March 17, 2014.  Bach.  Johann Sebastian Bach was born on March 21th, 1685 (but see the note below) in Eisenach, a small town in what is now the central German state of Thuringia, but back then – the ducal seat of the house of Saxe-Eisenach.  After working in Weimar for nine years and then serving at the court of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen for the following six (1717 through 1723), Bach received several prestigious positions in Leipzig.  He was appointed the cantor of the Tomasschule, the school of the St. Thomas church, where he was to serve as the choir director.  He was also made the music director of two other important churches in the city, St. Nicholas church (Nikolaikirche) and Paulinerkirche, the University church.  His responsibilities included teaching music to the students at the school (the choirs of the main churches in Leipzig were formed from the best students of Tomasschule) and composing music for the three main churches.  His most important assignment was to provide music for Sunday services.  Every Sunday he was supposed to conduct a cantata, and he composed most of them himself.  Additional cantatas were composed for holidays.  Fortunately, during the Advent and Lent music was not performed, which gave Bach a respite.  Cantatas were collected in annual cycles; in Bach’s obituary five such cycles are mentioned, of these three still exist and two were lost.  While in Leipzig, Bach wrote more than 300 cantatas, of which more than 200 survive. 

 Despite this astonishing workload, he found time early in 1724 to create one of his major masterpieces, a sacred oratorio The St. John Passion.  The Passion was composed for the Good Friday evening service.  The basis of the text comes from the two chapters, 18 and 19, of the Gospel According to St. John, in Martin Luther’s translation.  It was set in two parts.  Part I starts with the Betrayal and Capture of Jesus, following with Peter’s Denial.  Part II continues with Interrogation and Flagellation, then Condemnation and Crucifixion, followed by The Death of Jesus, and, finally, The Burial.  The Evangelist, sung by a tenor, directly follows the words of the Gospel, narrating the text in recitative.  The texts of the chorals come from the 16^th and 17^th century German hymnals.  The Passion is also interspersed with arias for an alto (sometimes sung by a countertenor), a tenor, a soprano, and a bass.  These voices represent the characters of the Gospel, such as Jesus himself, Apostle Peter, Pilate, and minor characters.  They also sing for the people of Israel and the congregation.

Bach intended the Passion to be performed in the Thomaskirche, but at the last moment it was moved to St. Nicolas church.  The harpsichord had to be repaired and additional room created for the choir, but that was done in time.  The council sent out the flyers announcing the change of venue.  Bach’s original orchestration was intimate: strings, basso continuo, flutes, oboes, and probably lute, viola d’amore and viola da gamba.  In the 20^th century a “romantic” tradition developed, with a much larger orchestra and richer sound.  Lately, though, the process has reversed to something more resembling Bach’s original intentions.  We’ll hear one such interpretation: Part I of The St. John Passion is performed by Concentus Musicus Wien, one of the earlier period-instrument ensembles, with the Arnold Schoenberg Choir, Nikolaus Harnoncourt conducting.  It runs about 35 minutes.

A note on the dates: in 1685, when Bach was born, all German principalities were still using the Julian calendar, even though Italy and some other Catholic countries had converted to the new calendar, following the bull of Pope Gregory, in 1582 (therefore called Gregorian).  German states didn’t adopt the modern calendar till 1700.  By the time Bach was born, the difference between the Julian and Gregorian calendars (old and new styles) amounted to 10 days.  That’s why some sources put Bach’s birthday on March 31, 1685.

March 10, 2014.  Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and many others.  We just cannot catch up!  Last week we celebrated the birthday of Antonio Vivaldi but missed on Maurice Ravel, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and Samuel Barber.  And three more interesting composers were born this week: Arthur Honegger, Hugo Wolf, and Georg Philipp Telemann.  All these composers are just too good to be missed, and we’d like to note at least some of them, however briefly.  Maurice Ravel remains as popular as ever.  In our library we have several dozens of his compositions, but not Valses nobles et sentimentales, so we decided to remedy this ommission.  Ravel composed Valses in 1911 as an homage to Schubert’s 1823 Valses nobles and Valses sentimentales.  The original version was written for the piano; one year later Ravel orchestrated it, as he often did with his piano pieces.  Here is the original, performed by Alicia de Larrocha.

