When 18th century composer George Frideric Handel wrote his timeless “Messiah” oratorio, he not only penned a classic holiday composition, he also established a foundation for a new business approach to opera. Paul Solman reports.

This article is part of a series on musician history. See also, Learning From Our Past.

Court musician was a career path for musicians in feudal Europe from the Middle Ages to the late 18th/early 19th century.  Of the gigs available to musicians during this time, court musician was the most prestigious and best paid job around.  The position disappeared when the court system itself crumbled.  Certain elements of the court musicians life and career parallel modern musician careers, but for the most part, court musician is a gig that has dissolved into our past.

What can we learn about ourselves from their careers?

What is a court musician?

Court musicians were hired by the rich nobility – dukes, kings, queens, etc.  There were two main reasons that courts held orchestras back then, only one of which is still relevant today.

First, from the middle ages to the 19th century, music was legally required at certain events (weddings, for example).  Music, we have to remember, was a scarce and valuable commodity at the time.  With the exception of music boxes and similar inventions, was no way to record music and play it back.  So if there was going to be music – there was going to have to be musicians.

Second, having music available on command was a symbol of status for the very wealthy.  17th century luxury included chefs to cook fine foods with new ingredients (“Hey Duke, check out this new thing called cinnamon!”), soap, wine, chamber pots – and what good would luxury be without music?

Unlike laws requiring music, the status symbol of live music still holds true today.   There are still plenty of gigs to be had among the uber-wealthy.  Sometimes this comes in the form of private parties and corporate gigs, but more often we see this in the form of charitable contributions, endowments and contributing patronage of non-profit arts companies like symphonies and ballets.  The rich are often still signing our paychecks, they just aren’t giving us a room in the palace anymore.

Was it a good gig?

While court musicians were the highest paid musicians of their day, it was also one of the least stable jobs.  Nobility were notoriously poor financial planners and it was not uncommon for courts to layoff all of their musicians at once without any warning.  Also, courts would often withhold payment for extraordinarily long periods of time – court records in Germany show payment delays from several month to, in the case of one German music director, a full 5 years without a paycheck!  As part of their contract they were usually given room and board at their employers residence – which is probably why the stuck around so long without payment.

According to the writings of court musicians at the time, many of them would have preferred to have worked in the relatively stable job of town musician (town musicians were professional musicians hired as full-time government workers by municipalities) if they wouldn’t have had to take such a pay cut to do so.

Yet another complaint of the court musician was the problem of isolation.  Courts, especially in the summer, were often located far from population centers (and far from the heat of the city).  Isolation is a grievance that is popularly attributed to Joseph Haydn, who spent his summers at Esterháza with the court of Esterházy, his full-time employer for 30 years.

I have to admit that a summer spent at a swampy castle in Hungary with no indoor plumbing, no phones, no internet, no TV and no fridge does sound like a bad vacation.  But then again, in the case of Haydn – he was the kapellmeister at his court (read: the boss), so his gig was probably pretty cushy compared to his sidemen.

There was a lot expected of court musicians.  Consider this, from a court musician in the late 1600s:

“With the court it is one day here, the next day off to someplace else.  There is no difference made between day and night.  Today one must perform at church, tomorrow at dinner, the next day at the theater.  In comparison to this, things are a little calmer in the cities.” ~ Johann Beer (1665-1700), chamber musician at Weissenfels

“Calmer in the cities” is a reference to the jobs in the city, as I mentioned before.

If you take out the word “church”, that complaint sounds a lot like something that musicians say today – maybe symphony musicians with run-outs or cruise musicians playing 6 sets a day.  I guess things haven’t changed much in 300 years.  At least, I suppose, we are paid on time.

How much money did they make?

Ok, so when they were paid, how much did court musicians make?

To answer that question we first have to solve the problem of currency.  We really have no good way of translating 17th or 18th century monetary figures into today’s money.  The best we can do is compare purchasing power – for instance, how much did a loaf of bread cost, or a cow, or the weeks groceries.  Another way to understand the value of a salary is to consider what other professions were making at the same time.

It’s also worth noting that there was a huge difference in pay between musicians on the same gig during this time.  There was a hierarchy of salary based on instrument as well as nationality.  A trumpet was a symbol of wealth and nobility, and accordingly, trumpeters were the highest paid musicians for hundreds of years.  Other wind and string players were considered less valuable (which makes me wonder why anybody would bother learning the lute in the first place).

