Globalization with a Twist
The Habsburg Monarchy, Louisiana and Salzburg
By Reinhold Wagnleitner
Top Photo: Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong (1901-1971). Library of Congress
Two centuries ago, the Habsburg Monarchy, the Prince-Bishopric of Salzburg and Louisiana were genuinely interconnected. At this special moment of globalization, the American, French and Saint-Dominguan (Haitian) Revolutions, the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna deeply interlaced the histories of these three states and territories.
When the creation of the short-lived Italian “sister” republic by the victorious Napoleon Bonaparte left the Duke of Parma landless, the luckless Italian prince immediately looked for his sister’s backing. Maria Louisa of Bourbon-Parma happened to be the Queen of Spain, and Spain was France’s ally at the time. While Maria Louisa vehemently demanded compensation for her brother, Napoleon wanted Louisiana back from Spain, which had administrated the former French colony since the secret Treaty of Fontainebleau in 1762.
A map of Louisiana by Arrowsmith & Lewis New and Elegant General Atlas, 1804.
Photo: Library of Congress
The result was the most stunning real estate deal of immense proportion and consequences: Spain returned Louisiana to France, and France transferred one of her Italian conquests, Tuscany, to the former Duke of Parma. Needless to say, now the Archduke of Toscana would have to get compensated as well. As the secularization of Salzburg had already been decided by the Treaty of Campo Formio in 1797, this territory could now get transferred to the former ruler of Tuscany, the Habsburg Archduke Ferdinand, a nephew of Emperor Francis II. So Louisiana was bartered for Tuscany and Tuscany for Salzburg – with dramatic consequences for its citizens.
The reign of the last Prince-Archbishop Colloredo (1772-1803) in Salzburg had been comparatively liberal and enlightened. But his secular successor Archduke Ferdinand re-established a political system of anti-liberalism with tight controls along the lines of Austrian absolutism (both reactions to the French Revolution). The former Duke of Parma, as King Ludovico I, also exposed Tuscany, which had been a center of enlightened rule under the former Habsburg GrandDuke Leopold, to a regime approximating that of the Spanish Inquisition. And the sliding transfer of Louisiana from Spain to France and further to the United States in 1803 caused a massive political and social deterioration for the considerable number of “free people of color.”
At the time, New Orleans alone had a larger population of free black citizens than all of the United States. For these “free people of color” therefore, the union with the land of the free resulted in the substitution of the comparatively permeable Latin American three-tiered racial structure with the much stricter two-caste society of the United States. In 1803, Napoleon’s decision to sell the massive land mass of Louisiana, covering about one third of the present continental United States, was based on two cardinal judgments: Most importantly, the French army, the largest European military contingent ever sent across the Atlantic, was annihilated by the Haitian revolutionaries. This made the French strategic position in the American hemisphere untenable, and the prospect of American cash to finance future military adventures in Europe made cutting his losses in America easier for Napoleon. Secondly, in a rather ironic twist, Napoleon realized that France might be unable to beat Britain in Europe.
Yet, the doubling of the size of the United States by the Louisiana Purchase could eventually reverse global power relations dramatically – with the former British colony ultimately reducing its erstwhile imperial ruler to the role of a junior partner and secondary client state. Furthermore, the declaration of independence of Haiti had confirmed the second successful independence struggle of a former European colony after the American Revolution of 1776. During this conflict, French slaveholders fled to Louisiana (most via Cuba), taking as many slaves along as possible. This energized and invigorated the already existing cultural ties between New Orleans and the Caribbean, which became one of the essential ingredients for the development of a completely new music – jazz.
Thus, while on the other side of the Atlantic in Salzburg more than a thousand years of ecclesiastical rule came to an end, President Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase laid the foundation for the westward expansion of the United States, which created the substructure and hinterland for the global economic and cultural power of the United States in the 20th century. “American rigidity for the suppressed class of Louisiana, Austrian absolutism for the citizens of Salzburg, Spanish inquisition for the inhabitants of Tuscany.”
Gilda Pasetzky’s conclusion for this anachronistic historical “progress” (nowadays labeled globalization) is more than sobering. Pasetzky was part of an American and European team of authors who contributed to Satchmo Meets Amadeus – three symposia accompanied by integrated classical and jazz performances in New Orleans (2000) and Salzburg (2001 and 2006) I organized jointly with Günter Bischof, Marshall Plan Professor of History and Director of the Austrian Marshall Plan Center for European Studies at the University of New Orleans.
