Interview March 2021: 10 Questions with Daniel Bernhardsson
Daniel Bernhardsson: Official Site
Daniel Bernhardsson Site: The Wranitzky Project Official Site
Daniel Bernhardsson: Daniel Bernhardsson (Facebook)
Daniel Bernhardsson: Daniel Bernhardsson (Twitter)
Daniel Bernhardsson: The Wranitzky Project (Facebook)
Daniel Bernhardsson: CDs
Daniel Bernhardsson: CD 1: P. Wranitzky – Orchestral Works No. 1
Daniel Bernhardsson: CD 2: Kozeluch – Joseph Der Menschheit Segen
Daniel Bernhardsson: CD 3: Kozeluch – Symphony No. 3
1. (a) This year 2021 will see a new Series of brand new CD productions available with music by an important contemporary composer of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven: Paul Wranitzky. Can you present these new recordings to our readers?
(b) You founded The Wranitzky Project and its Web Site in 2006, can you tell us about the origin of your project and about the various major achievements of your project during these years?
(c) Your project is collecting original scores and sources by and about Paul Wranitzky and his life: at which point is your work of research, collection and cataloguing?
With pleasure! 2021 seems to become quite a year for the lovers of Wranitzky’s music, with several CD releases in the works.
Naxos is releasing the first volume of a new series of CDs dedicated to Paul Wranitzky. It is part of the Czech Masters in Vienna project:
https://www.arcodiva.cz/en/czech-masters-in-vienna/
The CDs will feature world premiere recordings and I have helped with the selection and editing of the scores.
In conjunction with the CD release, we will release the scores for free download on www.wranitzky.com.
The first CD:
https://www.naxos.com/catalogue/item.asp?item_code=8.574227
that is to be released in April 2021, will feature two symphonies as well as opera overtures.
UPDATE 2023:
In April 2023 Five Volumes and 1 Volume of Oboe Works (from this Series) are now available from Naxos Records:
P. Wranitzky: Orchestral Works No. 2
P. Wranitzky: Orchestral Works No. 3
P. Wranitzky: Orchestral Works No. 4
P. Wranitzky: Orchestral Works No. 5
Wranitzky was the leading symphonist in Vienna at the turn of the 18th century, yet only a fraction of his works is available on record today. The symphonic genre seems to have held special interest for him as he kept writing symphonies throughout his compositional career.
The Symphony in B-flat op 33 no 1 is a mature work full with interesting ideas and masterful orchestral writing. As a renowned orchestral leader, it is no surprise that Wranitzky knows his forces well and his scoring is varied and colorful.
The Symphony in C major op 19, was written for the coronation of Franz II as Emperor in 1792 and is suitably celebratory. Wranitzky would go on to become a favourite composer of Franz II’s second wife, Marie Therese. He composed a great deal of music for her musical soirees, as well as providing music for the namesday and birthday celebrations of the Emperor and other court functions. Thankfully, most of this music has survived in the so called Kaisersammlung in Vienna.
Opening and closing the CD are ouvertures from two operas – Die Poststation and Das Fest der Lazzaroni.
Several more volumes in the series are currently under preparation for Naxos, so keep watching!
The Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin recorded a CD with symphonies by Wranitzky in January and the CD release is planned for this fall. Last year they performed Wranitzky’s op 31 symphony (La Paix) in concert and were much impressed by the music:
https://akamus.de/de/aktuelles/die-andere-wiener-klassik-akamus-spielt-paul-wranitzky
I was contacted by them before Christmas and helped providing scores and parts for the recording. The CD will, in addition to the aforementioned Sympony in C minor op 31, feature the ouverture to Wranitzky’s opera Oberon, the Symphony in D minor (La Tempesta) and the Symphony in D op 36. Much of the music recorded for the CD was broadcast by German radio in February and can be listened to at: https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/akademie-fuer-alte-musik-berlin-mozarts-freund-und.1091.de.html?dram:article_id=492685
– if visible click Beitrag hören to open the player. However, it seems this may only be available just to a few European listeners.
Other links to Akamus work:
Akamus at StartNext
Akamus at Deutschlandfunkkultur
Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin: P. Wranitzky’s CD official trailer
While not being directly involved, I also know of two recordings of symphonies by Paul Wranitzky which were done several years ago, but for unknown reasons not released by their labels yet.
I have never quite understood the reasoning behind waiting half a decade before releasing a CD, but hopefully we will all get to hear these lovely symphonies soon!
(b) You founded The Wranitzky Project and its Web Site in 2006, can you tell us about the origin of your project and about the various major achievements of your project during these years?
It was a bit of a chance that I stumbled upon Wranitzky about 20 years ago. I had been looking at some cello concerto scores at the music collection in Skara, Sweden – when I had time over before taking the bus home. I decided to make copies of random composers I had never heard of, skipping over anything by Haydn or Mozart. While quite a few of the compositions I came home with were not especially interesting, among the photos were a couple of symphonies by Wranitzky. I started to notate them on the computer and was surprised by their quality and wondered – who was this guy?
I read up on Wranitzky and discovered that he was a very productive and highly regarded composer. In contemporary documents he was often mentioned together with Mozart and Haydn as one of the leading composers. Unfortunately it seems as if music history only manages to keep a couple of names alive from a certain period, and Wranitzky had the bad luck to be a contemporary of his friends Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven.
I then went on to collect the Wranitzky works I could find in Sweden, and after that started to look abroad. About this time I came into contact with Christopher Hogwood who was very enthusiastic about Wranitzky and encouraged me to make a project out of my research. Through connections I got in touch with several others interested in Wranitzky and his music. Then on the 250th anniversary of Wranitzky’s birth – December 30 2006 – www.wranitzky.com was launched. In 2008, the 200th anniversary of Wranitzky’s death, we collaborated with the cultural club of Nová Říše, Wranitzky’s birthplace, and held a Wranitzky Festival. It featured several concerts, a lecture and the inauguration of memorial stone outside of the birth house. It was very appreciated and successful and we planned to continue with a new festival the following year. Unfortunately, just a few months later the financial crisis of 2008 struck, and it was no longer possible to get funding for a continuation…
[see infra the media coverage and gallery of the event]
Throughout the years we have provided scores and performances material to many orchestras and ensembles who have contacted us, and we have seen a rising interest in Wranitzky and his music. Now, with all the upcoming CDs we are very happy that more people will get to hear some of these works!
(c) Your project is collecting original scores and sources by and about Paul Wranitzky and his life: at which point is your work of research, collection and cataloguing?
The late musicologist Rita Steblin was extremely kind and helpful to show me around the most important archives in Vienna in search for more Wranitzky biographical material. In the course of this we found quite a bit of new information. As I have been very much focusing on trying to collect the music, Dr. Steblin asked if I would mind if she published the findings, which I was very happy to have her do (see Rita Steblin: Paul Wranitzky (1756-1808): New Biographical Facts from Vienna’s Archives).
When it comes to collecting the compositions, we have copies of probably 95% of all known surviving works. We hope to get the remaining ones in the near future, but unfortunately some private collections are not easy to access, and some collections are prohibitively expensive to get copies from. Fortunately, an increasing number of institutions allow researchers to freely take photos with their own cameras – a godsend.
As for the cataloguing, I have some on paper and much on the computer. Unfortunately I have not found the time to put as much on the website as I have wished for. As a visitor will notice, the website was not updated for quite a while. The top priority has always been to get the music out there to get played and heard, and with increasing requests for scores the updates suffered greatly. With the upcoming CD releases we are working on adding more information and updating the website, so keep checking in with us!
THE WRANITZKY FESTIVAL
Festival media coverage + Beautiful short documentary on Paul and Anton Wranitzky with many original documents and music from Paul and Anton Wranitzky presented by musicologist Stanislav Tesar:
[at 22.17min to 31.22min]
https://www.ceskatelevize.cz/ivysilani/1090848244-notes/308295350110007
The Wranitzky Festival in Nová Říše, Wranitzky’s birthplace.
2. Paul Wranitzky’s music activity was well linked to Mozart, Constanze Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven. Can you tell us about the various anecdotes and facts on Wranitzky’s friendship and/or collaboration with these composers and with the wife of Mozart? Wranitzky collaborated also with Schikaneder on a rather important Opera project, didn’t he? In your opinion, how do you see Wranitzky’s music production and style in comparison with that by Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven?
Vienna at the end of the 18th century was a truly exceptional musical environment, with numerous excellent and productive composers. Naturally, at the forefront, among these, were Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven – three of the top composers in all music history. While a majority of their works are rightly considered masterpieces today, we are unfortunately letting go of great riches of music by only focusing on these three. By looking at the contemporaries, such as Wranitzky, Kozeluch, Vanhal, Eberl, Eybler, Gyrowetz (etc etc etc) we get a better understanding of the music of the great three as well.
As orchestra leader of the court theatre orchestras and secretary of the Tonkünstler-Societät, Wranitzky held some of the most central post of the music life in Vienna. Unsurprisingly, he interacted with Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven both professionally and privately.
Mozart and Wranitzky were members of the same Masonic Lodge Zur neugekrönten Hoffnung, for which both wrote music. For example, a concert given at the lodge on 15 December 1785 included two symphonies by Wranitzky, written especially for the Lodge, as well as a cantata, a piano concerto and improvisations by Mozart.
Wranitzky acted as an agent in Vienna for the music publisher André of Offenbach, providing news as well as finding compositions for publishing. After Mozart’s death, Wranitzky helped with the sale of Mozart’s manuscripts to André. Constanze mentions Wranitzky in several of her letters, and it seems Wranitzky helped Constanze and André gather some of Mozart’s compositions not found among his papers.
In 1789, Schikaneder asked Wranitzky to compose an Opera on the very popular Oberon by Wieland. Its huge success spawned a whole series of other fairy tales operas, where Mozart’s The Magic Flute in 1791 being the best known today. The stories of Oberon and The Magic Flute have many similarities, as does have the music, with its mix of bravura coloratura arias and popular songs. The numbers were written for more or less the same performers, where the coloratura role of Oberon was taken by Mozart’s sister-in-law Josepha Hofer (née Weber, sister of Constanze) – the first Queen of the Night.
With all likelihood Wranitzky studied with Haydn in some form. While he is not mentioned as a student in the Haydn literature, several contemporary accounts in the French press describe Wranitzky as an élève of Haydn. We also know that Paul Wranitzky’s younger half-brother Anton studied with Haydn.
The Tonkünstler-Societät, the musician’s society whose yearly benefit concerts provided financial security for widows and orphans of its members, had failed to admit Haydn as a member as he was unable to produce the required documents. When Wranitzky became secretary of the society in 1794, he revitalized its outlook and worked to have Haydn admitted and welcomed him into the society with a glowing speech. The older master responded by insisting that Wranitzky would lead the orchestra in the society’s profitable performances of The Creation.
Beethoven certainly knew Wranitzky well and asked his older colleague to lead the orchestra in the premiere of his first Symphony in 1800. At this time Wranitzky was the most well established active composer of Symphonies in Vienna and Beethoven certainly was aware of Wranitzky’s compositions in the genre. Indeed, several recent dissertations and articles have shown stylistic traits regarded as typically Beethovenian being already present in Wranitzky’s compositions.
P. Wranitzky, Der Schreiner – Overture, ArcoDiva
3. Through your project, you are collecting and translating Wranitzky’s own original letters and many sources. Can you present to our readers a couple of original letters by Wranitzky, that you consider particularly meaningful? And a couple of notable lesser-known facts on Wranitzky from the rare sources you have collected?
There is not a great deal of correspondence of Wranitzky’s known today, but more documents are slowly coming up to light as people start taking note of Wranitzky’s importance. The bulk of the surviving correspondence comes from Wranitzky’s interactions of the publishing house of André of Offenbach. Wranitzky’s original letters to André are today dispersed in different collections around the world, and what survive must be only a fraction of their original correspondence. As Wranitzky acted as André’s agent in Vienna they contain interesting insights into the music scene of the city during its golden age, so hopefully more letters survive somewhere, perhaps private collections.
In one interesting letter dated 19 December 1798, today held at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, Wranitzky at the request of André lists many of the active composers in Vienna, together with sometimes damning judgements. Of the brothers Joseph and Thaddäus Weigl, Wranitzky writes the following:
Wiegl Joseph. Kapellmeister at the Italia Opera, worthy in his job but even greater in intrigues. A Viennese. Writes mostly vocal pieces. Wiegl Taddäus. His brother. A young man full of pride and insecurity. Composer in the service of the Court Theatre Management. Director of the music publishing house of the Court Theatre. Everything through connections, nothing by his own efforts.
A letter, in French, dated 12 December 1790 to the music publisher Bland in London is especially noteworthy for its delivery. In fact Wranitzky sent it with Haydn, who delivered it to Bland on his first visit to London. In the letter Wranitzky seeks to get his music published by Bland, expressing how much he would like to become known in London. Unfortunately it seems this venture fell through, as no publications are known today.
Finally I must also mention the correspondence between Wranitzky and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1795-1796. Goethe was working on the libretto for a sequel to The Magic Flute, and contacted Wranitzky asking him if he could put it to music. Unfortunately, as it turned out, The Magic Flute was (quite rightly) regarded as the intellectual property of Schikaneder’s theatre in Vienna. Wranitzky consulted with his employers at the court opera, and they felt it would not be right to create an opera on that subject. However, Wranitzky and the court opera responded they would be happy to consider any other libretto by Goethe, but sadly this did not come to fruition.
My Wranitzky Project colleague James Ackerman is currently working through transcribing and translating the letters for adding to the website.
