Johann Mattheson. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Yesterday we left him with a sword broken on Handel’s button. But Johann Mattheson deserves to be remembered for what he did with the pen: in 1739 he published in Hamburg Der vollkommene Capellmeister, the perfect Kapellmeister, the most ambitious manual of the musical trade the eighteenth century produced. Five hundred dense pages that promise, says the title page with marvellous shamelessness, everything a man must know who wishes to preside worthily over a musical chapel, and deliver.
Inside is the whole organisation chart of a vanished trade. The eighteenth-century Kapellmeister was artistic director, resident composer, teacher, administrator and diplomat: Mattheson explains to him how to write a fugue and how to deal with a prince, how to judge a singer and how to programme the liturgical year. There is the first great catalogue of national styles, with Italian, French and German set against each other without much diplomacy. And above all there is the summa of the theory of the affections: the idea, which the eighteenth century took seriously as a physics, that every key, every rhythm, every melodic figure moves a precise passion in the listener, and that the composer is a rhetorician who governs other people’s feelings as a lawyer governs a courtroom.
It is the book from which musicologists have drawn half of Baroque performance practice, and it is also, in its way, a monument to productive envy. Mattheson had the rarest talent: recognising other people’s genius and outliving it by writing about it. He was Handel’s first biographer, the gatherer of news on Bach when Bach interested no one, the founder of German music journalism with his polemical periodicals. Deaf in his last decades, he kept writing until death, and wanted to be buried in Hamburg Cathedral with a grandiose funeral that he had organised himself, down to the details, in writing: the perfect Kapellmeister even of his own exit.
The Capellmeister sits in the Melos library next to the Quantz and Emanuel Bach’s Versuch, and of the three it is the most ambitious: the others teach how to play, he teaches how to command. Anyone who runs anything today, a theatre, a festival, a newsroom, will find more relevance in it than they are willing to admit.