patronage and market in the creation of opera before the institution of intellectual property

Journal of Cultural Economics25: 21–45, 2001.© 2001Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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Patronage and Market in the Creation of OperaBefore the Institution of Intellectual Property

TIMOTHY KINGWorld Bank, Bajcsy-Zsilinszky út 42–46, H-1054 Budapest, Hungary

Abstract. Have different methods of financing the performing arts had an effect on the quality ordiversity of the stock of works to be performed? This paper contrasts experience in the Holy RomanEmpire and Italy from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century when copyright laws beganto play a major role in the economics of composition. The period 1751–1790 strongly confirmshypotheses that patron-driven opera would be expected to be qualitatively superior to market-drivenopera. Italian experience from 1810–1840, however, suggests that this result cannot be generalized.

Key words: finance, opera, patronage, quality

Most economic analysis of the performing arts focuses on the economics of per-formance. In this, of course, it follows the seminal work of William H. Baumoland William Bowen (1966). But at least as important a set of questions – and,indeed, logically prior ones – concerns the ways in which economics might affectthe stock of works that exists to be performed. Does extra-market financial supportfor artistic creation frequently improve the quality of this stock, or its diversity,as well as its quantity? The answer might have considerable implications for artspolicy.

The topic is a large one, not manageable in a single paper. The generalizationsthat can be drawn from an analysis of one art form at one particular period, ex-emplifying only a few types of patronage, are inevitably limited. A useful start,however, was made in a paper also by William Baumol, this time in collaborationwith Hilda Baumol (1994). They discuss the role that economic factors might haveplayed in causing the Holy Roman Empire in general, and Vienna in particular,to become so remarkably important in musical creation in the second half of theeighteenth century. They observe that this manifested itself particularly, though not,of course, exclusively, in opera. Although this paper takes issue with some aspectsof the Baumols’ interpretation of the market for composers’ services, this is not itsprincipal purpose. The paper’s main object is to follow up their suggestion that thesystem of financing opera through court patronage appears to have been of particu-lar significance, and to ask whether this implies that a patronage system might leadto the creation of better operas than the market. Operas first performed in 1751–1790 (and later extended to 1840) are classified by their place of first performance,

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which indicates whether their creation was wholly or largely the result of courtpatronage or in response to market demand. The paper then uses two measures –whether an opera is still performed, and expert opinion – as approximate indicatorsof quality. These confirm that, during 1751–1790, opera created under conditionsof patronage was generally better, and that Vienna was special in this respect.

The paper then considers possible explanations for such a qualitative difference.One would expect it to occur in one or more of three ways. First, one might findthat a patron, unhampered by normal market constraints, sponsors opera of thesame type as the market but of above-average quality. Second, one might find thatthe conditions of production of an opera under a patronage system differ from thoseof a market system in a way that would foster better quality opera. Third, patronpreferences may differ systematically from those of the market; in particular, theremay be a greater willingness to support innovation.

Opera provides a particularly suitable art form for studying the relationshipbetween patronage and the market. Opera is the most expensive of the performingarts, so if economic conditions anywhere affect either performance or creation ofcultural products, this is most likely with opera. Moreover, throughout most of itshistory opera has received some but not all of its finance from non-market sources,providing many opportunities for comparing the apparent consequences of differ-ent systems of finance. This paper follows the Baumols in focussing mainly on thesecond half of the eighteenth century in the area now formed by Germany, Austria,Hungary, the Czech Republic and Italy. The Baumols, however, make only passingreferences to Italy in their paper, and, noting that it was also politically fragmented,governed in part by the Habsburgs, and was a source of many composers, seemto imply that it can be considered as a mere extension of the “German-speakinglands”. In contrast, this paper highlights important distinctions between the marketfor, and the output of, opera in Italy and the other countries.

The reader should be warned at the outset that the paper is not very conclusive.What appear to be robust conclusions emerging from the eighteenth century ex-perience do not survive well in the nineteenth. In its concluding section, this paperdiscusses reasons for this contrast and the implications they carry for the potentialrole for economics in interpreting cultural history.

1. Patronage Versus the Market

It should be noted that this paper is using the terms “patron”, “patronage” and“market” slightly differently from the way they are used in a recent book by TylerCowen (1998). For Cowen, patronage entails the full-time, long-term employ-ment of a composer, which therefore restricts his artistic freedom in a way thata private commission to an independent composer does not. Cowen is anxious todemonstrate the role of markets in stimulating cultural creativity, and his criticaldistinction is therefore between a command and a commission.1 Later in this paper,a comparable distinction is made between patronage that works through the labor

PATRONAGE AND MARKET IN OPERATIC CREATION 23

market and patronage that operates in the product market. Our main concern, how-ever, is the nature of the market – whether there has been a qualitative differencebetween operas that rely to a major extent on ticket sales to the public and those thathave been largely financed by identifiable individuals who determine the nature ofthe opera and the incentives provided to the composer. A private commission byone or more wealthy people who pay a disproportionate amount of the costs of anopera is therefore regarded as patronage.

While the proportion of finance provided respectively by the box office andby patrons is an indicator of the extent of patronage, it is not necessarily a goodmeasure of the influence of patrons over decision-making. Of course, where therewas a single patron, it is reasonable to assume that decisions about opera are veryheavily influenced by the preferences of the patron, although not all patrons havebeen able or willing to devote a great deal of their own time to operatic details. Onewho did was Frederick the Great, who in 1742 built a new opera house in Berlinfor the performance of Italianopere serie.2 Lasting from November to March withperformances twice a week, a typical season would have two new operas, as well asa number of shorter works, with operas given no more than four times. Admission,limited to the court, army officers and the upper levels of Berlin society, remainedfree until 1789. Frederick involved himself extensively with operatic affairs. Heparticipated in the selection of librettos and wrote an initial draft of a particularlyinteresting one himself. He composed arias for insertion into other operas. Occa-sionally he used his despotic powers to intervene in the labor market for performers(Gaxotte, 1975, pp. 235–237; Rosselli, 1992, p. 23).

At the other extreme, public opera performances put on for profit and whollydependent on the box office were staged for the first time in Venice in 1637.Venetian-style opera was soon being exported all over Italy, first by travellingcompanies and within a few years by the establishment of permanent opera houses.Profit-seeking by individual impresarios continued to be a driving force in Italianopera for more than two centuries.

Individual patronage and purely profit-seeking opera are polar cases. His-torically and, of course, today, operatic financing has generally come from acombination of sources, both public and private. Few individual patrons had thewillingness and/or capacity to finance regular operatic seasons over a long period.Often opera flourished for a time, but then lapsed due to military distractions oreconomic problems. This was the case in Vienna in the 1740s. The Berlin OperaHouse was closed during the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), after which Frederickhad largely lost interest, and Italian opera never regained its preeminence in thecultural life of Berlin. Where there was a public demand for a regular season ofopera, it was obviously both feasible and sensible for the public to bear a shareof the costs, and this increased the probability that opera seasons would be sus-tained. Frederick the Great’s successor, Friederich Wilhelm II, who first institutedadmissions charges, had a personal preference for German opera, and founded aNationaltheater, while retaining Italian opera at the Royal Opera House. The new

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theatre soon proved profitable, and, unlike the Royal Opera House, was able tocontinue when the French occupation of the city in 1806–1807 cut off the royalsubsidy. The two companies then merged but each continued to give differentrepertoires. The wealthy citizenry tended to support German opera while the courtand nobility preferred Italian and French opera. A similar situation prevailed inDresden, where in 1815 a dual repertory was instituted largely for political reasons.