P. Wranitzky, Die Gute Mutter, ArcoDiva
P. Wranitzky, Trio from Menuetto from Symphony in F major, Op. 33, No 3
on the theme O du lieber Augustin (ArcoDiva):
https://www.facebook.com/jiri.stilec.9/videos/10215127345672212/
4. The case of Joseph Weigl and Wranitzky’s judgement is certainly particularly meaningful. He was a well known protegé and pupil of Salieri at the Imperial Court. As assistant of Mozart for some time, he conducted a few performances of Figaro in 1786 and Don Giovanni in 1788 in Vienna. von Weber himself (relative of Mozart and Constanze) apparently left some curious letter on the Weigls and opera downfalls: this time involving Weigl’s own old teacher and mentor Salieri himself…
Nonetheless, Beethoven (it seems, like Wranitzky: worthy) appreciated his work and his music and Carpani (the famous biographer of Haydn) put Joseph Weigl in his list of notable composers as No. 30, as the Parmigianino of composers.
The father of the Weigl brothers was a close friend of Haydn and knew both Mozart and Albrechtsberger… and Haydn was the baptismal godfather of Joseph Weigl…
Moreover, we know that the Sturm und Drang group, linked to Goethe and Schiller (among them the famous model of and one of the technical fathers of the whole Romanticism movement: Bürger), already in December 1791, had considered Paul Wranitzky as a possible composer of a Sturm und Drang Shakespearean opera based on The Tempest, that had been especially designed for Mozart (unfortunately he was dying in Vienna, before receiving the official offer). Among the composers as substitutes of Mozart, there were, beside Wranitzky (No. 5), Dittersdorf (No. 2), Schwenke, successor of C.P.E. Bach (No. 3), Reichardt (No.4, who actually wrote the music in the end), Haydn (No. 6) and Schulz (No. 7) a friend of Reichardt.
____________
If a musician is interested in performing pieces by Paul Wranitzky, how is it possible to contact you and your project, to receive scores and further info on Wranitzky’s works? You have developed also a certain activity of investigation on Anton Wranitzky, Kozeluch, Eberl and Kraus: at which point is your work on these composers? Are you going to create a dedicated section also to these composers on your main Site Wranitzky.com? What you projects for the future?
If you are interested in any particular work by Wranizky, just write to me at the email address given on the website and I will be happy to help you!
Adding information on Anton Wranitzky to the www.wranitzky.com website, is a long time goal that I hope to realize some day, but it is not a priority. While researching Paul, I have also taken notes and acquired music by Anton when possible.
For Kozeluch, Eberl and Kraus, my main focus has been Leopold Kozeluch. I have collected a majority of his works already, and have edited some for recordings and concerts. A few of these can be heard in the Naxos series dedicated to Leopold Kozeluch.
If I had the time, I would love to create a separate website dedicated to Kozeluch.
Living in Sweden, I’m also looking quite a bit into Swedish composers of the 18-19th century, though I have no specific plans for publications there at the moment.
L. Kozeluch, Joseph der Menschheit Segen, last Movement, ArcoDiva
5. Your favourite work by Mozart and your favourite work by J. Haydn.
I must admit I love The Marriage of Figaro. I just hope that at least once in my life I will manage to see a really good period staging of this marvellous opera. Also, I must mention that the Mozart’s Piano Concerto no 23 in A Major is very dear to me.
As a cellist, I absolutely love Haydn’s C major concerto. But really – oh, you cellists and orchestra managers out there! – there are other cello concertos from the classical era that should be heard as well!
By the way, Haydn wrote his cello concerto in ca. 1761/65 for Franz Joseph Weigl, his close friend and cellist, who was the father of the composer Joseph Weigl, we’ve talked about previously…
P. Wranitzky’s Cello Concerto performed by Michaela Fukacová – Part I
P. Wranitzky’s Cello Concerto performed by Michaela Fukacová – Part II
P. Wranitzky’s Cello Concerto performed by Michaela Fukacová – Part III
6. Unfortunately, what you say for Mozart’s Figaro is true also for other marvellous Opera Productions of the 18th century. Probably stage directors should seriously consider the fact of a return to the purest origins of the theatre of the 18th century, instead of insisting on void and dramatically misleading provocations… and misinterpretations.
____________
Do you have in mind the name of some neglected composer of the 18th century you’d like to see re-evaluated?
Pichl (1741-1805), Gyrowetz (1763-1850) and Krommer (1759-1831), to name only three that I would like to get to know better.
7. Name a neglected piece of music of the 18th century you’d like to see performed in concert with more frequency.
More or less anything not on the standard repertoire!
While we shouldn’t abandon the tried and true masterpieces altogether, we could really need also some sort of break from these works…
… Why not a piano concerto by Kozeluch instead of a Mozart one?
8. Have you read a particular book on Mozart Era you consider important for the comprehension of the music of this period?
While not exactly Mozart Era, I would really like to recommend Empress Marie Therese and Music at the Viennese Court, 1792-1807 by John Rice, which gives fascinating insights into the music life of the imperial family.
The book has been extremely valuable for my research as well.
9. Name a movie or a documentary that can improve the comprehension of the music of this period.
I could easily respond with a couple of very famous movies, which de facto you should not really see, if you want to get a balanced view of the musical life of this period…
… Unfortunately I must say I haven’t watched any documentaries or movies about music for quite some time. My other music activities take most of my spare time.
However, I think that the exploration of certain places in Sweden will certainly help to develop a better and more complete comprehension of the music life and of the actual music practice in the 18th century.
I may suggest:
1. The Drottningholm Royal Palace with his famous and marvellous Opera Theatre
2. The Skara Library Music Collection
3. The Official Site of the Swedish Musical Heritage, which has a rich collection of biographies, catalogues and also scores on the 18th century music composers, who lived and worked in Sweden in those years: among them certainly Kraus, the Sturm und Drang composer, friend of both Haydn and Mozart.
Ingmar Bergman’s The Magic Flute (BFI Official Trailer), photographed by using a set recreating the Drottningholm Theatre peculiar environment
Ingmar Bergman’s The Magic Flute BFI official clip from The Magic Flute
10. Drottningholm Theatre, in particular, was the model (the original Theatre could not be used with a cinema/tv crew) for the set of Bergman’s Mozart’s The Magic Flute film, developed by trying to follow, here and there when possible, the few elements of evidence of scenography and costumes, as intended, for the Opera, by Schikaneder himself at the end of the 18th century!
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Do you think there’s a special place to be visited that proved crucial to the evolution of the 18th century music?
Vienna, absolutely!
But going there today you will get the impression that there were only our well known three composers active in the city during that time, whereas there were, in Vienna in the 18th century, other extremely good composers working, composing and performing in concerts every day…
… like Paul Wranitzky and the other composers we’ve talked about so far!
In Vienna you can explore the most important Haus- Hof- und Staatsarchiv, with its 18th century music collections et cetera:
https://www.oesta.gv.at/ [DE]
https://www.statearchives.gv.at/ [EN]
Thank you very much for having taken the time to answer our questions!
Thank you!
Copyright © 2021 MozartCircle. All rights reserved. MozartCircle exclusive property.
Iconography is in public domain or in fair use.
Interview January 2021: 10 Questions with Anders Muskens
Anders Muskens: Official Site
Anders Muskens Site: Anders Muskens Official Site
Anders Muskens: Das Neue Mannheimer Orchester Official Site
Anders Muskens: Anders Muskens (Facebook)
Anders Muskens: Anders Muskens (Twitter)
Anders Muskens: Anders Muskens (YouTube)
Anders Muskens: Anders Muskens (SoundCloud)
Anders Muskens: DNMO (Facebook)
Anders Muskens: DNMO (Twitter)
Anders Muskens: DNMO (YouTube)
Anders Muskens: CDs
Anders Muskens: CD 1: Army of Generals
Anders Muskens: CD 2: Mozart, Haydn & C.P.E. Bach
Anders Muskens: CD 3: Marianna’s Salon
1. In November 2020 you have published Army of Generals: The World of the Mannheim Court Orchestra, from 1742-78 Volume I, with works from amazing composers such as Mozart, J.C. Bach, F.I. Beck, Jommelli and C. Stamitz, who all worked with and for this most famous Mannheim Orchestra. How did you choose the pieces you have selected for this CD? What led you to produce such a peculiar CD? Can you present, to our readers, all the pieces you have recorded and the marvellous and particular story behind them: the collaboration of a few of the greatest composers in history with one of the greatest orchestras in all times, the Army of Generals? Can you see the distinctive signs of such amazing collaboration in the scores themselves?
There are so much great, yet forgotten composers from this period, but today, they are completely overshadowed by Mozart & Haydn. However, their contributions remain important, even in influencing the bigger names, and upon closer inspection, the period is full of vibrant, contrasting styles that are quite different from the mainstream Mozart & Haydn fare.
We will be releasing further volumes of Army of Generals in 2021. I joked with some of my colleagues that we could easily fill 100 volumes. I had a lot of ideas on what to record for the first set, and I made a shortlist of pieces. Ultimately, I wanted to choose a varied selection which included symphonies, concerti, and opera arias. Through the development of the symphony, Mannheim was really one of the first centres where large scale instrumental music gained a life of its own, separate from dance or theatre. This is immediately apparent in its style, for the fiery drama is recreated through innovative use of instrumental textures.
Franz Ignaz Beck (1734 – 1809)
Symphonie Périodique No.17 in E flat major, C. 27 (1761)
Franz Ignaz Beck (1734-1809) was born in Mannheim, and began lessons on violin with his father. Recognizing Beck’s talent, the court decided to support his musical education, and he would become a pupil of Johann Stamitz. Beck briefly studied in Italy with Baldassare Galuppi, but left abruptly after supposedly killing an opponent in a duel. He gained fame when his works were performed in the Concert Spirituel in Paris, which was followed by lucrative publications. By 1760, he was director of a theatre orchestra in Marseilles, and by 1764, he became the director of the orchestra at the Grand Théâtre de Bordeaux, where he produced operas and published many sets of keyboard pieces. His symphonies have a distinctive Sturm und Drang quality, and are some of the most progressive of the period with their intense drama and advanced orchestration. The symphony we chose, which has never before been recorded, is quite representative of this style and is full of fiery drama and unexpected twists, making it a worthy candidate for revival.
Johann Christian Bach (1735 – 1782)
Recitativo e Aria (Alcidoro): Anime, che provate – Queste selve
gia d’amore from Amor Vincitore (1774)
Johann Christian Bach (1735-1782) was the youngest son of Johann Sebastian Bach. Unlike any other member of the Bach family, he would move to Italy, become Catholic, and wrote mainly opera and sacred music. He was hired by Queen Charlotte of Great Britain and subsequently established himself in London, where he promoted the new-at-the-time pianoforte in public performances, performed in fashionable concerts with his friend Carl Friedrich Abel, and produced a multitude of opera seria for the King’s Theatre at the Hay-Market. His symphonies, chamber works, and keyboard pieces were published and widely disseminated throughout Europe. He was commissioned to write two operas in Mannheim: Temistocle (1772) and Lucio Silla (1776). Amor Vincitore is a serenata written in 1774 for the theatre at Elector Carl Theodor’s summer residence in Schwetzingen, whose performance was attended by Gluck. This aria is particularly innovative, as it employs four wind soloists in addition to a soprano: flute, oboe, clarinet, and bassoon. This model would be later employed by Bach in an aria from his opera La clemenza di Scipione. The wind solos were tailored for the famous Mannheim virtuosi, which included Johann Baptist Wendling (flute), Friedrich Ramm (Oboe), and Georg Wenzl Ritter (bassoon). Mozart met them in late 1777 during his trip to Mannheim, and possibly inspired by this work (he was an ardent admirer of J.C. Bach) would feature some of the same soloists in his sinfonia concertante for winds, Idomeneo [this year its 260th Anniversary], and numerous other chamber pieces. We collaborated with musicologist Paul Corneilson, who provided the performing edition via the Packard Humanities Institute, Los Altos, California.
Muskens/DNMO: Johann Christian Bach: Aria (Alcidoro)
Queste selve gia d’amore from Amor Vincitore (1774)
Johann Christian Bach (1735 – 1782)
Concerto for the Pianoforte Op. 13 No. 6 in E flat (1777)
I recorded this piano concerto with an original square piano: a Longman & Broderip from 1787. Despite its small, delicate sound, the chamber scoring of this concerto fits it perfectly, and its charming and elegant galant sensibilities represent some of J.C. Bach’s finest writing. It is no doubt that Mozart was captivated by Bach’s compositions.
Muskens/DNMO: Johann Christian Bach
Concerto for Pianoforte Op. 13 No. 6 in E flat (1777)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Recitativo e Aria Alcandro, lo confesso…
Non sò d’onde viene K.294 (1778)
Mozart journeyed to Mannheim in 1777 at the behest of his father, seeking a permanent position. Unfortunately, he was unsuccessful in his endeavour, but he became friends with several prominent leaders of the orchestra, including flautist Johann Baptist Wendling. While there, he composed the concert aria Alcandro lo confesso… Non sò d’onde viene K. 294 on a text from Metastasio’s L’olimpiade for soprano Aloysia Weber, whom he was smitten with at the time, much to his father’s disapproval. The subject of the aria, which was adapted from its original context by Mozart, concerns the female narrator experiencing the first sensations of a blossoming love.
Muskens/DNMO: Preview of Mozart: Aria
Non sò d’onde viene K.294 with Tinka Pypker
Niccolò Jommelli (1714 – 1774)
Aria (Didone) Va crescendo il mio tormento from
La Didone Abbandonata (1763 version)
Niccolò Jommelli (1714-1774) was a Neapolitan composer who was esteemed in his day as the foremost innovator in the Italian opera genre, revolutionizing the genre with declamatory expression and increased complexity. His development of the orchestral crescendo captivated Johann Stamitz, who introduced this powerful effect into the Mannheim style, and it would go on to be known as the Mannheim Crescendo. His operas were performed frequently in Mannheim during the 1750’s and 60’s, and from 1754, he held a position as Ober-Kapellmeister in Stuttgart, where he continued to write opera and church music. La Didone Abbandonata was first performed in 1747 in Rome. A second version was prepared for Vienna in 1749, and the Stuttgart performance in 1763 is of the third revision. In this aria, the beleaguered Queen of Carthage Dido expresses her rising anguish as her personal life and regime crumble around her. Jommelli employs the aforementioned crescendo in an inventive, dramatic context that paints the scene for the audience.
