Dutch Successors to Bach’s Sons

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Joseph Schmitt surrounded by his musical predecessors

With its hustle and bustle of international trade, its trend-setting music publishing industry and its active court and public music life, cosmopolitan eighteenth-century the Netherlands was an effervescent international hub of exciting musical creation and export.

In the middle of the century, composers in the Netherlands maintained close ties with their European colleagues, particularly those working at the highly influential and glittering court at Mannheim, Germany – the birthplace of the symphony and symphony orchestra. Leopold Mozart stated that the radiance of Mannheim “illuminated the whole of Europe.” Equally inspired by the Mannheimers’ visionary symphonic excellence, composers in the Netherlands developed their own charged-up and distinctive symphonic tradition.

The two largest centers of musical practice and endeavor in the Netherlands were the trading city of Amsterdam and the court city of The Hague. Both cities were highly cosmopolitan and internationally orientated by nature.

During the mid-eighteenth century, Dutch Stadholder William IV and his wife Anna van Hannover (also referred to in English as Anne of Orange), daughter of King George II of England, and a favorite student of Handel, took up permanent residence in the city of The Hague. The reigns of William IV and particularly of his son William V (covering the period 1747 to 1795) saw the musical life of the court city flourish. The wife of William V, Princess Wilhelmina of Prussia, was the niece of Frederick the Great and was, appropriately, also actively interested in music and music-making.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, The Hague was a city of forty thousand inhabitants. It featured four opera houses, a court orchestra with regular concert series and international soloists, various formal and informal court chamber music series and events, several other public concert series and musical initiatives, pleasure gardens (with music, opera, theatre, fireworks and other entertainments), the first Dutch open-to-the-public art gallery (instigated by William V), international music publishers and leading instrument makers including Cuypers a.k.a. the “Dutch Stradivarius.”

Alongside witnessing visits from international musical superstars including the Bach student and Mozart mentor, Carl Friedrich Abel, Johann Christian Bach (“The London Bach”), Mannheim symphonist Franz Xavier Richter as well as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Jan Ladislav Dussek and Johann Nepomuk Hummel, The Hague had many heavyweight composer/performers in residence at the court. The composers included the hofkapelmeester Christian Ernst Graaf (1723–1804), the hofkapelconcertmeester Friedrich Schwindl (1737–1786), violin/viola virtuoso Carl Stamitz (1746–1801) and court cellist Francesco Zappa (1717–1803). These were composers who were all widely published and revered.

In Amsterdam, the central musical figure was Joseph Schmitt (1734–1791), also known as “The Dutch Haydn.” Schmitt was an internationally recognized composer as well as being a conductor, theorist, publisher and pedagogue, and belonged to the eighteenth-century jet set of symphonic composers, a circle which included the Bach sons and Abel. Schmitt was also the founding music director of the Netherlands’ first purpose built concert hall, the Felix Meritis, which opened its doors in 1788.

As a composer, Schmitt’s works display a highly individual voice. His musical language combines the eloquence of his teacher Abel, the drive of the Mannheimers and the Sturm und Drang of the older Bach sons. All this can be heard in his particularly rousing Symphony in E flat Major “The Hurdy Gurdy.”

As a publisher, Schmitt was responsible for introducing northern Europe, particularly Scandinavia, to the symphonic works of, among others, Mozart and Haydn for the very first time. From the offices of his publishing house in the Warmoesstraat in Amsterdam, Schmitt had a massive impact on the development of eighteenth-century musical taste and knowledge internationally. He also had a huge effect on the formation of the western musical canon and, in this way, continued in the tradition established by the earlier Dutch music publishers including Roger & Le Cène who were responsible for first introducing the world to such musical classics as Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and Corelli’s Concerti Grossi.

The most influential and far reaching Dutch music publishing house, however, was the firm of the Hummel Brothers started in The Hague in the 1750s. The company quickly expanded, adding offices in Amsterdam and Berlin. The Hummels produced particularly beautifully engraved editions and developed excellent international distribution. As a result, the works of the composers represented in their catalogue became Europe’s musical staple. The music published by the Hummels dominated the concert programs of court and public/private orchestras in mainland Europe, the British Isles, Scandinavia and America. The Hummels’ catalogue appealed to the voracious international audience of the time. The vocal, chamber and symphonic works of Dutch-based composers including Graaf, Schwindl, Stamitz, Schmitt and Zappa were an important part of the Hummels’ list of available works.

While composers working in eighteenth-century the Netherlands were certainly highly influenced by the Mannheimers’ musical style with its incredibly energizing, generating, enlightened, positive future vision, what is defining about the style of the Dutch symphonic school was its own open, international perspective and engagement – its cosmopolitanism. Reflecting the country’s unique political system, trading history and tradition of cultural exchange as well as the strong Dutch sense of independent individualism, the Netherlands’ eighteenth-century musical culture possessed the confidence to both reflect on and absorb from the world. From this it was able to distil and form its own musical blend, creating a wonderful, cosmopolitan musical language. And it is this cosmopolitanism which is the defining and highly appealing stylistic characteristic of the Dutch eighteenth-century symphony.