These examples illustrate that once an individual patron started to rely on themarket to cover some of his costs, he could no longer ignore its preferences. Nev-ertheless, although constrained in the degree to which he could impose his ownpreferences on the market, his would remain an extremely strong influence. Even inthe early twentieth century, Kaiser Wilhelm II participated actively in the selectionof the repertory and stage design at the Berlin Opera. Paid public subscriptionsto court-owned and subsidized theatres became a common pattern in German-speaking territories until the First World War – a financing pattern that can thenbe described as “patron-subsidized”.

Another mixed financing pattern emerged in Venice only a few years after operahad started there. “Even though the ostensible model of the Venetian opera housewas that of a profitable business, it was a business that did not usually make a profitand perhaps was not even expected to” (Bianconi and Walker, 1984, p. 226). InVenice, the required subsidies were normally provided by theatre owners, usuallymembers of great patrician families who were in the business as a hobby or toenhance their social standing, and were willing to assist the impresario who hadleased the theatre from them. Elsewhere in Italy, subsidies came from a varietyof sources, including local rulers and prominent citizens, who were regular sub-scribers to boxes. Limited data on receipts and costs from Modena in 1701 andBologna at various dates throughout the eighteenth century show theatre takingsat 60–84% of total expenditures (Rosselli, 1984, p. 52), but it is not clear whetherthese figures were typical. Regular cash subsidies from government or municipalsources appear, however, to have been rare, except in the case of royal theatres inTurin and Naples (Rosselli, 1998, p. 92).

One might describe this model of opera financing as “subscriber-subsidized”.Subscribers who at regular ticket prices would receive a consumer surplus fromthe opera can be persuaded to donate an additional amount to ensure its survival.This is, of course, the major source of extra-market support for opera in the U.S.today. Although donors are likely to be somewhat more enthusiastic concerningopera than the ticket-buying public as a whole, their preferences are unlikely tobe very different. Usually the impact of the preferences of individual donors willbe very diffuse compared with patronage models. In the century from 1750 to1850, with which this paper is principally concerned, subscriber subsidies oftenwent hand in hand with profit maximization by an impresario. In general, operain German-speaking countries can be classified as “patronage-driven” and that inItaly as “market-driven” (although there were important exceptions as in the courtat Parma, and some civic and commercial German opera).


The paper’s analysis ends in the mid-nineteenth century when copyright beganto make a major change in the economics of operatic composition. For example, in1854 Verdi noted that new copyright laws made it possible for him to earn five orsix times as much for an opera as a decade earlier (Lindenberger, 1984, p. 242.)

2. Was Vienna Exceptional?

The Baumols’ paper mentions the association with Vienna of Gluck, Mozart,Haydn, Dittersdorf, Salieri and Beethoven, and it is taken as self-evident that sucha famous collection of composers could not have been matched elsewhere. Noneof these composers was native to the city, though Haydn was born not far away,with the implication that the city offered some special attraction to composers. Aproblem in attempting to test this contention and to explore whether there was somekind of musical agglomeration at work is that this list of composers spans a verylong period. Gluck settled in Vienna in 1752, and Beethoven died there in 1827. Hearrived there in 1792 to study with Haydn, aged 60, after Gluck and Mozart weredead, and Dittersdorf, who had composed nothing for Vienna since 1789, had left,or was about to leave, the city. The Baumols’ paper focuses especially on “Mozart’sVienna” – the period between his settling there in 1781 and his death in 1791. Astarring role is assigned to Emperor Joseph II, who reigned from 1765 to 1790(sharing power with his mother, Maria Theresa, until 1780). The main discussion inthis paper includes all of Gluck’s time in Vienna, since this was such an importantmoment in operatic history, but not the period after 1790. The aftermath of theFrench Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars disrupted and/or altered the characterof a number of opera markets, and makes it more difficult to make the internationalcomparisons on which this paper depends.3

The Baumols’ assumption about the importance of Vienna for the compositionof opera can be readily tested. Table I shows the number of premières recorded inmajor theatres in selected European cities, aggregated by decades between 1751and 1790. Vienna has been separated out from other German-speaking territories.The estate of Prince Esterházy, Haydn’s employer, was in Hungary, and has beenlumped together with Prague; at this period both were under Habsburg rule fromVienna. Austrian rule also extended to important parts of what is now Italy, includ-ing Milan, but the characteristics of the opera industry remained distinctly Italian,and Italy has therefore been assumed to have the boundaries that it eventually hadafter full unification had been achieved in 1870.

Any statistical work on opera encounters questions of definition. How much ofthe musical theatre will be included – where should the boundary be placed in thedirection of spoken dramas with incidental songs, or towards revues with virtuallyno dramatic action? Table I is based on selected theatres, rather than individualoperas, and not all of these specialized exclusively in a particular operatic genreover several decades. There has also been a general tendency for types of comicor light opera, which started by catering for popular taste and was correspondingly

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Table I. Number of opera premieres at major theatres, 1751–1790

Vienna Hungary Other St. Paris Italy London Total

and German Petersburg

Prague speaking

1751–1760 20 3 55 14 56 251 16 415

1761–1770 29 11 72 7 81 287 34 521

1771–1780 38 23 170 17 93 330 32 703

1781–1790 49 7 145 21 126 408 24 760

Total 136 44 442 59 356 1276 106 2419

% 5.6 1.8 18.3 2.4 14.7 52.7 4.4 100.0

Source: Charles H. Parsons (1989).

scorned by regular opera-goers, to gain sophistication, improve in musical qualityand be increasingly accepted into the regular operatic repertory. The Italianoperabuffa, the Frenchopéra-comique, the GermanSingspieland, in the nineteenth cen-tury, French and Viennese operetta all moved upmarket in this way.4 The processhas continued with the frequent revivals of Broadway musicals by modern operacompanies. Moreover in the eighteenth century some of the most celebrated com-posers of more serous opera also wrote operas in these lighter genres. It seemstherefore appropriate to include several theatres that produced predominantly theselighter types of opera. Consequently, the Parisian data includeopéras comiquesat the Opéra Comique and the Théâtre Italienne, which account for about sixtypercent of the premières listed in Table I. (It should be noted that these wereunsubsidized.) About forty percent of the listed Italian premières were at fivetheatres – in Florence, Rome, Venice and two in Naples – which specialized incomic opera and were also unsubsidized. For London, however, the light operaticfare in English that was interspersed with stage plays (and very occasional seriousoperas) at both Covent Garden and Drury Lane has made no lasting impact onthe operatic repertory and so is excluded, leaving only premières in Italian in theKing’s Theatre. Similarly, the “magic operas” – folk tales in undefined orientalsettings with spoken dialogue and spectacular stage effects – that first appeared inVienna in the 1780s and boomed in the 1790s are also excluded.

While this may appear to increase the relative weight of Italy in Table I, itshould be noted that in other respects, the Italian premières understate the numberof premières given in Italy. They are based on data for 21 theatres, whereas in 1786alone (a year picked at random) there were premières at 33 theatres. Almost exactlya third of the operas first performed in 1786 were not at the theatres in Table I, withsimilar proportions foropere serieandopere buffe. The German data are drawnfrom the 24 most important theatres. Although many other places saw occasionalSingspielpremières, only one of the fifteen 1786 premières in Germany (as definedby today’s boundaries) is not included in the data of Table I.


