ABSTRACT
Within the past forty years, the regeneration of interest in music at the imperial court in Vienna from 1658 until 1740 has produced a significant corpus of scholarship which has profoundly enhanced our understanding of baroque style. 1 Documentary, archival, editorial and sociological studies brought to bear on the extent and function of music under the Habsburg Emperors Leopold I and his sons Joseph I and Charles VI have collectively demonstrated that the cultivation of music at the Viennese court comprises a complex and extremely fertile example of imperial patronage during the baroque period, which ranks in importance with other, similar examples of music under the duress of a conservative and powerful social structure. We might profitably suggest, as a result of this research, that the formulation and practice of certain musical genres in Vienna during the later seven-teenth and early eighteenth centuries compares in stature with the cultivation of related genres in Leipzig, Rome and London, to cite three obvious centres of musical significance. The achievement of Bach in Leipzig, for example, can only be comprehensively grasped in terms of socio-religious conditions which determined the essentials of his work there; Handel’s evolution of the English oratorio is likewise inconceivable without some sense of the fundamental social and aesthetic pressures on opera seria in London; the oratorios and chamber cantatas of Alessandro Scarlatti also reflect the vicissitudes of his operatic career and the social and religious circumstances which alternately inhibited and enhanced it. So it is with Fux: the range of Fux’s assiduous contribution to several major genres of the baroque period was unquestionably determined by the context of an imperial court which sought to celebrate the ‘two-fold triumph of counter-reformation and princely absolutism’ in its extensive patronage of music. 2
