Готфрид ван Свиетен: Классикалық дәуір композиторларының меценаты

Dutch born Austrian diplomat, librarian, and government official

Gottfried Freiherr van Swieten (29 October 1733 – 29 March 1803) was a Dutch born Austrian diplomat, librarian, and government official who served the Holy Roman Empire during the 18th century. He was an enthusiastic amateur musician and is best remembered today as the patron of several great composers of the Classical era, including Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven.

Van Swieten was born Godefridus Bernardus "Godfried" van Swieten in Leiden and grew up in the Dutch Republic to the age of 11. The young Van Swieten was educated for national service in an elite Jesuit school, the Theresianum.

Van Swieten died in 1803 in Vienna.

The evidence suggests that Van Swieten's relationship with the great composers of his day was primarily one of patronage. This means that the composers did not work for Van Swieten on salary or commission, but received payments from him from time to time in the manner of a tip. Thus, Joseph Haydn remarked to his biographer Griesinger that "He patronized me occasionally with several ducats." This was a common way of paying musicians in the age of aristocracy; Haydn had received similar payments from his employer Nikolaus Esterházy, though he also drew a salary. The patronage system also financed the early travels of the Mozart family. The relationship between patron and artist was not one of social equals. An 1801 letter of Haydn to Van Swieten, by then his longtime collaborator, used no second person pronouns, instead addressing the Baron as "Your Excellency"; presumably this reflected their everyday practice.

Van Swieten first met Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in 1768, when he was 35 years old and Mozart a boy of 11. The Mozart family was visiting Vienna, hoping to achieve further fame and income following the earlier completion of their Grand Tour of Europe. According to Mozart's father Leopold, Van Swieten was involved in the early planning of Wolfgang's ill fated opera La finta semplice (the opera was later blocked by intrigues, and could be performed only in Salzburg). In 1781, shortly after Mozart had moved to Vienna, Van Swieten met him again: at the salon of Countess Thun, Mozart played extracts from his recent opera Idomeneo, with Van Swieten and other important officials in the audience; this event helped instigate Mozart's commission for the opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail, his first great success as a composer. Many were left incomplete, and even the completed ones are not often performed today; Olleson suggests they have "a dryness which is absent from most of [Mozart's] music." Mozart took on the task of conducting these concerts in 1788. and notes that already in 1793, Van Swieten was trying to get him to write an oratorio (to a text by de). The practice of cultivating the music of previous decades and centuries only gradually increased. By about 1870, older works had come to dominate the scene. The music publisher Johann Ferdinand von Schönfeld wrote in 1796:
[Van Swieten is], as it were, looked upon as a patriarch of music. He has taste only for the great and exalted. When he attends a concert our semi connoisseurs never take their eyes off him, seeking to read in his features, not always intelligible to everyone, what ought to be their opinion of the music. A corollary of a "taste for the great and exalted" is the idea that concert audiences should maintain silence, so that each note can be heard by all. This was not the received view in the 18th century, but was clearly Van Swieten's opinion. In his 1856 Mozart biography, Otto Jahn reported the following anecdote from Sigismund Neukomm:
[He] exerted all his influence in the cause of music, even for so subordinate an end as to enforce silence and attention during musical performances. Whenever a whispered conversation arose among the audience, his excellence would rise from his seat in the first row, draw himself up to his full majestic height, measure the offenders with a long, serious look and then very slowly resume his seat. The proceeding never failed of its effect.

Van Swieten has not fared well in assessments of his personal demeanor. In a frequently reprinted remark, Haydn remarked to Georg August Griesinger that Van Swieten's symphonies were "as stiff as the man himself." He maintained a firm social distance between himself and the composers he patronized, a distance rooted in the system of aristocracy still in force in Austria in his day. Sigismund Neukomm wrote that he was "not so much a friend as a very self opinionated patron of Haydn and Mozart". Olleson suggests that "in his own time Van Swieten won little affection" (adding: "but almost universal respect."). He also was not close to his fellow aristocrats; although his public roles in music and government were prominent, he avoided salon society, and after 1795 expressed content that he lived in "complete retirement". Concerning Van Swieten's contributions to music, posthumous judgment seems most critical of his role as librettist. Olleson observes that in the three successive oratorio libretti that Van Swieten prepared for Haydn, his own involvement in the writing was greater for each than in the previous one. According to Olleson, "many critics would say that this progressive originality was disastrous". Even Van Swieten's musical taste has been harshly criticized, but here the consensus is perhaps more positive. Van Swieten seems to have singled out for his favor—from among many composers whose reputation is now obscure—the composers that posterity has judged very highly. As Olleson notes, "One could scarcely quarrel with his choice of composers of the past, Sebastian Bach and Handel; and of those of his own time, Gluck, Emanuel Bach, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven."

Unlike his protégés Mozart and Beethoven, Van Swieten is seldom portrayed in works of modern popular culture. He does appear as a supporting character in Peter Shaffer's 1979 play Amadeus and in Miloš Forman's 1984 film based on it. He is seen in the play as helping Mozart to be inducted into Masonry, only to be somewhat concerned when it seems that some of Mozart's work is referencing their organisation's practices, as well as the fact that he is beginning to beg fellow members for money. In the film, he is one of the few attendees at Mozart's funeral.