Dutch Successors to Bach’s Sons

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Amsterdam, Anna van Hannover, Anne of Orange, Beethoven, Burchard Hummel, Carl Friedrich Abel, Carl Stamitz, Christian Ernst Graaf, concerto grosso, Corelli, Felix Meritis, Four Seasons, Francesco Zappa, Franz Xavier Richter, Frederick the Great, Friedrich Schwindl, George II, Handel, Haydn, Jan Ladislav Dussek, Johann Julius Hummel, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Johannes Cuypers, Joseph Schmitt, Leopold Mozart, Limelight Magazine, Mannheim, Mozart, opera, Simon Murphy, Stradivarius, Sturm und Drang, symphony, Symphony in E flat Major "The Hurdy Gurdy", The Hague, Vivaldi, William IV, William V

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

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Interview with Zachary Carrettin: Real Authentic Practice

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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.

Finding the Perfect Balance

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acoustics, Affekt, Andrea Marcon, balance, Berlin, bowing, cantabile style, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, emotions, Haydn, Konzerthaus, Leopold Mozart, Mahler, Mozart, performance practice, phrasing, Radio Symphony Orchestra Berlin, string tone, vibrato

In 1756, Leopold Mozart observed that “there are performers who tremble consistently on each note as if they had the permanent fever” and suggested that vibrato should be used only on sustained notes and perhaps as an ornament at the ends of phrases. He recommended that “the performer pay attention to the Affekt [i.e., emotion] intended by the composer, so that the most appropriate bowing could be chosen” and that musicians pursue an education broad enough to encompass the study of literature and especially poetry, “for a cantabile style should be the aim of every instrumentalist, and poetry is the key to good musical phrasing.”

The intention to satisfy Leopold Mozart’s ideals was evident during a 9 December 2011 concert with the Radio Symphony Orchestra Berlin when Andrea Marcon led the ensemble in four symphonic works of the eighteenth century, including a cello concerto and symphony by C. P. E. Bach as well as Haydn and W. A. Mozart symphonies. Marcon’s radical reduction in the size of the string sections and emulation of historical string tone, bowing and phrasing, however, were not in themselves sufficient to guarantee this modern-instrument orchestra’s success. He also had to pay great attention to the acoustical characteristics of the performance environment as defined by the architecture of the hall, the instrumentation and physical arrangement of his orchestra, and the size of the audience.

The concert took place in the Konzerthaus on the Gendamenmarkt in Berlin, a new 1,600-seat concert hall inserted into the shell of the Schauspielhaus of 1821 that was severely damaged during the Second World War. Opened in 1984, the classical vocabularly of the original theatre’s architect, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, was interpreted by the designers in such a way that the resulting room acoustical characteristics of “envelopment” and “warmth,” as opposed to “clarity,” were maximized. The initial result was a performance environment that so clearly favored the symphonic repertoire of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that the acousticians were subsequently directed to adjust the hall’s response to a broader spectrum of compositional forms and eras.

The concert opened with Haydn’s Symphony no. 44 in E minor (Hob I:44) of 1771, scored for strings with a bassoon and pairs of oboes and horns. It quickly became apparent that the sound in a seat in the first gallery on the house left side of the orchestra was dominated by direct, rather than reflected, sound from the horns. Furthermore, the overhanging second gallery above was preventing any sound from the upper volume of the room from reaching that listening position. As a result, it was impossible to accurately judge the overall string tone and the relative balance among the sections of the orchestra.

The following Concerto for Violoncello in A Major (Wq 172), composed in 1753 by Bach’s second son, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, dispensed with the winds and called Marcon to the centrally-located harpsichord where he could lead the continuo group in either a standing or sitting position. Xavier Phillips, the cello soloist, was therefore free to indicate the pace for each of the three movements and lead the push and pull of each sequence of musical Affekts. As for the string tone, however, the hall’s reputation for being bass-rich could still not be perceived in the first side gallery, even in the complete absence of horns, so that it became apparent that a better listening position needed to be found.

Looking around at the audience, it became obvious that the concert was far from being sold out, and many seats were available in the rows where the same orchestra, under the direction of Marek Janowski, had been heard performing Mahler’s Symphony no. 3 just two weeks earlier. During that fully-occupied performance onstage and off, and therefore in the presence of an absolute maximum extent of sound-absorbing surfaces, the blend among the various orchestral sections was excellent, as was the balance with the alto soloist and two elevated choirs, but the sound of the orchestral soloists seemed distant and obscured by the rest of the ensemble. Yet, in spite of the huge forces on an extended stage, the sound was never ear-splittingly loud, and the audience was repeatedly immersed in the amassed sound of the full orchestra.

Because the overall listening experience in a main floor seat during the Romantic concert had been so superior to what was being experienced in the side gallery, I vowed to return to the main floor for the second half of this Classical concert. Luckily, I was able to occupy the same seat as for the Mahler during the intermission, and, as expected, the sonic impression of the second half of the concert, unencumbered by any gallery overhang, was completely different from the first.

C. P. E. Bach’s Symphony in D Major (Wq 183/1), composed in 1776, had, with the addition of two flutes, the same instrumentation as the Haydn symphony that opened the concert, but now, with a varied diet of sound energy traveling to my ears from the ceiling, sides and rear of the concert hall, the balance among sections was greatly improved, the string tone was full and warm, and the wind solos began to shine. Marcon and his orchestra conveyed an almost joyful sense of play as they passed themes from section to section. Interesting timbres resulting from surprising pairings and quick dynamic changes could now be appreciated as well.

Near perfection was ultimately achieved during Mozart’s Symphony in D Major (KV 385) of 1783. With the addition of a few more stands of strings and pairs of bassoons, trumpets and timpani, but in the presence of less absorption, due to the less than capacity audience, father Leopold’s cantabile style was achieved by all, and the hall’s reputation for envelopment was readily fulfilled whenever a moderate loudness threshold was achieved. The tutti tone was full, the basses were warm, and the wind solos projected with ease. Andrea Marcon had struck a balance among the orchestra’s and audience’s familiarity with the work being presented, the room acoustic’s ability to respond to both the performers’ and audience’s needs, and his personal insistence on performance styles that were true to the emotions of each composer.