For those unfamiliar with operatic history, but aware of the frequency withwhich today’s opera companies repeat a fairly small repertoire, the large numberof new operas in Table I may come as a surprise. A major reason for this is thatthere was relatively little repetition of the stock of existing operas. Consideringonly for the moment Italianopere serie, there were few incentives on either thedemand or supply side to repeat an old opera rather than produce a new one. On thedemand side, audiences expected their operas to be new ones each season, whichsubscribers would then see several times. These operas, however, were virtuallyinterchangeable. Librettos were frequently reset – the 27 librettos of Metastasio,the most famous librettist of the eighteenth century, were utilized in more than 800operas and his most popular,Artaserse, was set more than 80 times. The attractionto the audience lay in the quality of the singing, and star singers were paid verymuch more than the composer. Although there were significant exceptions, and animportant part of the history of opera in the second half of the eighteenth centurydeals with the reform of serious opera in Italian, it is principally with Rossini thataudiences became anxious to see a particular opera which had proved a successelsewhere.

On the supply side, there was as yet no effective system of copyright in mostof Europe – though the monopoly privileges granted to the Paris Opéra by LouisXIV amounted to ade factoexception. In Italy, the composer was usually paida lump sum, irrespective of the success of the opera (Surian, 1998, p. 300). Theowner of the theatre in which a work was performed or the impresario who putit on usually retained the score and the right to use it again. A similar situationprevailed in German courts. Although there may have been some piracy of scores,there was not a huge incentive to do so. The various parts would still have had tobe copied, and the musical publishing companies that would become a dominantforce in Italian opera in the second half of the nineteenth century (following thepassage of effective copyright laws) had not yet been established. Staging a newopera was probably little more expensive than producing one performed elsewhere– it would not have been worthwhile to transport scenery, and, compared withsingers, the composers’ fee was a minor expense.5 Moreover, since there were notyet professional conductors, somebody was required to take charge of rehearsalsand to lead the orchestra from the keyboard – the composer was the right man forthis job, and his contract normally required him to do so, at least until after the firstthree performances. In addition, principal singers would expect the composer toadapt the music to suit the singer’s individual strengths; if they were dissatisfied,they might insist on his using an aria by another composer that they happened tohave with them. Revivals of the opera usually involved the composer himself andmight entail extensive revisions.

In the world of Italian opera, therefore, the composer would normally be presentfor each production, and, in consequence, the market for composers’ services wasto a very large degree the market for operatic performances. Nevertheless, foranalyzing patron-driven systems it will be useful to distinguish between patronage

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Table II. Operas performed 1996–1999, which were first performed 1751–1790

Date of Vienna Hungary Other St. Paris Italy Total

first and German Petersburg

performance Prague speaking

1751–1760 2 1 1 4

1761–1770 4 2 7 1 3 17

1771–1780 3 5 3 5 16

1781–1790 9 2 1 2 2 5 21

Total 15 7 14 2 7 13 58

% 25.9 12.1 24.1 3.4 12.1 22.4 100.0

Source: www.operabase.com, opera company web pages and advertising.

that takes the form of employing a composer, or providing him with a grant, andthat which simply commissions a single opera. The former involves the activityof the patron in the labor market, and the latter, activity in the product market.The Baumols emphasise labor market intervention, whereas this paper will suggestthat, in the Viennese situation they discuss, product market intervention was moreimportant.

In Table I, Vienna accounts for a relatively small proportion of the total numberof operatic premières. If, however, we try to attach some measure of quality to theoperas first performed there, its prominence increases. One possible measure mightbe described as a “survival test” – i.e., whether an opera is still performed today.Table II is a listing of the location of the premières of operas first performed duringthis period, that received a professional performance in North America or WesternEurope between 1996 and the middle of 1999.6 These are all the operas that I couldidentify, principally from Internet sources. The Table is not comprehensive, sincefor many companies, the information is complete only for limited periods, but it isunlikely to have missed many operas that are frequently performed.

Comparing Tables I and II, it is clear that Vienna, which accounts for less than6% of total premières, accounts for over 25% of the number of operas that have“survived”.7 It should not be thought that this is simply due to the popularity ofoperas by Mozart and Gluck. In Mozart’s case, only four of the fourteen operas inthe list were first performed in Vienna, and in Gluck’s case, only five out of eight.

The survival test is a long-term market test, and as such probably needs littlejustification to economists. Operas were written to appeal to audiences, so afterallowing enough time for these to sift the wheat from the chaff and to absorb in-novations, a market test should provide an indication of quality. However, a list thatgives the same weight to Pietro Auletta’sIl maestro di musica(Paris, 1752) and toMozart’sApollo et Hyacinthus(Salzburg, 1767) as toLe Nozze di Figaro(Vienna,1786) cannot pretend to be a precise measure of either popularity or operatic qual-ity. For the former, it would in principle be better to use a measure of the number


of productions of each opera, better still to use the number of performances, evenbetter to weight these by the capacity of the opera house, and best of all to use thenumber of seats sold. This was not practicable. Had it been done, the popularityof Mozart’s five best-known operas (four of which were first performed in Vienna)would have dwarfed all the other 58 operas into insignificance.8 While I made noattempt to count productions, it is clear that some of Mozart’s other operas, someby Gluck, and one by Domenico Cimarosa received more than one production.

Not everybody would accept any sort of market test as a satisfactory indicatorof quality. First, it is subject to fashion. The performance listing includes nineteenoperas by Handel – twenty-five years ago there would have been virtually none.(These are not, of course, reflected in the Tables, since his operas were composedearlier.) Second, there have been major instances of neglect of operas that are nowgenerally regarded masterpieces; for example, Mozart’sCosì fan tuttewas virtu-ally ignored during the nineteenth century, and for almost a century, Berlioz’sLesTroyenswas performed only occasionally, and hardly ever in its entirety. Third, fewmusicologists would accept that even those operas that have been almost continu-ously popular are necessarily of high quality. For example, many would argue thatthe worldwide popularity of Puccini grossly overstates his relative aesthetic merit.9

It is perhaps a virtue of the survival test that it is not confined to well-known crowd-pleasers, but includes operas that are performed at specialized festivals as well asin major opera houses.

In this respect, however, the survival test may be biased in favor of minor worksby well-known composers, rather than providing a pure test of apparent merit. Inselecting operas from the several thousand eighteenth century operas available, thedirector of an opera company is, ceteris paribus, more likely to select operas by acomposer whose name is reasonably familiar to audiences. This is partly becausethere is interest in even the most minor works of a composer as great as Mozart,and partly because a well-known name is more likely to find an audience. In spiteof the growing interest in baroque opera, only twenty composers are represented inthe list of recently performed operas of this period.

Because of the limitations of the survival test, it needs to be supplemented byexpert opinion on what are the most important composers and operas of the period.To this end, three standard works were examined –The New Oxford History ofMusic (Wellesz and Sternfeld, 1973), Grout’sA Short History of Opera(1988),and theOxford History of Opera(Parker, 1996). Table III is based on operas thatreceived their first performance between 1750 and 1790, that are by composers thatare mentioned by all three of these sources, and that receive an individual referencein at least two of them, with no more than three operas by any composer beingincluded. (The purpose of this restriction is to prevent the list being dominated byGluck and Mozart who are clearly regarded as supremely important. Grout, forexample, devotes a separate chapter to each of them. Both resided in Vienna forextremely productive periods of their lives, and their Viennese operas are at leastas important as those produced elsewhere.) For Gluck, Table III arbitrarily places

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Table III. Significant operas first performed 1751–1790, as assessed by experts

Vienna Hungary Other St. Paris Italy Total

and German Petersburg

Prague speaking

1751–1760 1 1 2 4

1761–1770 5 1 2 4 12

1771–1780 1 0 5 1 7

1781–1790 8 2 0 1 6 1 19

Total 13 4 3 1 16 4 41

% 31.7 9.8 7.3 2.4 39.0 9.8 100.0

Source: Wellesz and Sternfeld (1973), Grout (1988) and Parker (1996).

one opera in Vienna and two in Paris; for Mozart, two operas in Vienna and one inPrague. The number of operas for Dittersdorf, Gretry and Haydn was also reducedto three, but this did not entail any selectivity with respect to location.

