This Week in Classical Music: September 11, 2023.Transitions. For the last four weeks, we were preoccupied with two Florentine composers, Emilio de' Cavalieri and Jacopo Peri.In a way, this is unusual, as neither of them was what we would call “great,” as were, for example, Tomás Luis de Victoria, just two years older than Cavalieri, or Giovanni Gabrieli, born sometime between Cavalieri and Peri.But somehow the Florentines became instrumental in furthering one of the great shifts in classical music, from polyphony to monody of the early Baroque.This is a fascinating topic in itself: How could the relatively simplistic works of Cavalieri and Peri replace the grand and sophisticated music of the High Renaissance?How could such stunning works as Victoria’s Funeral Mass or Gabrieli’s In Ecclesiis fall out of favor while the first rather clumsy attempts at opera became all the rage?As far as we can tell, Baroque music, as interesting as it was in its early phases, didn’t reach the level of Palestrina or Orlando di Lasso till the late 17th century and into the 18th, when Handel and Bach composed their masterpieces.This introduces another great example: Johann Sebastian Bach, who, in his later years, was considered old-fashioned, past his time; his great Mass in B minor was completed in 1749, a year before his death, when the music of his son, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, was much more popular.The first public performance of the Mass had to wait for more than 100 years (the history of St. Matthew Passion was similar).In the meantime, composers of the Mannheim school, nearly forgotten now, were working at the court with the best orchestra in Europe and developing, unknowingly, the style that would bring us, several decades later, the symphonies of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.The “not-so-greats” leading the way, leaving the greats behind but paving the way for a new generation of supreme talents…
Yet again we don’t have the time to properly acknowledge the composers born this week (among them are Arnold Schoenberg and Girolamo Frescobaldi, and also Arvo Pärt, Clara Schumann and William Boyce, who, like Beethoven, went deaf but continued, for a while, to compose and play the organ).We wanted to go back a month and commemorate some of the composers born during that time: too many to mention, but two of them, Henry Purcell and Antonin Dvorak, were born last week.And of course, we’ve missed a lot of performers and conductors, among whom were the pianists Aldo Ciccolini and Maria Yudina, Ginette Neveu (violin) and William Primrose (viola), the singers Kathleen Battle and Angela Gheorghiu, and conductors Wolfgang Sawallisch and Karl Böhm.Till next time, then.
From Renaissance to Baroque. 2023
This Week in Classical Music: September 11, 2023. Transitions. For the last four weeks, we were preoccupied with two Florentine composers, Emilio de' Cavalieri and Jacopo Peri. In a
way, this is unusual, as neither of them was what we would call “great,” as were, for example, Tomás Luis de Victoria, just two years older than Cavalieri, or Giovanni Gabrieli, born sometime between Cavalieri and Peri. But somehow the Florentines became instrumental in furthering one of the great shifts in classical music, from polyphony to monody of the early Baroque. This is a fascinating topic in itself: How could the relatively simplistic works of Cavalieri and Peri replace the grand and sophisticated music of the High Renaissance? How could such stunning works as Victoria’s Funeral Mass or Gabrieli’s In Ecclesiis fall out of favor while the first rather clumsy attempts at opera became all the rage? As far as we can tell, Baroque music, as interesting as it was in its early phases, didn’t reach the level of Palestrina or Orlando di Lasso till the late 17th century and into the 18th, when Handel and Bach composed their masterpieces. This introduces another great example: Johann Sebastian Bach, who, in his later years, was considered old-fashioned, past his time; his great Mass in B minor was completed in 1749, a year before his death, when the music of his son, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, was much more popular. The first public performance of the Mass had to wait for more than 100 years (the history of St. Matthew Passion was similar). In the meantime, composers of the Mannheim school, nearly forgotten now, were working at the court with the best orchestra in Europe and developing, unknowingly, the style that would bring us, several decades later, the symphonies of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. The “not-so-greats” leading the way, leaving the greats behind but paving the way for a new generation of supreme talents…
Yet again we don’t have the time to properly acknowledge the composers born this week (among them are Arnold Schoenberg and Girolamo Frescobaldi, and also Arvo Pärt, Clara Schumann and William Boyce, who, like Beethoven, went deaf but continued, for a while, to compose and play the organ). We wanted to go back a month and commemorate some of the composers born during that time: too many to mention, but two of them, Henry Purcell and Antonin Dvorak, were born last week. And of course, we’ve missed a lot of performers and conductors, among whom were the pianists Aldo Ciccolini and Maria Yudina, Ginette Neveu (violin) and William Primrose (viola), the singers Kathleen Battle and Angela Gheorghiu, and conductors Wolfgang Sawallisch and Karl Böhm. Till next time, then.