Simon Murphy – Limelight Magazine

Rewriting Bach, As Bach Rewrote Others

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Gustav Mahler in 1907

When Gustav Mahler arrived in New York in the winter of 1907-8 to take up his post as principal conductor of the Metropolitan Opera, he came as the champion of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra and other immense masterworks, and as the composer of equally monumental symphonies.

It must have seemed somewhat incongruous, therefore, to those attending the New York Philharmonic Society concert of 10 November 1909, to see Mahler, by then the conductor of that orchestra as well, tuck his baton under his arm (as an eyewitness reported), sit down at a harpsichord and lead a performance of orchestral-suite music by Johann Sebastian Bach.

Mahler had assembled the score himself, taking music from Bach’s Orchestral Suites in B minor (BWV 1067) and D Major (BWV 1068), and producing a symphonylike arrangement of four movements. The fact that the new suite began in B minor (with the Overture from BWV 1067) and ended in D Major (with the Gavottes I and II from BWV 1068) might have violated Baroque convention, but it was fully in line with Mahler’s personal enthusiasm for ascending, minor-to-major key schemes, seen, for example, in the Resurrection Symphony of 1895 (which climbs from C minor to E flat Major). Like many other nineteenth and twentieth-century composers, Mahler did not hesitate to put his own stamp on Bach’s music when bringing it to performance.

Mahler’s admiration for Bach was intense and of long standing. According to his wife, Alma, the only scores he allowed in the summer house where he composed were the works of Bach. And in 1901 he confessed to Natalie Bauer-Lechner: ”It can hardly be expressed, what I learn more and more from Bach (admittedly as a child sitting at his feet), for my innate method of writing is Bach-like. If only I had time to immerse myself completely in this highest school!”

To this he added: ”I will dedicate my later days to him, when I am my own man.” In America, freed from the constraints of the Court Opera in Vienna and aware of his own fragile health, Mahler seems to have believed that the moment to express his passion for Bach publicly had arrived.

In making his suite arrangement, Mahler was following a path taken by many other musicians who were equally driven to update or improve Bach’s scores. Indeed, one can trace this path back to the composer’s own family: soon after Bach’s death, his eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann, revamped many of the cantata scores for performances in Halle, adding, for instance, trumpet and timpani parts and a Latin text to two movements the cantata Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott (BWV 80). The brass parts were so attractive that they were printed with the work in the complete Bach Edition of the nineteenth century and are still included in many performances today.

The second-eldest son, Carl Philipp Emanuel, took great pains to preserve and champion his father’s music. Yet in 1786, when he paid homage to the Mass in B minor (BWV 232)  by giving the premiere of the Credo section at a benefit concert in Hamburg, he did not balk at updating the work by adding an instrumental introduction of his own composition and by changing the instrumentation in a number of movements. Around the same time, Mozart arranged preludes and fugues from The Well-Tempered Clavier (BWV 846-93) for string ensemble, for performances at Baron Gottfried van Swieten’s famous ”Bach salons” in Vienna.

In 1802 the early Bach biographer Johann Nikolaus Forkel seems to have sounded the alarm for restraint, noting that the unaccompanied violin Sonatas and Partitas (BWV 1001-6), for example, were so perfect and complete in themselves that ”a second instrument was neither necessary nor possible.”

Mendelssohn and Schumann clearly thought otherwise. Mendelssohn wrote a piano accompaniment for the Chaconne of the Partita in D minor (BWV 1004) for a Leipzig Gewandhaus performance with the violinist Ferdinand David in 1841, and Schumann wrote piano accompaniments for all six of the unaccompanied violin works, and for the unaccompanied cello suites as well. Schumann remarked that Mendelssohn’s piano accompaniment of the D minor Chaconne sounded so fresh and convincing that ”the old, immortal cantor seemed to have a hand in the performance himself.”

Since then, there has been no turning back. Liszt, Brahms, Busoni and Reger rushed in to fashion piano transcriptions of organ and instrumental works. Raff, Elgar, Schoenberg, Holst, Respighi, Webern, Stokowski, Stravinsky and Honegger tried their hands at large-scale orchestrations. Others augmented Bach’s counterpoint with newly composed parts: Moscheles wrote melodic cello lines for Well-Tempered Clavier preludes, Reger added pedal lines to the Fifteen Inventions (BWV 772-86) to produce organ trios, and Gounod placed a soprano melody over the C Major Prelude from The Well-Tempered Clavier to create his kitsch classic Ave Maria, Mélodie Religieuse.

And this is to say nothing of the electronic transformations of Wendy Carlos, the vocal renditions of the Swingle Singers and Bobby McFerrin, or the jazz interpretations of Jacques Loussier and Dave Brubeck. The list of Bach arrangements is lengthy indeed, and in the less dogmatic atmosphere of the post-”original forces” age, it appears to be getting longer. (Witness Ton Koopman’s recent reconstruction of the lost St. Mark Passion [BWV 247].)

What is it about Bach’s music that makes it such prime material for rearrangement? Why don’t we have a host of Mozart transcriptions or Brahms reorchestrations?

