The Music Room, Schloss Sanssouci, Potsdam. Design and ornament by Johann Michael Hoppenhaupt (1685–1751), Johann Michael Hoppenhaupt II (1709–1755), Johann Christian Hoppenhaupt (1719–1785), and Johann August Nahl (1710–1781); Completed 1747; Materials: wood, plaster, glass
Frederick II of Prussia (1712–1786) composed around 120 flute sonatas during his lifetime, many of them opening with adagios. He performed almost every evening when in residence at Sanssouci, and the room where he played, the Music Room (Konzertzimmer), was decorated accordingly: it is the most elaborately ornamented interior in a palace already thick with ornament. Completed in 1747, less than two years after the palace’s architect Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff (1699–1753) broke ground on the hilltop site, the room was the product of several hands, not all of them willing ones.
The earliest and most inventive contributor was Johann August Nahl (1710–1781), a sculptor and decorator who had trained under his father, the court sculptor Johann Samuel Nahl (1664–1727), before spending formative years in Paris (1731–1734), where he studied the work of the leading French ornamentists, and in Rome, Strasbourg, and the episcopal workshops of the Palais Rohan. Frederick summoned him to Berlin in 1741, and by 1745 Nahl held the post of Surintendent des Ornements, responsible for the decorative programmes of all the royal building projects. He worked at Charlottenburg, the Berlin Stadtschloss, the Potsdam City Palace, and the early stages of Sanssouci. But in 1746 Nahl left Prussia, apparently after a serious quarrel with the king. The Oxford Companion to Western Art puts it plainly: he fled to Switzerland to escape the working conditions Frederick imposed. He settled near Bern and never returned to Prussian service, going on instead to produce his most celebrated work, the tomb of Maria Magdalena Langhans (1751–1752) in the church at Hindelbank, a monument Goethe later made a special journey to see.
Nahl’s departure left the Music Room incomplete, and the commission passed to the Hoppenhaupt brothers, sons of the Merseburg sculptor and architect Johann Michael Hoppenhaupt (1685–1751), who had served as court sculptor to the Dukes of Saxe-Merseburg but never worked in Berlin himself. His elder son, Johann Michael Hoppenhaupt the Elder (1709–after 1755), had trained in Dresden and Vienna before following his brother to Berlin in 1740. It was this Johann Michael, not his father, who executed the woodcarving in the Music Room between 1746 and 1747, carving the walls, doors, and the elaborate frames surrounding both the paintings and the mirrors. His younger brother Johann Christian Hoppenhaupt (1719–1778/86) was appointed Directeur des Ornements in Nahl’s place, and Johann Michael worked under his direction. Because the brothers collaborated closely and almost none of their work is signed (as was common practice in the eighteenth century), individual attributions depend on building accounts and surviving drawings. Johann Michael also published approximately eighty ornamental designs during his final years in Prussia, covering wall and ceiling decoration, furniture, clocks, chandeliers, pulpits, and carriages, which were etched between 1751 and 1755 by the Berlin illustrator Johann Wilhelm Meil (1733–1805) and distributed by the Augsburg engraver Johann Georg Hertel. These printed sheets carried the Frederician Rococo idiom to courts and workshops beyond Brandenburg.
The room itself plays a series of visual games with the boundary between indoors and out. The ceiling is decorated with a fantastical garden trellis hung with vines, springing from each corner of the room. On the inner wall, mirrors are set within gilded trellises overhung with festoons of flowers, so that the reflected garden light from the three arched windows opposite appears to pass through a second, imaginary pergola. The walls carry paintings by Antoine Pesne (1683–1757), Frederick’s long-serving court painter, with subjects drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the most popular source of mythological imagery in mid-eighteenth-century decoration. Gilded carvings in wood and plaster, depicting musical instruments, floral garlands, and putti, cover every available surface. The effect is not restrained. It is, in fact, deliberately overwhelming, though the vocabulary remains light: shells, scrolls, tendrils, flowers, the asymmetric C-curves and S-curves of mature rocaille. The ornament is the room.
What makes the Music Room unusual is its relationship to the person who used it. Frederick’s apartments at Sanssouci were, by his own insistence, arranged according to personal taste rather than court protocol, and the term Friderizianisches Rokoko (Frederician Rococo) was coined to describe the result. Frederick sketched his requirements for decoration and layout himself, and craftsmen such as Nahl, the Hoppenhaupts, the Spindler brothers (who specialised in marquetry), and Johann Melchior Kambly (1718–1783) interpreted those sketches into finished work. The Music Room was not simply a decorative scheme commissioned from specialists. It was a room shaped, at least in outline, by the man who intended to play the flute in it every evening, and who cared more about the adagio he was composing than about following French or Bavarian fashion. Johann Christian Hoppenhaupt’s later contribution to the palace, the Voltaire Room (1752–1753), designed from Frederick’s own sketches, takes this personal involvement further still: lemon-yellow lacquered panels covered with polychrome carvings of apes, parrots, cranes, storks, fruits, and garlands. An earlier decorative scheme in the same room, featuring silver floral motifs, was removed to make way for it; a fragment survives in the bed alcove.
Adolph Menzel’s painting The Flute Concert at Sanssouci (1852) shows Frederick in this room, apparently mid-cadenza, with a gathering of friends, family, and court musicians, including Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714–1788), the composer Johann Gottlieb Graun (1703–1771), and the flute virtuoso Johann Joachim Quantz (1697–1773), looking on. Menzel painted the scene a century after the fact, and his reconstruction is more atmosphere than archaeology. But the essential point holds. The Music Room was not built for state occasions or for impressing ambassadors (the Neues Palais would serve that purpose two decades later). It was built for chamber music among friends, in a palace whose very name, Sans Souci, promised the absence of care. Whether a king who fought three major wars, drove his best decorator out of the country, and composed 120 sonatas while running a military state was ever genuinely carefree is another question. But the room, at least, was designed to make it look as though he were.
References
Berckenhagen, E. (1972) ‘Hoppenhaupt, Johann Michael’, in Neue Deutsche Biographie, vol. 9. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, p. 619
Eggeling, T. (1996) ‘Hoppenhaupt’, in Turner, J. (ed.) Grove Art Online. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Jordan, M. (2001) ‘Johann August Nahl’, in Brigstocke, H. (ed.) The Oxford Companion to Western Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Kreisel, H. (1970) Die Kunst des deutschen Möbels. Spätbarock und Rokoko [The Art of German Furniture: Late Baroque and Rococo]. Munich: C.H. Beck
Streidt, G. and Feierabend, P. (1999) Prussia: Art and Architecture. Oldenburg: Könemann