The Peninsula Music Festival - Season 2009 Program Notes
Program 4 - Tuesday, August 11, 2009 - From The Old Times
Brandenburg Concerto No. 6 in B-flat major, BWV 1051
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Composed around 1717.
The Bach Brandenburg Concerto #6 was last performed at the Peninsula Music Festival on August 15, 1990 with Laura E. Burton, soloist, and Victor Yampolsky conducting.
Brandenburg, in Bach’s day, was a political and military powerhouse. It had been part of the Holy Roman Empire since the mid-12th century, and its ruler — the Markgraf, or Margrave — was charged with defending and extending the northern imperial border (“mark,” or “marche” in Old English and Old French), in return for which he was allowed to be an Elector of the Emperor. The house of Hohenzollern acquired the margraviate of Brandenburg in 1415, and the family embraced the Reformation a century later with such authority that they came to be regarded as the leaders of German Protestantism; Potsdam was chosen as the site of the electoral court in the 17th century. Extensive territorial acquisitions under Frederick William, the “Great Elector,” before his death in 1688, allowed his son Frederick III to secure the title and the rule of Brandenburg’s northern neighbor, Prussia, with its rich (and nearby) capital city of Berlin; he became King Frederick I of Prussia in 1701. Frederick, a cultured man and a generous patron, founded academies of sciences and arts in Berlin, and built the magnificent palace Charlottenburg for his wife, Sophie Charlotte. When Frederick William I succeeded his father in 1713, however, he turned the court’s focus from music to militarism, and dismissed most of the excellent musicians that his father had assembled; several of them found employment at the court of Anhalt-Cöthen, north of Leipzig. Frederick William did, however, allow his uncle, Christian Ludwig, younger brother of the late King Frederick and possessor of the now-lesser title of Margrave of Brandenburg, to remain at the palace and retain his own musical establishment.
Johann Sebastian Bach met Christian Ludwig, Margrave of Brandenburg, in 1719, during his tenure as music director at the court of Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen, the young prince who had recently signed up some of the musicians fired by Frederick William I. Bach worked at Anhalt-Cöthen from 1717 to 1723, and early in 1719, he was sent by Leopold to Berlin to finalize arrangements for the purchase of a new harpsichord, a large, two-manual model made by Michael Mietke, instrument-builder to the royal court. While in Berlin, Bach played for Christian Ludwig, who was so taken with his music that he asked him to send some of his compositions for his library. Bach lost an infant son a few months later, however, and in 1720, his wife died and he rejected an offer to become organist at the Jacobkirche in Hamburg, so it was more than two years before he fulfilled Brandenburg’s request. By 1721, Leopold had become engaged to marry a woman who looked askance at his huge expenditures for musical entertainment. Bach seems to have realized that when she moved in, he would probably be moved out, so he began casting about for a more secure position. He remembered the interest the Margrave Brandenburg had shown in his music, so he picked six of the finest concertos he had written at Cöthen, and sent them to Christian Ludwig in March 1721 with a flowery dedication in French — but to no avail. No job materialized at Brandenburg, and in 1723, Bach moved to Leipzig’s Thomaskirche, where he remained for the rest of his life. It is possible that the Margrave never heard any of these magnificent works that immortalized his name, since records indicate that his modest Kapelle might not have been able to negotiate their difficulties and instrumental requirements. The Concertos apparently lay untouched in his library until he died thirteen years after Bach had presented them to him, when they were inventoried at a value of four groschen each — only a few cents. Fortunately they were preserved by the noted theorist and pedagogue Johann Philipp Kirnberger, a pupil of Bach, and came eventually into the collection of the Royal Library in Berlin. They were brought to light during the 19th-century Bach revival, published in 1850, and have since come to be recognized as the supreme examples of Baroque instrumental music.