Carl Stamitz (1745-1801)
Symphonie de chasse in D (1772)
Carl Stamitz (1745-1801) was the son of the famous first concertmaster of the Mannheim Court Orchestra, Johann Stamitz (1717-1757) and one of the leading members of the second generation Mannheim School. He toured across Europe and performed on violin, viola, and viola d’amore. His compositions were widely published and he is renowned for his contribution to the symphony, concerto, and symphonie concertantes. Le chasse (The hunt) was a common subject for musical pieces in the eighteenth-century, and was often inspired by the decadent rituals performed in the French court. This energetic symphony was descended from the energetic, fiery, Mannheim style, evocative of the aggressive excitement associated with the hunt. The winds are used to make all of the appropriate signal calls that were used in the French-style court hunt, which are documented in Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie (see infra at Q.9, the original Diderot’s tables).
Muskens/DNMO: Carl Stamitz – Symphonie de chasse in D (1772)
III. Allegro moderato – Presto
Muskens & DNMO: The Rise of Classicism
Muskens & DNMO: Graun
Aria Mi paventi il figlio indegno from Britannico WV B:I:24 (live)
Anders Muskens Georg Benda on Clavichord
Anders Muskens performs Beck: Sonata Op. 5 No. 2 (fortepiano)
Anders Muskens performs Beck: L’Éveillée (fortepiano)
2. You have completed and reconstructed a series of fragments by Mozart and even some interesting Mozart’s spurious works: can you present, to our readers, any single of such pieces, completed by you, and the peculiar story behind them and the criteria you used in reconstructing them?
The two most recent Mozart pieces I have reconstructed were a violin sonata in A major based on a fragment K. 385e, and a horn concerto in E major, based on fragment K. 494a.
In both cases, these were works left unfinished by Mozart which contained a substantial first portion of material which was rather high quality, which simply just ends, as if intended to be continued later.
I was disappointed at previous efforts to reconstruct these pieces, for it is always very clear where Mozart ends and the reconstruction starts. When I was working on my reconstructions, I wanted to use my knowledge of historical performance practices, and 18th century compositional styles and aesthetics to create a result that was more seamless and did not feel anachronistic.
Mozart Discoveries (on Spotify)
In cases where I had to invent new themes, I tried to use my creativity as a composer, but carefully filtered through this 18th century window.
I hope that when these are recorded and distributed listeners will find them to be compelling re-imaginings of what Mozart might have done if he had managed to finish these pieces.
ANDERS MUSKENS: RECONSTRUCTIONS, COMPOSITIONS & PARTS
These scores by Anders Muskens are available for ordering and part rental at this address:
Muskens’s Compositions
Reconstructions and Completions of Mozart’s Works:
• Completion of Mozart fragment K. 385e (480a/Anh 48)
• Completion of Mozart fragment K. 370b
• Completion of Mozart fragment K. 494a
• Reconstruction of a spurious Mozart Flute Concerto in D
Scores on Text by Metastasio:
• Cantata, The Dream (Metastasio)
• Cantata, The Storm (Metastasio)
• Cantata, The Excuse (Metastasio)
• Aria: Ah! Non lasciarmi! from La Didone abbandonata (Metastasio)
• Recitative and Aria: To Scorn my flame! – O! Heaven, I faint!
from Dido (Metastasio)
• Duet: Prince, farewell! – Ah, speak not thus relentless fair
from Zenobia (Metastasio)
Anders Muskens: Cantata, The Storm, excerpts (Metastasio)
3. (a) In 2016 you have established your ensemble Das Neue Mannheimer Orchester (DNMO), with a direct dedication to one of the most famous orchestras in history. What the story of your orchestra and of the musicians who work with you? You have already received prizes and awards for the quality of your activity and you have produced so far also some notable but, alas, neglected works by J.C.Bach and G.F. de Majo (both influenced somehow Mozart in his own style development). Can you tell us about all this?
(b) Can you present and tell us about your other CDs released in 2019 (Marianna’s Salon) and 2020 (Mozart, Haydn & C.P.E. Bach on a 1791 Fortepiano). What attracts you most of Haydn’s music? What the difference among Mozart, Haydn and C.P.E. Bach, somehow the father of the other two (to paraphrase Mozart)?
(a) The orchestra was founded at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague (KC), and is completely made up of students and recent graduates of the KC and the Conservatory in Amsterdam. As a result, we are an extremely young, youthful, vibrant, international ensemble full of fresh ideas and new approaches that can take 18th century music in a new – albeit historically informed – direction. Of course, it is difficult to get a footing in today’s highly competitive arts sector, with fewer resources available every year. Nevertheless, we are persistent in our entrepreneurial efforts to build something new. The namesake of this anthology Army of Generals reflects the spirit behind our ensemble. It comes from a quote by English musicologist Charles Burney, who visited Mannheim in 1772 and wrote: «There are more solo players and good composers in this, than perhaps in any other orchestra in Europe; it is an army of generals, equally fit to plan a battle, as to fight it».
We expressly decided to focus on the repertoire of the Mannheim School (hence the namesake) and the associated artistic scene around it, because this music is neglected but deserving of revival, especially in an historically-informed manner. We have worked on reviving large pieces by J.C. Bach and G.F. de Majo: both composers were invited to write opera in Mannheim, and it gives us a picture of the world that incubated Mozart’s style, as these were his influences.
(b) Marianna’s Salon is a live recording of the final round of the London Early Music Young Ensemble Competition, in which Tinka Pypker (soprano) and myself (on fortepiano) took the prize. Musical gatherings among friends and colleagues were an important part of social life in late 18th century circles. These were important places for composers, patrons, and musicians to network and present music together. The programme is comprised of relatively unknown music sampled from late 18th century salons in Vienna and Naples, and depicts the cycle of human life by celebrating the life of Marianna Auenbruggen – a talented Viennese noble lady and friend of Haydn, Mozart, and Salieri, who died far too young. The programme begins with a cheeky, youthful Anacreontic cantata by relatively unknown composer Domenico Corigliano, and proceeds to a more mature sonata by Marianna herself and a funeral ode written by Salieri to commemorate her untimely death. The programme concludes with a Mozart lied as a final farewell to the world, evoking the peace of passing.
Mozart, Haydn & C.P.E. Bach on a 1791 Fortepiano is a solo fortepiano album recorded using an original Louis Dulcken II fortepiano c. 1791 at the National Music Centre in Calgary, Canada, as part of my residency at Studio Bell.
The works of Mozart, Haydn, and C.P.E. Bach are remarkably distinct, although contemporary. Joseph Haydn is attractive for his joking, quirky inventiveness and eccentricities – qualities that are for me, less apparent in Mozart, whose invention focuses on refinement and perfection in elegance and form taking precedence. In some ways, Mozart is more the successor to J.C. Bach, which is not surprising given his influence. These contrast completely to C.P.E. Bach, whose inventiveness and eccentricities manifest in the manic, sombre, and tormented.
All together, these composers represent a wide spectrum of expressive possibilities that all co-existed in the late 18th century, and at the same time can also remain derived, but distinct from the various forms of the typical Mannheim style.
Other CDs available from Anders Muskens:
• Beck & Traetta: The Music of the Mannheim Court Orchestra
• J. Haydn: Sonata Hob XVI 42
• Beck, Richter & Mozart: Keyboard Music from the Mannheim School
• Mozart & C.P.E. Bach: Fantasias
Anders Muskens in Mozart – Concerto for Fortepiano K. 491 Live Excerpts
Anders Muskens in Mozart – Sonata K. 309
Muskens & DNMO: The Mozart & Friends Concert 2017 Video
with Highlights from Mozart’s Symphony K184, Exsultate Jubilate K165,
Piano Concerto K413, Aria Deh per Questo Istante K621,
J.C. Bach & Kraus Symphony in C minor VB142 (Live)
4. One of the most fascinating aspects of Historical Informed Music productions is also the story of the instruments used by modern musicians and by modern orchestras to perform such beautiful scores from the 18th century: can you tell our readers the story of the instruments used by you and by your orchestra for your concerts and recordings? As a composer you have a certain interest in Metastasio’s texts, moreover you are well known for presenting, in concert, music programs of improvisations in the purest style of 18th/first 19th century: in your opinion, what attracts modern audience to such peculiar language and style so much? Beside your marvellous series Army of Generals, you have also an intense International musical activity of concerts, what your projects for the future?
The following solo instruments were featured heavily in the set:
Square pianoforte by Longman & Broderip in London c. 1787, restored by Paul Kobald in Amsterdam c. 2018 A fascinating original instrument, impeccably restored, that produces the warmest, most charming and delicate sonorities, and turns the simplest harmonies into pure delight.
Wind quartet
1. 8-keyed flute after Johann Heinrich Grenser in Dresden c. 1810 by Rudolf Tutz in Innsbruck c. 2015
2. 6-keyed oboe after Johann Heinrich Grenser in Dresden c. 1806-13 by Toshi Hasegawa in Deventer
3. 6-keyed clarinet after Johann Heinrich Grenser in Dresden c. 1802 by Rudolf Tutz in Innsbruck c. 2013
4. 8-keyed bassoon after Johann Heinrich Grenser in Dresden c. 1806 by Pau Orriols & Alfons Sibila in Vilanova i la Geltrú
Anders Muskens performs J. Haydn Sonata Hob. XVI:49
on Square Piano by Longman & Broderip c. 1787
I do believe that modern audiences are attracted to 18th century sounds, because in some way, they are familiar, yet also not of this modern world.
It is familiar because unlike a lot of post-modern inventions, it uses a language of affects that is accessible, and it remains moving to people to this day.
Apart from the Army of Generals series, I am working on a few other projects, including releasing an album of Beck keyboard pieces, and an album release of Franz Schubert on fortepiano.
I hope to announce a few more initiatives in the coming months, as we see how the coronavirus situation develops.
ANDERS MUSKENS & MOZART’S MANNHEIM/MUNICH PRODUCTION
OF IDOMENEO IN THE YEAR OF THE 240th ANNIVERSARY
Mozart: Idomeneo – D’Oreste, d’Aiace with Natalia Pérez (live)
Here videos and photos from other projects by Anders Muskens and DNMO, among them the celebration of Beethoven’s 250th Anniversary (1770-2020), the 2020 Opera Production of J.C. Bach’s Carattaco and the 2020 Cantata Production of de Majo’s La gara delle Grazie Eufrosine, Aglaia e Talia.
Anders Muskens: Beethoven 250th Anniversary Livestream Concert (2020)
Anders Muskens: J.C. Bach’s Carattaco (1767) – An Introduction (2020)
Anders Muskens: J.C. Bach – Vanne, superbo audace from Carattaco
5. Your favourite work by Mozart and your favourite work by J. Haydn.
Hmm this is very tricky to pick.
I am going to say (and it is possible that it will change) that my favorite work by Mozart is the piano concerto K. 482.
For Haydn, I would say it’s the Sonata in D Hob. XVI:42.
Anders Muskens performs Haydn:
Sonata in D, Hob. XVI:42 I. Andante Con Espressione
6. Do you have in mind the name of some neglected composer of the 18th century you’d like to see re-evaluated?
The two neglected 18th century composers I currently focus on advancing are Johann Christian Bach, and Franz Ignaz Beck.
Another composer who should be revived further is Anton Schweitzer.
And… lastly,…
a really important composer that is neglected today is Niccolò Jommelli.
There is no doubt that Jommelli’s style is innovative, fresh, and highly influential – yet nearly completely neglected today. Important music theorist and composer C.F.D. Schubart wrote of him in 1784:
«Jommelli, the creator of an entirely new taste, and certainly one of the best musical geniuses who has ever lived. This immortal man paved himself, as have all spirits of the first rank, a completely unique path. His highly fervid spirit shines forth from all of his compositions: burning imagination; glowing inventiveness; great harmonic understanding; abundance of melodic passages; bold, strongly effective modulations; an inimitable instrumental accompaniment — [these things] are the outstanding characteristics of his operas. Also, Jommelli elevated himself to the rank of a musical inventor. The staccato of the basses, whereby they almost received the stress of the organ pedals, the precise determination of musical nuance, and, especially, the all-effective crescendo and decrescendo are his! When he applied these figures in an opera in Naples for the first time, all the people on the parterre and in the loges rose, and the astonishment shone from wide eyes. One felt the magical power of this new Orpheus, and from this time on, he was considered the world’s best composer».
Certainly Jommelli deserves more attention!
[Here infra Jommelli’s 1812 identification with the great Late Renaissance/Early Baroque school master L. Carracci: see Carpani’s Grand-Gallery of Composers & Painters, 1812]
7. So true! Certainly also Reichardt, Hiller and Heinse (among others, like Reicha, who considered Jommelli one of the greatest masters in counterpoint ever) left fundamental and important historical and aesthetic judgements on Jommelli, underlining his importance in developing a new sophisticated and nuanced approach to performance (in particular, orchestral) and music writing. It’s interesting to consider that Schubart, Reichardt, Heinse were also well known active members of the German Literary Genius Movement/Sturm und Drang, beside the Music one, and all with a great interest in painting, especially that of Late Renaissance and Early Baroque (Caravaggio, Reni, Rubens, Preti, etc.).
____________
Name a neglected piece of music of the 18th century you’d like to see performed in concert with more frequency.
I think a good example of a piece of 18th century music that could have wide appeal would be Anton Schweitzer’s opera, Alceste c. 1773.
It was also played in Mannheim, and it’s remarkably dark, stormy, dramatic, and very fresh sounding. For these reasons, it could be appealing to modern audiences, who often look for this sort of sound.