Part of the explanation can be found in Baroque musical practices, and in Bach’s compositional methods in particular. During the Baroque there was a strong tradition of musical borrowing, of using existing music as the basis for improvisation or new composition. A contemporary tells us that when Bach sat down at the keyboard, he would ”set his powers of imagination in motion” by playing something by another composer. Handel could scarcely pick up a pen without quoting someone else’s themes. Telemann liked to use the works of others, too.

In his youth, Bach reworked music by the day’s leading composers: Johann Adam Reincken (the Hamburg dean of German organists), Giovanni Legrenzi (the Venetian master of progressive trio sonatas) and Arcangelo Corelli (the Venetian codifier of the Baroque concerto). By fashioning fugues and keyboard transcriptions from their music, Bach acquainted himself with current styles and forms while finding his own artistic voice.

Later, as an established organ virtuoso at the Weimar court, Bach turned once again to keyboard arrangements, transcribing dozens of fashionable instrumental concertos by Vivaldi, Telemann, Benedetto Marcello and others. Here he appears to have competed with his cousin and colleague Johann Gottfried Walther to create keyboard transcriptions that captured the colors and contrasts of the Baroque instrumental ensemble.

When Bach became St. Thomas Cantor and town music director in Leipzig in 1723, he found himself under tremendous pressure to produce new works on a weekly basis, first for Lutheran church services and then for concerts of the university collegium musicum. During the initial years, he composed an extraordinary amount of music.

But he also began to recycle earlier pieces on a vast scale, arranging the music in brilliantly imaginative ways. New texts were inserted for old, outdated scorings were modernized, and instrumental concertos were transformed almost beyond recognition into cantata sinfonias, choruses and arias.

By the 1730’s, reworking old music had become a compositional way of life for Bach. The St. Mark Passion, the Christmas Oratorio (BWV 248) and the second book of The Well-Tempered Clavier (BWV 870-93) appear to have been produced largely through the recycling of existing material. The same is true of the harpsichord concertos, the four short Masses (BWV 233-6) and the Mass in B minor. Bach also arranged music by Palestrina, Caldara, Pergolesi and others, adding new touches and bringing the scores into line with his own style.

For many Baroque composers, revamping existing scores was a practical expediency. For Bach, it became a high art, an opportunity to enhance his own music and that of others, and carry it to a loftier level of perfection. Since absolute perfection could not be achieved by mortal man, the improvement of musical works was a never-ending process.

When Mozart and Brahms completed a piece, they closed the book and moved on to another project. For Bach, composition was a continuing affair, even with seemingly finished works. Hence, the Goldberg Variations (BWV 988) were augmented with a set of Fourteen Canons (BWV 1087), the Canonic Variations on Vom Himmel hoch da komm ich her (BWV 769) were given a new organizational scheme, and The Art of Fugue (BWV 1080) was expanded beyond its original design.

The transcendent values of Bach’s music – its melodic beauty, its contrapuntal strength, its rhythmic vitality, its harmonic profundity – speak across time, in a universal language, to a multitude of composers. But it is the embracing, inspiring open-endedness of his works that seems to move others to roll up their sleeves and try to carry Bach’s efforts farther.

It was in this spirit that Mahler appears to have approached his Bach orchestral-suite arrangement. He preserved the general text of Bach’s score, limiting his changes to the addition of dynamic markings, slurs and tempo gradations. He also shortened the value of detached notes here and there, to ensure uniform articulations.

In forte passages, he reinforced the solo flute with supplementary flutes and a clarinet, to produce a sufficient tutti in Carnegie Hall. (As it happens, Bach once did a similar thing: in the instrumental march of the cantata Vereinigte Zwietracht der wechselnden Saiten (BWV 207), a movement apparently used for a student processional in a large space, he asked that the parts be reinforced by as many as seven players.)

But Mahler also embellished Bach’s music with the addition of two written-out continuo parts, one for harpsichord, the other for organ. In the published score of 1910, he stated that the printed parts should be ”regarded as a sketch, which should bear . . . the characteristics of a free improvisation.” Mahler revived the suite arrangement several times with the Philharmonic, and Alma tells us that he altered the harpsichord accompaniment each time, ”according to his fancy.”

In the published version, we see that Mahler treats the harpsichord not as a steadily chordal instrument, in a Baroque way, but rather as a first-chair instrument that emerges here and there to add special splashes of orchestral color. This imparts a distinctly Mahleresque touch to the score.

Bach’s colleague Johann Mattheson seems to have had such accretions in mind when he advised composers that it was perfectly permissible to borrow someone else’s music, as long as it was returned with interest.

George B. Stauffer – The New York Times

Europa Galante at the Logan Center for the Arts

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battle music, cello, Corelli, Couperin, Europa Galante, Fabio Biondi, Francisco Jose de Castro, harpsichord, Jean-Marie Leclair, John von Rhein, Jose Herrando, La Follia, Latino Music Festival, Lawrence Kirkegaard, lute, Marco Cellini, Michele Mascitti, Parnassus or the Apotheosis of Corelli, Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, therobo, University of Chicago, violin, violoncello, Vivaldi

Much the same resourcefulness and quickness of mind that characterize the Italian period-instrument ensemble Europa Galante’s performances of Baroque music evidently carry over into the way violinist Fabio Biondi’s vibrant group conducts its business affairs.

