Even though Emperor Joseph II styled himself an enlightened despot who brought the ideals of the Enlightenment to the people, he was still a despot. Although rulership in the early modern period was far from absolute, executives had a fairly broad and undefined set of powers. This especially true in the realm of culture where the monarch sat at an apex of one of the largest patronage networks available and had the power to influence state censorship. The fate of ballet under Joseph II illustrates this intertwining of personal tastes and the interests of state that was typical in an late eighteenth-century court.

Part of the problem for ballet in the Austrian Empire was that Joseph II simply did not like it very much. He generally disliked both ballet and opera seria (serious opera), which were large, grandiose productions that were typically Italian operas and librettos in this period. In an 1781 letter to his chief minister Kaunitz, Joseph II admitted:

in regard to opera seria from Italy, it is too late to arrange something good; and anyway, it is such a boring spectacle that I do not think I will ever use it.

He had much the same opinions of ballet productions, which at this time typically crammed into opera productions and not integral to the plot or the production. He lambasted ballet as a:

useless excitement of sensuality by an erotic jumping around on the stage.

The emperor's critiques of both opera seria and ballet illustrate not only his aversion to both forms, but also his conceptualization of the role of musical productions in the Austrian state theater. Joseph II preferred opera buffa productions, which were much more frivolous and gay, and also maintained pretenses of being the father of a truly German national theatre tradition. Both ballet and opera seria were respectively very much French- and Italian-dominated genres. Figaro's ballet section, written by a German under his patronage, ticked off a number of boxes for Joseph II. It was both organic to the opera's plot, and thus played to his aesthetic sense, and this opera and its ballet was a product of his patronage.

The latter box was particularly important for understanding the overarching rationales for Joseph II's arts policies. As emperor, Joseph II sought to distinguish himself from both his contemporaries and his predecessors. Both opera seria and ballet were popular genres in contemporary courts, and Joseph II was not one who wanted to swim with the tide. Championing German music and theatre- he actually renamed the state theatre the German National Theatre- differentiated his patronage from other courts like the Francophile Prussia. Joseph II also had spent an interminable amount of time co-ruling with his mother Maria Theresa and this pushed him further to be different than his peers. Ballet had enjoyed some success in Austria during his mother's reign, but the companies soon found themselves bereft of court patronage.

Neither ballet nor opera ballet were proscribed completely in Austria, but they were no longer found favor within the court theatre. The somewhat parsimonious Joseph II, whose theatrical management introduced the then unprecedented step of having theatre goers pay for their boxes, disliked ballet and opera seria because their stars often commanded much more in terms of salary. In 1783 when the Emperor ran into trouble over demands of an Italian opera troupe demanding an increase in salary, Joseph II refused these demands, writing:

If these gentlemen and fine ladies don't want to remain at precisely the salary at which they are presently engaged, and if especially Benucci [an Italian bassist star] must be engaged for three years with us to keep him, it is not worth the trouble. We need only allow them to finish their contracts and make the best use of them, and then simply let them go. The we'll try and get some German singers to put back German operas on to the stage. This is my last word. We don't want to increase the wages of these warblers unreasonably, especially since the uncertain [geopolitical] situation is uncertain and 100 grenadiers may be worth more than three comic turns who cost the same.

In this labor dispute, Benucci and his company blinked first and stayed out the rest of their contract and performed in The Barber of Seville.

This merging of personal aesthetics and state imperatives was typical of court patronage in the Enlightenment. Decisions on cultural policies often had to balance the personal tastes of the monarch with politics. Joseph II's relaxation on censorship, for example, was not only about positioning himself as a ruler in harmony with the Enlightenment, but also sending a message towards the hitherto Jesuit-dominated censors that he decided Austrian policy, not Rome. While Joseph II would not permit wide attacks on Christianity, he did allow Protestants to publish in lands where Protestantism was tolerated. In the case of ballet, Joseph II's own distaste for the genre and its association with a opera form he disliked, meshed with his desire to create a German national theatre in Vienna on the cheap.

Sources

Beales, Derek. Joseph II. Volume II, Against the World, 1780-1790. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Blanning, T. C. W. Joseph II. London: Longman, 1994.

Scott, H. M., and Brendan Simms. Cultures of Power in Europe During the Long Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.