It’s not just any anniversary of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, it’s his 300^th: he was born on March 8^th of 1714.  Emanuel lived and worked during an “interregnum,” a period when Baroque music went out of vogue but any composer of genius in the new “classical” style was yet to emerge.  Emanuel’s older brother, Wilhelm Friedemann, was active, and so were composers of the Mannheim school.  And of course Christoph Willibald Gluck was writing operas in Paris.  Still, the world had yet to wait for Haydn and Mozart to create real masterpieces.  In the mean time, Emanuel became one of the most influential composers of the transitional period (he would be highly praised by Mozart and Beethoven).  Emanuel was the fifth child of Johann Sebastian Bach and his first wife, Maria Barbara, but only the second to survive childhood.  Georg Philipp Telemann was his godfather (thus the Philipp in his name).  Emanuel was born in Weimar, but in 1723 the Bach family moved to Leipzig, were Johann Sebastian became the cantor at the famous St. Thomas church and school.  That’s were Emanuel went to study (as did his elder brother, Friedemann).  Later he attended the University of Leipzig, studying law.  In 1738 he moved to Berlin were he obtained a position at the court of Crown Prince Frederick, the future king of Prussia, Frederick the Great.  Emanuel stayed in his employ for thirty years.  While in Berlin, he composed a large number of keyboard sonatas, several symphonies and other music.  Berlin under Frederick became a center of arts and philosophy, and Emanuel acquired many friends, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock and Moses Mendelssohn among them.  Here’s a keyboard sonata in A Major, W55, no. 4.  It was composed at the end of Emanuel’s stay in Berlin, in 1765.  It’s easy to hear how this sonata could’ve influenced Haydn.  The pianist is Marc-André Hamelin (recorded in concert, with some small mishaps in the otherwise impeccable and brilliant performance, quite unusual for the virtuoso Hamelin).

As long as we’re celebrating Emanuel Bach, we should also mark the birthday of his godfather, Georg Philipp Telemann, who was born on March 14^th 1681.  Telemann, a good friend of Johann Sebastian Bach and an acquaintance of George Frideric Handel, was four years older than both and at some point more famous.  That would change drastically in the early 19th century when public opinion turned against Telemann, being inferior to Bach.  That may be the case, but the change created some amusing misconceptions.  For example, two major biographers of Bach, Philipp Spitta and Albert Schweitzer, would favorably compare a Bach cantata to those of Telemann, except that now we know that the “Bach” cantata was actually written by Telemann.  Here’s a good example: the first two parts of Telemann’s Cantata Das ist je gewisslich wahr.  For a long time it was attributed to Bach as his Cantata BWV 141.  It is performed by the ensemble I Febiarmonici, Wolfgang Helbich conducting.

March 3, 2014.  Chopin, Smetana, Vivaldi.  Just like last week, we’re running a bit late.  We missed the birthday of Frédéric Chopin, who was born on March 1, 1810 (although that’s not definite – he may have been born on February 22nd of that year) and Bedřich Smetana, born March 2^nd of 1824.  Chopin was born in Żelazowa Wola, a small village about 20 miles west of Warsaw.  He started composing at the age of 15 (his opus 1 was a piano Rondo in C minor).  Two years later he wrote Variations on "Là ci darem la mano" from Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni  (op. 2), the first and one of the very few pieces for piano and orchestra.  Robert Schumann heard it in Leipzig four years later, and declared Chopin a genius.  Chopin lived in Poland till September of 1831, when he left for Paris, as so many of his compatriots did after Russia repressed the Polish uprising of 1830-31.   He hoped to return to Poland once the regime there had changed, but it never happened: Chopin was to live in France for the rest of his short life.  In Paris he stayed close to the Polish émigré society (his French was never very good).  Very soon he became famous both as a pianist and composer, met all the celebrities of the day and acquired a large number of well-paying students.  One of the first compositions Chopin wrote in Paris was his opus 17 consisting of Four Mazurkas.  Mazurka is a simple Polish folk dance, which in time was accepted on a ballroom floor, and Chopin’s exquisite piano pieces are just reminiscences of the originals.  Here they are, performed by the great Arthur Rubinstein, no. 1, no. 2, no. 3, and probably the most popular in the set, no. 4.  Rubinstein recorded these Mazurkas three times, in the 1930, 1950s and in 1965-66.  These are the latest recordings.