When Hurricane Sandy forced the cancellation of numerous flights out of New York City earlier this week, including one Biondi and friends were to have taken from LaGuardia to O’Hare to fulfill their concert engagement at the University of Chicago, they snapped into action, renting two cars that enabled them to safely reach their destination, some eight hundred miles away.

The touring contingent of five musicians presented one of the first classical concerts in the Performance Hall of the new Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts on Tuesday evening. This was the first collaboration between the Latino Music Festival and the University of Chicago Presents concert series.

Europa Galante and the physical and acoustical intimacy of the center’s handsome new, 474-seat concert room proved a felicitous match.

So good is the sound, in fact, that the instrumentalists – playing violins, cello, theorbo (lute) and harpsichord – always were warmly yet clearly “present,” even in passages where Biondi, who led the performances from the violin, took dynamics down to a whisper.

With an acoustical design overseen by the Chicago firm Kirkegaard Associates, the hall has adjustable acoustical drapes that make it suitable for everything from speech to music. Its beautiful, wood-paneled interior and comfortable, terraced setting are further advantages. This is a wonderful boon for an area that has lacked a chamber music and recital hall with first-rate acoustics for music: a performance space that sounds as beautiful as it looks. I can’t wait to hear other classical artists, local and visiting, perform here.

Tuesday’s program showed the fluid interchange of musical styles and influences among Italian, Spanish and French musicians active in the Baroque era. The virtuosic violin playing of Biondi was one common denominator. Each half of the concert was anchored by a different set of variations on the familiar Baroque form known as the folia (or follia, as it was known in Italy).

A lesser group performing both Arcangelo Corelli’s sonata La Follia and Antonio Vivaldi’s Trio Sonata in D minor, which is based on the same Baroque greatest hit, might court musical overkill, but not Europa Galante. Biondi’s violin playing was both finely poised and electric in both works: full of energy, but never aggressively so, always elegant of phrasing and refined of tone.

His colleagues in the Corelli – Antonio Fantinuoli, cello; Giangiacomo Pinardi, theorbo; and Paola Poncet, harpsichord – had plenty of opportunities to shine on their own, which they seized on with comparable zestiness. In the Vivaldi, Biondi and violinist Andrea Rognoni engaged in dueling bursts of passage work, yet never did their quick tempos bring a sense of scrambling. One could not fail to appreciate the subtlety and grace of Biondi’s melodic embellishments.

The five players brought further refinements of phrasing and articulation to Francois Couperin’s trio sonata Parnassus, or the Apotheosis of Corelli, a charming homage from one master to another. Typically Biondi would make a sudden swell or fade, giving the line a quick dramatic jolt that always felt in character with the French style.

Much the same rhythmic vitality and lucidly articulated and balanced textures that marked the readings heard earlier also animated works by the more obscure composers Michele Mascitti, an Italian who gained fame at the French court in the early eighteenth century; Francisco Jose de Castro, a Spanish nobleman and musical amateur who worked in Brescia, Italy; and Jose Herrando (1680-1763), the leading Spanish violinist of his day.

Both Mascitti’s violin sonata Psyche and Herrando’s Sonata for violin and basso continuo are delightfully programmatic works, the former depicting the mythic love story of Psyche and Eros, the latter evoking the birds and other natural sounds of the Spanish royal palace gardens at Aranjuez. Biondi and friends tossed off all the chirpy, stormy sound effects with conspicuous panache. The same held true for their account of Castro’s trio sonata Trattenimento, which had the two violins intertwining in flourishes reflecting Corelli’s stylistic influence on the young Spaniard.

The encores consisted of some battle music by one Marco Cellini and Jean-Marie Leclair’s Tambourin.

John von Rhein – Chicago Tribune

Interview with Zachary Carrettin: “Bach, the Passionate”

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Edward McCue (EM) Zachary, how are Rick Erickson and you interpreting this year’s Boulder Bach Festival theme, “Bach, the Passionate?”

Zachary Carrettin (ZC) As a theme, “Bach, the Passionate” manages to embrace both of the largest programs of our new season. The Chamber Concerts this month will feature Italian-influenced concertos and how Bach adapted the passionate Italian style of writing and playing, especially in the case of the violin as a virtuoso instrument. In contrast, “Bach, the Passionate” also celebrates our Festival Week performances of his St. John Passion (BWV 245). In that great work we will hear Bach’s religious fervor relating the story of the Passion of Jesus Christ. These two very different kinds of passion will result in dramatically different listening experiences that both reveal Bach at his very best.

When considering Bach’s concertos, I think that it’s important to understand that he recognized clear distinctions between French tastes and Italian tastes, the two prevailing national styles of instrumental writing of the time, and that the Germans, by and large, were known as being expert at both styles of playing. Major orchestras, such as the one at the Electoral Court in Dresden, featured principal players who had studied with the great masters in Italy and France. At least one contemporary critic claimed that the Dresden orchestra played French music better than the French and Italian music better than the Italians

I think that the degree of difference between the stylistic approaches of the French and Italians can be best understood by examining what a Frenchman wrote after traveling to Venice to hear Vivaldi and his orchestra: “Vivaldi wretched with passion in a disgusting display of indiscipline,” and it was in fact this “disgusting display of indiscipline” that was eventually exported throughout Europe. Today we might characterize this emotional style as being “unabashed Romanticism.”