Moreover, one must keep in mind that the German libretto of this opera was by the great Wieland himself.
8. Wieland and Goethe, two main protagonists of the German Literary Genius Movement/Sturm und Drang (even though of two rather different and even constrasting phases of it), exerted a great influence on the German music of the second half of the 18th century and promoted hundreds of new compositions, operas and stage music of any kind (mainly in a passionate/stormy style of Gluck, Jommelli, Traetta, de Majo), with the not hidden, but deliberate intent to be saluted as the Metastasios of Germany (Wieland actually received such title!). It is well known, how eventually Goethe managed to create the new fundamental European Music Centre in Weimar, thanks to his friendship with Hummel, the celebrated pupil of Mozart and Haydn, and, in his role in Weimar, the precursor to Liszt and his music of the future.
____________
Have you read a particular book on Mozart Era you consider important for the comprehension of the music of this period?
I am currently working on my PhD thesis, which is related to implementing principles of classical rhetoric in performance practice using 18th century methods.
In a way, a lot of these rhetorical treatises are more prescriptive of producing a moving performance than many music treatises.
I will recommend John Walker’s Elements of Elocution (1781), particularly Volume II where the Passions are discussed in explicit detail.
Here you can read the books. At my site you find my introduction to Walker and one of my works of J. Walker.
J. Walker, Elements Of Elocution, Vol. 2, 1781
J. Walker, Elements Of Elocution, Part 1 & 2, 1799
Anders Muskens: Introduction to John Walker
Anders Muskens: Approaching a Rhetorical Performance of Late 18th Century Keyboard Music Using the Methods of John Walker
Anders Muskens: C.P.E. Bach’s Fantasia in F Sharp Minor Wq. 80
9. Both Schubart and Mozart famously condemned the musician mechanicus. And C.P.E. Bach’s performance principle A musician can move others, only if he too is moved was a fundamental part of the strong aesthetic ideas and of the performance practice of both Leopold Mozart and Wolfgang Mozart and of others of that period.
The artists and intellectuals around Samuel Johnson certainly formed a nice English-Italian group (Baretti, Garrick, Montagu and others), devoted to the promotion of the Artistic Freedom of the Genius and to the universal appreciation of Homer, Shakespeare, Dante Alighieri, Milton and others, and deliberately against Voltaire and the aesthetic principles of the French Academy pseudo-classicism (as it was substantially defined by Bodmer): the essays by Baretti and Montagu against Voltaire were important and remarkable.
____________
Name a movie or a documentary that can improve the comprehension of the music of this period.
Not sure I can think of one right now…
nonetheless, there’s certainly an 18th century work that has the same power as a documentary of our time, if not even something more…
… Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie with its articles and tables.
This is, for example, one of the sites, where you can explore and discover the world of the 18th century through the eyes of Diderot:
Diderot’s Encyclopédie
Diderot’s Encyclopédie: Les beaux-arts
Diderot’s Encyclopédie: 40 Tables dedicated to the History, Theory and Performance of Music
Here down the table dedicated to the disposition of the Orchestra of the Opera Theatre of Dresden in 1750s/60s as conducted by Hasse.
An orchestra of strings: 8 vl.I, 7 vl.II, 4 vla., 3 cl., 3 ctrb.;
of winds: 5 ob., 5 bsn., 2 flt., 2 hunt hrns.;
of cembali: 1 for the Kapellmeister + 1 for the accompaniment;
+ trumpets and timpani at the wings.
Here dedicated to the theory of music and counterpoint.
And here the tables dedicated to the art of hunt and the horn calls, we were talking about at Q. 1 about Carl Stamitz.
10. Do you think there’s a special place to be visited that proved crucial to the evolution of the 18th century music?
For people in the 18th century, this would probably be Naples, given that it was such a musical hub.
Many of the Elector’s musicians in Mannheim received scholarships to study there and return, bringing back what they learned.
The Neapolitan style, and the operas of Traetta, Jommelli, and de Majo are definitely important models to understand the evolution of style leading up to the time of Mozart.
Visit the sites of:
• Pietà dei Turchini
• San Pietro a Maiella
Thank you very much for having taken the time to answer our questions!
Thank you!
Copyright © 2021 MozartCircle. All rights reserved. MozartCircle exclusive property.
Iconography is in public domain or in fair use.
Interview September 2019: 10 Questions with Peter Leech
Peter Leech: Official Site
Peter Leech Site: Peter Leech Official Site
Peter Leech: Peter Leech (Twitter)
Peter Leech: Peter Leech (Cardiff University)
Peter Leech: Harmonia Sacra (Official Website)
Peter Leech: Costanzi Consort (Official Website)
Peter Leech: Cappella Fede (Official Website)
Peter Leech: CDs
Peter Leech: CD 1: The Cardinal King
Peter Leech: CD 2: Princely Splendour
Peter Leech: CD 3: Cherubim & Seraphim
1. In June 2019 you presented a very special concert dedicated to Leopold Mozart and his 300th Anniversary (1719-2019). Among the pieces performed, the world premiere of Leopold’s Missa Brevis in C reconstructed by you and a series of other short works always by Leopold. Can you tell us about Leopold’s sacred music and in particular the Missa Brevis you have reconstructed and the other pieces you have chosen? Why your interest in that Missa Brevis? As piece by Wolfgang Mozart you have chosen the Missa K140, written by a young Wolfgang in 1773. What the differences and similarities in the Sacred Music style of Leopold and Wolfgang?
As a musicologist and conductor, I have always been fascinated by setting the repertoire I perform in a clear context, seeking both to understand (and convey to my audiences) as much as possible about how certain composers and their styles emerged in given times and places, and what other kinds of other music were being performed in the environment in which these composers had been trained or brought up.
The revival of lesser-known composers is an important aspect of setting this context…
… Composers such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Franz Joseph Haydn and other classical giants are rightly revered today for their genius, but it is important to understand the full nature of the musical world in which they lived, and what set them apart from their contemporaries, not all of whom were necessarily as inferior as they are portrayed in some standard music histories. Imagine the kind of music the young Wolfgang Mozart heard as a small child when his father was rehearsing the choir and orchestra at Salzburg Cathedral in 1760!
Leopold’s sacred music (much of which still lies unedited in manuscript sources) is excellent, demonstrating a mastery of harmony and counterpoint as well as an expressive flare certainly equivalent to other Salzburg Cathedral composers (such as Michael Haydn, for example) at the same stage of their development. Leopold was particularly fond of dark diminished-7th harmonies (used at pivotal points in the mass, for example at Qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis (Gloria) and at Et incarnatus (Credo).
Leopold’s C major Missa Brevis is particularly interesting to me not only because it is incomplete (necessitating a reconstruction of the missing Sanctus and Agnus Dei) but also because evidence suggests it may well have been originally performed with colla-parte strings, in the Austrian 18th century church tradition, as has been demonstrated by scholars working on surviving performance materials for masses by Albrechtsberger and Georg Reutter Jnr.
In contrast, Wolfgang’s G major Mass (KV 140) comprises independent string parts.
If Leopold’s Mass does date from around 1760, then it is also similar to the style of Eberlin and Adlgasser, a style which relied heavily on strict counterpoint, used most typically at the closing fugues of the Gloria and Credo. Wolfgang followed this fugal tradition with his longer solemnis masses, but not so frequently in the brevis masses. KV140 is almost completely devoid of counterpoint, and is composed in a much more modern style, utilising homophonic textures akin to the choruses of his early operas. Leopold’s Missa Brevis in C has no designations for soloists, whereas Wolfgang’s work incorporates solo interjections throughout. In some ways it is not easy to compare these works, since they are a at least a decade apart and Leopold stopped composing around 1760, but we can nevertheless surmise that some fundamental elements of Leopold’s skill must surely have been passed on to his son…
… The extent to which this took place mostly in the early years (or by a process of gradual understanding through immersion in so many different musical experiences) remains a matter for debate. Much more of Leopold’s music needs to be transcribed and edited to gain a fuller understanding of his church style in particular.
Peter Leech & Harmonia Sacra:
After the Concert with music by Leopold & Wolfgang Mozart
__________________________________________________
PETER LEECH’S MOZARTERA DISCOGRAPHY
__________________________________________________
• In Dulci Jubilo: Choral Music For Advent & Christmas
• The Cardinal King: Music by Bolis, Costanzi, Jommelli
• Princely Splendour: Music by Bolis, Costanzi, Scarlatti
• Cherubim & Seraphim: Russian Orthodox Choral Works
• Aylesbury Choral: Handel, Linley, Wesley, Attwood
Peter Leech & Aylesbury Choral:
Praise be to God, and God alone by Thomas Linley
2. In 2016, you released a marvellous CD Album The Cardinal King: Music For Henry Benedict Stuart In Rome, 1740-91. The Album is dedicated to the music by Jommelli, Bolis and Costanzi. In 2014 you had already released another marvellous CD Princely Splendour with music by Costanzi, Casali, Bolis, Scarlatti. During the June 2019 Concert dedicated to Leopold Mozart’s 300th you presented also music by Sebastiano Bolis and Giovanni Battista Casali. Just few know that all these 18th century Italian composers are, in reality, also linked to the Mozarts in various ways also through Padre Martini (Jommelli, Casali and Costanzi) or through another famous pupil of Padre Martini, like Mozart, Grétry (Costanzi and Casali), and all these composers were among the music models used by young Mozart to study and develop his own art. When did you think to start a long work of research on the music by these composers? How did you carry on this type of research? Can you tell us about the works and music of these composers? How do you see now the two Mozarts and MozartEra in the light of your discoveries? In your opinion, what is, in reality, the Mozartian classical style?
Thank you for your praise!
My interest in the Roman school of composers emerged as long as 12 years ago, when Sebastiano Bolis first came to my attention when I rediscovered the strong link between him and Cardinal Henry Benedict Stuart (1725-1807). What fascinated me utterly from the moment I began transcribing Bolis’s music is how truly classical it sounded.
The tremendous variety of Bolis’s church compositions is extensive, in that he could turn it to any effect (whether an unaccompanied stile antico design for Lent, or a highly operatic, orchestrally-supported aesthetic for Christmas and Easter), but we still know so little about him and precisely from whom he absorbed the classical style. It is believed that he studied with Giovanni Battista Casali (1715-1792), maestro at S Giovanni in Laterano from 1759. We also know that in 1774 Bolis passed his Accademia di S Cecilia exam and that by 1778 he was working for Cardinal Henry. It soon became clear to me that Bolis represented a kind of Roman style of classical church music which has scarcely been explored by musicologists, Italian or otherwise. It has therefore not been set in context, and since many scholars consider Rome to have been a backwater in church music after 1725, I have been determined ever to establish the importance of Bolis and his Roman contemporaries as Italian equivalents, at least in church music, to the first Viennese school of composers. Thus began my process of rediscovering, from Roman archives, the church music of Casali, Jommelli as well as lesser-known names such as Cavi, Terziani and Jannacconi and of course Costanzi, the last of whom had been Bolis’s predecessor at S Lorenzo in Damaso. (Bolis was also maestro at Frascati Cathedral).
A common link between all of these composers is Cardinal Henry (a patron of Jommelli who also knew Casali well too, and an employer of Baldassare Galuppi at S Maria in Campitelli during the 1750s).
Henry clearly supported more modern styles of church music that were worlds away from the austere counterpoint of the Papal Chapel.
It is my plan to write a cultural biography of Cardinal Henry which will shed light on this Roman classical church music school of composers, setting them in the context of wider European developments. My research chiefly involves painstaking transcriptions of the works of these composers from original manuscripts, and, where possible, comparing various sources in order to create definitive performing editions. I have championed many of these new composers with recordings and performances; for example in September 2019 Harmonia Sacra will perform Bolis, Costanzi and Galuppi in S Lorenzo in Damaso, Rome again, and, for the first time, taking Bolis back to Frascati Cathedral. Only by performing the music have I been able to arrive at an understanding of the Roman classical style. It is certainly not easy to fully quantify Bolis in isolation – sometimes his music is utterly classical sounding, whereas at other times he uses an orchestra, for example, as underpinning for a double-choir work; a kind of fusion of old Roman polychoralism with rococo exuberance.
My discoveries in Roman classical music, along with those of other scholars, have shown that there is still a great deal more to be known about Leopold and Wolfgang Mozart and their possible influence beyond Central Europe into the other spheres, and the Italian peninsula in particular. The Mozartian classical style, at least to me, is, as far as sacred music is concerned, one in which standard liturgical texts become energised with a new vigour – liberated from more serious Baroque formality into a joyous, uplifting and playful idiom which is utterly infectious and a delight to perform.
Peter Leech & Harmonia Sacra perform Dextera Domini by Sebastiano Bolis
in San Lorenzo in Damaso, Rome. First modern performance in the original
3. Your main interest in 18th century music led you also to explore another particular repertoire: choral works composed by Italian and Russian composers between 1765 and 1825 (starting from the reign of Catherine the Great). With music by Bortnyansky and, especially, by Giuseppe Sarti, this CD has again also a direct connection with Mozart, since we know that Sarti and Mozart were both pupils of Padre Martini and that Mozart was particularly friendly with Sarti in Vienna and dedicated to him a famous section of his Don Giovanni (1787). On the other hand, you have produced another CD with music of other famous composers directly personally linked to Mozart: Linley, Attwood and (only in part linked to Mozart) Wesley. From your point of view, how do you see the music of the second half of the 18th century from England to Italy to Austria and then to Russia? What the chains of influence? And what the Mozart effect on that world, firstly considered a touchstone as a child prodigy (Burney) and then a magnificent (but not always well accepted, as one might think) model?
One of my major research interests has always been cross-cultural exchange. Over the years my research into music of the international diaspora of the Jesuits has revealed how they were particularly skilled at transporting European musical culture to far-flung corners of the world, whether by establishing Latin American choir schools, or building pipe organs in China.
