‘This Charming Invention Created by the King’

Christian IV and his invisible music

Abstract

Court ceremonial in early modern Europe functioned, in J.rg Jochen Berns’s words, as ‘a media-strategic system for the creation and maintenance of princely-courtly representation and pretension to power.’ Music was an essential part of this system, since it legitimized the ceremonial by linking it to the Pythagorean idea of the ‘harmony of the spheres’. This idea, still present in early modern discourse, was evoked through music in connection with other media, such as visual arts, and in specifi c spatial situations.

This article explores a particularly spectacular form of musical display that was practised at several European courts during the late Renaissance and has so far largely escaped the attention of musicologists. The Danish King Christian IV (1577/1588–1648), who employed musicians of European fame in his Hofmusik, not only publicly staged them as precious objects, but also kept them from view so that their performance, through the ‘charming invention’ (in the words of a contemporary visitor) of sound conduits, appeared as an acoustic miracle to visitors. Provisions for invisible music could also be found at the courts of Stuttgart and Dresden.

The article presents an outline of what is currently known about the settings of invisible music at the court of Christian IV, discussing both recently discovered sound conduits in Rosenborg Castle and hitherto unnoticed seventeenth-century travel accounts. Moreover, it evaluates possible cultural sources, such as installations in garden villas in northern Italy as well as theatrical practices in the Florentine Intermedi, placing invisible music in the context of other currents in mannerist aesthetics, such as Kunst- and Wunderkammern and musical machines. It also discusses Christian IV’s use of his ‘charming invention’ as a political instrument. The king used this acoustic device not only as a cultural capital that set him apart from the local nobility and neighboring princes in northern Germany, but also as a tool that allowed him to symbolically stage himself as cause and center of earthly harmony and, accordingly, of political order and peace in the destructive times of the Thirty Years War.