We use many different terms in our attempt to describe the French and Italian styles during the Baroque period. In an interview that Christopher Hogwood, the music director of the Academy of Ancient Music in London, held with Baroque violinist and historian Jaap Schröder, Schröder demonstrated how a violinist would bow a French minuet as opposed to bowing an Italian minuet.

Schröder noted that, in the French minuet, there are repeated lifts and retakes of the bow. The note is played, and then the bow is lifted in the air, resulting in a mannered performance that emphasizes the strong beat versus the weak beat.

Schröder’s example of playing an Italian minuet leaves the bow on the string and simply bows down-up down-up as it comes. With this sort of bowing, the strong beat often occurs on the up bow stroke, which violates what the French were going for, that is, an emphasis on the strong beat brought about by gravity. By simply playing through the line without lifting the bow, the Italians, especially in the north, adopted a less mannered, more sustained approach to playing that was much like singing.

Thus, to a French musician, it might have seemed that the Italians were not very proficient in the art of bowing, but, to the initiate, it was obvious that the Italians were going for a longer line and a more legato, more fluid, more cantilena approach to bowing.

Now, with this explanation of some aspects of the Italian style, we can begin to consider the details of Vivaldi’s world. An ordained Catholic priest, Vivaldi was a composer of sacred music and a music educator at the orphanage attached to the Church of the Pietà in Venice. A true showman, Vivaldi was fond of flipping around his red curls and really playing in a virtuoso style. Thus, a severely intellectual or refined performance of a Vivaldi concerto cannot accurately portray his ethos.

However, in spite of their cultural differences, Vivaldi’s concertos influenced the Lutheran Bach more than any other concerto composer, more than Handel, more than Corelli, and certainly more than the countless other Italians, such as Albinoni. Bach was greatly influenced by Vivaldi’s concertos even though there is no evidence that Bach ever met Vivaldi or heard him play. Vivaldi’s reputation somehow succeeded in making its way to Bach, as did those aspects of his performance style that demanded that a concerto to be played in a very dramatic and spontaneous manner.

If you look at Vivaldi’s compositions, as compared to Bach’s, Vivaldi’s are indeed more simple, and I’ve encountered a number of theory professors who have disregarded him as a composer, claiming that “he wrote the same concerto five hundred times.” I think, though, that those particular theorists are missing out on the important fact that it’s the performer who brings Vivaldi’s concertos to life. Vivaldi wrote his concertos in such a way that they are quite extraordinary when placed the hands of gifted interpreters. With Vivaldi, we very much have a marriage of the performer and composer. In Vivaldi’s case, the composer invites the performer to say as much in the performance as the composer did in the writing of the piece.

EM So how does understanding Vivaldi change the way that we approach the works of Bach?

ZC Bach was a different composer, a more complete composer than Vivaldi. One can really disrupt the genius of Bach if one adds too much of oneself to Bach. On the other hand, I think that there is still adequate room for a lot of flair and extroversion in Bach’s concerto writing.

You can see that, especially in slow movements, for example, in the Concerto for Violin in A minor (BWV 1041), but also in the Brandenburg Concertos. Think of Brandenburg Concerto no. 5 in B flat Major (BWV 1050), where the violin, flute and harpsichord are featured as solo instruments. The middle movement, entitled affettuoso, is a gorgeous cantabile in a minor key that is totally heart-felt; however Bach assigns fragments of each phrase to each of the three instruments, never allowing a single instrument to play a complete statement. By doing so he almost forces to the musicians be a little bit more reserved and coherent, as opposed to the andante of the Concerto for Violin in A minor. There Bach has fluid, floridly ornamented lines cascading and spanning the entire range of the instrument’s extensive tessitura. This example of Bach’s creative genius is very much like the singing of an aria and, in that respect, is very much like Vivaldi’s writing for the violin.

EM We know that Bach heard an orchestra playing in the French style while he was living in Lüneburg, but did Bach ever come into contact with an entire orchestra of Italians?

ZC I don’t know about the personnel in Bach’s orchestras, yet I doubt that he had many Italian musicians working for him. I do know that Bach was limited in his resources and that not all of Bach’s musicians had mastered their instruments at the highest level. He often had to deal with disparities in technical levels and experience, which is probably why the instrumentation of the cantatas vary so greatly from week to week. When he had the good fortune to meet extraordinary talents, such as when a couple of excellent oboists visited Leipzig, he took the opportunity to feature those forces in the church service on the next available Sunday or feast day.

Antonio Vivaldi

In Vivaldi’s case, however, the composer had a consistent group of accomplished musicians available to him at all times. I think Vivaldi wrote something like thirty-nine bassoon concertos, evidence that he had more than a couple of good violinists readily at his disposal. Vivaldi really had such a strong base of musicians in his conservatory that he was encouraged to write many concertos for two, three and even four solo instruments. In contrast, while in Leipzig, Bach had to write concertos for himself and settle for an orchestra of town musicians and students who were, for the most part, unqualified to perform as soloists in their own right.