Using expert opinion as an indicator of operatic importance fully confirms theimportance of Vienna as a remarkable center of operatic creation during 1751–1790. Had we extended the tables for only two further years, which saw thepremières in Vienna of Mozart’sDie Zauberflöteand Cimarosa’s masterpiece,IlMatrimonio Segreto, the evidence for this would have been even stronger. It shouldbe noted that expert opinion may sometimes highlight an opera not because of itsmusical or dramatic qualities, but because it represents an innovation that was ad-opted in later and greater operas. It should also be noted that the books in questiondeal separately with operas of different styles, so one cannot use Table III to judgethe relative musical merits of French or Italian operas, oropera serieas contrastedwith opera buffe. The importance of Paris in Table III is in marked contrast to itsweight in Tables I or II. Only six of the operas in Table II were first performed inFrench (and of these, three were by Gluck and one by Salieri). The French operaticmarket was a very important one that would a few years later begin to dominate theworld of opera but its several different features from markets elsewhere in Europecomplicate comparative analysis, and it will not be explored further here. Only fiveof the operas that meet the survival test of Table II used German librettos.

The remaining operas in these lists were all composed in Italian, including thir-teen out of the fifteen for Vienna in Table II. If only operas in Italian are considered,then even more striking than the importance of Vienna is the relative absence inboth Tables II and III of operas that were first performed in Italy, given that overhalf the recorded operatic premières of the time took place in Italy. This is a pointto which we shall return.


3. Patronage and Operatic Quality

3.1. THE MARKET FOR COMPOSITIONAL TALENT

Broadly speaking, the quantity of new operas was much larger in Italy, and qualitywas higher in the Holy Roman Empire. If London, where we are considering onlyItalian opera, and where in the 1780’s the main impresario of the King’s Theatrewas himself Italian, is regarded as an extension to the Italian opera market, the con-clusion is reinforced. Similarly, one might consider Russia as an extension of theHoly Roman Empire, since Catherine the Great was herself German and her courtopera in St. Petersburg could in all respects have been in Germany. Can we explainthe different performance in the two markets to any or all of the possible differencesbetween patronage-driven and market-driven opera as hypothesized above?

The first possible difference is that a higher quality of operas was created atcourt because patrons could afford a higher quality of creators. This is the es-sence of what the Baumols call their “basic hypothesis”. They observe that thepolitical fragmentation of the Holy Roman Empire led to a profusion of courts inwhich music, particularly opera, was an important component of recreation, whichprovided talented musicians and composers with a market for their services. Sincethe independent states varied greatly in their economic status, they suggest thatricher ones could and did outbid the poorer ones for the best composers. Vienna,which was both very prosperous and the Imperial capital, could be expected to getthe best. In contrast, they note the relative absence of native composers in Englandor France, and hypothesize that this is because their secondary cities and greatcountry houses did not provide opportunities for native musical talent to manifestitself.

The Baumols overstate the fragmentation. Their estimate of “1800 more-or-less independent German states” is rather higher than the 234 estimated by thewell-respected historian, Geoffrey Barraclough (Barraclough, 1946, p. 385).10 Thisprobably does not matter, however, since the significant element was presumablythe ability and willingness to pay, and this might be possessed by aristocrats whowere not rulers. For example, Franz Josef Haydn wrote the great majority of hisoperas as an employee of a wealthy Hungarian landowner. There would not appearto be any economic reason why similar patronage could not have been displayed inEngland or France.

To explain why rich patrons employed the best composers, the Baumols suggestthat the market for composers was analogous to a market for sports stars, in whichplayers start with their local teams, and the most talented are hired by richer clubs –in other words a labor market dominated by headhunting competitive employers.11

The careers of the composers whose operas are represented in Tables II and/or IIIdo not suggest that the labor market for most composers was much like this. Ofthose whose operas (as represented in the tables) include premières in Germanyand/or Austria, four are German, three are Austrian (on present-day boundaries),three are Bohemian, four are Italian and one is Spanish.12 One must beware of

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generalizing from such a small sample, especially since the composers exhibit avariety of career patterns, and span a large number of years in a changing labormarket. The four German composers include Georg Phillip Telemann, a man olderthan Handel or J.S. Bach, included because his last opera, written when he was80, was recently revived. Incidentally, although Telemann held occasional courtpositions, his principal association was with the civic opera house at Hamburg,which was profit-driven. On the other hand, the presence of a composer on this listsuggests that he was relatively successful, and any validity in the Baumols’ basichypothesis should therefore apply to at least some of them.

The Baumols are correct that employment at a German court, even if not as acomposer but only as a performer, could provide a very valuable point of entry tothe musical labor market. This could provide useful contacts, further opportunities,and theatrical experience.13 Perhaps Carl Heinrich Graun’s career comes closest tothe progression suggested by the Baumols; he was employed first as a tenor andthen as vice-Kapellmeisterat Brunswick before spending more than two decadesin the service of Crown Prince Frederick (who became Frederick the Great). Jo-hann Adolf Hasse also began as a singer. Gluck, Georg Benda and Karl Dittersvon Dittersdorf, younger in age (especially the last) began as orchestral playersfor whom the market was growing. But having eventually obtained positions asKappellmeisters, most composers held on to them for decades rather than migratingto more generous employers, Benda spent most of his career at Gotha, Hasse wasmore than thirty years at Dresden, and Haydn was employed for nearly as longat Esterháza. Although Dittersdorf had several employers, his career with eachof them ended because they had abandoned the activity for which he had beenengaged. Florian Gassmann completed his training and spent his early career inVenice; after he had become well-established there he was invited back to Viennaas a ballet composer. Soon he had succeeded Gluck asTheaterkapellmeister, anda few years later was promoted toHofkapellmeister, a position that he still held athis death.

Serious headhunting might have led to diplomatic incidents.14 If an analogy tothe labor market for composers were to be found in professional sports, it wouldbe that sports contracts typically prevent a player from marketing his serviceselsewhere for a period of years. In 1717, J.S. Bach was imprisoned for repeatedlyasking to leave the service of the Duke of Weimar. As the child prodigy son ofthe Chamber Composer and DeputyKapellmeisterto the Prince-Archbishop ofSalzburg, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had, of course, no difficulty in getting star-ted, or in obtaining a court position asKonzertmeister. The significant career movefor Mozart was to abandon this position in 1781 to freelance in Vienna. Mozart’sdecision to become a free agent was very ill-received by his employer, but he wasnot forcibly prevented from leaving.