Bedřich Smetana, the first truly great Czech composer, was born in Litomyšl, a beautiful town of Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque buildings.  By 1854-55 he was living in Prague and composing mostly for the piano.  Then a series of personal tragedies befell him: in July of 1854 his second daughter died of tuberculosis.  A year later his eldest daughter died of scarlet fever.  Around that time he fourth daughter was born but she also died when she was just one year old.  To make things worse, around the same time his wife was diagnosed with tuberculosis, of which she would die three years later.  During that terrible period Smetana composed just a few pieces, one of them – a beautiful Piano Trio in G minor.  He considered it a tribute to his eldest daughter Bedřiška.  Here it is, performed by Carlota Amado, piano, Iason Keramidis, violin, and Vasily Bystroff, cello.

Antonio Vivaldi was born in Venice on March 4th, 1678.  One of the most influential pieces in Vivaldi’s output was his L'Estro Armonico, op. 3, a collection of 12 concertos for one, two or four violins.  The designation of "opus 3" is somewhat misleading: L'Estro Armonico was composed in 1711, and by then Vivaldi had composed dozens of concertos.  L'Estro Armonico became very popular all over Europe, so much so that Johann Sebastian Bach reworked no less than six of these concertos: he arranged nos. 3, 9, and 12 for solo keyboard, 8 and 11 were turned into the organ concertos, and concerto number 10, originally for four violins was made into a concerto for four harpsichords, BWV 1065.  Here is Vivladi’s original concerto, L'Estro Armonico, Op. 3, no. 10 in B minor for four violins, cello and strings.  It is performed by the violinist Viktoria Mullova with the ensemble Il Giardino Armonico, Giovanni Antonini conducting.

February 24, 2014.  Handel and Rossini.   George Frideric Handel‘s birthday was yesterday (he was born on February 23rd, 1685).  Since last week we wrote mostly about Corelli, we’ll mark Handel’s birthday a day late.  There is a connection between Handel and Corelli.  After spending his childhood in Halle, at the age of 21 Handel moved to Italy.  There he was feted by the same patrons who some years earlier supported Corelli: cardinals Ottoboni and Pamphilii.   And then of course there was a famous encounter years later in London.  Corelli was known to have a quirk: he refused to play any note higher than high D on the E string.  He felt that that was as high as music should go.  None of his violin pieces, and there are a few, have any notes higher than D.  Everybody knew this, including Handel.  During one concert Corelli was supposed to play on sight a violin sonata by Handel.  Just to spite his competitor, Handel inserted a high E in the score.  Corelli played the sonata beautifully up to that point, saw the note, stopped and walked off the stage.  A rather sad story of a rigid old master and an unkind, if supremely talented, challenger.

Handel is rightly famous for his operas, oratorios, and organ concertos and concerti grossi.  He also wrote a number of keyboard suites.  The keyboard suite no. 7 in G minor, in six parts, was composed around 1720.  Handel had just recently founded an opera company, Royal Academy of Music; it was funded by a group of English aristocrats, and Handel assumed the position of Master of the Orchestra.  He would write several masterpieces for the opera company, for example, Giulio Cesare and Ottone.  Extremely productive, he also found time to write this grand keyboard piece (here).  The pianist is the 24-year-old Andrei Gavrilov.  In 1979 he accompanied Sviatoslav Richter to Tours, France, where Richter had established a music festival.  There each of them performed several of Handel’s keyboard suites, turning score pages while the other played (just to remind you: Gavrilov had won the Tchaikovsky Competition five years earlier but was otherwise relatively unknown.  Richter, world-famous, was 40 years his senior).