EM During Bach’s lifetime, Handel, in London, was deeply immersed in the world of Italian opera. Is that why, when we hear Handel, we know we’re not hearing Bach?

ZC When we hear any of Handel’s solo lines for an instrument, we are struck by the fact that that gorgeous melody could just as well have been sung by a great operatic soprano. That’s not at all the case for Bach. Bach was not an opera composer, and one wonders if Bach’s music could have survived if he had somehow managed to land a position with a major opera company.

I say this because even Bach’s vocal writing is so highly contrapuntal, with multiple, coexisting melodic lines, rather than simply lyrical. Within Bach’s counterpoint, a melodic line, such as a chorale melody, will appear and disappear and reappear while primary and secondary obligato voices weaving a complex texture over a bass line. This style of writing is really distinct from the kind of composition that Handel was undertaking, yet Handel’s writing, while more straightforward, is not simple. While it is every bit as harmonically complex as Bach’s, Handel’s writing is more accessible. Handel’s melodic lines start and finish with the same instrument, while Bach’s melodic lines are constantly shared among the participating instruments.

I remember reading a quotation that great counterpoint is like a great democracy, that each individual line or each individual person willingly sacrifices some freedom for the betterment of the whole organization. I think that that is what is really happening all the time in Bach’s music.

I guess that this is very similar to Mahler’s symphonies. Mahler can be compared to Bach in that Mahler rarely allows a melody to started on one instrument and completed by that same instrument. Working in the late nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, Mahler was fascinated with tone colors and sonorities and would first have part of a melody doubled by the trumpet and clarinet and then replace the clarinet with and oboe and then ask the trumpet to drop out and go with a flute instead. Thus Mahler’s melodies are spun out with multiple timbres one hundred and fifty years after Bach, and that’s what Mahler did differently from Brahms and what Bach did differently from Handel.

EM The upcoming Chamber Concerts also include a work by Corelli. Wasn’t Corelli sort of the old man among this group of composers being featured?

ZC Indeed, Corelli was already quite popular in Rome in 1680, while Bach was not born until 1685. Corelli was the “grandfather of the concerto,” or at least he gets that credit today. Corelli was writing in the concerto grosso genre where there are two dueling forces: the ripieno, which is the tutti or the whole orchestra, and the concertino, which is the soloist or group of soloists.

Often in Corelli you’ll have two violin soloists, a first violin and a second violin, along with a cello soloist. Generally, there will be a four measure phrase that is first played by a soloist and that is then is repeated in imitation by the whole orchestra. As a result, a conversation takes place between the leaders of the sections and the rest of the instrumentalists. While parts of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos are very much reminiscent of this older concerto grosso style, the concertos for solo instruments by Vivaldi or Bach have evolved into something else.

The Concerto for Two Violins in D minor (BWV 1043) that Nurit Pacht and I will be playing is a good example of a greatly evolved concerto grosso. The two solo violins are always playing solo materials even though at least half the time they are joined by the other violins in the section. What I mean by that is that the two violinists can play the double concerto without additional accompaniment because the two solo parts make musical sense on their own. Yet, when you hear the concerto performed live with the orchestra, you realize that the concertino versus ripieno is very much what’s happening, in the outer movements especially, and nowhere more obviously than in the first movement.

EM In conclusion, is there anything else you want to say about what makes Vivaldi Vivaldi and Bach Bach?

ZC While I have strongly experienced Northern Italian culture, as an outsider, as an American, in spite of the fact that people around the globe are becoming more similar as the result of the various forces of globalization, I would have to say that Italians still seem to thrive on a lack of predictability while many Germans really do get along extremely well with a lot of organization. And nowhere better can these cultural distinctions be seen and heard than in Vivaldi’s and Bach’s music. 

Still, while Bach’s counterpoint is highly organized, Bach is never lacking in surprise and in absolute beauty. While Vivaldi is really into shocking the listener, I would never say that he is more passionate or emotional than Bach. Both Bach and Vivaldi strived to accurately document the psychology of his own world and his own time. I think that’s why, after the passage of three hundred years, so many of us are so fascinated with the music and the musicians of the Baroque era.

Interview with Rick Erickson: 32nd Season Kickoff

Tags

Boulder Bach Festival, Brandenburg Concertos, cantata, chorus, concerto, continuo, Corelli, Handel, harpsichord, improvisation, organ, ornamentation, pedal, Sonata in G minor, St. John Passion, viola da gamba, Vivaldi, Zachary Carrettin

Edward McCue (EM) Now that we’re starting a new season, how do you feel about last year’s season and its theme, “Brandenburg and More?”

Rick Erickson (RE) I loved it, and I know that other people did, too. It was so much fun to do the complete Brandenburg Concertos over the season, plus the cantatas and everything else. As an instrumental ensemble and chorus, we all got to know each other, and this season is the direct result of all the great ideas that developed as we walked through last season together.

EM That reminds me of what I’ve always said about moving to a new place. You really have to experience the seasons a second time before you can claim a new city or new ensemble to be your own. So, Rick, I figure that, after this second season with the Boulder Bach Festival, Boulder really will be your place, too.