During the mid-18th century, Italian composers worked all over the world and could be found as distantly as Ireland, Mexico or St Petersburg, employed both as church musicians and opera composers. I studied the German, Italian and Russian languages and have also specialised in Russian Orthodox music as a conductor.
The links between Russia and Italy were very strong in the reign of Empress Catherine the Great (1762-96), a ruler who paid vast sums of money to her Italian musicians such as Galuppi and Sarti. One fascinating link, which has not yet been fully explored, is that between Sarti, Mozart, Galuppi, Catherine the Great and Cardinal Henry Benedict Stuart. Shortly before his time in Russia, Galuppi had been working for Cardinal Henry. Henry had also entertained Grand Duke Paul (Catherine’s son) in Rome in 1782, not long before Sarti took up his post in St Petersburg (having met Mozart en-route). What this demonstrates is the highly cosmopolitan nature of late 18th century Europe, a Europe where travelling composers, working in the emerging classical style, knew no national boundaries. It was a style that clearly evolved partly through exchange, and could be felt in 1770s England in the hands of Thomas Linley (who knew Mozart and studied in Italy), or in 1780s Russia with Sarti, or in 1780s Rome with Sebastiano Bolis.
The full extent of the Mozart effect on all of this still needs more work, but as we learn from Burney and others, it was not unusual for composers who travelled to meet each other in different places, especially those involved with the unending maelstrom of activity that was the world of Italian international opera seria.
4. You are at the very centre of many important and very interesting musical projects, choirs and ensembles: Harmonia Sacra, Cappella Fede, Costanzi Consort, Spectra Musica, SWEMF, Musica Jesuitica. In particular, in 2008 and 2009 you founded the two major groups Harmonia Sacra and Cappella Fede, you worked with to produce your critically acclaimed CDs (BBC Radio 3). What the story and origin of Harmonia Sacra and Cappella Fede? And what about your work with the Costanzi Consort? You are also a composer: how do you think your profound knowledge of the 18th century music, of the music of the two Mozarts and of the many pupils and contemporaries of Padre Martini influenced and is alive in your work as a composer today in the 21st century?
Thank you very much again!
Harmonia Sacra is a hand-picked amateur chamber choir formed in 2009 comprising singers I had worked with from many other choirs from the previous 10 years or so. I was determined to establish a non-profit choir that would have honourable aims and objectives, performing music from c.1600-1800, but which would also uncover hitherto unknown musical repertoire as well as support young emerging composers. I am very proud of the work we have done, and the choir is so pleased to be at the forefront of many aspects of my music research. We have developed a very special relationship with Nimbus records in particular, who have supported our projects from the outset, bringing lesser-known works of the 18th century to wider audiences.
Cappella Fede is my professional ensemble who came together by invitation for an international conference concert in Liverpool in 2008, and have since gone on to perform at many prestigious venues in the UK and, last year, in Rome. Like Harmonia Sacra, they have also performed and recorded music which I have edited and transcribed from original sources. Next year Cappella Fede will appear in concert in Cardiff in a programme of music by Isabella Leonarda, which will also feature music by the Roman female composer Maria Rosa Coccia (1759-1833). She was a contemporary of Bolis (they both sat the St Cecilia exam in 1774) and her church style is also highly classical, not just in the traditional Neapolitan sense (a label which is often placed on Roman church music of the 1750-1770 period) but also in a very distinctive way; like Bolis she wrote polychoral Vespers settings, alternating strict contrapuntal choruses with virtuoso solo arias.
Costanzi Consort (named after Giovanni Battista Costanzi, another unjustly neglected 18th century composer) was formed to be a high quality chamber choir in the North Somerset area where I live. The group has championed music by lesser-known 18th century Italian composers and future plans include a project to perform and record music by Giovanni Battista Casali.
So, as you can see, the church music (in particular) of the Roman mid-to-late-18th-century school has become something of a major interest for me, and a major departure from my original PhD work as a specialist in 17th-century British court music.
My knowledge of 18th century music does indeed affect my own work as a composer. My style has changed considerably over the years, in that I now accept and acknowledge that counterpoint, if used in a deliberate and uninhibited way (sometimes a combination of Fux’s traditional rules of consonance and dissonance with more wide-ranging chromatic explorations) create my own distinctive musical language, one which choirs seem, thankfully, to enjoy.
• Lux Memoriae: Contemporary British Choral Works
Peter Leech conducts J.J. Fux, Benedixisti Domine (excerpt).
Peter Leech & the Cardiff University Chamber Choir China Tour (15 June-4 July 2019). With music by Sebastiano Bolis, Maria Rosa Coccia and Dimitry Bortnyansky.
5. Your favourite work by Mozart and your favourite work by J. Haydn.
Mozart: Vesperae solennes de Dominica KV 321,
Joseph Haydn: Die Schöpfung
Because the Dominica Vespers, less well known than Mozart’s KV 339 set, is resplendent with the harmonic intensity and rhythmic vitality of Mozart’s Church music style in the later Salzburg years and which looks forward to the style of the much later Requiem.
The Haydn represents, to me, the composer at his mature best, ranging from the modern chromatic darkness of the chaos music to the vibrant choruses which echo the Gloria and Credo movements from the late masses such as the Nelson.
6. Do you have in mind the name of some neglected composer of the 18th century you’d like to see re-evaluated?
Giovanni Battista Costanzi (1704-1778; at imslp with list of works).
Because he was a link between the late Baroque Roman Church style of Alessandro Scarlatti and Giuseppe Ottavio Pitoni and the later Roman classical composers such as Casali (1715–1792; at imslp), Bolis and Jannacconi.
Costanzi was an important teacher and although we certainly know a few of his important pupils, there were undoubtedly more, who will be discovered through more detailed research.
His biography in music texts is pitifully small for such a long-lived composer.
The surviving music of his early Christmas cantatas composed for Cardinal Ottoboni in the 1720s is superb.
7. And certainly another interesting fact about Costanzi (who was also a famous cellist) is that he is probably the real composer of the Cello Concerto in D major IGC 1 (= Hob. VIIb: 4; 1772?), a piece for long time attributed to Joseph Haydn.
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Name a neglected piece of music of the 18th century you’d like to see performed in concert with more frequency.
Sebastiano Bolis (c.1750-1804): Dixit Dominus in D major for double choir – full orchestral version.
Because it would display fully Bolis’s compositional skill with its contrasting movements, orchestration and contrapuntal ingenuity, not to mention a strong sense of choice of appropriate harmonic colour for different texts.
8. Have you read a particular book on Mozart Era you consider important for the comprehension of the music of this period?
Ruth Halliwell, The Mozart Family – Four lives in a Social Context (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1998).
It gives such a vivid insight into the day to day lives of the Mozart family and their interactions with so many personalities, both musical and non-musical, and the way in which Wolfgang managed his hectic life.
9. Name a movie or a documentary that can improve the comprehension of the music of this period.
Amadeus.
Because no other film has been made, either directly or indirectly about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart which puts the music first, above the drama and plot, regardless of any factual inaccuracies there may be. The Salieri intrigue, whether real or imagined, does not detract from the dramatic impact of the music upon any watcher. This film single-handedly changed my mind from wanting to be a historian who performed music to being a professional musician, but who continued to love history.
10. Do you think there’s a special place to be visited that proved crucial to the evolution of the 18th century music?
Difficult to answer…
Vienna certainly,…
… but also Mannheim and Naples.
These cities were home to a variety of composers who, at a certain time in the 18th century, and before the post-1789 revolutionary period, worked in vibrant musical environments which were dependent upon courtly and ecclesiastical patronage to survive. Stylistic changes ebbed and flowed in patronage systems which were also the frameworks within which composers from all over Europe constantly moved and interacted.
Thank you very much for having taken the time to answer our questions!
Thank you!
Copyright © 2019 MozartCircle. All rights reserved. MozartCircle exclusive property.
Iconography is in public domain or in fair use.
Interview December 2019: Great Musicologists – Marius H. Flothuis
1. Who is Marius Flothuis?
Marius Flothuis maintained a position of leadership within the musical world of the Nertherlands for more than 50 years and, at the same time, maintained a leading position also within the world of the Mozartian studies, thanks to his extremely active collaboration with Salzburg and with the Dutch Mozart Society.
A man of great erudition, knowledge and learnedness, his career as a professional musician/musicologist was marked by an important sign of continuity with the Dutch Mozartian tradition of the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century through his pre-WWII post as a young assistant to Rudolf Mengelberg (Concertgebouw), nephew and pupil of that Willem Mengelberg who, as a conductor successor of Kes, carried on (especially in the years 1895-1919) a good work of Mozartian promotion both through and within the Concertgebouw Orchestra, which in 1880s was not particularly famous for its Mozartian choices.
2. Marius Flothuis & The Period Before WWII
In the period before WWII Marius Flothuis completed his secondary studies and, at the same time, mainly as a self taught composer, started an intense activity of music composition which, since then, he continued all his life long. Among his teachers we remember: Jacques Presser (who according to his pupil and family friend Leo Samama had an enormous influence on Flothuis’s approach to the studies and the knowledge); Hans Brandts Buys (piano and music theory); Smijers (music theory, Utrecht); Bernet Kempers (music theory, Amsterdam).
In the 1930s, he became a Bachelor both in classical languages and in musicology (Amsterdam) and became assistant to Rudolf Mengelberg at the Concertgebouw Orchestra (1937).
In this period (the 1930s) Flothuis reveals all his Mozartian major interest and especially for a strict philological and historical informed approach, a fact rather unusual and revolutionary at that time.
With Lili Kraus, Flothuis prepares an intense and finely documented work of reconstruction of the style, of the quality and of the correctness of the performance of the piano concertos by Mozart, a research for knowledge and formal purity that was also at the very centre of the interests of the Dutch Mozart Society since the beginning of the 1902 and that even pre-dated it.
In a very special atmosphere of extremely accurate work, the idea that probably it was possible to use even the original instruments to play Mozart’s music created a first historical step towards a certain musical practice that will become common only 30 years later!
Lili Kraus and Flothuis worked on C.P.E. Bach and on his theory manual, reconstructed an orchestra of 45 performers in the style of Mannheim, carried on a subtle work on the type of touch and interpretation, in order to develop it as more similar to the original piano technique of Mozart.
This preparation led to a legendary Season of Concerts 1939-1940 (Lili Kraus-Flothuis), which marked a milestone in the long way towards a real Mozart Renaissance.
3. Marius Flothuis & The Period During WWII
WWII represents a period particularly difficult and hard for Flothuis. Lili Kraus left the Netherlands for the Dutch Indies to end up in a Japanese concentration camp, while Flothuis, under the Nazi regime, refuses to collaborate, loses his position, helps Jews. All this makes him an undesired figure in the occupied Netherlands and from 1943 to 1945 will spend these tremendous years in prison camps and concentration camps.
He managed to find his way back to the Netherlands only in May 1945, still alive but in very bad health conditions.
4. Marius Flothuis & The Period After WWII
Despite his personal conditions, on 27 October 1945 Flothuis managed to attend the general meeting of the Dutch Mozart Society and with Limperg, Halbertsma, Meeter and Nella Gunning created a committee to purge out the collaborators of the Nazi regime from the Dutch Mozart Society.
His personal health situation and also the situation of the Dutch Mozart Society are not particularly good at this moment, and only after a period spent as a librarian at the Foundation Donemus (1946-50) he will manage to have his position back at the Concertgebouw and to start a new florid season for the Dutch Mozart Society again in collaboration with the Mozarteum of Salzburg and also in collaboration with Leonhardt.
So the 1950s see the Dutch Mozart Society intensifying its Mozart promotion activities and its concert seasons organization.
In 1969 Flothuis gets his doctor’s degree with a work on Mozart (Amsterdam). And from 1974 to 1983 he is professor of musicology at the University of Utrecht.
In 1975, after 34 years spent as a major motor of the Association, Flothuis receives the honorary membership of the Dutch Mozart Society.
5. The Netherlands+Salzburg: The Great Mozartian Activity
Flothuis intense Mozartian scholarly activity and his long time contacts with the Mozarteum made him the perfect man to become the chairman of the Zentralinstitut fur Mozart-Forschung (Salzburg), a position he held from 1984 to 1994.
In 1989 there’s the celebration of the 50 years of the Dutch Mozart Society in the Netherlands and TV and Radio and Flothuis are at the very centre of this event with the special presence of high representatives of IS Mozarteum Salzburg.
In 1994 Flothuis writes also a play on a Mozartian subject: A domestic musical evening at the Mozarts. The play is performed by members of the Dutch Mozart Society: Passchler as Mozart, Peddemors as Haydn, Voorwijk as Constanze.
6. Flothuis, The Composer
During his intense life, Flothuis kept composing music and also the completion of some unfinished works (i.e. Mozart’s Adagio K580a, 1789).
He wrote ca. 100 compositions in any genre, but not operas. Many compositions by him are still today public’s favourite works.
In 2001 Flothuis died at the age of 87.
Marius Flothuis, Symphonische Muziek Op. 59 (1957)
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WORKS BY Marius Flothuis
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A) Written works by Marius Flothuis (a selection of the most important ones):
• Mozart (The Hague, 1940)
• Hedendaagse Engelse componisten (Amsterdam, 1949)
• Pianomuziek (Bilthoven, 1958)
• Mozarts bearbeitungen eigener und fremder Werke, Diss. (Kassel, 1969)
B) Scores editions by Marius Flothuis (a selection):
• Haydn J., Arianna a Naxos (Salzburg, 1965)
• Mozart W.A., Klavierkonzerte (4 concertos) (Kassel, 1972)
Copyright © 2019 MozartCircle. All rights reserved. MozartCircle exclusive property.
Iconography is in public domain or in fair use.
