3. - Schlösser-Magazin

list of musicians for the first time 5 . In that way,
not only were all the sections of the orchestra
up to full strength, but the legendary court
orchestra had taken on its definitive shape. The
court records for the next twenty years show
that the orchestra was continuously enlarged.
In 1762, the number of musicians playing in
it exceeded seventy for the first time, and after
1770 there were more than eighty of them. The
highest headcount was for the years 1773 and
1774, when the number of active musicians
on the payroll totalled 89. After that, the figure
fell to around 75, where it stayed with slight
fluctuations. This ensemble was thus one of
the largest eighteenth-century court orchestras
anywhere in Europe.
Contemporaries were first of all amazed by
the sheer size of the orchestra and its full
complement of musicians. None less than
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart vouchsafes for the
orchestra’s composition: “the orchestra is very
good and strong. On each side: 10 to 11 violins,
4 violas, 2 oboes, 2 flutes and 2 clarinets, 2
horns, 4 cellos, 4 bassoons and 4 double basses,
as well as trumpets and drums. It can produce
lovely music” 6 . With this formation of two big
violin sections, the wind players with solo parts 7
(the bassoons were used to strengthen the bass
whenever they had no solo parts to play) and
the decision taken as early as the 1750s not
to include a harpsichord, lute or theorbo, the
palatine musicians produced the sound quality
of a modern orchestra, namely the so-called
classical symphony orchestra, for which Haydn,
Mozart, Beethoven and other composers wrote
their symphonies on into the nineteenth-century.
5 In other orchestras, clarinets only featured as standard instruments
in the last quarter of the eighteenth-century, especially
in the 1780s. In Stuttgart, for example, they were still absent in
1789. Cf. Ottmar Schreiber: Orchester und Orchesterpraxis in
Deutschland zwischen 1780 und 1850. Berlin 1938, reproduced
in Hildesheim-New York 1978, pp. 133–134
6 Letter dated 4 November 1777, in: Mozart. Letters, 2nd vol., p.
101
7 The usual practice at the time was for the wind instruments to
play chorally, i.e. for there to be several of each of them. One
example is Dresden in 1756: 3 flutes, 5 oboes and 6 bassoons.
Planned positions for clarinets were not added until 1795 (cf.
Ortrun Landmann: Die Entwicklung der Dresdener Hofkapelle
zum ‘klassischen’ Orchester. Ein Beitrag zur Definition dieses
Phänomens. In: Basler Jahrbuch für historische Musikpraxis,
XVII [1993]. Winterthur 1994, pp. 175–190, esp. p. 181)
V. Report on the Music Historical Importance: Dr. Bärbel Pelker
Quite apart from the large number of
musicians, with players for every instrument,
what contemporaries admired most about the
Palatinate’s court orchestra was its musical
discipline and its (quite literally) breath-taking
performance, with the famous crescendo and
diminuendo effects as well as the advanced
technical skills of each individual musician.
One of the earliest judgements on the court
orchestra by someone who knew what he was
saying came, once again, from Leopold Mozart,
who sat through the whole four-hour musical
academy on 18 July 1763, in which his children
“moved the whole of Schwetzingen”. He thus had
sufficient time to obtain an impression of the
performing skills of the court musicians: “I had
the pleasure of hearing not only good singers
(both male and female) but also a remarkable
flutist, Mr. Wendling, and the orchestra is the
unchallenged best in Germany and made up
solely of young people leading a clean life,
without drinking or gambling or dressing
slovenly, so that both their manners and their
production are to be held in high esteem” 8 . In
1775, the court orchestra’s performance inspired
Klopstock to proclaim that: “living here is being
pampered by the voluptuousness of music!” 9
The most famous words of praise for the court
orchestra came from Schubart in expressing his
ideas on the aesthetics of the musical art: “When
the Prince Elector was in Schwetzingen and had
been followed there by his exquisite orchestra,
it was easy to feel transported to a magic island,
where everything sang and played music. [...] No
orchestra on earth has ever before managed to
perform in the way the Mannheim one does. Its
forte is a peal of thunder, its crescendo a torrent
of water, its diminuendo a crystal-clear river
babbling into the distance and its piano a breath
of spring.” 10 For Jacobi, the residence in 1777 was
without doubt a “musicians’ paradise” 11 . There
was no disguising the enthusiasm expressed
in the letter that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
8 Letter dated 19 July 1763, in: Mozart. Letters, vol. 1, p. 79
9 Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart: Deutsche Chronik, 2nd
year, 1775, no. 23, p. 183
10 Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart: Ideen zu einer Ästhetik
der Tonkunst, p. 130
11 Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi: Briefwechsel, Gesamtausgabe, series
1, vol. 2. Stuttgart 1983, p. 62, letter no. 466
V.
211