en France, 36 vols. (London, 1777-89), 25:255-57.18. Claude Petitfrere, Le scandale du Manage de Figaro: prilude a la Rdvoluaonfrancaise? (Paris: Edition Complexe, 1989), 10-11 .19. See Ren Pomeau, Beaumarchais ou la bizarre desanie (Paris: Presse Universitairefranchise, 1987), 7; Margaret Leah John son, Beaumarchais and His Opponents (NewYork: Whittet and Shepperton, 1936); and Petitfrere.20 . "The Censor and the philosophes," Times Literary Supplement, 14 Feb. 1992: 6.21 . Blum; Rudolph Angermuller, Figaro (Salzburg: Internationale, 1986), 17; BruceBrown, Gluck and the French Theatre in Vienna (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1991); Daniel Heartz and Thomas Bauman, Mojort's Operas (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1990), chs. 7 and 8.22 . Reader's Encyclopedia of World Drama, ed. John Gassner and Edward Quinn(London: Methuen, 1970), 894-95; Oxford Companion to the Theatre (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1967), 985-86.23 . Sarah Maza, Servants an d Masters m Eighteenth-Century France: Th e Uses of Loy-alty (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 252.24. Maza, 252.25. Derek Beales, Mozart and the Habsburgs: The Stenton Lecture, 1992 (Reading:University of Reading, 1993); Joseph 11, vol. I: In the Shadow of Maria Theresa,1741-80 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).26 . Beales, 15.27 . Dorothy Koenigsberger, "A New Metaphor for Mozart's Magic Flute," EuropeanStudies Review 5 (1975): 229-75.28 . Beales, "Mozart and the Habsburgs," London Mozart Conference, 1991.29 . Pomeau, 7.30. Maza, 77-78; Cissie Fairchilds, "Masters and Servants in Eighteenth-CenturyToulouse," Journal of Social History 12 (1979): 368-93; and Fairchilds, Domestic Ene-mies: Servants and Their Masters in Old Regime France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni-versity Press, 1984). Jacqueline Sabattier sees less rapid change, however, in Figaro etson maitre: Maltres el domestiques a Paris au XVlll' siide (Paris: Perrin, 1984)-31. Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies, 188-92; Sabattier.32. See Camille Piton, Paris sous Louis XV, 5 vols. (Paris: Socie'te' du Mercure deFrance, 1908-14), and Loredan Larchey, journal de M. Sartine (Paris: Dentu, 1910),for extracts from the dossiers of police reports on prostitution in the Archives Nation-ales, Bibliotheque de I'Arsenal, and Bibliotheque Nationale.33. Beaumarchais, Le mariage de Figaro, ed. Jacques Sherer (Paris: Socie'ti d'Editionsd'Enseignement Sup^rieure, 1966), 9, 13.


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