18th-Century Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 34

[cahn]

And including Emperor Joseph II!

from Derek Beales: Joseph II, Volume 2: Against the World, 1780 - 1790:

Joseph's alleged comment to Mozart about the Entführung, "Too many notes", has been taken as evidence of his ignorance. But he probably said something like, "Too beautiful for our ears, and monstrous many notes." It is always necessary to bear in mind, when appraising the emperor's remarks, his peculiar brand of humor or sarcasm. He was usually getting at someone. And he did not use the royal "we". The ears in question were those of the Viennese audience, whom he was mocking for their limited appreciation of Mozart's elaborate music.

(though not gonna lie, I think it is a LOT of notes)

Comments

Letters shown, Nancy Goldstone exhonorated of one particular charge

[selenak]

Mes amies, I've come across one of the nuttiest ocnspiracy books (historical-musical edition) I've ever read, "Mozart und seine Kaiser" by one Harke de Roos. Aside from the sheer entertainment theory of the bizarreness, of which more in a moment, it actually exhonorates Nancy Goldstone on one particular important point: she did have a source for the "Mimi showed Joseph Isabella's letters" claim, which unlike her de Roos mentions by name, to wit: Caroline Pichler's memoirs, Denkwürdigkeiten aus meinem Leben (to be found here.) Since Caroline Pichler was born in 1769, well after Isabella's death (and after Mimi supposedly showed the letters), I assume she heard about it second hand, and hence Derek Beales didn't regard it as inclusion worthy, but at least Nancy G. didn't make it up. Otoh Caroline Pichler's mother had been MT's maidservant and reader (she was the one cutting MT's hair after FS had died on her orders), so she does have some source plausibility. Naturally, I had to look up the passage in question, which comes in an overall portrait of Joseph after he's died. Ms Pichler narrates how he loved Isabella and was desperate after her death, but:

During (Isabella's) short life at (Joseph's) side, her heart had turned towards one above all others, one of his sisters, the beautiful Archduchess Christina, later governor of the Netherlands. With her, the dearly departed had created a bond of friendship, and had exchanged many letters with her in which she opened her heart and presented the true state of her emotions faithfully. Now, when Christina saw her beloved brother in the depths of despair, she, who knew best that he mourned for something which he in reality had never possessed, for Isabella's love, she considered it her duty out of compassion and a sense of justice to reveal the truth to the deceived man and thus moderate his fierce pain. She showed him the letters of the departed.
It turned out to be a mistake, an unfortunate idea, and it did not miss its target. Joseph saw his bleeding, devoted heart spurned, his high opinion of the departed destroyed. His tears for the lost one may have ceased, but embitterement and loathing against the entire female sex took hold in his breast, of which his better sense only excepted a few, while he saw the rest as mere dolls or objects of sensuality. Still, in later years he liked to visit some older ladies, a Princess Liechtenstein, a Kaunitz and others, and enjoyed talking to them, who were clever, well educated matrons.

(Older ladies: methinks here Caroline Pichler is going by her own impressions of the surviving princesses, who certainly were old by the time she was an adult. But Eleonore Liechtenstein and her sister Leopoldine Kaunitz were Joseph's own age. Two of the other princesses were about a decade older, I think, not sure about the fifth.)

Now, I'll tell you the convoluted and breathtaking theory de Roos developed based on this passage in a separate comment, and leave this one for us to debate the story itself. Caroline Pichler doesn't say who her source for this story was - her mother? The princesses? someone else? Viennese gossip? -, and she was of course a novelist by profession. Also, her memoirs appeared after her death, and I think Albert (Mimi's husband) published the slightly bowlderized version of Isabella's letters to his late wife before that point (i.e. no erotic references left, but it's clear whom Isabella loved and whom she didn't love), so Ms Pichler knowing about the letters per se is not proof the story is real. Otoh: she doesn't have a motive for invention. Her overall portrait of Joseph is positive, btw, and her own biography makes her sound like an interesting woman.