The Sixth Concerto, the final entry in the set Bach collected for Margrave Brandenburg, may have been the first composed. It lacks the clear contrasts between solo and tutti sections that was characteristic of concertos of the late Baroque era, and some evidence suggests that this finished version was based on an even earlier composition Bach wrote before entering Prince Leopold’s service in 1717. Though the violas are the featured members of the ensemble, they are more fully integrated into the texture than are the soloists in the mature concerto grosso, suggesting that the work dates from the developmental period of that genre very early in the 18th century. The sonority of the piece created by the exclusive use of middle- and low-register strings is dark and mellow, recalling the throaty timbres of the Elizabethan consort of viols. No little part of Bach’s genius in this work is the manner in which he sharply defined the individual instrumental lines in what could otherwise have been an almost undifferentiated mass of sound.
The Concerto is in the three movements traditional for the form. The opening Allegro, athletic and dance-like at the same time, brings the violas to the fore with strict canonic writing above the steady accompaniment, and occasional comments, of the lower instruments. The second movement, which omits violas da gamba, is one of Bach’s richest long-limbed, contrapuntally bedecked melodic flights, informed with an intensity of emotion that borders on the operatic. The finale returns the buoyant mood and dancing rhythmic figurations of the opening movement.
Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Cello in A major
Johann Christian Bach (1735-1782)
Composed around 1770.
In the winter of 1782, Leopold Mozart received a letter from his son, Wolfgang, in Vienna: “I suppose you have heard that the London Bach is dead? What a loss to the musical world!” The “London Bach” was Johann Christian, youngest son of Johann Sebastian, and probably the most famous while he lived of any of the members of that venerable family. Johann Christian profoundly influenced the formation of Wolfgang Mozart’s musical style, and the two composers harbored great mutual respect. They first met in 1764 in London, when the eight-year-old Mozart came to entertain the English court; Johann Christian, the Queen’s Music Master, was responsible for scheduling the prodigy’s appearances. The two got along splendidly. One contemporary report noted that Bach seated himself at the keyboard and took the boy upon his knee, with “each in turn playing a bar or so with such precision that no one would have suspected two performers.” To the further delight of the auditors, Johann Christian began improvising a fugue and little Wolfgang completed it. It was the graceful, flowing, galant style of J.C. Bach that served as the foundation for Mozart’s elegant compositional idiom.
Johann Christian was fifteen when his father, Johann Sebastian, died in 1750. He left Leipzig to continue his education with his older brother Carl Philipp Emanuel in Berlin, and moved to Italy in 1754 to study composition with the renowned pedagogue Padre Martini. Christian began writing Latin church music, and by 1757, he had been received into the Roman Catholic faith. (His staunchly Lutheran family might well have dubbed him the “Renegade Bach” for such a heretical action.) His appointment as organist at the Milan Cathedral in 1760 was quickly followed by the composition of his first opera, and it was not long before his church duties were neglected in favor of the more glamorous opera house. Reputation followed success, and in 1762, he accepted an offer to compose operas for the King’s Theatre in London, the city that was to be his home for the rest of his life.
Though his earliest operatic efforts in England met with considerable acclaim (“Every judge of Music perceived the emanations of genius,” reported the indefatigable British chronicler Charles Burney), Bach was soon forced from his position at the King’s Theatre by political intrigues. He turned to instrumental music, and established himself in the royal favor of the German-born Queen Charlotte with such effect that he was appointed Master of the Queen’s Music within two years of his arrival. At that same time he also renewed his friendship with Carl Friedrich Abel, a German composer and performer who had studied with Johann Christian’s father in Leipzig. Together they organized the Bach-Abel Concerts that were to be such an important stimulus in establishing the public instrumental concert. Their first concert was given in February 1764 (only two months before Mozart arrived) and their series of January-to-May weekly programs continued for almost twenty years, with much of the programming devoted to Johann Christian’s instrumental music. The modish currents of British taste began to flow away from Bach in his last years, and he suffered several financial reverses, including his overextended investment in a new hall for the concerts. His health began to decline in 1781, and he died on New Year’s Day 1782, deeply in debt. It is said that only four people attended the funeral. Queen Charlotte, however, remembered her old music master, and she enabled Bach’s wife, an opera singer, to return to her native Italy and live on a royal pension for the rest of her life.