Interview June 2022: 10 Questions with David Stern
David Stern: Official Site
David Stern Site: David Stern Official Site
David Stern: Opera Fuoco Official Site
David Stern: Palm Beach Opera Official Site
David Stern: David Stern (Facebook)
David Stern: David Stern (Twitter)
David Stern: David Stern (YouTube)
David Stern: Palm Beach Opera
David Stern: Opera Fuoco (Facebook)
David Stern: Opera Fuoco (YouTube)
David Stern: David Stern (SoundCloud)
David Stern: Palm Beach Opera (Facebook)
David Stern: CDs
David Stern: CD 1: J.C. Bach – Zanaida
David Stern: CD 2: Berenice, che fai?
David Stern: CD 3: Gassmann – Ah, ingrato amor
1. This year we celebrate the 240th Anniversary of J.C. Bach (1782-2022). In 2011/2012 you produced certainly one of the most beautiful and charming operas by J.C. Bach: Zanaida (1763). Can you tell our readers about the amazing story, in details, of this production from the origin of the score to the actual musical performance by you with your Opera Fuoco and then your CD Album? You have explored J.C. Bach’s music also with your other CD Album Berenice, che fai!, featuring a World Premiere from Catone in Utica. What attracted you the most about J.C. Bach and his music? What do you think about J.C. Bach’s music relation to that by Mozart?
In 2009/2010, I was shown a manuscript of Johann Christian Bach’s Zanaida that was in the possession of a major collector in the US (Elias Nicholas Kulukundis, New York, who had purchased it in 1986: see also Warburton 2001).
I was thrilled to be given the chance to be part of the rebirth and the new edition of this wonderful score by the composer known as the London Bach, whose significance to the development of opera in the classical era cannot be ignored.
While his musical education was dominated by his father and his brother CPE (whose own style reflects Telemann), JC’s move to Italy in 1754 led to his championing the Italian galant style…
… While we always talk about his influence on Mozart’s writing, we must also acknowledge how JC brought to northern Europe bel canto vocal writingmixed with a classical orchestral color that marked the future of opera in the later part of the 18th century…
… His technique is more succinct than baroque composers, with shorter arias that avoid the tradition of da capo form, and a dramatic energy that pulls the listener into the narrative from the beginning of the story.
Although we don’t know the provenance of the manuscript, the score was definitely in JC’s hand and not that of a copyist. While there were a number of note errors in the score, the most notable issue was the absence of Roselane’s first aria: the implication was that in the original version there was a substitution aria, which today is unknown, so we inserted a number from La Clemenza di Scipione, in order to preserve the balance of arias that JC had intended…
… The orchestration is very particular: it contains tailles, which are tenor oboes. The clarinets in B flat mark the first time these instruments are used in London in the opera pit (J.C. Bach with his 1763 operas Orione, 19 February, and Zanaida, 7 May, introduced the use of clarinets in opera in England; see infra the famous account by Burney, in General History of Music, 1789), and in one aria of Zanaida‘s, these baroque clarinets soar over the dark color of the oboes to give a particular sound that I had never heard before…
…The particular nature of these clarinets led us to choose to perform the work at a pitch of 415, and not 430.
Then I asked Sigrid T’Hooft, an expert in period choreography, to do the staging because I felt it necessary to reveal the score in its original context after so many years of neglect.
We premiered the production in Bad Lauchstädt, a jewel of a theater built by Goethe, which only enhanced the ambiance of the opera’s setting…
… The young singers of the Opera Fuoco Young Artists Program could concentrate on resonating and communicating, rather than forcing their voices in a large hall…
… The orchestra was positioned in the old style, on benches facing each other…
… We really felt as if not that much had changed since 1763!
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DAVID STERN’S ZANAIDA ON SOUNDCLOUD
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A. Zanaida (1763) on SoundCloud
J.C. Bach, Zanaida:Ouverture
zanaida-ouverture
B. Zanaida (1763) on SoundCloud
J.C. Bach, Zanaida:Aria Ogni ragion
jc-bach-la-zanaida-ogni
C. Zanaida (1763) on SoundCloud
J.C. Bach, Zanaida:Acte I Almen la parca irata
zanaida-mustafa-acte-i-13
D. Zanaida (1763) on SoundCloud
J.C. Bach, Zanaida:Acte I Tortorella che abbandonata
zanaida-zanaida-acte-i-15-v2
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The Original 1763 Libretto, in Italian with English Translation:
Bach, Zanaida, the Libretto, London 1763
P. Corneilson’s Essay: Johann Christian Bach’s Zanaida
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J.C. Bach, Zanaida, Act II, Scene 8:
Aria: Parto, addio. Io vado a morte. (Zanaida)
This number from Zanaida was one of the most famous and celebrated one in 1763 with Mentre volgo intorno il piede palpitar mi sento il cuor.
From YouTube David Stern – Topic with auto commercial system.
J.C. Bach, Zanaida, Act II, Scene 4:
Aria: Se spiegò le prime vele. (Tamasse)
This number from Zanaida was another famous one in 1763 and was at the very centre of the well known anecdote between J.C. Bach and Mozart child-prodigy in London, who, at 8yo, immediately detected an erroneous note in the score (see supra).
From YouTube David Stern – Topic with auto commercial system.
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DAVID STERN
DISCOGRAPHY & PRODUCTIONS
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DISCOGRAPHY
• J.S. Mayr L’Amor Conjugale
• F. Gassmann Ah, Ingrato Amor
• Haydn, Mozart, J.C. Bach, Martines, Mazzoni, Hasse Berenice, Che Fai?
• Cherubini, Catel, Hérold, Boisselot French Romantic Cantatas
• J.C. Bach Zanaida
• J. S. Mayr Medea in Corinto
• G.F. Handel Jephtha
• G.F. Handel Semele
• J. Field Field: Piano Concertos Nos 2 & 3
• Clementi, Field, Mozart, Salieri, Steffan Concertos & Solo Works for Fortepiano
• O. Nicolai Orchestral Works Vol. 1
• O. Nicolai Orchestral Works Vol. 2
MUSIC PRODUCTIONS
Among the many music productions by David Stern, we remember:
MOZART
Airs d’opéras et de concerts, La Finta Giardiniera, Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Der Schauspieldirektor, Le Nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, Così Fan tutte, Die Zauberflöte
GLUCK
Orfeo ed Euridice, Iphigénie en Aulide
TELEMANN
Der Tag des Gerichts, Ino, Damon, Orpheus
HANDEL
Hercules, Semele, Jephtha, Giulio Cesare
J.S. BACH
Mass in B minor
J.C. BACH
Zanaida
CHERUBINI
Médée
MAYR
Medea in Corinto, L’Amor Conjugale
DONIZETTI
Don Pasquale, Rita, L’Elisir d’Amore
Many other music productions well reaching the composers of the 19th- and 20th-century, from Verdi to Bizet, Gershwin, Cole Porter, Mascagni, Leoncavallo to contemporary music productions.
David Stern & Opera Fuoco present:
J.C. Bach, Zanaida (1763)
2. (a) This year we celebrate also another important Anniversary: the 250th Anniversary of the 1772 premiere of Gassmann’s Oratorio La Betulia Liberata, inaugural performance for the 1771 founded Vienna Tonkünstlersozietät, founded on the initiative of F.L. Gassmann himself. You have produced a marvellous CD Album entirely dedicated to Gassmann’s Opera music (Ah, ingrato amor!) with really some remarkable pieces. What’s your opinion on Gassmann’s music within his own time and how have you selected the Opera Arias to be presented in your Album?
(b) Another fundamental musical work of re-discovery by you is, without doubt, Giovanni Simone Mayr, that Carpani (the biographer of Haydn), already in 1812!, considered an important pivotal composer in the history of Opera! Both your productions and CD Albums were received with international acclaim and awards (BBC Radio 3, Gramophone): Medea in Corinto (2010) and L’Amor Conjugale (2021). When did you decide to work on Mayr’s Operas and why? How have you rediscovered and studied his scores, after so long time of silence?
While I have been a long-time fan of Gassmann (1729-1774), particularly due to his Opera Seria, I did not choose the repertoire for the CD I made.
I have been working for a number of years with the NDR orchestra in Hannover, concentrating in baroque and classical repertoire. They had asked me to make the recording with the wonderful Ania Vegry, who had chosen arias that suited her voice. The contrasts and changes between comic and serious styles in this music are clear and very well constructed.
There are definitely Gassmann operas that are on my wish list, including Achille in Sciro.
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I have been fascinated by Simone Mayr’s music ever since I recorded his Medea in Corinto while I was music director in St. Gallen.
First of all the idea that a composer coming from Ingolstadt in Bavaria would become known as the father of Bel Canto, just because he was Donizetti’s teacher, is enough to pique interest in Mayr.
I was lucky to have as an Intendant in St. Gallen, Peter Heilker, who, like me, enjoyed finding works that had long been ignored. We threw ourselves into a new production of Medea, which was staged brilliantly by David Alden.
Actually, I find the music more compelling than Cherubini’s version. The orchestral writing is rich and multi-layered, while the bel canto vocal style is beautiful without being exaggerated…
… Having a young Lawrence Brownlee sing the role of Egeo was a very special experience.
Because of the Medea recording, I was approached a few years ago by the Beethoven Festival in Bonn to perform L’amor conjugale…
… This one-act work was one of four versions of the same story, of which the most known was of course Beethoven’s Fidelio.
Mayr’s interpretation is less political than Beethoven’s, but it holds its own as a first rate piece. The mixture of the buffo and the serio, the wonderful ensemble writing and the classical orchestral sound accompanying exquisite vocal writing make this opera well worth the detour…
… While the performances in Bonn were canceled due to Covid-19, I decided to pursue the project by making a recording on Aparté featuring three different generations of singers from the Opera Fuoco Young Artists Program.
We are looking forward to bringing the work to the Theater an der Wien in September of 2023, when we will be touring the work in other venues in Europe.
We asked the editor Pasal Duc to prepare the material for us, and going through the various versions that were performed in the 19th century, we could see the care and thought that went in to the orchestral details.
I do consider Mayr a significant crossroads composer, who gives us insight to how we can approach the development of opera style from the classic to the early romantic.
As it states on his tomb in Bergamo, Mayr was a musician who had no rival!
Carpani in his 1812 Gallery of Composers (and Painters!) identifies the music style of Mayr with the painting style of Maratta… that’s to say, a very successful artist in his art and works with a palette, that could oscillate from the most perfect Raphaellism to the most “photographically” realistic and dramatic Naturalism à la Caravaggio, with all the different tones inbetween… so Mayr, according to Carpani, is really “a significant crossroads composer, from the classic to the early romantic” (David Stern):
MozartCircle presents Carpani’s Grand Gallery of Composers 1812
David Stern & Opera Fuoco present:
J.S. Mayr, L’Amor Conjugale
David Stern & Opera Fuoco present:
J.S. Mayr, L’Amor Conjugale(Teaser 2)
3. You have studied at Yale and the Juilliard School. When has your passion for the music of Mozart and of the 18th-century begun and when have you decided to dedicate a part of your wide international career to bringing long-neglected masterpieces of the 18th-century Opera back to the modern theatres? What your relationship with Mozart’s music and his works? After many Mozartian productions and explorations (Mozart & Paisiello, Mozart & Haydn-Hasse-Martinez-JCBach, etc.), last year you have launched the brilliant Mozartian TV Project Figaro in the City, an Opera conceived as a television series! What led you to develop such project in such an unusual (for Opera) Format? How do you consider now this experience? Do you think that other Operas may be coming in the future in the same Format?
My conducting studies at Yale and Juilliard focussed primarily on romantic symphonic repertoire. My teacher, Otto Werner Mueller, had a very thorough methodology, but he hardly devoted time on operatic works.
When I had a chance to come to Paris to be an assistant for John Eliot Gardiner for a production of the Damnation of Faust, I jumped at the opportunity. John Eliot subsequently re-hired me for his Mozart cycle at the Châtelet Theater and all of a sudden I was working with a period orchestra. From this time on, my understanding of Mozart’s music developed a great deal…
… First of all, I learned that almost all of his composition has its basis in operatic expression, whether it is a slow movement of any of his piano concerti, or his Mass in C.
While of course I cherish every moment of the da Ponte triptych, I have had the opportunity to conduct Finta Giardinera, Schauspieldirektor, Idomeneo and Mitridate, among many others. These works paint the entire portait of Mozart, along with the composers just before and after, like Hasse, Berton, JC Bach, Gassmann, Mayr, Paisiello or Cimarosa.
Mozart can exist in a vacuum, but he becomes all the more human when placed in his historic context.
In early 2020 I had planned a performance of Figaro with the Opera Fuoco singers, and this production was supposed to be one of the highlights of their time with us. While the pandemic forced us to cancel almost all of our projects, I invented the idea of doing a version of Nozze suited to the situation:…
… we recorded the music with piano replacing the orchestra and a baroque guitar replacing the harpsichord, and then on playback we filmed the staging as if it was a television series.
Of course, since this crazy project occurred between shutdowns, our resources were limited, but as far as I know, it marked the first time an opera was filmed as a mini-series!
We edited the video in 2 seasons and 14 episodes and sold the project to MarqueeTV!
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David Stern & Opera Fuoco present:
Figaro in the City the Series
Here The 1st Episode free of Figaro in the City!
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I remember it as some the moments during these past two years when we felt hopeful again. I am not sure how I feel about continuing the experiment. Now that live performance has returned I think it is important not to rely too much on the video format, but if one does use the internet for culture, it should be in a way that is dedicated to the media, and not simply a filmed concert…
… Music must remain live, but we need to reach out with every kind of media to bring opera to as wide a public as possible! I think to achieve this we must show as much flexibility as possible in order to adapt our art to modern technology: a Youtube museum display of classical music is not going to reach new audiences!
