Gottfried Freiherr van Swieten (29 October 1733 – 29 March 1803)[1] was a Dutch-born Austrian diplomat, librarian, and government official who served the Holy Roman Empire during the 18th century.

He was an enthusiastic amateur musician and is best remembered today as the patron of several great composers of the Classical era, including Carl Phillip Emanuel Bach, Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven.

[2] His father, Gerard van Swieten, was a physician who achieved a high reputation for raising standards of scientific research and instruction in the field of medicine.

In 1745, the elder Van Swieten agreed to become personal physician to the Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa and moved with his family to Vienna, where he also became the director of the court library and served in other government posts.

Van Swieten was ambassador during the First Partition of Poland (1772), in which much of the territory of this nation was annexed by the more powerful neighboring empires of Austria, Russia, and Prussia.

According to Abert, it was Van Swieten's "thankless task" to negotiate on this basis; the 60-year-old Frederick replied to him: "That's the sort of suggestion you could make if I had gout in the brain, but I've only got it in my legs."

[3] On his return to Vienna in 1777, Van Swieten was appointed as the prefect of the Imperial Library, a post which had been vacant for five years since his father's death.

[12] Van Swieten was strongly sympathetic to the program of reforms which Joseph sought to impose on his empire, and his position in government was a critical one, considered by Volkmar Braunbehrens (1990) to be the equivalent of being minister of culture.

Joseph's goal of building up a middle class with a political responsibility towards the State depended on great advances in elementary education, and on the universities.

The historian Nicholas Till suggests that had Van Swieten's law been implemented, the career of his protégé Mozart as an independent musician might have gone much more successfully.

In 1787, the Emperor launched a "disastrous, futile, and costly"[16] war against the Turks, which put Austrian society in turmoil and undermined his earlier efforts at reform.

The Grove Dictionary opines that "the chief characteristics of [his] conservative, three-movement symphonies are tautology and paucity of invention ... As a composer Van Swieten is insignificant."

[5] Unlike his father, who remained a Protestant after coming to Austria, Gottfried converted to Roman Catholicism, the state religion of the empire.

"[20] This was a common way of paying musicians in the age of aristocracy; Haydn had received similar payments from his employer Nikolaus Esterházy, though he also drew a salary.

An 1801 letter of Haydn to Van Swieten, by then his longtime collaborator, used no second person pronouns, instead addressing the Baron as "Your Excellency";[22] presumably this reflected their everyday practice.

The Mozart family was visiting Vienna, hoping to achieve further fame and income following the earlier completion of their Grand Tour of Europe.

[5] By 1782, Van Swieten had invited Mozart to visit him regularly, in order to inspect and play his manuscripts of works by J. S. Bach and Handel, which he had collected during his diplomatic service in Berlin.

[24]Others also attended these gatherings, and Van Swieten gave Mozart the task of transcribing a number of fugues for instrumental ensembles so that they could be performed before the assembled company.

"[26] Later, Mozart assimilated Bach and Handel's music more fully into his style, where it played a role in the creation of some of his most widely admired works.

Generally, these concerts were first given in van Swieten's private rooms in the Vienna Hofburg, then in a public performance in the Burgtheater or Jahn's Hall.

[3] On 2 January 1793, he sponsored a performance of Mozart's Requiem as a benefit concert for Constanze; it yielded a profit of 300 ducats, a substantial sum.

Olleson suggests that Haydn participated in the Handel concerts of the Gesellschaft der Associierten,[34] and notes that already in 1793, Van Swieten was trying to get him to write an oratorio (to a text by Johann Baptist von Alxinger [de]).

However, he only partly followed this suggestion, and after pondering, added to his bass line a rich layer of four-part harmony for divided cellos and violas, crucial to the final result.

[e] The premieres of the three oratorios The Seven Last Words, The Creation and The Seasons all took place under the auspices of the Gesellschaft der Associierten, who also provided financial guarantees needed for Haydn to undertake long-term projects.

He generally had to stay long after the other guests had departed, for his elderly host was musically insatiable and would not let the young pianist go until he had 'blessed the evening' with several Bach fugues.

—Swieten[39] Albrecht explains "nightcap" as follows: "This aspect of Swieten's invitation was as much practical and considerate as it was hospitable: if Beethoven had returned home after the citywide 9 p.m. curfew, he would have had to pay Lichnowsky's turnkey a fee to let him in the locked house doors.

Van Swieten expressed some of his views about the value of earlier music in the pages of the first volume of the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung:

[45]DeNora describes the devotion to earlier masters as a "fringe" view during the 1780s,[46] but eventually others were following Swieten's lead, particularly with the success of The Creation and The Seasons.

[47] He also was not close to his fellow aristocrats; although his public roles in music and government were prominent, he avoided salon society, and after 1795 expressed content that he lived in "complete retirement".

Olleson observes that in the three successive oratorio libretti that Van Swieten prepared for Haydn, his own involvement in the writing was greater for each than in the previous one.