One of the more popular musical genres used to display artists and instruments during Christian Bach’s day was a hybrid form called the “sinfonia concertante,” which combined the richness of sonority and clarity of structure of the symphony with the tunefulness and technical virtuosity of the concerto. Such works, initially popular beginning about 1770 in the great musical centers of Paris and Mannheim, where the best performers congregated, were scored for a group of two or more soloists with orchestral accompaniment. Several dozen examples are known, most by such now-forgotten performer-composers as Bernhard Henrik Crusell, Georg Abraham Schneider and August Ritter, but Haydn and Mozart also contributed to the sinfonia concertante repertory. Haydn wrote his only such work — in B-flat, for oboe, bassoon, violin, cello and orchestra — for his London concerts in 1792. Mozart composed his three specimens of the genre as a result of his visits to Mannheim and Paris between 1777 and 1779: the Concerto for Flute and Harp (K. 299), the Sinfonia Concertante for Oboe, Clarinet, Bassoon, Horn and Strings (K. 297b), and the great Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola (K. 364). Christian Bach left some twenty examples of the sinfonia concertante.
Most of Christian Bach’s instrumental compositions — the symphonies, concertos, overtures, sinfonie concertante and chamber pieces — were created for his own series of concerts, which started life in the “Great Rooms in Spring Gardens, near St. James’s Park” on February 29, 1764. A dozen years later, they were transferred to the new Hanover Square Rooms, which hosted the remarkable public appearances of Joseph Haydn in the 1790s. About the year 1770 (the score was published by Johann Sieber in Paris around 1773), Bach wrote the Sinfonia Concertante in A major for one of his St. James’s programs in the two-movement version of the form then fashionable in Paris. The soloists would have been Wilhelm Cramer, the orchestra’s concertmaster, and Abel, its principal cellist. Both movements exhibit the gracious, carefully considered melodic idiom and galant harmonic style couched in fluid rhythmic motion that is often referred to as “singing allegro,” and which worked such a profound influence on the young Wolfgang Mozart. The opening movement, which follows the Classical sonata-concerto form, is moderate in tempo and elegant in demeanor, while the closing Rondeau, in the manner of a gavotte, is more vivacious.
Concertante for Two Flutes in G major
Domenico Cimarosa (1749-1801)
Composed in 1792.
Domenico Cimarosa was among the most celebrated composers of his day — he held appointments in three of the royal houses of Europe; the French novelist and biographer (of Rossini) Stendhal (1783-1842), who noted Cimarosa’s “glittering array of comic verve, of passion, strength and gaiety,” wanted it inscribed on his tombstone that above all he loved Cimarosa, Mozart and Shakespeare (in that order); Goethe thought highly enough of L’impresario in angustie after hearing it in Rome in 1787 to make a German translation of the libretto for performance in Weimar; and Haydn produced at least twelve of Cimarosa’s operas at Esterháza between 1783 and 1790. Cimarosa was the most popular and highly regarded Italian opera composer until the advent of Rossini during the second decade of the 19th century.
Cimarosa’s output of instrumental music is tiny compared with his vocal works. In addition to the Concertante for Two Flutes, there is just a Harpsichord Concerto, two sextets for strings and winds, a half dozen string quartets and a modest volume of one-movement keyboard sonatas. (In 1942, the Australian-British composer Arthur Benjamin cobbled a pleasant Oboe Concerto from some of the keyboard pieces.) For voices, Cimarosa wrote more than twenty Masses, numerous cantatas and vocal duets, at least six oratorios, and no fewer than 76 (!) operas. His style is pleasingly Classical, comprising all the gestures familiar from the music of Haydn and Mozart without the ineffable brilliance of their works. It is music designed to delight and entertain rather than to move, and this graceful Double Flute Concerto is a fine example not only of Cimarosa’s musical personality, but also of the 18th-century taste (specifically the Viennese taste) that found Mozart’s music too richly emotional and, as Emperor Leopold once scolded, “too full of notes.”
