Europe: A History (135 page)
The mechanism of the Partitions rested on two simple considerations: first, that a Russian army of intervention was required to suppress the Polish reform movement; and secondly, that a Russian advance into the Republic posed a threat to the Republic’s other neighbours, Prussia and Austria. After the draining experience of the Seven Years War, Prussia in particular was in no condition to fight another war against Russia. Instead, it was suggested that Prussian and Austrian interests could best be protected if, as the price of their acquiescence in Russian actions in Poland, they could be given territorial compensation. So, by general agreement of its neighbours, the defenceless Republic was to submit to the suppression of its reformers by Russian force, and to pay for the operation by the cession of huge tracts of territory. What was worse, the Republic had to listen in silence whilst its tormentors told the world of their generous and peaceful intentions.
DESSEIN
W
HEN
the second edition of the Due de Sully’s memoirs were prepared for publication in 1742, a great deal of re-editing was done. In particular, a large number of the Duke’s scattered and often contradictory comments on foreign relations were simplified and consolidated into one single chapter entitled ‘The Political Scheme commonly called the Grand Design of Henri the Great’. In this way, Sully’s
Grand Dessein
was reconstructed, not to say invented, more than a century after his death. Critics have argued that it was a product more of the eighteenth than of the seventeenth century.
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It must be said that Maximilien de Béthune (1560–1641), Baron de Rosny and Due de Sully, had little to do with foreign policy during his decade as Henri IV’s chief minister. He had been Superintendent of the Royal Finances, Grand Voyer (from
viarius
, ‘master of the roads’) of France, Grand Master of Artillery and then of Fortifications, and Governor of the Bastille.
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His thoughts on international relations date from his first years in retirement after 1610 and then, with major amendments, from the Thirty Years War. He had published them all, unsorted, in the two volumes of his
Mémoires des sages et royales oeconomies d’estat
(1638).
Sully’s immediate purpose was to reduce the preponderance of the Habsburgs. From this essentially opportunist purpose, however, he drew up a plan which envisaged both a new map of Europe and the machinery for maintaining a perpetual peace. The map was to consist of fifteen equal states that would be created by confining Spain to Iberia, by separating the House of Austria from the Empire, and by redistributing their possessions. The Spanish Netherlands, for example, were either to be divided between England and France or to be given to the United Provinces. Hungary was to be restored as an independent elective monarchy. The imperial throne in Germany was to be filled by open elections, and free from the monopoly power of any one dynasty. In the interests of perpetual peace, Sully planned a European League of Princes. The League was to be governed by a Federal Council, where the greater powers would hold four seats each and the others two, and where the chairmanship, starting with the Elector of Bavaria, would rotate. It would use its combined forces to settle disputes and to enforce policy.
The key concept behind both the new map and the new league was to be ‘equilibrium of strength’. No power was to be strong enough to impose its will on the others. Europe was to be ‘une république très chrétienne’ and ‘one great family’. Within its borders, it was to enjoy freedom of trade. Beyond its borders, it was to destroy the Turk and to undertake ‘convenient’ conquests in Asia and North Africa.
Fashioned by a statesman in irresponsible retirement, and refashioned by an eighteenth-century editor, the Grand Design has more than a smack of abstract theorizing. It may have been influenced by émeric Crucé’s
Nouveau Cynée
(1623), with its plan for a world-wide peace assembly to be chaired by the pope at Venice, which in turn may have owed something to the ‘League of Perpetual Union’ proposed by a Bohemian king as long ago as 1458 (see p. 428). It certainly belonged to the long tradition of theoretical writing from Dante’s
De Monarchia
to Erasmus and Campanella. But popularized in the age of the ‘balance of power’, it attracted great attention. In the two centuries which separated its relaunch from the League of Nations and the European Community, its basic thoughts on international stability, on free trade, on pooled sovereignty, and on joint enforcement have not ceased to appeal. Above all, it recognized what many ignored, that peace is a function of power.