Gioachino Rossini was also born this week, on February 29^th, 1792 in Pesaro.  His mother was a singer and his father – a horn player (Rossini himself would eventually learn to play the horn).  When he was eight, he was brought to Bologna where he received his initial musical education.  He later went to the Conservatory of Bologna to study cello.  There he fell in love with the music of Mozart.  He wrote his first opera, La cambiale di matrimonio (The Marriage Contract) at the age of 18.  His most famous opera, Il barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville), was written in 1816 when Rossini was only 24.  Later in his life Rossini claimed that he wrote Il Barbiere in 12 days.  The researchers think that it actually took him two or three weeks, still an astonishing feat.  The first performance took place in the Teatro Argentina in Rome and was not successful: fans of  Giovanni Paisiello's opera on the same subject practically sabotaged the premier.  The second performance was successful, and the opera has never left the world stage since then.  Right now, for example, it is being performed at the Lyric Opera in Chicago, with the young American baritone Nathan Gunn as Figaro.  Probably the most famous aria of the opera, which is filled with tunes that have became familiar to millions, is the very first one, sung as Figaro enters the stage.  Called Largo al Factotum (Make way to the factotum, a servant responsible for many tasks), it is not only technically difficult, but is being performed while the singer’s voice is not completely warmed up.  Here’s the great Tito Gobbi in a 1957 recording.

February 17, 2014.  Corelli.  Arcangelo Corelli was born on this day, February 17^th, in 1653 in a small town of Fusignano, not far from Ravenna.  We’ve written about Corelli a number of times, for example here and here.  Corelli might not have been a towering figure in the history of music, but judging by the number of students he had, who became major composers, by the influence he exerted, and the number of references to him by composers of following generations, from Rameau to Rachmaninov, he occupied a very important place in the history of music of the 17^th century.  By the time Corelli was born, the Baroque style had been in development for about 50 years.  Claudio Monteverdi, born in 1567, was one of the first composers to transition from the Renaissance to the Baroque (his early madrigals, like this Lamento d'Arianna in the performance by Concerto Italiano, exquisite as they are and fresh of new ideas, are still looking back to the older era, whereas his opera L'incoronazione di Poppea is clearly a baroque composition).  Girolamo Frescobaldi and German Heinrich Schütz, both followed a similar path.  On the other hand, Jean-Baptiste Lully, 20 years older than Corelli, was already a pure Baroque composer.  Our knowledge of Corelli’s childhood is rather vague.  He probably studied music in Faenza.  In 1666 he went to Bologna where he studied the violin and composition.  By 1675 he was already in Rome, known as “Arcangelo Bolognese” and one of the leading violinists in town.  He found several patrons, among them Cardinal Benedetto Pamphili, Queen Christina of Sweden and, in particular, Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni.  (All three were extraordinary figures and patrons of art.  Benedetto Pamphili, for example, a scion of the Pamphili family, whose forbearers included the Pope Innocent X and several cardinals, built the famous Galleria Doria Pamphilj, wrote libretti for Alessandro Scarlatti’s operas, and extended patronage to many composer, including George Frideric Handel.  Cardinal Ottoboni, a nephew of a pope, who resided in the enormous Renaissance Palazzo della Cancelleria, just off Campo de' Fiori, supported not only Corelli, but also the abovementioned Scarlatti and, later, Antonio Vivaldi.  And, just like Benedetto Pamphili, he wrote libretti.  Art wasn’t his only pleasure: according to Montesquieu, Ottoboni had numerous mistresses, whose portraits in the guise of saints graced the walls of his rooms, and with whom he had more than 60 children).

During his lifetime, Corelli was probably more famous as a violinist and teacher than composer (many of his students became famous violinists with their own pupils; modern violinists still like to trace their roots to him).  These days he’s noted as composer, mostly for his Trio Sonatas and Concerti Grossi.  Corelli didn’t invent Concerto Grosso, in which a group of soloists (“concertino”) are juxtaposed with the rest of the orchestra (“tutti”), but he certainly developed it much further and wrote some great music in this genre.  His Op. 6 consists of twelve Concerti Grossi, the first eight designated as Concerti da chiesa (Church concertos, sometimes called Church sonatas) and the last four as Concerti da camera (or Chamber concertos).   We’ll hear Concerto Grosso no. 4 op. 6 in a very energetic performance by Fabio Biondi’s ensemble Europa Galante.