The solo flutes in this Concertante are treated as friendly partners in the enterprise rather than as contentious duelists. Much of the writing is in sweet parallel intervals, with a certain amount of conversational phrase-trading for contrast. The first movement is in the customary sonata-concerto form, with a main theme beginning with a chordal pattern in long notes and a pert complementary melody for flutes in tandem. The development section is rather long without being involved, and leads to the restatement of the themes in the recapitulation. The serenely lyrical Largo breathes the air of the opera stage in its decorative songfulness. Following without pause is the cheerful rondo-finale, based on a lilting, country-dance tune in 6/8 meter, and sporting several openly virtuosic passages for the soloists.
Symphony No. 29 in A major, K. 201 (K. 186a)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Composed in 1774.
Word reached Salzburg in early summer 1773 that Florian Gassmann, court music director in Vienna, had fallen seriously ill. Leopold Mozart thought that his son, Wolfgang, would make a splendid replacement for the ailing Gassmann, and the two went to Vienna in July to carry the suggestion to Empress Maria Theresa. Maria, who had bounced little Wolfgang on her knee when he visited Schönbrunn Palace a decade earlier to play for her, did not find the no-longer-boyish Mozart suitable for the position, however, and the disappointed father and son left Vienna several weeks later. Even if it failed to produce a new job, however, the trip proved to be an important milestone in the musical development of the young composer.
In 1773, Vienna was home to some of the 18th century’s most notable musicians. Hasse, Gluck, Gassmann, Wagenseil, Salieri, Haydn, Dittersdorf, Vanhal and other prominent composers made Vienna the greatest city of music in the world, and Mozart reveled in the expanded expressive possibilities presented by the works of this sterling aggregation during his stay there, especially the recent quartets (Op. 20, with their fugal finales) and symphonies (“Mourning,” “Farewell,” “La Passione”) of Joseph Haydn. Mozart carried with him the excitement of this new music when he returned to Salzburg in late September, and incorporated its innovations into several of his works of the following months, most notably a set of four symphonies, in C major (K. 200), G minor (K. 183), A major (K. 201) and D major (K. 202). December 1773 also saw the composition of his first original piano concerto (K. 175), his four earlier efforts in the genre having been transcriptions of music by various now-forgotten composers.
The Symphony No. 29 shows the manner in which Mozart invested the gallant Italianism of his earlier works with a Germanic seriousness of expression and fullness of texture. “There is here,” wrote Alfred Einstein, “a new feeling for intensifying the symphony through [contrapuntal] imitation, of rescuing it from the domain of the purely decorative through a refinement of detail.” The Symphony’s opening movement demonstrates Einstein’s point. The first melodic gesture is a descending octave leap followed by a few repeated notes, which could easily have been harmonized with a simple “oom-pah” accompaniment as it sequences its way up the scale. Mozart, however, wrapped this violin theme with a breathtakingly beautiful veil of enriched harmonies, exquisitely distributed among the lower strings. The repetition of the theme at full dynamic level draws the upper and lower strings into imitative conversation. The graceful second theme arrives after a moment of silence, and is soon joined by yet another melodic kernel, this one presented quietly in canon by the violins. Rather than an elaboration of previous themes, the compact development section consists of a vigorous running-about on the notes of the scale and a delicate melody whose built-in transposition carries it directly into the recapitulation and the recall of the earlier themes.
The second movement, like the first, is in sonata form, though here the mood is much more elegant and refined, redolent of the sweet rococo spirit that Mozart had learned in London from J.C. Bach a decade before. The Minuet, a movement favored in Viennese symphonies but little appreciated in Salzburg, exhibits sharp dotted rhythms and sudden dynamic contrasts that have an almost Beethovenian vigor. The finale, another sonata-form movement, mixes elements of bounding hunt music, humor (with scales flying off into silence, a trick Mozart pulled again in the late E-flat Symphony), and masterful technique of symphonic development.
©2009 Dr. Richard E. Rodda