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In the first round, the point was reached in the late 1760s when the turmoil in Poland-Lithuania could no longer be contained. The King’s proposals for limited reform had stirred up opposition on all sides. The Prussians had bombarded Polish customs posts on the Vistula, thereby ending all preparations for a modern fiscal system. The Russians had been stirring up a campaign against the alleged maltreatment of religious minorities in Poland, and had carried off the Polish bishops who protested. The Confederates of Bar, led by Casimir Pułaski (1747–79), bad taken the field to oppose both the King and the Russians. In 1769 the Austrians had used the uproar to seize the thirteen towns of the district of Spisz. St Petersburg would be obliged to take drastic action as soon as its Turkish war permitted. Berlin saw the chance: Prussia would not oppose Russian intervention if granted the Polish province of Royal Prussia. Austria would agree if given a slice of southern Poland: ‘The more she wept,’ joked Frederick II of Maria Theresa, ‘the more she took.’ Russia would take most of’White Ruthenia’.
The first Treaty of Partition was signed in St Petersburg on 5 August 1772. Legal niceties were observed throughout. The air was filled with homage to Poland’s ‘golden freedom’. Then the victim was persuaded to wield the knife. The King placed a motion in favour of the Partition before the Sejm. The one member to protest, Tadeusz Rejtan, who lay across the threshold of the Chamber to bar the King’s entry, was later declared insane. The three treaties of secession between the Republic and each of the partitioning powers were completed on 7/18 September
1773. The one sovereign to protest was the King of Spain. ‘I have partaken eucharistically of Poland’s body,’ was Frederick’s comment, ‘but I don’t know how the Queen-Empress has squared her confessor.’
The First Partition bought several years of relative calm. Poland-Lithuania was absorbed with the labours of the National Education Commission (see above); and in 1775 the King was given permission to form the outlines of ministerial government. All the Confederates of Bar had been deported to Siberia or had fled abroad. Pułaski had gone off to America, where he founded the US Cavalry. Russia, Prussia, and Austria were busy absorbing their ill-gotten gains.
The century of the Enlightenment drew to its close with the spectacle of three enlightened despots taking concerted action to crush an enlightened reform movement. The assault on the Polish state was accompanied by much enlightened rhetoric; and the consequent ‘rationalization of the map of Europe’ was widely excused. ‘Un polonais—’, quipped Voltaire, ‘c’est un charmeur; deux polonais— une bagarre; trois polonais, eh bien, c’est la question polonaise’ (one Pole—a charmer, two Poles—a brawl, three Poles—the Polish Question).
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[METRYKA]
Yet the basic problem remained. Poland-Lithuania was still a Russian captive, and the reformers were straining at the leash. If the King were to lose control, others would act for him. And as soon as they moved, the whole cycle of reform and repression would begin again. It began in 1787.
Monday evening, 29 October 1787, Prague
. In the National Theatre of Count Nostitz in the old city (now the Tyl Theatre), Bondini’s Italian opera company was presenting the première of
Il dissoluto punito
, ‘The Rake’s Reward’. The performance had originally been advertised for the evening of the 14th, under the title of ‘The Guest of Stone’, when it had been intended to entertain the Princess of Tuscany on the way to her wedding in Dresden. In the event, the score of the new opera had not been completed. According to one Václav Svoboda (Wenzel Swoboda), who played the double bass in the orchestra, the composer had sat up all the Sunday night of the 28th with a small army of copyists; and the score of the overture was delivered to the theatre with the ink still wet on the page.
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But the players were not deterred. Cheering broke out when the composer took his bow at the front of the candlelit auditorium at 7 p.m. Two extended f
orte
chords in D minor brought the uproar to a halt. Then the music sped away,
molto allegro
, info the fast chatter of the overture’s opening bars.
Ouverture
Str. 2 Fl. 2 Ob. 2 Cl. 2 Bsn. 2 Hn. 2 Tr. Timp.