Tables II and III include a number of operas first performed in the Holy RomanEmpire that were by composers who started their careers in Italy, usually ratherdifferently from their German counterparts. Italian composers were far more likely


than German ones to begin opera composition early. After training in a conser-vatory in Naples or Venice, they typically started composing comic operas for asmaller theatre in that city. This might then lead to commissions to produce anopera seria– for example for the court-managed San Carlo theatre in Naples. Gio-vanni Paisiello varied this slightly, in that his first position was as a music directorof a small opera company which took him to Bologna and Modena where his firstoperas were performed. He soon returned to Naples as a freelance composer andhis career then followed this route. Tommaso Traetta began in this way, and thenobtained an appointment at the court at Parma, which was politically influenced byFrance and whose First Minister was proposing to combine features of French andItalian serious opera. A court position was often compatible with the acceptanceof commissions from other opera houses, and, while employed at Parma, Traettawas able to fulfill commissions for Turin, Vienna and Mannheim. The Mannheimcommission is interesting because it not only produced one of Traetta’s most sig-nificant operas (Sofonisha, 1762) but also because it was offered as a deliberateattempt by the Elector Palatine Carl Theodor to outshine the operas put on by CarlEugen, the ruler of the neighbouring state of Württemberg, thus manifesting thesort of competition hypothesized by the Baumols. Traetta left Parma due to lack offunds and diminished enthusiasm for opera, and eventually took a court position inSt Petersburg.

An alternative start for an Italian composer was as an assistant to a more estab-lishedmaestro. In Venice, aged about 16, Antonio Salieri was fortunate to attractthe attention of Gassmann, who took him to Vienna where he was now established,and provided him with a program of training and, eventually, opportunities forViennese commissions. After Gassmann’s death, Salieri received an appointmentas composer and music director of the Italian opera in Vienna, where he spent therest of his career.

Italian composers might hold posts, but except for Egidio Duni and Traetta atParma, these tended to be in educational or religious institutions and tended to beobtained after the composer had acquired a successful reputation as a composer ofopera. These positions were often compatible with continued opera composition,and though they did not pay well could at least reduce the treadmill of constantmovement and the need to produce several new operas a year that constituted thelife of the average Italian composer.

Italian composers obtaining court commissions were of course likely to be muchbetter than the Italian average, which might appear to offer broad support for thehypothesis that eventually the courts of the Holy Roman Empire were able to attractthe best composers. Nevertheless, this analysis casts considerable doubt on theBaumols’ claim that the system of court music provided a singularly useful pointof entry to the talented composer. Their comparison is with England and France,where openings were indeed relatively scarce, but if entry of large numbers wasthe critically important factor in determining the quantity of musical talent, onewould have expected it to have manifested itself much more strikingly in Italy

34 TIMOTHY KING

than in the Holy Roman Empire, since the very large number of Italian premièresmade it easier for a young man to get started as an opera composer. In this respect,it might be noted that the movement of composers between Italy and the HolyRoman Empire was a two-way one. The youthful Mozart wrote three operas forMilan. Gluck’s first eight operas were also written for various Italian theatres; andhe accepted commissions in London, Dresden, Vienna, Copenhagen and Italy again(this time Naples) before eventually settling in Vienna.

3.2. CONDITIONS OF CREATION

Where a composer wrote operas for both the Italian and German markets, it ap-pears that the one(s) for the market in the Holy Roman Empire were generallythose that would survive (Table II) and/or get expert recognition (Table III). Wetherefore need to look not only at what differentiates composers but also at whatdifferentiates operas by the same composer.

The second hypothesis above is that the conditions of production of an operain a patron-driven system systematically differed from those in a market-drivensystem. A court position might reduce the need for producing operas at great speedwith little time between each. For example, Paisiello wrote more than 80 operas,47 of them in Italy between 1764 and 1776. In three of those years, he composedfive operas. In 1777 he accepted a court position in St. Petersburg, where, initially,he wrote 2–3 operas a year, but from 1781–1784 he wrote only one a year (in 1784for Vienna). His two most celebrated operas were written in this period,Il barbieredi Siviglia (1782) andIl re Teodoro in Venezia(1784). He then returned to Naplesto take up a position at the court of King Ferdinand. His rate of opera compositionincreased but to only 2–3 per year, and one of these,Nina (1789) became widelycelebrated. Cimarosa provides another example. While in Italy in the late 1770s andearly 1780s, he composed at an even faster rate than Paisiello, producing 22 operasin the four years 1781–1784. In 1787, he too took up a position at the Russiancourt, where he presented only three new operas, two in 1788 and one in 1789. In1791 he left Russia for a court position in Vienna, and soon afterwards producedwhat is generally regarded as his masterpiece,Il matrimonio segreto. While it istrue that a few earlier operas by these composers are included in Table II becausethey have been recently revived, the expert opinion in Table III singles out theiroperas that were produced under court conditions.

It therefore seems likely that the failure of operas first performed in Italy topass either the survival or the expert test is because they were hastily composedby men who had little incentive or time to innovate or polish. It is not clear thatat court there was necessarily more time to compose since composers would nor-mally have other duties, and they would still have often to adjust their music tothe capabilities of particular singers, but at least they were on less of a treadmillthan in Italy. Several decades later, Verdi would describe the period between 1839and 1853, in which he wrote 18 operas, as “my years in the galleys”. This was a


rate of opera composition never equalled since Verdi’s time. These numbers palein comparison, however, with the 56 operas Niccolò Piccinni composed in a singledecade 1761–1770, including 8 in each of 1761 and 1762 and 9 in 1770. (The NewGrove Dictionary of Operastates that the figure of 130 operas attributed to Piccinni“is not much exaggerated”.) Piccinni’s masterpiece is generally considered to behis comic opera,La buona figliuola, written at the very outset of a decade of hugeoperatic productivity, with only two operas written in the previous year. The 10% ofhis operas written for Paris after he moved there in 1777 also receive some criticalattention.

En route from Naples to Paris, one of Piccinni’s operas received its premièreat King’s Theatre, London. Six of the ten composers included in Tables II and/orIII who were born in Italy, and also Gluck, wrote operas for the King’s Theatre,Haymarket. J.C. Bach, Antonio Sacchini, and Luigi Cherubini were all at one timehouse composers there. But none of the operas first produced there has passedeither the survival or the market test. The London audience did not encourageinnovation. In general, operatic fees in London were higher than anywhere elsein Europe – they had to be to persuade Italians to endure high living costs and a cli-mate that was both unpleasant and a threat to the voice. Composers were, however,not well treated – singers typically inserted their favorite arias from elsewhere anda high proportion of the repertory waspasticcios– operas whose arias were takenfrom the works of several composers. These were not the conditions to encouragecomposers to write operas of lasting quality. Just as it does appear that patronagedid on average lead to superior opera, London in the second half of the eighteenthcentury is an example of the failure of wholly market-driven opera to do so.15

3.3. INNOVATION

The third of the above hypotheses is that patron-driven opera might result in operaof a higher quality because it can ignore market preferences and so support operathat the market would not. This may be because the patron has different tastesfrom the market as a whole, or because he is willing to take risks in support ofartistic experimentation that a composer or profit-seeking impresario would notdare to take on his own. Where this led to innovations of lasting importance, thesewould be noted by historians of opera, and so reflected in the data of Table III. Theimportance of Vienna as opposed to the non-Habsburg part of the German-speakinglands is particularly marked in that table.

For most of the 1751–1790 period, opera in Vienna was dominated by theCourt. “Patron-subsidized” opera in the early 1750’s was reestablished followingthe bankruptcy of one of the impresarios who had been organizing opera whilethe Empress, Maria Theresa, was at war to maintain her throne. She appointed assuperintendant of theatres, Giacomo Durazzo, who became anxious to fuse ele-ments of French and Italian opera. Gluck had recently settled in Vienna, where hewould hold various positions, including musical director of the one of the city’s

36 TIMOTHY KING

two main theaters andKappellmeisterin a princely household. Encouraged byDurazzo, Gluck’s most famous opera for Vienna,Orfeo ed Euridice(1762) in-corporates choruses, ballet, and visual effects, reflecting the influence of Frenchtragédies lyriques(though with simpler plots and music). Gluck produced twomore “reform” operas in Vienna,Alceste(1767) andParide ed Elena(1770); thesecond was not a popular success. He moved to Paris in 1773.