My idea, which eventually morphed into a book, not only connected music with scholarship, but also classical music with jazz, New Orleans with Salzburg, as well as the New World with the old. It brought together the likes of S. Frederick Starr (Incubating Musical Talent: Vienna and New Orleans) and Oliver Rathkolb (Continuity and Discontinuity in Mozart’s Exploitation by Nazi-German and Post-War Austrian Cultural Policies) and many others, including Rainer Gstrein (Jazz as Non-Culture – the Suppression of Jazz in the “Third Reich”) and Penny von Eschen (The Real Ambassadors), Robert Hoffmann (Mozart and the Image of Salzburg) and Kurt Luger (Fun-Factory Salzburg: Sound of Music, Salzburg Festival, and Tourism), Connie Atkinson (Louis Armstrong and the Image of New Orleans) and Lawrence N. Powell (New Orleans: An American Pompeii?), Hubert Giesinger (Jazz in Salzburg) and Clemes Panagl (Roll Over Mozart: New Sounds in and Old Music Town), John H. Baron (Mozart in New Orleans) and David Nelson (The Mozart Effect: Truths Errors, Exaggerations), Hans-Christian Gruber (Satchmo and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart on the Silver Screen) and Erwin Giedenbacher (Cultural Icons: “Satchmo” and “Amadeus” in the World Wide Web), Jack Stewart (The Musical Geography of Louis Armstrong’s Second Neighborhood) and Tad Jones (December 31, 1912), Berndt Ostendorf (Jazz Funerals and the Second Line and Is American Culture Jazz-Shaped?) and, finally, my own scoop, Jazz – the Classical Music of Globalization.
These essays were further enhanced and complemented by the contributions of a quartet of fine musicians including Wolfgang Pillinger (Minuet & Blues, Schnitzel and Noodles: Considerations of a Notorious Go-Between), Abi von Reinighaus (Classical Music, Jazz, Rock, Pop – What’s the Difference?), Tom McDermott (Jazzin’ the Classics: A Survey of the First 100 Years) and, last but not least, by the (then) last surviving member of the Louis Armstrong All Stars, the one and only Joe Muranyi, whose delicate “Pops Meets Moze” wonderfully opened the discussion.
Satchmo Meets Amadeus examines the close encounters between classical music, the soundtrack of the Europeanization of the world, and jazz, the classical music of globalization (aka the Americanization of the globe). The essays analyze the cultural economic, social and political forces and dynamics creating the myths over, about and against these seminal musical figures of the 18th and 20th centuries. In other words, they look at the creation of Satchmo and Amadeus. They touch upon the highly problematic interface of the symbolic clash of two musical expressions, two cultures, two supposedly completely different ways of life. They give the lowdown on questions of anti-modernity vs. modernity, convention vs. innovation, high vs. low, in short: Europe vs. America.
“What we play is life.” This definition of music by Louis Armstrong hauntingly resonates with the equally problematic relations of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s life and oeuvre. From the vantage point of one of the most important African American innovators and creators of 20th century music, not much had changed over the last hundred and fifty years. Despite all international fame and admiration, Armstrong until the end of his life faced the daunting task of overcoming the prejudices and unjustness of American ethnocracy – just like Mozart, one of the most important innovators and creators of 18th century music, despite all achievements, never managed to overcome the inequities of European aristocracy.
The revolutionary qualities of both musicians could only be tolerated by domesticating them, by taking away all semblances of socially explosive features from their art. Mozart was defused as the notoriously childish “Wolferl” and Armstrong became deactivated as a rather simple-minded, endlessly grinning “Uncle Tom”. Needless to say, these characteristics hardly corresponded with Mozart’s and Armstrong’s lives and travails. But they became set images nevertheless, and these reflections apparently have become far more important in the public mind than historical reality.
Louis Armstrong and singer Velma Middleton at the Wiener Konzerthaus, 1955.
Photo: Austrian National Library/ Alfred Cermak
An imagined borderline between artistic creation and commercial exploitation has been sharpened to a cutting edge over the last two centuries. The debates about the artistic, cultural and political meaning, the struggle between tradition and modernity, as well as the economic significance of the music festivals of New Orleans and Salzburg are a permanent reminder of that fact. For many, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Louis Armstrong may appear as the most unlikely, absolutely incomparable, couple. And yet, when all differences are considered, certain similarities between Mozart’s and Armstrong’s real lives, social roles, and especially mediated images as well as a comparison between New Orleans and Salzburg are less far-fetched than many would like to admit. While both were world artists, they were, to put it rather mildly, not particularly popular among the ruling classes of their respective home towns. Both had to search for happiness, acceptance, fame, money and liberty in the world far away from their places of birth.
The well-known fact of Mozart being forced to leave Salzburg under rather unworthy circumstances does not quite resonate with Salzburg’s favorite image as “City of Mozart” until the present day. While Vienna, Prague, Kassel and Berlin organized distinguished memorial festivities on the occasion of Mozart’s death, Salzburg ignored even that occasion completely. For a long time, there was no love lost between Salzburg and Mozart, who had more than once complained that he deemed the language and way of life of Salzburg’s inhabitants wholly insufferable. It may be less universally known that the leaders of the city of New Orleans had Louis Armstrong’s birthplace torn down as late as the mid1960s in order to build the parking lot of a jailhouse.
