Handel, Hummel, Handel
Saturday - August 14, 8:00 pm

Terry Everson, Trumpet
Members of the Apollo Chorus
Handel - Water music: Suite no. 1, F major
Hummel - Trumpet Concerto in E-flat major
Handel - Dixit dominus (Psalm 109)

This concert is sponsored by Stonehill Publishing

Program 6

Suite No. 1 in F major from Water Music
George Frideric Handel (1685-1759)

Composed in 1717.
Premiered on July 17, 1717 on the River Thames near London.

On July 19, 1717, two days after the event, the London Daily Courant carried the following report: “On Wednesday Evening, the King took Water at Whitehall ... and went up the River towards Chelsea. Many other Barges with Persons of Quality attended, and so great a Number of Boats, that the whole River in a manner was cover’d; a City Company’s Barge was employ’d for the Musick, wherein were 50 Instruments of all sorts, who play’d all the Way from Lambeth ... the finest Symphonies, compos’d express for the Occasion, by Mr. Hendel [sic]; which his Majesty liked so well, that he caus’d it to be plaid over three times going and returning.”

Handel modeled the Water Music that he composed for King George I’s boating party on the festive, outdoor compositions written by such French masters as Lalande and Mouret to accompany the al fresco suppers, parties and barge excursions at Versailles. (The theme for television’s Masterpiece Theater derives from just such a work by Mouret.) The Water Music, like those French works, is simple in texture, dance-like in rhythm and majestic in spirit, and relies on the bracing sonorities of the wind instruments that made outside performance viable. In Handel’s score, many of the individual movements recall the dance forms that are the basis of all Baroque suites. (The manuscript of the Water Music is lost, and there is no way to know exactly the order or even the precise instrumentation in which the various movements were intended to be played. The compilation of the music into suites was the job of later editors, and it is from these that present-day interpreters choose the specific movements to be performed. The actual music heard, therefore, may differ from one concert to another.) The dances include the minuet, a stately court dance in triple meter that became a regular fixture in the Classical symphony; the leaping, triple-meter gigue, derived from an English folk dance, and the model for many instrumental finales by French and Italian musicians when it migrated to the Continent in the 17th century; the bourrée, a spirited duple-meter dance of French origin; the English hornpipe, whose nautical associations are particularly appropriate for the Water Music; and the rigaudon, a Provençal dance especially popular in the French opera-ballet. The other quick movements, though untitled, are related to these types. The slow sections derive either from the limpid, flowing operatic aria of which Handel was undisputed master or from such dances as the saraband. A majestic ouverture in the French style rounds out the complete set.

Trumpet Concerto in E-flat major
Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778-1837)

Composed in 1803.
Premiered on January 1, 1804 at Esterháza Palace in Hungary, with Anton Weidinger as soloist.

Sic transit gloria mundi. During his lifetime, Johann Nepomuk Hummel was judged to be among the greatest musicians of the age. As a composer, he was placed second only to Beethoven. Many thought his piano playing without peer, especially in his improvisations. He was one of the most respected (and expensive) keyboard teachers in Europe, who published a tutor that sold thousands of copies within days of its appearance. His talents for conducting and management enabled him to assume the position as successor to Haydn at Esterháza, as well as important posts in Vienna, Stuttgart and Weimar. He was among the first musicians to campaign for a uniform copyright law. He traveled widely, befriended such notables as Goethe, and seemed to be a thoroughly likeable person whose success did not go to his head. Today, he is largely forgotten.

Hummel was a prodigy. When his father, a string player and conductor, moved the family to Vienna to take a job at the little theater run by Emanuel Schickaneder (the eventual librettist of The Magic Flute) when Johann was eight, the boy came to the notice of Mozart. Mozart took him on as a pupil, and the young musician lived with the Mozarts for two years. After this brief apprenticeship, Mozart encouraged Johann to go out into the world and make himself known, and a five-year-long series of concert appearances throughout northern Europe and England was undertaken. Hummel enjoyed good success during those years, and he was an accomplished musician when he returned to Vienna in 1793. During the next decade, he performed little, concentrating instead on study (with Salieri, Albrechtsberger and Haydn), composition and teaching. He met Beethoven, and the two began a long, though stormy, friendship. In 1804, Haydn recommended Hummel to take his place as head of the Esterháza musical establishment, and Hummel was accepted largely because of his association with the Viennese theaters. At Esterháza, he composed, conducted and trained the choirboys in singing and violin and keyboard, while also assembling a Haydn archive and overseeing the music for the court theaters. (He composed over two dozen works for the stage.) He left Esterháza in 1811, and soon thereafter resumed touring as a concert virtuoso. He was appointed Kapellmeister at Stuttgart in 1816, but that position did not allow him time to pursue his career as a pianist, and two years later he was able to negotiate a more suitable contract at Weimar, where he remained for the rest of his life. The 1820s were a productive time for Hummel as composer and performer. In the years before his death, however, he suffered a decline in popularity as the public was dazzled by the virtuoso wizardry of Paganini and Liszt, and beguiled by the new sensitivity of the music of the early Romantic composers. His death in 1837 was regarded as the passing of the Classical era.

Hummel occupies an important place in the history of music. He carried the Mozartian tradition into the 19th century and lightly flavored it with some newer harmonic and stylistic confections, resulting in a style that the noted pianist and scholar Charles Rosen called “post-Classicism.” Elegance, reserve and a certain formal predictability characterize much of Hummel’s large output, which includes works in all the major genres of the time except the symphony. He was especially known for the elaborate decorations with which he filled his own keyboard performances, a quality that resulted in a rather mannered version of what seems in Mozart fresh and inventive. Some of his keyboard techniques and compositional devices were appropriated by such Romantic composers as Mendelssohn, Schumann and even Liszt, but Hummel himself remained more closely allied to the 18th than the 19th century. His musicianship and talent are unquestioned, but, as Joel Sachs wrote in the New Grove Dictionary, “His music reached the highest level accessible to one who lacks ultimate genius.”

