1 - Paradise lost: Dittersdorf's Four Ages of the World and the crisis of Austrian enlightened despotism

Summary

A glittering audience attended the Viennese premiere of Dittersdorf's twelve symphonies on Ovid's Metamorphoses, given at two concerts in May 1786. A hundred tickets were purchased and distributed by the city's most prominent patron of music, Baron van Swieten, and among those present may have been Austrian Emperor Joseph II, who granted Dittersdorf's request to use the site of the first concert, the Augarten, in a face-to-face interview. He was in for a surprise. It was not simply that Dittersdorf brought symphonies from the periphery of concert programming to the center (see p. 13 above). An audience of aristocratic and upper-class Viennese would have known the Metamorphoses, whether firsthand from their study of Latin in school or through the many stage works and paintings based on Ovid's compendium of Classical mythology – but rarely would they have encountered so dark an interpretation of the tales. Dittersdorf's first symphony treats the Four Ages of the World, the classical parallel to the biblical Fall of Man, and nearly all of the remaining works relate comparable if more personal disasters: Phaethon's attempt to drive the chariot of the sun, Actaeon's encounter with Diana, Orpheus’ failed rescue of Euridice.