I Fought the Law... | Part 1
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David Hackett17. March 2023
This is part 1 of 3 in a series about composers who fell foul of authority, by David Hackett. Read part 2 and 3.
When a boss takes your resignation really badly
The steady figure of JS Bach (1685 – 1750) might not appear to be the first composer we associate with lawbreaking. But the great Baroque maestro was not a man who liked to be messed with. Sometimes his hot temper could land him in trouble with his superiors.
In 1717, frustrated not to get a long-overdue promotion from his employee, the Duke of Sachsen-Weimar (having watched the duke’s incompetent son get the position instead), Bach decided to hand in his notice.
But lowly court musicians in the eighteenth century were not supposed to have a say in such matters. Worse still was Bach’s defiant insistence that he really was going. The duke had his feisty Konzertmeister thrown in the nearest jail instead, as if allowing him time to think things over.
He did not realise he was up against one of the finest but also most stubborn musical geniuses of the eighteenth century. Happy to have a break from his normal duties, Bach took to prison life with surprising ease and even wrote some organ preludes from his cell. After a month, the exasperated duke had had enough. He ordered Bach’s release and grudgingly granted him his dismissal.
Ragamuffin on the loose
Perhaps it’s less surprising that Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 – 1827) once had his own brush with authority. It came after he had taken a wrong turn during one of his long afternoon walks and ended up in an unfamiliar town just as night was falling. Never a man endowed with generous amounts of social awareness, Beethoven tried to get his bearings by peering alarmingly into windows, provoking sufficient shocks and screams from the local residents that a policeman eventually had to be called out. Beethoven was locked up for vagrancy, despite his strenuous protestations. The on-duty officer complained to his superior, “we have arrested somebody who will give us no peace. He keeps on yelling that he is Beethoven; but he’s a ragamuffin, has no hat, an old coat … nothing by which he can be identified.”
The misunderstanding was finally cleared up after one of Beethoven’s friends turned up to vouch for the bedraggled composer. The police were presumably relieved to see the back of him.
When a get-rich-quick scheme goes wrong
Before he became the pioneering creator of such early German romantic operas as Der Freischütz and Euryanthe, Carl Maria von Weber (1786 – 1826) had a surprisingly colourful, riotous youth. He drank and womanized and spent far beyond his means.
Weber was already heavily in debt by the time he was working at the court of Duke Ludwig of Württemberg in his early twenties. But matters only got worse when he managed to lose a large sum entrusted to him by the duke. In a desperate attempt to recover the money, he became embroiled in an illegal scheme to sell military exemptions on behalf of his employee. The ruse was discovered, and Weber was arrested while taking an opera rehearsal. After a brief spell behind bars, he was fined, thrown out of Württemberg and told not to come back anytime soon.
The whole episode was sufficiently embarrassing to Weber that he resolved henceforth to live a more sober and orderly life. He was true to his word. A year or so later he scored his first major success with two clarinet concertos, after which there was no looking back.
To read more from David Hackett, go to www.musicbytheyear.com.