David Stern & Opera Fuoco present:
The Making of The French Romantic Cantatas with Karine Deshayes
4. What the origin of your orchestra Opera Fuoco and what the story and the people behind it? What the origin and the meaning of the term Fuoco? Has it some intentional relation to the artistic world of the 18th-century? Your activity is not limited to the 18th-century music, but well reach the modern and the contemporary repertoire, especially with your work with Palm Beach Opera, this year celebrating its 60th Anniversary! How does your Young Artists Program work and what the main achievements you are particularly proud of? What your projects for the future?
It was after a few years of working with John Eliot Gardiner that he urged me to create my own ensemble.
My wife, Katharina Wolff, who is the co-director and concertmaster of Opera Fuoco, was already working with Reinhard Goebel and Musica Antiqua Köln. Together we plunged into the early music world and we have not looked back since…
… When I created the ensemble, it was with the intention of doing primarily vocal music. I believe that the period instrument revolution brought about major changes in music making, especially in Europe. One of the most important developments has been the notion of rhetoric in instrumental playing.
Baroque and classical bows and gut strings not only allow, rather they oblige musicians to take into account the affekt of the vocal line.
The variety of bow strokes that period instrumentalists master offers a greater palette than what one hears from most modern players…
… The paring of an articulation of a violinist with a particular word or emotion expressed by a singer, for me, is the greatest advantage of working with such ensembles.
________
Our use of the word fuoco in our title comes from this attention to language. I found the name with my colleague Jay Bernfeld, who also helped me create the ensemble, and we were looking for the word that would represent the fire that we seek in operatic expression…
… I often ask the instrumentalists to play more buffo or serio rather than piano or forte!…
… The level of expression that these instruments display is always impressive!
One of my first projects with Opera Fuoco was a tour of Mozart’s La Finta Giardiniera and for the run I auditioned only young singers!…
________
Having worked already extensively with young talent at the Festival in Aix-en-Provence, where I created the Académie Internationale d’Art Lyrique, I had developed an interest in helping young singers, and the Finta project convinced me to create a young artists program within Opera Fuoco!
Since 2004, Opera Fuoco has been putting on productions in Europe and Asia, and today, the list of the most important singers coming out of France contains a number of our graduates: Clémentine Margaine, Vannina Santoni, Lea Desandre, Chantal Santon and Adèle Charvet are just a sample of the singers who appear regularly in opera houses throughout Europe.
During their three years with the young artists program, they do operas, concerts and masterclasses in many different languages and styles, from Monteverdi to Cole Porter. The reality of the opera world today is that the singer needs as many tools as possible in order to shine…
… Relying on one particular repertoire for their careers is not the best idea and we give them experiences that they can use in their futures.
While I enjoy working with my company in Palm Beach on Grand Opera repertoire (this year I’ve produced Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore, to celebrate the 60th Anniversary of the Palm Beach Opera), coming home to Fuoco is always a special moment for me. Our future projects include Boyce’s Solomon, Handel’s Hercules, Martin y Soler’s L’Arbore de Diana and Marcello’s Arianna.
And Donizetti (1797-1848) was not only the pupil of J.S. Mayr, but Mayr himself, at some point, sent him to complete his studies in music composition at the most famous Bologna Padre Martini’s school, then under the direction of Stanislao Mattei (pupil and successor of Martini): so this is the link of Donizetti (and Rossini!) to that world renowned composition school of Padre Martini (the teacher and father of all composers), that had among its pupils Mozart, J.C. Bach, Martines and many other great composers of that Era, such as Jommelli, Myslivecek, Sarti (teacher of Cherubini) and F. Gassmann.
Palm Beach Opera presents:
Maestro David Stern on conducting a new opera
David Stern & Opera Fuoco present:
Mozart, Don Giovanni, Finale Acte II with Atelier Lyrique d’Opera Fuoco
Arte TV 2009
David Stern & Opéra-Théâtre de l’Eurométropole de Metz present:
Mozart, Idomeneo (1781)
5. Your favourite work by Mozart and your favourite work by J. Haydn.
There simply cannot be a favorite work of Mozart’s because it would be disdainful of every other work he composed!
Suffice to say that every time I conduct the coda to Nozze I feel like the countess’ extraordinary forgiveness allows all of humanity to atone for one brief moment.
I find that conducting Haydn is essential after having worked on Mozart. Where Mozart finds the perfect turn to a phrase, where he requires the interpreter to evoke the magic of the music without getting in the way, Haydn wants you to find your own voice in his music: it is music with infinite imagination and surprises!
Again I would be hard pressed to find my favorite moment, but I would venture the slow movement of the C major violin concerto, which I grew up listening to my father play.
David Stern and France Musique present:
the young singers Natalie Perez and Axelle Fanyo singing
Mozart, Le Nozze di Figaro (1786) (extraits) at Le live de la matinale
de France Musique
https://www.dailymotion.com/embed/video/x3e6d1a
Isaac Stern plays:
Haydn, Violin Concerto in C Major, Hob.VIIa:1: II. Adagio
From YouTube Isaac Stern – Topic with auto commercial system.
6. Do you have in mind the name of some neglected composer of the 18th century you’d like to see re-evaluated?
I must say that for me it remains Telemann (1681-1767)!
While hardly neglected, he is dreadfully underrated, even, or especially in Germany, where is considered a Vielschreiber.
The imagination and natural lyricism of his writing is always inspiring, and I consider his Ino, Tag des Gerichts and Damon to be first rate works!
David Stern & Opéra de Magdebourg present:
G.P. Telemann, Damon, 2016 (extrait)
7. Name a neglected piece of music of the 18th century you’d like to see performed in concert with more frequency.
Berton’s Nouvelle Chaconne (1727-1780) from Le Feu (1762/1773/1777; see the score at BNF), Rebel’s Les Elements (1666-1747) (both with music dedicated to Fuoco/Fire) and Idomenée by Campra (1660-1744; Maître de Musique de la Chapelle du Roi), which was the original model to Abate Varesco to develop Mozart’s Idomeneo, in part Dantesque, libretto (1781)!
Sorry, I see a French bias, but I am living in Paris!
… And also Marianna Martines’s Berenice, che fai?, which is featured on my CD Album!
Rebel’s Les Elements, with the most famous modernistic first number dedicated to Chaos and the elements (and fire!).
8. Have you read a particular book on Mozart Era you consider important for the comprehension of the music of this period?
Hildesheimer’s Mozart. I often pick it up again to get his refreshing opinion, even if I don’t always agree.
9. Name a movie or a documentary that can improve the comprehension of the music of this period.
Tout les Matins du Monde (I know, a bit too early, but it is still a wonderful music), dedicated to the viol player and composer Marin Marais (1656-1728), with Jordi Savall performing the music of the film…
… As a moment of self serving advertisement, I would add the documentary on YouTube which I made about the B minor Mass. If only for Andreas Scholl’s commentary and the music in the most authentic J.S. Bach’s environment (St. Thomas Kirche, Leipzig), it is worth watching!
[On June 23, 2019 the Opera Fuoco orchestra and soloists, the Tölzer boys choir and guest soloists Andreas Scholl and Laurent Naouri, performed Johann Sebastian Bach’s B-minor Mass under the direction of David Stern in the St Thomas church in Leipzig. For this performance, the configuration of the chorus in front of the orchestra closely follows the placement Bach regularly used for choral works with instrumental accompaniment during his years as Thomas Cantor, despite some modifications made to the organ loft in the 19th century.]
Aparté Music presents David Stern’s Documentary:
J.S. Bach, Mass in B minor BWV 232
D. Stern, Opera Fuoco, Tölzer Knabenchor, A. Scholl, L. Naouri
St Thomas Church – Leipzig
Webinar on J.S. Bach, Mass in B minor BWV 232
This webinar will present a live discussion about the documentary with some of the participants in the project.
Clemens Haudum is the musical director of the Tölzer Knabenchor, the boys’ choir featured in the performance. Countertenor Andreas Scholl, one of the world’s most renowned specialists of Baroque music, was a soloist in the concert.
Wide-ranging conductor David Stern is the founder and director of Opera Fuoco, the Paris-based international opera company and young artist program dedicated to lyric repertoire from the mid- 18th century to the present.
Christoph Wolff, Professor Emeritus of Musicology at Harvard University, is the foremost authority on the life and music of Johann Sebastian Bach, and was the director of the Bach Archive in Leipzig from 2001-2014.
The discussion will be moderated by Susan Boynton, Professor of Musicology at Columbia University.
Tout les Matins du Monde, official Trailer
10. Do you think there’s a special place to be visited that proved crucial to the evolution of the 18th century music?
Versailles of course, but even more authentically, the theater at Drottningholm:
• Opera Theatre
• The Drottningholm Royal Palace.
I have done two productions there, and they will remain with me for life!
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Interview May 2022: 10 Questions with Cuarteto Quiroga
Cuarteto Quiroga: Official Site
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Cuarteto Quiroga: CDs
Cuarteto Quiroga: Cuarteto Quiroga CD 1: Und Es Ward Licht
Cuarteto Quiroga: Cuarteto Quiroga CD 2: Heritage
Cuarteto Quiroga: Cuarteto Quiroga CD 3: Statements
1. You have recently released a marvellous couple of CDs Und es ward Licht!, entirely dedicated to Haydn and Mozart, with the intent also on exploring the world of symbolism in music! Can you tell us about the origin of this project? Can you present, to our readers, the single pieces selected for your Album and the reason of your choice? What’s your relationship with Haydn and Mozart and their music?
Every CD is, for us, much more than just a recording!…
… It is a way to actually depict our understanding of the string quartet repertoire, a real milestone in our development as ensemble, and also part of a larger project, which is to be shared with our audiences, through all our years of work, the great cultural legacy of this craft and this fascinating musical genre, flagship of our European identity…
… So all our CDs tell a story, raise certain aesthetic questions and propose a way of combining repertoires, which want to invite you to approach the listening in a different, original and hopefully unique way. We are strongly convinced that nowadays a CD cannot be only a nice audio material: it must be food for thought!
After the success of our previous recordings (dedicated to a Statement of Principles as a quartet, to the (R)evolution of the Second Viennese School, to the Turning Point, that the Brahms quartets imply in string quartet history, to the Folk-Based Roots of every music, to Spanish rarities for piano & quartet and to Our Music of Madrid in the time of Goya) in this double CD album we decided to join forces with the world renowned violist Veronika Hagen (founder of the celebrated Hagen Quartett, from Salzburg) to musically depict one of the most fascinating periods in music history: the birth and triumph of string quartet as genre and, with it, the advent of a new era, in which a new generation of Europeans saw in this pure, instrumental music an art, that emanated from reason and thought, but spoke directly to their heart and feelings, and so had the power to persuade and convince, perfectly combining the syntactic and structural force of language with the free semantic poetics of the imagination!…
… that’s to say: Music to illuminate a new world, music to instruct and seduce!… A universal, democratizing music, wholly modern and enlightened!
To illustrate this journey across the musical Aufklärung, we carefully selected a repertoire, that focuses on four masterpieces by Haydn and Mozart written all in C-major, the symbolic key of Light, the key chosen as well by Haydn himself to depict the moment of The Creation in his most famous oratorio, with the luminous cry of Und Es Ward Licht!.
From our point of view, few works define this period, as Haydn’s six Op. 33 quartets of 1781 do, quartets which practically musically operate in an almost foundational manner!…
… For this reason, one of the most emblematic quartets of the set is the No. 3 and is, at the same time, the first work on this recording, acting as a real gateway into that new world of string quartet… There is something of the dawn, an explosion of radiance about its opening, as if it were distilling, into a few bars, the whole journey into light and a longing for a universal language represented by the birth of the string quartet!
It is a fact, that the impact of the Op. 33 set was enormous! Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the greatest talent of his days – perhaps of all time – studied these pieces, led by fascination, and was soon inspired to publish six quartets of his own, dedicated to the man he regarded as his teacher, friend and (second) father figure, and for whom he had the greatest admiration, especially as a composer of string quartets…
… Mozart called these works the «fruit of a long and laborious endeavor» and poured the best of his expertise and spirit into them, creating some of the most complex, elaborate and intriguing works in his entire catalogue!
In the introduction of the last of the set, K.465, he seems to anticipate that journey from chaos to light. As a matter of fact, this is one of the most audacious openings in all 18th-century music and one of the most iconic in the string quartet literature as a whole… Conflict and resolution, chaos and order, darkness and light, Eros and Thanatos, ambivalences, that in Haydn and Mozart’s skilled and visionary hands acquire a profoundity and sincerity still moving beyond compare!
As a musical account of the advent of a new era, this album would be incomplete, if it failed to illustrate the other great revolution of the age: the birth of the public concert and the explosion of the editorial business. For it was during the Enlightenment, that instrumental music underwent a Copernican turn by moving from the private space (and not just private, but exclusive, in the case of the aristocracy and high clergy) to the public sphere. Transformed into an animated, non-verbal ideological debate, a wordless conversation, that went beyond the discourse of the passions and communicated logic and ideas, as suggested by Wittgenstein, it became the centerpiece of social soirées and, in the final decades of the 18th-century, made that gigantic leap from bourgeois and aristocratic salons to public arenas! Haydn’s public, virtuosic music gestures of Op.74 n.1, and Mozart’s glorious Quintet K.515 represent perfectly this kind of approach to composition, in which chamber music becomes the favorite tool to democratize music knowledge and bring it to the agora publica.
Und Es Ward Licht: Official Trailer (Cuarteto Quiroga)
This recording explains and celebrates a musical process, which, child of its time, ended up shaping a way of writing and making music, that would guide generations of composers, performers and music lovers, and whose ethical and aesthetic reflections still gleam brightly today…
That is why the four works of this double CD are beacons of light that relate to and intersect with one another… listening to them leads you across a great world of the highest level of eloquence… their beams of light triangulates and depicts, in the sonic atmosphere, a musical map, that defines the new era of modernity…
It is thus a journey from darkness to light, from ingenuity to genius, from the human to the sublime… a journey to the very roots of Europe’s musical and cultural identity!
