A monster concert featuring some 600 performers in Vienna`s Court Riding School on 29 November 1812 led to the formation of the "Gesellschaft der Musikfreuude" (Society of the Friends of Music), and this was celebrated two centuries later in the form of a reconstruction of that memorable concert under the direction of Nikolaus Harnoncourt. On the programme, then as now, was Timotheus oder Die Gewalt der Musik, the German version of Handel’s Alexander's Feast that Mozart himself had prepared.

The Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde was Founded in Vienna on 29 November 1812 thanks to the confluence of a number of musical, social and historical factors. We need to know this background if we are to understand the reasons for the Gesellschaft`s inaugural concert and the choice of music performed on that occasion, music repeated at the concert held to mark the organizations bicentenary and documented in the present release.
Starting in the 1780s, there had been repeated attempts and proposals aimed at setting up an organization that would promote concerts and cater for both practising musicians and listeners. The most important of these short-lived experiments was the Society of Music Lovers that gave a series of Well-received concerts during the winter of 1808/9, but any thought of building on the success of these concerts was thwarted when Napoleon recaptured Vienna in May 1809, resulting in lengthy negotiations aimed at ending the war. It must be remembered that the Wars of the Coalition against Revolutionary and, later, Napoleonic France that began in 1792 and lasted until 1814 brought conflict to large swathes of Europe for a period of twenty-two years. At the heart of the lighting were the Habsburg lands and the Austrian Empire that had been established in 1804. Not only the War itself proved a heavy burden, so too did the resultant political humiliations and economic consequences. Austria’s bankruptcy in February 1811 and the ceremony held in Dresden in May 1812, when Kaiser Franz II was forced to pledge his allegiance to Napoleon, marked two particular low points in terms of Austrian self-confidence.
It was against this hacliground, then, that Fanny von Arnstein - one of Mendelssohn's aunts who was living in Vienna - proposed the idea of establishing an association of musical dilettantes in April 1812. These dilettantes - the word had no derogatory overtones at this period but referred to fully trained musicians whose income was independent of their knowledge and love of music - were to have an opportunity to perform music together, while at the same time their abilities were to be exploited for the public good. The secretary to all the court  theatres, Joseph Sonnleithner, took up this idea. Remembered nowadays chiefly as the librettist of Beethoven's Fidelio, he was also the secretary of the Society of Noblewomen for the Encouragement of the Good and Useful, and it was under the aegis ofthis society that he organized a huge benefit concert at the Imperial and Royal Court Riding School on 29 November 1812. Its aim was to put into practice the idea ofa music society with manifold musical, scholarly and pedagogic concerns that went far beyond those proposed by Fanny von Arnstein's Dilettante Association. The concert involved at least 590 performers - according to some sources, there were as many as 704. Although they included many professional musicians, they were made up for the most part of amateurs. Following the concert, 507 music lovers - participants and audience members alike - signed a document declaring themselves the founding members of the new Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde.
The concert was more than just a musical event that was widely reported in the press. Napoleon`s defeat at the gates of Moscow in September 1812 and the subsequent retreat of his army, for which Austria, too, had had to provide troops, had oliered the nations groaning beneath the Napoleonic yoke their first glimmer of hope that the French emperor`s star might yet set. Austria could not counter Napoleon with military might, but musical forces similar to those mobilized at the concert on 29 November demonstrated Austria’s “power of music”. As a result, the concert was also a patriotic occasion allowing Austrians to rally round their country’s flag. This patriotic aim was reflected in the choice of the work performed: Timotheus oder Die Gewalt der Musik. The power and force of music were Austria’s answer to Napoleon’s military might, and every performer and audience member could see parallels between the Alexander the Great of the work's plot and Napoleon Bonaparte. No less obvious was the analogy between the bard Timotheus, who breaks the spell on the world’s ruler thanks to the power of music, and the Austrian Empire. Thanks to Timotheus’s music, Alexander becomes putty in the singer’s hands, while in more general terms his music achieves only good things: “He rais’d a mortal to the skies,” the final chorus celebrates Timotheus. In heaven St Caecilia, the patron saint of music, intervenes to demonstrate the celestial, nay divine, element of music. And so it had to be: with the power of the music bequeathed to humankind by heaven - in other words, with God’s help - Austria could once again hold its head high.
A remarkable incident took place at exactly this time that neatly underscored the concert’s programme, for on 26 November 1812 Napoleon suffered a crushing defeat at the Battle of Berezina, when his armies were routed. In fact, the news of his defeat did not reach Vienna until after 29 November, serving as belated confirmation of the concert’s underlying message.
Alexander's Feast or The Power of Musick was the title given to the ode that Handel wrote in 1735-36 and that received its first performance at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, on 19 February 1736. The words by John Dryden date from 1697 and were revised for Handel by Newburgh Hamilton. Carl Wilhelm Ramler saw the work’s true protagonist as the singer Timotheus, prompting him to give his 1766 German translation the title Timotheus oder Die Gewalt der Musik. In turn Mozart adapted Handel’s ode - in Ramler's translation - in July 1790 for the oratorio concerts of Vienna’s Society of Noblemen. It was Mozart’s version that served as the basis of the performance on 29 November 1812. The instrumentational retouchings, including the addition of a bass drum, were presumably the work of the conductor Ignaz Franz von Mosel. These were entered in the orchestral parts, which have all survived in the archives of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde and which were used by Nikolaus Harnoncourt while he was preparing for his performance in 2012.
Mosel conducted the concert in 1812 using a baton, the first time a baton had been used in the history of music in Vienna. Given the number of musicians taking part in the concert, its use was indispensable. The fact that there were so many performers was due not primarily to musical considerations but to the programmatical reasons outlined above. The musical consequences of this decision were no less remarkable and can be heard in the present recording, for which the Concentus Musicus fielded as many players as could be accommodated on the platform in the Grosser Musikvereinssaal, while the Singverein of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde was made up of one hundred or so singers. The decision to use choirs of wind instruments not only produced a different balance but also a different kind of sound. As a whole, the concert documented by this recording was intended not to muster large forces simply for the sake of doing so but to recreate the sort of massed sounds produced in 1812 in a large hall which, although endowed with good acoustics, was not designed for the purposes of a concert, and to do so, moreover, before an audience of 2500 listeners. (A similar number attended the performance on 3 December 2012.) The recitatives are accompanied by a fortepiano from the collections of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna, an instrument made in the city by Anton Walter & Son between 1805 and 1810.