Artists’ Livelihoods
“Stolp, stolp, stölperlein,
da wird ein Pfeifer begraben sein.”
Hans Sachs
We know that blind composer Moondog (Louis Thomas Hardin), who for many years performed his poems and compositions on the street corners of Manhattan on a zither or a drum, was able to successfully market his music beginning in 1955. What about the social status and income of his predecessors, the medieval players? Traveling players lived from hand to mouth, but there were many forms and levels of payment. Often, they had to demand their pay, be it in honorary payment, alms, and salary, dress, room and board, in rare cases also a horse. In contrast, court players with property were the exception, and the other extreme were the large number of begging musicians. Tellingly, pay was often the “gages” (debts) left by the players in the inns-hence the origin of the German term Gage. Beginning in the late Middle Ages, not just the city piper, but also traveling players were paid in coinage for a calculable work.
Mozart to his Freemason lodge brother Michael Puchberg, June 17, 1788
“If you would want to have love and friendship towards me to support me for one or two years with one or two thousand Gulden for proper interest you would be helping me greatly! You would certainly find it sure and true that it is horrible, indeed impossible to live when you must wait from payment to payment!”
There is a stubborn myth that famous composers die poor. While this is on the one hand true-both Beethoven and Mozart had existential difficulties in Vienna. But at the same time, Joseph Haydn worked for decades in the court of Prince Esterházy in a relatively well-paid position of employment, later came lucrative commissions in London. In the seventeenth and eighteenth century, the overwhelming number of composers were employed at courts and churches, but there were also numerous freelance composers before Mozart, usually opera composers. From the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries, freelance activity increasingly grew in scope, according to the rapidly increasing demand for works to be played at public concerts and for private music making. Among the composers of these three centuries, there are freelance composers just as well as hired musicians. Some could achieve wealth and property, others died impoverished. The conclusion? There are no links between economic relations, pecuniary expectations, and artistic quality.