RE Look, I’m Swedish enough to already be completely positive about the Boulder Bach Festival. It already feels very natural and very good, and I’m so excited about this new season. Just look at what we’re taking on. We’re starting with ambitious Chamber Concerts this fall, and then it’s the St. John Passion (BWV 245) in the spring and Bach Camp! in the summer.

The program for the Chamber Concerts later this month is going to be so much fun for our players and the audience. It’s all about context. It’s all about Bach’s world. That to me is both exciting and gives a clear picture, too, as to who Bach was. To be lining up Bach with Corelli, Vivaldi and Handel and hearing concerti in the context of Bach’s time is really exciting and will be just phenomenal. I think we’re all going to have a ball.

EM You know, what surprises me is how radical, fresh and new Bach’s idea of the keyboard concerto was. He took other composers’ works for other instruments and turned them into keyboard concertos, and, to complement that, you’ve selected to also feature a Handel organ concerto during the upcoming Chamber Concerts.

RE Handel was in England where the organ was not perceived to be a primary contrapuntal instrument, unlike in Germany. It had very little in the way of a pedal division, and yet, in spite of that instrument’s incredible limitations, Handel wrote this elaborate keyboard game with lots of room for piles of ornamentation and expansion on a basic idea. It’s almost as if all keyboardists looked at each other one day and said, “Our time his here. We’re soloists, too.”

It’s pretty amazing just how quickly writing for keyboards evolved during the Baroque period, and already last spring, Zachary Carrettin and I began investigating this when we performed the Sonata in G minor (BWV 1029) at the Gala Benefit. The harpsichord is a full-fledged participant in the language of that sonata and equal to the viola da gamba in every sense. That had to have been really important for continuo keyboardists after years and years of just quietly filling in the harmonies.

But, actually, here’s the really interesting thing.

I’ve been to helping to edit some historical materials on continuo improvisation that suggests to us modern folk that continuo playing during the Baroque period was actually never any neutral kind of “fill in the chord, fill in the harmonic blank and stay out of the way” sort of thing. Instead, these caretakers of the bass line were producers of melody in their own right. The continuo keyboardists weren’t simply sitting there filling up time with pleasant harmonies, but they were freely improvising and highly involved with what was going on. That, of course, is incredibly appealing to me, and it makes perfect sense that, as the concerto form took on broader and broader language, it would be a natural inclination for the keyboardists to take their turn as soloists. I very much resonate with this argument.

But back to the topic of our upcoming season.

I’m so honored to make music with these amazing artists we have in the community, and I’m thrilled that later this month we get to perform the Chamber Concert three times in Longmont, Denver and Boulder. This is absolutely terrific. Think how unified in sound and approach we’ll have become. I think that, after the third concert, we should dash into the recording booth and lay down every bit of this really great program.

I can’t wait. Here we go!

The Lutheran Bach Speaks Italian

Tags

Alps, Bach Biennale Weimar, Brandenburg Concertos, concerto, Corelli, improvisation, Italian Concerto, jam session, Legrenzi, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Vivaldi, Weimar

Computer rendering of Bach’s house in Weimar around 1700

The Bach Biennale Weimar, under the patronage of Nikolaus Harnoncourt, is Germany’s only festival devoted to the performance of Bach’s works, and those of his contemporaties, on period instruments. Because Bach was employed in Weimar, Thuringia on two occasions and some festival events can be performed in the same buildings where Bach worked, the festival is particularly attuned to Bach’s musical language. Each year the festival concentrates on a specific topic by linking programming to cultural and historical contexts, searching for new types of events that can complement the “classical” concert, and providing ample opportunities for improvisation.

With international artists and ensembles performing solo, chamber and orchestral music, a high-profile architecture forum and panel discussion on Bach’s house in Weimar, improvisation and jam sessions, lunchtime concerts, and concerts featuring young artists, this year’s festival, 9-15 July 2012, is entitled “Weimar Anno 1712: The Lutheran Bach Speaks Italian.” It investigates both the spiritual and secular sides of the “Weimar Bach” by focusing attention on traditional Lutheran church music and traveling the same musical journey, through the concertos of Vivaldi, Corelli, and Legrenzi, that brought Italy to Bach in Weimar. With this, the festival shows how these works tinged Bach’s own musical language with an Italian accent and suggests that the Italian Concerto (BWV 971) and the Brandenburg Concertos (BWV 1046-1051) would probably not have been composed if Bach had not experienced music from south of the Alps while living in Weimar.

Interview with Zachary Carrettin: Real Authentic Practice

Tags

acoustics, Baroque bow, Boulder Bach Festival, bowing, Corelli, harmonic series, improvisation, Kenneth Goldsmith, Leopold Mozart, Mozart, performance practice, Rick Erickson, string tone, tenor, vibrato, Zachary Carrettin

Edward McCue (EM) You’ve been complimented on your expressive playing on the Baroque violin. Where did this affinity for period instruments originate?