Gluck was explicit in his intentions to reform serious opera and the rationale forhis own approach.16 Nevertheless the stimulus was the expression of preferencesby an agent of a patron, if not by the patron herself, and it led to an innovationthat the market was unlikely to produce unaided. The Vienna columns of TablesII and III include two other composers. Traetta’s two operas,Armida (1761) andIfigenia in Tauride(1763), were the products of leaves of absence from his positionin Parma. Links between the two courts were encouraged by Archduke Joseph’smarriage to Isabella of Parma in 1760, where an Italian court manifested leaningstowards French opera. The other composer, Gassmann, succeeded Gluck in histheatrical position, which Gluck gave up in 1764, and is remembered principallyfor hisopere buffe, of which one is included in Table II and two are in Table III.

Beginning in 1764, the Viennese opera scene was disrupted by ArchdukeJoseph’s coronation in Frankfurt, the death of Emperor Francis in 1765, and thesubsequent period of mourning by Maria Theresa. The Court theatres again be-came dependent on impresarios, who generally lost money. The quality of opera inthe early 1770’s declined to such an extent that eventually long-term subscribersbegan to cancel their subscriptions. Joseph II then decided to reassert personalcontrol over opera, and his preferences largely determined the types of opera thatwere performed. He initially dismissed the Italian singers and their orchestra andreplaced them at one of the Court-owned theaters with a Nationaltheater to presentworks in German – at first only spoken plays, laterSingspiele. Even Salieri wascommissioned to write one (as his only German opera, this gets expert mentionand is included in Table III). The only opera of any distinction was Mozart’sDieEntführung aus dem Serail(1782), but its great success was not enough to sustainthe experiment. In 1783 Italianopere buffereturned in its place – and the Italianoperas by Salieri, Paisiello, Vicente Martin y Soler and, of course, Mozart includedin Tables II and III for this period in Vienna were of this genre.17 Again in 1785Joseph brought German opera back to Vienna, this time without dismissing theItalians. Dittersdorf wrote a series of well-received German operas. Competitionbetween German and Italian opera continued in the 1790’s. After Cimarosa’sIlmatrimonio segreto(1792), neither produced any operas of lasting distinction.

In 1781, Mozart had left his Salzburg employment to earn his living in Viennaas a freelance composer performer and teacher, reflecting a growing private marketfor instrumental music. Most of Mozart’s income came from concerts and musiclessons, and his commissions from opera were only a modest part of his totalincome.18 Although, as we note below, there was beginning to be a private the-atrical market for operas to which Mozart would later contribute, during Joseph’s


reign his operas were for the Court opera, and their genre reflected the Emperor’spreferences.

Joseph claimed to findopera seriaboring, but it has also been suggested thathe was reluctant to pay the high fees commanded by singers in that genre.19 Heengaged directly in contract negotiations and was regarded as stingy – though hecould be generous in paying bonuses to artists. Singers at theNationalsingspielreceived from 400 to over 2000 florins (Braunbehrens, 1990, p. 130).20 Singers ofItalian opera got more. The castrato, Luigi Marchesi, was paid 2250 florins (about$27,000 at 1999 prices) for six performances. For comparison, in London in 1788-1799 he was paid £1500 (about $160,000) and 13,253 lire piemontese ($47,000)for the much shorter, Carnival season in Turin. It is reported that Nancy Storace,Mozart’s first Susanna, declined 5000 florins for the 1788 season in order to returnto her native London.

The Baumols note the high incomes of the Viennese opera audience and the lowcosts of production (Baumol and Baumol, 1994, pp. 177–179). It might be expectedthat this combination would have made opera a profitable venture. Aristocrats sub-scribed to boxes on a seasonal basis, and ticket prices were substantial. A box seatin the Burgtheater in 1791 cost 4.5 florins (about $53 at 1999 prices),21 A seat in thepit was 1 fl. 25 kreutzer (about $17) and a locked seat, 1 fl. 40 kreutzer (about $20).Ticket revenue did not fully cover costs in the main houses, the Burgtheater andKärntnertortheater, and Court subsidies were required. It would not seem, however,that the subsidy should ordinarily need to be very large. Opera in London couldcover its much greater costs with ticket prices only a little higher, in a theatre thatwas not much bigger than the Burgtheater.22 In other words, Joseph’s dominanceof the opera scene probably did not require large expenditure on his part.

With respect to composers, Joseph II’s interventions were principally in theproduct market rather than in the labor market, although Salieri, a favorite ofJoseph’s, held a Court position throughout this period. Paisiello and Martin y Solerwrote individually commissioned operas for Vienna. Even for Court commissionscomposers received much less than singers. In Vienna, Mozart received 450 florins(about $5300 at 1999 prices) forLe nozze di Figaro, and 900 fromCosi Fan Tutte.The première ofDon Giovannibrought him 450 florins in Prague and a further225 florins in Vienna. The outcome of the imperial intervention –Singspieleandopere buffe– reflected very much Joseph’s own preferences; if his taste had beenfor opere serie, it is likely that Mozart’s greatest operas would never have beenwritten. Of course, Mozart was good atopera seriatoo –Idomeneo, composed for aMunich commission from Carl Theodor, is now widely regarded as the finestoperaseriaever written – but the static nature ofopera seriaand its stilted conventionsdestroy any dramatic vitality, which is why neitherIdomeneonor La clemenzadi Tito have ever had the prominent places in the operatic repertory accorded toMozart’s Viennese operas.23

Considering only the period 1751–1790, Viennese experience appears to con-firm that there was a difference in quality between patronage-driven opera and

38 TIMOTHY KING

market-driven opera that reflected both conditions of production in the former(better operas in the same style as the market) and innovation. The large majority ofopera premières of this period were market-driven, but the majority of those that arestill performed, or which are singled out by experts, were originally patron-driven.Opera buffa(and other genres of comic opera such asopéra-comique) had begunas popular operas responding to market demand but were carried to new heights atcourt. Composers who wrote operas under both systems produced their best operasfor court commissions – those written for the Italian and London markets havefor the most part been forgotten. The most important reforms to serious opera inItalian took place in response to the preference of agents of rulers, rather than inmarket-driven circumstances.

4. After 1790

Unfortunately this plausible hypothesis begins to crumble if one extends the periodby as little as one year. When Joseph reasserted control of opera in Vienna in 1776,he explicitly abolished the court monopoly over spectacle. This led eventually tothe establishment of a significant private theatrical sector. The Theater auf derWieden, directed by Emanuel Schikaneder, concentrated primarily on opera. Schi-kaneder commissioned several composers to set his texts, including his long-timefriend and fellow-mason, Mozart. Their resulting collaboration,Die Zauberflöte,first performed in September 1791, has many of the elements of a “magic opera”but is, of course, so much more. It had immediate market success, and more than200 performances were given at the theater before 1800. Schikaneder eventuallybuilt a new theatre, the large and well-equipped Theater an der Wien, the theatrein which the first two versions of Beethoven’sFidelio had brief runs in 1805 and1806.