At the end of the overture the maestro turned to the orchestra and complemented them on their sight-reading: ‘Bravo, Bravo, meine Herren, das war ausgezeichnet’ (Bravo, Gentlemen, that was admirable).
The libretto, as printed in advance for the court, could be bought at the box-office in Italian only (40 kr. bound in gold paper, 20 kr. ordinary). The title-page read:
IL DISSOLUTO PUNITO. O sia II D. Giovanni. Dramma giocoso in due atti. Da representarsi nel Teatro di Praga l’anno 1787. In Praga di Schoenfeld … La Poesía è dell’Ab Da Ponte, Poeta de’ Teatri Imperiali di Vienna. La Música è del Sig Wolfgango Mozzart, Maestro di Cap, dadesco.
The cast was: Giovanni—Luigi Bassi; Anna—Teresa Saporiti; Ottavio—Antonio Baglioni; Elvira—Caterina Micelli; Leporello—Felice Ponziani; Zerlina— Caterina Bondini (wife of the impresario); Commendatore—Giuseppe Lolli.
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Mozart’s
Don Giovanni
, as it came to be known, was but the latest variant of a popular tale of seduction that had reached the status of a European myth. Don Juan, the
burlador
of Seville, had been played over two centuries both in Neapolitan carnival and in French fairground pantomime. It had been given literary form by Molina (1630), Cicognini (c.1650), Molière (1665), Corneille (1677), Goldoni (1736), and Shadwell (1776). It had been set to music, for ballet or stage drama, at Rome in 1669, at Paris in 1746, at Turin in 1767, at Cassel in 1770. In the decade before it reached Mozart it had inspired at least four full-blown operas—by Righini at Vienna (1777), by Albertini at Warsaw (1783), by Foppa/Guardi and Berlati/Gazzaniga at Venice (1787). Mozart’s librettist, the Abbé da Ponte, had drawn heavily on Berlati’s words; and the tenor who sang Ottavio in Prague had come post-haste from singing the same role to Gazzaniga’s music in Venice.
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The basic plot was disarmingly simple. In the opening scene Don Giovanni kills the Commendatore, the angry father of Anna, his latest amorous conquest. After numerous intrigues, he is twice confronted in the closing scenes by the dead Commendatore’s statue, which cries for vengeance as the sinner is swallowed by the fires of Hell. Da Ponte condensed the story into two matching acts, each built round the same dramatic structure:
ACT I | ACT II |
Nos. 1–7 | Nos. 14–18 |
| SEPARATE EXPOSITION | SEPARATION OF ANTAGONISTS |
| [ Giovanni and 3 women ] | [ Giovanni disguised or absent ] |
| (Aria) Giovanni-Anna | Giovanni-Leporello |
| (Trio) Death of Commendatore | (Trio) Deceit of Elvira |
| (Duet) Anna-Ottavio | |
| Elvira misdirected to Leporello | Elvira misdirected to Leporello |
| (No. 4) | |
| Zerlina-Giovanni-Masetto | Giovanni-Masetto |
| Giovanni-Zerlina | Zerlina-Masetto |
Nos. 8–10 | Nos. 19–21 |
MIXTURE OF PERSONS & PASSIONS | MIXTURE OF PERSONS & PASSIONS |
| Collective antagonism | Antagonism directed at Leporello |
| Quartet | Sextet |
| [ Giovanni in background ] | [ Leporello escapes ] |
| Anna sees Giovanni’s guilt | Ottavio sees Giovanni’s guilt |
| Aria (No. 10 | Aria (No. 21) |
| [Graveyard Scene] | |
| Leporello’s narrative | Giovanni’s narrative |
| Aria (No. 11) | Duet (No. 22) |
| [Giovanni’s Garden] | [Anna’s House] |
| Aria (No. 12) | Aria (No. 23) |
| FINALE Entry of Masker Attempt on Zerlina Collective Antagonism | FINALE Entry of Elvira Retribution: the statue Collective Conclusion 38 |