Luigi Boccherini was also born this week, on February 19^th, 1743.  Here’s his String Quintet in C major, Op. 25, no. 4.  A virtuoso cellist, Boccherini wrote his quintets for two cellos and one viola, instead of the customary instrumentation with one cello and two violas.  The performance is also by Europa Galante.  George Frideric Handel’s birthday falls on Sunday February 23.  We’ll write about him next week.

February 10, 2014.  Tomás Luis de Victoria.  Only minor composers were born this week.  Fernando Sor, the Spanish guitarist and composer, was christened on February 14, 1778 (and probably born a day earlier) in Barcelona.  Here is one of his best-known compositions, Variations on a Theme by Mozart, performed by the guitarist Rafael Serrallet.  Alexander Dargomyzhsky, born on February 14, 1813, was a Russian composer mostly known for his operas Rusalka (The Mermaid) and The Stone Guest, both based on Alexander Pushkin’s works: the former – on an incomplete poem, and the latter – on a “little tragedy” in blank verse.  Dargomyzhsky was an important link between Glinka and the “Mighty Five.”

We’ll turn instead to a composer of genius, the Spaniard Tomás Luis de Victoria.  He was born around 1548 in a small town of Sanchidrián, not far from the walled city of Ávila.  When Victoria was 10, he was sent to the Cathedral of Avila.  There, he was a chorister, but also learned to play the organ.  In 1567 he was accepted at Gollegium Germanicum, a Jesuit seminary in Rome (Ignatius Loyola was one of the founders).  The seminary was created for the German-speaking students, but also accepted young men from other countries.  It is quite possible that around that time Victoria took music lessons from Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, the most famous composer of the time.  Victoria also became an organist at the Spanish church in Rome, Santa Maria de Monserrat.  In 1571 he succeeded Palestrina as the chapel master of the Pontifical Roman Seminary (Palestrina received the prestigious position at the St-Peter Cathedral).   The following year in 1572, Victoria published his first book of motets.  Three years later he was made the choir master of his alma mater, Collegium Germanicum, which by then had moved to the magnificent Palazzo di Sant’Apollinare.  In this position he not only taught music and managed the choir at the college, but also supervised all music-making in the church of St. Apollinare, which was adjacent to the college and were the choir performed during services.   Victoria raised the choir to such a level that people from all over Rome flocked to the St. Apollinare to listen to it.  In 1575 Victoria, a deeply religious man, was ordained a priest.  He retired from Collegium Germanicum in 1578, and for the following seven years worked as a chaplain in one of the churches of Rome, actively composing.  Several anthologies of his works were published in Rome during these years and his fame as a composer spread across Italy.

In 1587 Victoria returned to Spain after King Philip II granted him a position of chaplain to his sister, Empress Maria.  Maria, daughter of Emperor Charles V, who had served as regent of Spain during the absence of Philip II, by then retired to the Monastery of Las Descalzas Reales in Madrid.  Victoria served to Empress Maria for the following 17 years, until her death in 1603.  He only took one break, in 1593, when he went back to Rome and stayed there for two years.  In 1594, while in Rome, he attended the funeral of Palestrina.  Upon Empress Maria’s death Victoria wrote a Requiem Mass, one of his finest compositions.  Here is the motet Versa est in luctum (My harp is turned to mourning) from the Mass.  It’s performed by the Westminster Cathedral Choir, David Hill conducting.   After the Empress’s death Victoria stayed in Las Descalzas Reales as a mere organist, even though his fame had spread all over Spain and several important cathedrals, Seville’s among them, wanted to hire him.  He continued composing and published several more books of music.  Tomás Luis de Victoria died in the convent of Las Descalzas Reales on August 20^th of 1611.  Here is another famous composition by Victoria, motet O magnum mysteriumfrom the eponymous mass.  It’s performed by the Oxford Camerata, Jeremy Summerly conducting.