Schikaneder was in frequent financial difficulties, and therefore his ventures donot perhaps refute claims made for the importance of patronage to the successof German opera. Only the final version ofFidelio at the Court-run Kärntner-tortheater in 1814 had lasting success and, in opera, unlike instrumental music,patronage remained a dominant force in Germany throughout the nineteenth cen-tury. Weber, Wagner and Richard Strauss all held positions in court-subsidizedcompanies. These posts were more comparable to that of an artistic director ina modern opera company than the “court composer” position occupied by Haydn.While this provided immensely valuable experience, it also required a large amountof work, leaving relatively little time for composition, as Weber found after twoearly operatic successes, especially his one-actsingspiel, Abu Hassan(1811). Tenyears elapsed between its première and that of his next opera and masterpiece,Der Frieschütz. The decline in the creation of lastingly successful operas under theGerman patronage system of the first six decades of the nineteenth century doesnot weaken claims concerning the importance of patronage of an appropriate sort,since it can be attributed more to a change in the nature of patronage. When Wagner


Table IV. Operas performed 1996–1999, that were first performed 1791–1840

Date of first Vienna Hungary Other St. Paris Italy Other Total

performance and German Petersburg

Prague speaking

1791–1800 3 1 1 3 1 9

1801–1810 1 1 1 2 5

1811–1820 1 14 15

1821–1830 1 1 5 9 2 18

1831–1840 2 1 7 18 28

Total 6 1 4 1 14 46 3 75

% 8.0 1.3 5.3 1.3 18.7 61.3 4.0 100.0

Total 1811–1840 2 0 3 1 12 41 2 61

% 3.3 0.0 4.9 1.6 19.7 67.2 3.3 100.0

Source: www.operabase.com, opera company web pages and advertising.

later received several years of very generous traditional patronage by Ludwig II ofBavaria it enabled him to complete the Ring, when the market would not.

A much greater difficulty with generalizing from the experience of 1751–1790comes with the second decade of the nineteenth century in Italy. In a matter ofa very few years, the youthful Gioachino Rossini, whose career began in Venice,began to dominate the world of opera, restoring leadership not merely to Italiansbut also to Italy. This is confirmed by Table IV – over two-thirds of the operas firstperformed between 1811 and 1840 that have “survived” in the sense of Table II,had their premières in Italy.

Rossini’s first performed opera in 1810 more or less coincided with two eventsthat would eventually transform the business side of opera in Italy beyond all re-cognition – the founding of a music publishing company by Giovanni Ricordi andthe passage of Italy’s first copyright law. Rossini’s Italian operas, however, werewritten in an environment for opera composition that had not yet changed markedlysince the eighteenth century. Although the number of premières dropped slightly,it remained extremely high. In the theatres used for Table I, the peak number forany decade was 435 in 1791–1800. In 1801–1810, there were 408 new premières,and the number did not drop below 300 per decade until the 1840’s.

Successful composers continued to write operas at a great rate. Rossini wrote29 operas between 1810 and 1819 and another nine during the next decade.24

Saverio Mercadante and Giovanni Pacini, who were almost exact contemporar-ies of Rossini, wrote about 60 and about 90 operas respectively. This pace ofcomposition could not have been achieved without some elements of mass pro-duction. Librettos were frequently reset. For example, many of Felice Romani’smore than eighty texts were set several times, often with changed titles. One ofthese,Francesca di Rimini, was set eleven times between 1823 and 1857. Rossini

40 TIMOTHY KING

sometimes borrowed his music from an earlier opera. His arias also acquired astandard form; so too did the sequences of orchestral preludes, arias and recitat-ive that formed the dramatic building blocks of his operas. These structures werewidely imitated. The mass production was not, however, of the Henry Ford type.Indeed, even when an opera was repeated with a different cast in a new location itwould usually be revised to suit the talents and preferences of the new principals. Itwas more the mass production of a large real estate developer who builds his housesto order of a client, but based on designs from a standard book of house-plans, andusing pre-fabricated components to the extent possible. The difference between theeighteenth century and the early decades of the nineteenth was an expansion in thesize of the book of plans, and increases in the complexity of the components, ratherthan of a change in the basic technology of production.

The last five years of Rossini’s career as an active opera composer were spentin Paris. In Italy, however, there were other composers behind him, especiallyGaetano Donizetti and Vincenzo Bellini, to confirm Italy’s leadership in the cre-ation of operas of lasting quality. Donizetti was some four years older than Belliniand had already had twelve operas performed before Bellini had composed any,but it was Bellini who first achieved major public success with his third opera,Ilpirata, performed at La Scala in 1827. Donizetti was undoubtedly influenced byBellini’s operas, reducing the ornamentation in his own music, and giving musicalpriority to an interpretation of the atmosphere of the dramatic setting and the spiritof the action. In the late 1820’s, Donizetti appeared to be a typical successful busyNeapolitan composer, writing three to four operas a year under a long-term contractwith a leading impresario. An important commission for Milan in 1830 producedhis first big success,Anna Bolena, an opera that has remained in the repertoire. Thiswas Donizetti’s fourth opera that year and the twenty-eighth to be performed in hiscareer – which appears to refute any suggestion that the Italian system of operaticmass production was hopelessly inimical to high quality. It was not the case thata hitherto unknown composer was suddenly discovered to have been producingunappreciated work. Almost all the Donizetti’s operas that are still performed –some, very frequently – were written later thanAnna Bolena. It was also not thecase that success led to a fall in the rate of composition. Donizetti continued towork at a rapid pace for several more years, producing twenty operas in 1831–1836.L’elisir d’amore (1832) was written in only two weeks, andLucia di Lammermoor(1835) in less than six.

Bellini’s early public success enabled him to ask relatively high fees, risingeventually to 16,000 francs (about $48,000 at 1999 prices) for an opera.25 He thenexplicitly limited himself to not more than one opera per year in order to concen-trate on each of them. At his early death at age 34, he had composed 10 operas. Atthat age Rossini had composed 34 operas and Donizetti, 35. This represented anindividual choice that he was able to carry out, rather than a change in the incentivestructure. Such a change came only in the 1840’s, with a new copyright law, active


operatic promotion by music publishers, and different business possibilities forcomposers, pioneered by Verdi.

Rossini and Donizetti, however, worked in a completely traditional manner.The quality of Rossini’s operas, particularly during the 1810–1819 period, varieda great deal. One might also note that Bellini rather than Donizetti was the stylisticinnovator. It is also true that few opera-goers, at least outside Italy, would arguethat the quality of any operas by either composer rival that of the best operas byMozart, and neither managed such a consistent flow of great operas as Mozart from1781 until his death ten years later. Nevertheless, the achievements of Rossini andsubsequently Donizetti clearly prevent the robust finding that patron-driven operawas qualitatively superior to market-driven opera in the period 1751–1790 fromestablishing itself as a historical generalization.

5. Economics and the Creation of Cultural Goods

For an economist, the conclusions of this paper are perhaps disappointing. Whileeconomics may help to understand the nature of demand for opera in particularmarkets and the system of incentives faced by individual composers, in the periodsdiscussed in this paper there does not seem to have been a consistent relationshipbetween these and operatic quality. This does not mean that the issue does not meritfurther investigation, even for opera at other time periods, let alone for other artforms. It does, however, suggest some of the limitations of economics in analyzingcultural history.

Economics helps to explain the aggregate behavior of groups of individuals,where the groups are large enough to accommodate wide individual variance.Imposition of a tax on wine leading to a rise in its price relative to the price ofeverything else can safely be predicted to lead to a fall in the quantity of wine sold.Enough consumers on enough occasions will make price at least one considerationin their purchases to affect demand. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, thenumber of professional composers was large enough that their collective behaviorcould be seen to respond to incentives in an economically predictable way. In thenineteenth century rewards in Paris for a successful composer of operas were muchhigher than in Italy or Germany, and this is sufficient to explain the move there byall the most celebrated opera composers. Since studying at particular conservator-ies in Naples or Venice provided a superior start to a composing career, it was notsurprising to find many young composers in that city.