Otoh: without looking it up again, I seem to recall positive references to Isabella in the letters written after their daughter died, which if Mimi showed the letters to Joseph in the year after Isabella's death would have been definitely after he knew. Mildred, queen of index, could you check the Beales pdfs for "Pichler", in case I have overlooked something, in a footnote maybe?

Re: Letters shown, Nancy Goldstone exhonorated of one particular charge

[mildred_of_midgard]

Mildred, queen of index, could you check the Beales pdfs for "Pichler", in case I have overlooked something, in a footnote maybe?

Nothing that I saw. He cites her a handful of times, but not in the context of letter-showing. One caveat: the pdf search is only as good as the OCR. Both extraneous spaces that my scanner inserts between letters, and word-wrap at the end of the line, will defeat it. However, search did find all the mentions of Pichler listed in the respective indexes of the two volumes, so we can be almost certain Beales didn't cite Pichler as his source for any letter-showing claims. (The other possibility being that he mentioned the claim but didn't cite her by name. But that's also unlikely.)

Re: Letters shown, Nancy Goldstone exhonorated of one particular charge

[cahn]

Ah, I am glad you tracked this down! And that makes sense re: Goldstone -- her flaws seem to be more in the way of taking sources too uncritically, oversimplifying, or jumping to conclusions, not so much making up stuff.

I kind of hope that it isn't true (surely we'd have more evidence than that? he would have written to someone about it, even obliquely?) and it does seem very possible that -- well, she's talking about what she heard secondhand and years after the fact, so there might be some game of telephone going on. (I guess that would make more sense to me than her actually making it up.)

Re: Letters shown, Nancy Goldstone exhonorated of one particular charge

[selenak]

Yes, I hope it's not literally true as well. I mean, if Isabella had lived, then I would have wished for her not having to go through her life having to fake love, but since she was dead, and since Joseph's life was depressing enough as it is, finding out your wife really loved your sister and tolerated you at best, when the memories of those three years and then the next few with his daughter before she died as well were something he clung to would just be extra cruel. At the same time, I don't think Caroline Pilcher made it up, either, and a game of telephone seems at least possible. Maybe Maria Christina at some point during the many arguments she and Joseph were to have said something like "She didn't really love you anyway, as I know, and if you've read the letters in the Albert-published form, you put two and two together and conclude, aha, she must have shown him the letters.

Or maybe she did show him the letters. We have to at least consider it possible now. But if so, you'd think Albert (to whom she was already married by then) would have mentioned this in his memoirs, and that would be what people would quote, not a second hand account. (Then again: haven't read Albert's memoirs, just quotes from same in MT and Joseph biographies.)

Re: Letters shown, Nancy Goldstone exhonorated of one particular charge

[cahn]

But surely Beale or Stollberg-Rilinger would have found Albert's memoirs??

(Also, as a result of having to figure out how to spell Stollberg-Rilinger, I looked her up and Maria Theresia is finally out in English! Though I wonder if I'm up to something dry yet... possibly not. And of course I'm still working on Catherine right now. But at least I suppose I'll get the sample and see what it's like :) )

Caroline Pichler

[mildred_of_midgard]

A passage that jumped out at me while searching Beales:

Caroline Pichler, whose memoirs I have already quoted more than once, stressed how hostile the regime of Metternich was to the legacy of Joseph. She died in 1843, leaving the manuscript of her memoirs, to which she added this note:

A little book which, even though not always approvingly, tries to describe truthfully the times of Joseph II and the ideas which had currency in that remarkable decade ... can have no hope of being published now in Austria, however harmless it is.

Her memoirs were in fact published in 1844, but only after cuts had been made at the demand of the censor. As we saw, she looked back on the 1780s as a golden age of social and political freedom, literary and musical achievement.

Re: Caroline Pichler

[selenak]

*nods* Yes, I didn't have time to browse through more than the Joseph related parts in my search for the letter showing story, but that's the impression I had of how she saw this era.