Zachary Carrettin (ZC) When I was a freshman at the High School for Performing and Visual Arts in Houston, I became a private student of violinist Kenneth Goldsmith. We immediately began working on the Mozart violin concertos, and when I was sixteen, I bought a Baroque bow primarily for work on solo Bach and Corelli trio sonatas. By the time I was seventeen, Mr. Goldsmith had put a Baroque violin with pure gut strings in my hands, and so I began working on the original equipment, as well as original manuscripts, before I entered college. As a Rice University undergraduate, I pursued further studies in Holland and Belgium and began to work professionally on historical instruments, so I would say that period instruments have been integrated into my training as a violinist, not something outside of learning violin technique and violin style.

EM So what do you look for in a historical instrument?

ZC This is a big issue for me as I believe that a historical instrument’s setup should achieve the most honest, pure, beautiful sound that fully expresses the harmonic series. Often times violinists will convert their instruments into what they believe to be an eighteenth century setup, and they lose all of the great qualities of the instrument. Success depends on who is doing the work and what they are using for the model for the work on the instrument.

I do play an instrument with a retrofitted Baroque neck, but it was a careful operation, and the instrument retains an enormous amount of resonance. If the ring had been lost, there would really be nothing authentic about the resulting sound.

EM I often hear musicians discussing specific bowing techniques required to play the Baroque violin in an authentic manner, but isn’t an understanding of style and repertoire at least as important as the equipment and technique?

Francesco Saverio Geminiani (1687-1762)

ZC Certainly, and that repertoire becomes so much more interesting the further that you go into it. Eventually you begin to understand things that are in the music but are not notated on the page. To do this, one needs to look at harpsichord music, and virginal music, and organ music, and lute manuscripts as all of these things inform the practice of playing the violin for seventeenth and eighteenth century repertory.

After working with so many teachers and musicians I now realize that there are many viable technical and stylistic approaches to playing Baroque music. Today’s diversity of approaches really reflects the diversity that existed in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries because, in addition to the national styles of composing and playing in France and Italy, there were regional styles. Even within a given city you might have found a violinist who lived three city blocks away from an equally important violinist, and yet the two of them agreed on nothing.

This kind of diversity of approaches led to a warning from Leopold Mozart that “one should not vibrate on every note” as opposed to Geminiani’s recommendation that “since the shake makes the tone more agreeable, it should be used as often as possible.” Clearly, each heard someone else doing something he didn’t like, so I think that treatises are often reacting against things that a particular musician didn’t favor.

And I have worked with people who favored the lower part of the bow and people who favored the upper part of the bow and some who liked to play open strings as often as possible without using the fingers and others who try to avoid the open strings as often as possible. In fact, there is documentation supporting all of these practices.

This diversity makes it difficult to implement a concept called HIPP: Historically Informed Performance Practice. I think this diversity is reconciled by applying RAP: Real Authentic Practice.

For me there are three concepts to Real Authentic, early eighteenth century, Practice. Those three concepts are: everybody composed, everybody improvised, and everybody played more than one instrument. That pretty much goes without exception. Singers played several instruments. Composers sang and played several instruments, and concertmasters played several instruments, sang, improvised and composed.

My point being is that we should be constantly expanding the tools of expression that we have at our disposal. To this end, the first ten years of playing Baroque string instruments might be devoted to reading documents, playing original instruments and learning a variety of practices, and then the next ten years might be committed to merging all of those ideas by pursuing Real Authentic Practice. My hope for everyone involved in historical performance is that we will eventually embrace all of the equipment and documents as colors on a palette for our expressivity, rather than limiting ourselves to any single approach that we perceive to be “authentic.”

EM How have you integrated singing into your playing?

ZC Your question makes me think back to when I was fifteen or sixteen. My mentor, Ken Goldsmith, gave me a stack of LP records of the great singers of the 1940’s, 50’s and 60’s and said, “You know, if you want to learn how to play the violin, you must listen to the great singers.” Ferruccio Tagliavini is still my favorite tenor, and I think that what Mr. Goldsmith said is true for all of us instrumentalists.

We learn from what’s natural to the voice, and the color, the sonority that a choir achieves, should be our ideal as instrumentalists. We should always be going for that, yet, strangely, many of us forget that along the way. We get caught up with the equipment, with notions of authentic performance practice, with documents, with the different functions of a violin, and a cello and an organ, and often we stray too far away from the true nature of the sound.

Fortunately, Rick Erickson and I agree on so many things. For example, we agree on the inherent vocal nature of bowed instruments and wind instruments, and we want to find what is most natural. We don’t want to limit ourselves with our concepts of what may have been done in a particular choir or orchestra in a particular city in the year 1715, but rather, the more we read, the more ideas we have, the more we compose, the more we improvise, the more we explore, the more we try things on different instruments, the more we can bring to our audiences.

I think that, here in Boulder in the early twenty-first century, our audiences and we are in a particularly fantastic place. We have an enormous number of manuscripts and documents at our disposal. We have recordings, we have traditions of playing early music. We have teachers and musicians and colleagues with whom we can exchange ideas. So we actually have more possibilities than they may have had, say, in Dresden in 1715 or Venice in 1730.

When we combine our own imaginations and our own experiences with playing and hearing this music, the sky is the limit. That’s not say that we can do everything better than they did in Bach’s time. I don’t believe that’s possible, for a number of reasons, but whatever we do, we can do it beautifully, and we can do it in our own way.