On the other hand, economics cannot help to predict whether, in response toa rise in price, a named individual will buy less wine, or a cheaper variety, nextSaturday, or indeed ever. Cultural history, especially the history of the creationof the finest cultural objects, is concerned with the activities of very small num-bers of named individuals, possessed of a particular genius. What determines theemergence of this genius at a particular time and in a particular place is quiteunclear. Italian operatic experience in 1750–1791 suggests strongly that it is not

42 TIMOTHY KING

just a question of numbers. Genius has been studied with respect to family influ-ences, such as the fame of parents, their patterns of mortality, and the genes andsiblings they provide (Simonton, 1984). The effect on genius of role models andmentors, and of education, scholastic success and self-study have been explored.Connections between genius and intelligence, personal needs for achievement orfor power, emotion and madness, and social relationships with others have all beenexamined. One can think of economic conditions that would prevent the exerciseof genius. But the evidence of this paper is that the economic analysis of incentivesand working conditions is very limited, perhaps indeed useless, in its capacity toexplain why genius emerged where it did. With hindsight, the patronage-drivenoperatic market of Vienna suited Gluck and Mozart, but the inferior conditionsunder which market-driven opera was created in Venice, Milan and Naples did notprevent the emergence of the genius of Rossini and Donizetti.

If there is an apparent market for a certain type of music, then that sort of musicis likely to be written. But whether it will be written by an honest journeyman, likethe bulk of composers serving the vast Italian operatic market, or by a Mozart, whoin Vienna took every genre of music to new heights, appears to be something thateconomics is unable to predict.

Notes

1. Cowen (1998), pp. 137–138.2. Unless otherwise attributed, the operatic facts are usually taken fromThe New Grove Dictionary

of Opera(Sadie, 1992, hereafter referred to as NGDO).3. Table IV below shows how few operas that were first performed during the period 1791–1810

pass the “survival test” of Table II.4. In this paper, all Italian “comic operas” are described asopere buffe, even where an individual

opera was classified as adramma giocoso. The NGDO entry on the latter term suggests no usefuldividing line can be drawn between the two. It should be noted that the terms “comic opera” andopéra-comiquedo not imply that the operas were comic in the usual sense of the word.

5. Rosselli (1984, p. 52) presents cost structures for individual seasons at several Italian operahouses. The sample is too small and the variance too large to permit easy generalization, but innone of the eighteenth century examples did composers’ fees exceed 6%, and they ranged as lowas 2%. In contrast, soloist fees ranged from as low as a third to more than half.

6. The omission of London from Table II (and similarly from Table III below) in spite of itsinclusion in Table I is because none of the operas created there pass the “survival” (or “expert”)tests.

7. A chi-squared analysis suggests that the probability of Table II’s being a random subsample ofTable I is less than 3 in 1017.

8. This statement implicitly includesDie Zauberflöte, which is not included in the Tables since itwas first performed in 1791.

9. Note, for example, Joseph Kerman’s description ofToscaas a “shabby little shocker” (Kerman,1988, p. 205).

10. Note that Kindleberger (1993) states (p. 118) that in 1790 there were 300 rulers in Germany.11. The sport that the Baumols use as an example is baseball. This is perhaps not the best example,

since the farm teams in which new entrants begin are owned and operated by the franchises


to whose major league teams the most successful will eventually rise. Although trading amongfranchises takes place, competition for players exists primarily at the time of entry into thesystem, and at occasional periods when a player has “free agent” rights. A more appropriatesporting analogy to the Baumols’ hypothesis might be soccer, where headhunting is intense, andinternational boundaries appear to play no role.

12. They are Benda, Dittersdorf, Gassmann, Gluck, Graun, Hasse, Haydn, Hiller, Jommelli, Martiny Soler, Mozart, Paisiello, Salieri, Telemann, and Traetta.

13. Because the performance of an opera requires such a large number of cooperating factors, andalso because few, if any, composers have had striking successes with their first operas (Rossiniat age 18 probably came closest), getting a start as an opera composer has always been difficult.Experience of what succeeds in a theatre has often seemed to be a prerequisite to successful operacomposition. In nineteenth century Germany, only those opera composers who gained practicaltheatrical experience – for example, Weber, Wagner, Albert Lortzing and, later, Richard Strauss– achieved any lasting success as opera composers.

14. There were examples of this with singers – in 1685, a leading soprano, Margherita Salicola, washeard in Venice by the Elector of Saxony and taken back to Dresden, to the immense anger ofher patron, the Duke of Mantua. See Rosselli (1992, pp. 14–15).

15. An anonymous referee has suggested that this statement might be qualified by noting Handel’sexperience in London earlier in the century when Handel was at his most productive as anopera composer and his most effective as an impresario, and some of the most significant operapremières of the time, both musically and artistically, had taken place in London. The companyhe partly directed at the King’s Theatre from 1720 to 1728, was the recipient of £1000 a year(about $150,000 at 1999 prices) from the King, but it had been initially financed by aristocraticsubscribers, and could be described as “subscriber-subsidized”. On the other hand, althoughHandel was a consistently productive composer, his rate of composition from 1720 to 1738 wasnormally one to two new operas a year, substantially lower than the Italian examples cited above,so that although he had many other activities he was not perhaps on the same creative treadmill.

16. In his preface toAlceste, Gluck articulated the reform ideals he was striving to follow – musicshould serve poetry without excessive ornamentation, and should reflect the dramatic action.Einstein (1964, pp. 98–100), and Pestelli (1984, pp. 274–275) have English versions.

17. Strictly speaking, Salieri’sAxur, re d’Ormusis described as adramma tragicomicoand does notfit easily into any conventional genre.

18. The sources and amounts of Mozart’s income are discussed extensively in Braunbehrens (1990)and Baumol and Baumol (1994).

19. See the entry “Joseph II” in the NDGO (Sadie, 1992).20. The conversion of eighteenth century prices to modern equivalents is a highly approximate affair.

In this paper, historical exchange rates are used to convert the currency into sterling, and thelong price series constructed by Phelps, Brown, and Hopkins (1956) extrapolated to 1996 withthe British retail price index, is then converted to dollars at 1996 exchange rates, and adjustedfor recent U.S. price changes.

21. These prices, from Landon (1988), were for a Mozart concert, but it seems unlikely that operaseats would be significantly cheaper.

22. The Baumols state that the Burgtheater “probably” held 1600–1700 people. According to theNGDO, after its 1782 remodeling, the King’s Theatre held just over 1800. The best seat therecost half a guinea (nearly $60 at 1999 prices). An excellent study of the economics of opera inEngland during this period is Price, Milhous and Hume (1995).

23. However Rosen (1997, p. 165) argues that the delays to dramatic action found in theda caporepetitions ofopera seriado not require any greater suspension of belief than comparableconventions inSingspiel, andopera buffa.

44 TIMOTHY KING

24. For reasons that can never be fully understood, he then composed no more operas, and littleother music, for the remaining 39 years of his life.

25. For comparison, the highest fee that Rossini ever received in Italy was 5000 francs ($15000at 1999 prices) in Venice in 1822. For this he was to revise an earlier opera (Maometto II)and compose a new one (Semiramide). By this time he was already the most famous operaticcomposer in Europe. Rossini did not receive more than 800 francs (about $2400) for an operauntil 1815, when he was already the most celebrated composer in Italy. See Weinstock (1989).

References

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patronage and market in the creation of opera before the institution of intellectual property

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