There is some evidence that a premium placed on certain nationalities, at least in some courts.  In the court of Dresden, for example, the German concertmaster was paid 1,200 Thaler (a good wage), but the Italian singers were paid 3,000-10,500 each.

Here are some salary figures from several locations in Germany during the 18th century, which I have lovingly lifted, along with most of the information here, from the book, The Social Status of the Professional Musician from the Middles Ages to the 19th Century.

Musician Salaries

Non-Musician Salaries, Cost of goods

So what?

So what can we learn from all this?  First, it was nice work if you could get it.  You might say the same thing about premium gigs today – back-ups for rock stars, Broadway shows, international tours, film scoring, etc. The court musician career afforded it’s workers a middle class lifestyle or better, also much like today’s elite gigs.

Yet, at the same time, the job had it’s difficulties and it was still, in the end, a job.  A few weeks ago a friend and I were talking about the classical age of music and he shook his head when he considered how much easier it must have been hundreds a years ago…when musicians were taken seriously and treated with respect.  Unfortunately, the research suggests that professional musicians during this era had many of the same complaints that were have today.  Wages were not standardized, work was unstable, gigs often required travel and time away from home, there was little, if any, considerations made for retirement or long term interests.

What interests me about this epoch is that these musicians all made careers without the aid of recordings – a predicament we may, to a lesser degree, find ourselves in today. They also, I should say, made their careers without the burden of recordings. Nevertheless, the lesson here might be that this has never been an easy career. There’s no reason to look back with nostalgia on the time of Bach or Haydn, because it doesn’t seem like was any easier back then.

Is it just me, or does it seem like recorded music doesn’t have the same value that it used to?  I mean, albums still cost $10-15, and iTunes tells me that my songs are worth $1 to each of you (or hey! maybe $1.29!), but that’s not what I mean.  It’s just that people aren’t impressed anymore.  It used to be that someone would tell you that they had an album and you’d be like, “Wow!  You made an album!  I’m so impressed and excited that I’m going to pay money for it!”

But these days you have to beg someone to buy your album.  Friends and relatives begrudgingly buy it as if they are doing you a favor.  I feel like major labels are even trying to trick me into buying albums by including extra incentives that have nothing to do with music – behind-the-scenes materials, bonus videos, etc., etc.

Let’s face it, recorded music just isn’t as valuable as it used to be and as working musicians, we’re going to have to stop relying on recorded performances for our bread and butter.

Here’s the problem, though: we’ve been relying on recorded music as an income for nearly 100 years!  Remember when musicians would retire from playing live and only record music for a living?  The Beatles…Glenn Gould…Rubinstein – it doesn’t look like we’ll be able to do that anymore.  Not, at least, as easily as they did.

Ok, but let’s not lose our heads here.  “Professional musician” was not a career created by record labels and recording gear.  Ours is a proud, ancient profession.  There have always been working, professional musicians.  In fact, for the majority of human history, professional musicians did not have the luxury of recorded audio and still made a living.

As we move forward into this new era of the musician industry, maybe we should look back.  What did musicians do for a living 100 years ago?  300 years ago?  Who hired them?  How did they get gigs?  What kind of money did they make?  Which of their mistakes and triumphs can we learn from?

I believe that we are moving into a new musician industry that is a hybrid of the old world (pre-recording industry) and new world (post-recording industry).  We still can sell recorded music – we shouldn’t abandon everything we’ve achieved in the past century – but we also have to relearn how to make a living as musicians did before the invention of audio recording.

What if we are able to create a new, more sustainable model for the musician career by combining all of the knowledge of the two traditions?  Who knows.  Maybe musicians are broke, have always been broke, and that’s just the way it is.  I don’t know – I think it’s worth looking into.

And now you know my new project.  I’m lucky enough to live near one of the largest and best supplied performing arts libraries in the world (The Lincoln Center Library) and I’ve started looking into it.  I don’t pretend to be a qualified historian, I’m just a working musician – but I’ll let you know what I learn.  I’ll write about it here on MusicianWages.com.  Subscribe to our feed or email list, join our Facebook group, follow us on Twitter…or find us any of the other ga-billion ways that you can follow people these days.

More to come.  Thanks.