It is a matter of record that it took official New Orleans more than seventy years to end its long-lasting hostility towards jazz and to publicly adopt the music – if not the musicians – as a welcome soundtrack for the tourism industry. Irrespective of these realities, Salzburg and New Orleans managed to create their worldwide reputation as shrines of music exactly as birthplaces of their most famous citizens, basking in the glory of their important roles in the history of music. However sizable their problems with the cities of their birth may have been, Salzburg and New Orleans until this day have been identified with “their greatest sons”, and both cities extremely capitalize on those images.
From music tourism alone, New Orleans - at least until August 2005 - skimmed more than half a billion dollars annually, while the importance of Salzburg’s music tourism – between the Salzburg Festival and the Sound of Music tours – is generally known as well: On the occasion of the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth in January 2006, it was announced that Mozart was worth more than 4 billion euro ($4.4 billion). In contrast, music education in Salzburg – from children to the students of the University Mozarteum – and alternative cultural institutions have been curtailed at the same time through a variety of cuts by the “City of Music’s” government.
The imaginary production of contemporary Salzburg (as well as contemporary New Orleans, at least until Hurricane Katrina) generates a hybrid commodity, cities that act as both stage and scene. As arena for the entertainment industry, both cities have become a refreshing excursion from modernity. The cultural politics of Salzburg – as the city of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and, more recently, the Sound of Music – have long resembled a prime bastion of anti-modernity, where a touch of modernism may be acceptable only so long as it does not disturb the vision of the whole globe resembling a giant Mozartkugel that revolves within the planetary system of tourism around the sun of commercialism.
Needless to say, jazz and rock musicians found it rather difficult to gain any ground in this self-proclaimed “city of music.” In New Orleans: An American Pompeii?, Lawrence N. Powell demonstrated that the rebuilding of New Orleans’ infrastructure, which had been long overdue for an extreme makeover, was in danger of crossing over the fine line separating opportunity from opportunism, whether it be the opportunism of commercialism or racism or a combination of the two. The recovery of New Orleans may have resulted in one of those ‘lost cities’ that have been restored solely as sites of tourism and myth, and Preservation Hall may have been turned into Preservation Mall.
The French Quarter in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Photo: Library of Congress
For close to a hundred years, critics have been wondering about the reasons for the global attraction of jazz, the most unique and important contribution of the United States to the culture of modernity, without understanding that the music itself had been representing the musical heartbeat of a global culture right from the beginning. When jazz was created, New Orleans not only was by far the most ethnically diverse and international city of the United States – and thereby also the least “typically American.” It also represented the culturally most international urban space, jazz being truly trans-national urban music. The secret of its global attraction is therefore not difficult to unravel.
It is already contained in the global ingredients of traditional jazz. Jazz has been celebrated as the classical music of America – and yet that designation falls rather short. Jazz is much more. It is the classical music of globalization as well as the soundtrack of the 20th century. While early jazz represented the classical music of globalization, swing stood for its romantic period, bebop, modal and free jazz characterized its modernist phase, just as acid jazz and hip-hop can be interpreted as its postmodern moment – if these latter forms did not already constitute the classical music of rebellion against the global agenda of neo-liberalism.
Satchmo Meets Amadeus not only connects music and scholarship, classical music and jazz, New Orleans and Salzburg, the new world and the old. It also represents more than just a step of practical tolerance: the bridging of an apparently insurmountable division between the two embodiments of classical music of modernity. It bypasses the artificial crevice between European classical music and American jazz, which, in reality, is nothing less than the classical music of globalization. Selling people as slaves and civilized enlightenment hardly go hand in hand, and many observers still seem somewhat shocked when they are confronting the fact that the transatlantic slave trade peaked during Mozart’s time in the 18th century.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Louis Armstrong: two lives, two periods, two styles, two larger than life musical myths – generating many different Mozarts and Armstrongs over time – which became transformed into two major brand names for cultural tourism, record sales and countless entrepreneurial activities: Two histories of celebration, exultation, festivity, joy and jubilation – but also of bitterness and lack of understanding.
Two lives that experienced crowning achievements, accomplishment, ascendancy, big hits – as well as hard work, hard travel, loneliness and suffering. Two musicians whose oeuvre stands for exactness as well as improvisation, delicate exquisiteness as well as precision, highest quality, wholeness, sublimity and transcendence as well as exploitation and imperfection.
Reinhold Wagnleitner is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Salzburg. Among his many works, he edited Satchmo Meets Amadeus (Innsbruck, Wien, Bozen: StudienVerlag, 2006) (Transatlantica Volume 2), reedited version.