Hummel composed his Trumpet Concerto in 1803 for Anton Weidinger, the virtuoso who had inspired Haydn’s only work in the genre seven years before. The Concerto, first played by Weidinger for members of the Esterházy court on New Years’s Day, 1804, may have been instrumental in securing him the position as Haydn’s successor with that noble clan. The solo part, to which the manuscript suggests Weidinger made significant contributions, was tailored to the capabilities of the keyed trumpet, a new instrument which Weidinger helped to develop. Into Beethoven’s time, the trumpet was still a “natural” instrument, i.e., simply a wound metal tube capable of producing only the signal-call notes of a bugle. To fill the gaps between the available tones, various mechanical experiments were tried beginning in the late 18th century, including Weidinger’s keyed trumpet, which achieved pitch alterations by means of levers covering holes along the sides of the instrument. It was for this instrument that Haydn and Hummel composed their trumpet concertos. Though the instrument inspired two of the finest brass concertos in the repertory, its tone quality was flawed by its key mechanism, and it found little favor. It was superseded by the invention of the modern piston valve in 1815 by the Berlin horn player Heinrich Stölzel, which allowed brass instruments to produce the complete chromatic compass of notes with full, ringing tones. It is the system still in use today.

The opening Allegro of Hummel’s Trumpet Concerto is cast in the traditional sonata-concerto form. Its orchestral introduction contains both of the movement’s important themes: an octave-leap motive inspired by the fanfare proclivities of the solo instrument, and a pert complementary phrase in dotted rhythms initiated by the strings after a brief pause. The trumpet appropriates and elaborates these melodies as the movement progresses through a second exposition, a compact development section and a recapitulation. (Hummel, rather extraordinarily, allowed for no cadenzas in this Concerto.) The Andante is in the nature of an expressive operatic aria, beginning in a somber minor mode before turning to brighter feelings in its second portion. The movement is remarkable for its chromatic writing, employing notes which would have been impossible to produce on a natural trumpet but which were newly available on Weidinger’s keyed instrument. The finale is a bounding rondo in which Hummel further exploited the low register scales and chromatic inflections of the keyed trumpet. The movement is merry closing music, the sort of thing the Germans call a Kehraus, a “sweeping-out” — the last, lively dance of the evening.

Dixit Dominus (Psalm 110) for Soloists, Chorus, Strings and Continuo
George Frideric Handel

Composed in 1707.
Premiered in 1707 in Rome.

Early in 1703, Handel left his native Halle to gain experience and make some musical allies in Hamburg, then the most important opera center in Germany. The reputation he established there brought him to the attention of the visiting Prince Ferdinando de’ Medici, son and heir of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, who invited the young composer to Italy. Handel was intrigued by the Prince’s proposal, but since Medici would not finance the venture Handel “resolved to go to Italy on his own bottom, as soon as he could make a purse for that occasion,” according to his first biographer, the Rev. John Mainwaring. Handel arrived in Florence late in 1706 (his first Italian opera, Rodrigo, appeared there the following year), and he traveled on to Rome before the end of the year. The town immediately started to buzz with reports of his spectacular organ playing, and it soon learned of his compositional talents as well. During the spring of 1707, he produced his first oratorio, Il trionfo del tempo e del disinganno (“The Triumph of Time and Truth”), and followed it with a series of cantatas and motets. Between April and July, he wrote his three most ambitious Latin church works: the psalms Dixit Dominus, Laudate Pueri and Nisi Dominus. Musicologist James Hall suggested that these pieces formed part of a complete setting of the Carmelite Vespers for the feast of Madonna del Carmine, and were performed in Rome on that holiday — July 16, 1707. Handel’s Roman friends and patrons thought that these Latin-texted works might indicate sympathy toward Catholicism on his part, and they pressed him to convert. “But,” wrote Mainwaring, “he was resolved to die a member of that communion [i.e., Protestantism], whether true or false, in which he was born and bred.”

Dixit Dominus, composed in April 1707, is “the masterpiece of Handel’s youth,” according to Paul Henry Lang in his study of the composer. Though the work, a setting of Psalm 110, is much indebted to the German polyphonic tradition that Johann Sebastian Bach brought to perfection, it also shows the influence of the Italian lyricism that Handel had journeyed south to assimilate. “In Dixit Dominus, Handel has become euphony-conscious, the antithesis of Bach, to whom linear logic took precedence over euphony,” wrote Professor Lang. Most of the work’s movements are scored for five-part chorus accompanied by strings and continuo, with three also calling for soloists; alto and soprano are each allotted a single solo aria. As a means of unifying the work’s overall structure, a chant melody from the Easter liturgy is given in sustained notes in the opening and closing sections, to the words “donec ponam” in the first movement and to “sicut erat” in the finale.

Basil Lam was extravagant in his praise of the finale of Dixit Dominus. “With the evidence of such achievements as this chorus,” Lam wrote, “we can understand better why Handel made such a deep impression on the musical world of Italy. Northern science is here united with the fiery energy of the Italian Baroque. . . . [The movement] develops a momentum far beyond the scope of any other Baroque master, Bach only excepted. For anything comparable we must look to the next century and to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, a work sustained by the same complete confidence of a composer in his ability to handle any material, however vast, in terms of controlled energy.”