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CUARTETO QUIROGA
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CUARTETO QUIROGA
AITOR HEVIA (violin)
CIBRAN SIERRA (violin)
JOSEP PUCHADES (viola)
HELENA POGGIO (cello)
2. In your repertoire you have developed an important section of lesser known Spanish composers of the 18th-century and demonstrated that their music writing was, in reality, on high levels: hidden gems, so to say! When has your love for this 18th-century Spanish repertoire begun? When and what have you discovered? Your 2019 CD Album Heritage was critically acclaimed and selected for ICM Awards: can you present, to our readers, the composers chosen for your Album and their music? To what extent do you think Haydn model attracted those composers?
We were always somehow aware of the fact, that there was an amazing cultural heritage, in the field of string quartet, that was linked to our country, and that it was actually neglected in many ways, remaining unknown to the most of the music lovers and even quartet players, not only in our country, but also internationally.
We have explained this fact very often: most people around the world, and in Spain too, identify the birth of string quartet with the name of the great Austrian composer Joseph Haydn, so called by musical tradition the father of the string quartet…
Cuarteto Quiroga: Heritage Album – Teaser (Brunetti String Quartet L.185)
… As a consequence, the collective cultural imaginary identifies the string quartet, thus, as a central European phenomenon, mainly linked to Vienna, Mannheim, and maybe northern Italy and the Bohemian lands, as epicentres of a musical earthquake, which would shake the European music scene forever. Furthermore, when the expansion of quartet as totemic genre is studied, the names of London, Paris, Amsterdam, the court of Prussia and even the nordic Stockholm appear in the picture consistently, while one European capital is usually left behind, as culturally peripheral: Madrid.
Through our contact with the work of extraordinary musicologists, like Prof. Miguel Ángel Marín (MozartCircle Interview:January 2022), we became more and more acquainted with the immensity of the legacy, that still remains silent in the libraries and the archives and never reaches the concert halls. We started reading intensively loads of string quartets, discovering with amazement and joy the extraordinary music of several composers, that worked in Spain in the late 18th-century…
… We were absolutely fascinated: those were really, as you say, hidden gems!
As a quartet that lives and works in Madrid, we felt then that it was our duty to contribute a little bit to illustrate musically, how the town, we live in daily, during the Enlightenment, became one of the most active capitals of the European string quartet scene. In fact, around the Royal Court, the arts flourished, and while the now world renowned Francisco de Goya was chamber painter for the Royal Household – producing masterworks that have attained all the historic attention they deserve – a bunch of extremely talented, skillful and brilliant composers, such as Boccherini, Brunetti, Canales, Almeida and many others, actively and extensively composed a large catalogue of chamber music – especially string quartets – that unfortunately today (and with no musical justification!) has remained in oblivion or has been regarded with disdain…
Cuarteto Quiroga plays Brunetti String Quartet L.185
… Indeed, as you suggest in your question, the monumental figure of Joseph Haydn acquired a stature and a level of influence in many composers, already during his lifetime, that has overshadowed many other excellent composers, but, if we want to understand well, what a great international phenomenon string quartet was in the late 18th-century, we need to open the scope of our view a bit more and widen the frame of the historical and musical picture…
… In fact, many composers followed Haydn’s model of string quartet, brought to perfection in his Op.20 and sealed with his Op.33, but many others, like Boccherini, approached string quartet in such a personal, individual way, that we could say nowadays, that there was also a Boccherini paradigm, already well-respected during his lifetime, besides and beyond Haydn himself!…
… In Madrid the two models (Haydn & Boccherini) co-exist in the music of the composers of the time (Brunetti, Canales, Almeida, and many others), but each of them brought their own personality to their string quartet works, and that is, why we selected this anthology, as a way to showcase the diversity of the Madrid string quartet scene…
… We also performed their music, by using the gut strings, with bows in process of transition and, as we always do, following historically informed performance practice criteria.
We can really assert, without doubt, that this Heritage is of the great musical value, and, that it is of capital importance to fully comprehend the birth and expansion of one of the most important genres of European music: the String Quartet!
Cuarteto Quiroga plays Joao Pedro de Almeida Mota: String Quartet Op. 6, nº 2, in D Minor. Finale
3. (a) Your quartet received its name after the great Spanish violinist Manuel Quiroga (1892-1961). Can you tell us about him? Why have you decided to dedicate your quartet to such a great violinist?
(b) What is the origin of your quartet?
(c) Of your many acclaimed tours across the world do you remember one or a couple of them, that has left a great enduring impression on you?
Well, Galician violinist Manuel Quiroga Losada, is undoubtedly, together with Pablo de Sarasate and Pau Casals, one of the most outstanding string players of Spanish music history and one of the greatest violin players of the first half of the 20th-century.
Unfortunately, although during the great moments of his short career, his fame would be internationally acclaimed, his memory has almost vanished in present times. He suffered a terrible accident in New York in the late 30s, and could never play again.
The explosion of recorded music came right after his musical death, and therefore many have forgotten his incredible stature. We felt it was a must to pay tribute to his incredible figure by naming our quartet after him, helping to bring back his memory to all those incredible halls, where he once performed and where he has been sadly forgotten by many…
… We are all the result of a certain legacy, a certain heritage, and it is an act of justice to pay tribute to our ancestors and to those who, in the past, paved the way for us.
But please let us tell you a little bit about him, because his life was fascinating and it is really our duty to take every chance we get to share his story…
… born in the Galician town of Pontevedra on April 15th, 1892 he moved first to Madrid to study violin with Professor José del Hierro and in 1909 to Paris where he attended lessons with Edouard Nadaud and also Jaques Thibaud. At the Paris Consevatoire (the main musical academic institution of the time) he meets Georges Enesco, Eugène Ysaÿe and discovers his admiration for Fritz Kreisler. Two years later Kreisler himself would be —alongside with Lucien Capet, Martin Marsick, Jules Boucherit and Jaques Thibaud, among others— one of the members of the jury which, under the chairmanship of Gabriel Fauré, would award a 19-year-old Quiroga with the 1st prize of the Paris Conservatoire, following the unwalked path of Pablo de Sarasate…
… Le Monde Musical stated then: «Sarasate is not dead, Quiroga is his heir». Other important newspapers and magazines of the time would also echo the great achievement of the young galician violinist: Le Matin, Le Figaro, Le Journal… Other prizes and awards followed, such as the Sarasate Prize, the Jules Garcin or the Monnot.
During those Paris years Quiroga meets his partner and pianist, Marta Leman (1st prize in Piano the same year as Quiroga) as well as many artists and key figures of the musical world of the time: Falla, Turina, Casals, Nin, Ruiz Casaux, Cortot, Paul Paray or Darius Milhaud (who would obtain the accésit at the same concours won by Quiroga). The applause becomes international, and concerts and tours consolidate his fame as violinist virtuoso until the beginning of the 1st World War. In his hometown of Pontevedra he is received as a local hero and performs with Granados at the Piano. He tours all over Spain and France programming not only the classical repertoire but also Sarasate’s and Kreisler’s compositions and transcriptions…
Manuel Quiroga plays Spanish Dances for violin and piano (Op. 23 nº2) from Pablo Sarasate
… By the end of 1913 he signs his first contract with the international manager J. J. Schürmann, who represented also leading musicians worlwide such as Kubelik, Paderewski, Isadora Duncan, etc. After a big and succesful Europe Tour together with José Iturbi (in Austria he was released, helped by Spain’s King Alfonso XIII, after a short detention, under the accusation of espionage), he returns to France and does his first American Tour, starting in New York City.
Installed in Paris since 1917 with his couple Marta Leman, when the end of the Great War allows concert seasons to function normally again, Quiroga visits Portugal, his natal Galicia, and all the main Spanish Cities, with a great triumph at Barcelona’s Palau de la Música Catalana.
1919 and 1920 will be the years of his british debut, with recitals, among other great halls, at the prestigious Wigmore Hall of London. Critics and colleagues, such as violinist Mischa Elman (who wrote he would never dare to play again a single note, after listening to Quiroga’s virtuosity) and cellist Guilhermina Suggia wrote about him with awe. Suggia, for example would describe, with amazement, his «marvellous and flawless» interpretation of Tartini’s Devil’s Trill Sonata.
Manuel Quiroga plays Cadenza for Sonata in G minor The Devil’s Trill (Tartini – F. Kreisler)
England, Scotland, France, Germany, Portugal, Switzerland, Belgium (where he would perform together with Ysaÿe) and Spain stage the success of Quiroga, always accompanied by great pianists such as Paul Paray, J. José Castro or Marta Leman herself.
Igor Stravisnky listens to him and confesses publicly his admiration for Quiroga. Composers such as E. Naudet, R. Penau, J. Arnay and S. Rousseau write music for him. Ysaÿe himself would dedicate his Six Violin Solo Sonatas to the six greatest living violinists of his time. Quiroga was one of them.
In 1924 he returns to the USA, with a debut at New York’s Carnegie Hall which would put the great Mischa Elman in a state of shock, as he would declare publicly himself. He returns to Britain and plays with the London Symphony Orchestra under Sir Thomas Beecham, touring as well Belgium and Spain.
In 1926 he makes his first South American tour (Argentina, Uruguay) playing with a Stradivarius lent to him by J. J. Wallen. His return to New York in 1928 would bring him the chance to play on a Guarneri del Gesù, courtesy of the rich benefactor J. Wanamaker. Concerts all over America, includig Cuba and Mexico would follow. Still settled in Paris, he starts his phonographic activity, recording with labels RCA Victor and Pathé. In 1931, he is awarded with the highest distinction granted by the French Government: La Légion D’Honneur. The Spanish equivalent would be only granted to him years later: La Encomienda de Alfonso X El Sabio.
1933 and 1937 see his last tours to America, with concerts with the New York Philharmonic under the baton of the great Georges Enesco, or recitals with Mischa Levitzki and José Iturbi. It was precisely after greeting farewell to his dear Iturbi, in New York, where they had performed together, when he was fatally run down by a lorry. As a tragic result, he lost mobility in his arm and soon developed a paralysis.
When 45 years old, he tries without success to keep on playing for a short while after the accident, but ignored after the tragic Civil War in Spain, he will only continue with his musical work as a composer, being forced to leave the violin behind.
His talent as painter will be his only artistic shelter with time as well as the brilliant caricatures that ornamented his letters. With big suffering, also due to Parkinson’s disease, and the economical problems due to the complicated treatment of his delicate health, Manuel Quiroga Losada died on April 19th, 1961, close to his new partner Maria Galvani.
His artistic legacy (paintings, drawings, original scores, and his two violins, an Amati and a Lambert) is today custody of the Museum of Pontevedra, and we indeed encourage everyone to visit this institution and find out about his incredible legacy, as painter, as composer and pubic figure. You can also find online several recordings of the 20s and 30s that show his incredible virtuosity, dazzling musicianship and sincere interpretative poetry.
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(b) What is the origin of your quartet?
Well, our first rehearsals and concerts were held actually in Galicia, the land of Manuel Quiroga himself. We are soon going to celebrate the 20 years Anniversary of our Quartet in July 2023-2003.
We started, firstly, only for the pure enjoyment of playing together, as Aitor and Cibrán, the founding members of the quartet, shared a common dream of having a serious, professional string quartet. Then, after the first attempts, we realized we were sharing something very meaningful and powerful, and we decided to take it as seriously as possible…
… We left all our professional commitments and went to study the discipline and craft of string quartet playing with Prof. Rainer Schmidt (Hagen Quartett), sort of our musical father, at the Reina Sofia School of Music, in Madrid. There we met also one of our main pedagogical references, our dear teacher Walter Levin (LaSalle Quartet) and from then we went on studying with the great Hatto Beyerle (Alban Berg Quartett)…
… These three giants of the Art of the String Quartet have shaped our personality tremendously and we can understand, who we really are, only thanks to all we have learnt from them!
We were then lucky enough to be awarded in several competitions for string quartet of international relevance, and that helped to build an international career that has led us, slowly and with much work, discipline, dedication and respect for the music, to where we are now. We can only feel blessed and thankful for making our profession, out of our passion, and we can only wish we can continue doing it for many years from now…
… to share the incredible beauty of this genre, our genuine love for this craft, its enlightened message and its important civic and ethical values.
Festival Monteleón: an Interview with Cuarteto Quiroga
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(c) Of your many acclaimed tours across the world do you remember one or a couple of them, that has left a great enduring impression on you?
We have been asked this question several times, and it is truly impossible to respond faithfully and truthfully, as, after almost two decades of activity, the amount of concerts is quite big and the memories pile up, filled with incredible experiences, legendary halls, inspiring chamber music partners, amazing works of music, old and new…
… It would be probably unfair to select experiences, but we remember dearly all those places where music was not there before, and all of our outreach activities: performing in a prison, for all inmates; performing in hospital, for chemotherapy and dialysis patients; in a children’s clinic, in neighborhoods, where institutions have forgotten, that culture and beauty are also a human right, because they feed our soul, our spirit, our imagination, our dreams, small villages, where string quartet music had never been heard before…
… String Quartet was devised to bring music out of the privileged spheres, and we take this part of our task very seriously…
… Music exists not only for those who love it already, but, principally and especially, exactly for those who, in reality, need it the most!
4. (a) Manuel Quiroga played on his special violins and you yourself in 2012 played on four decorated Stradivarius of the Royal Collection of the Palace of Madrid, performing music by Haydn, Arriaga, and Beethoven! Can you tell us the story of the instruments you have played and you are playing across your career and tours and their peculiarities?
(b) What your first tip or advice to a group of young musicians who want to start a new activity as a quartet?
(c) You have worked also on modern and contemporary music: what path are you following in this?
(d) What your projects for the future?
Cuarteto Quiroga has its official residence throughout the year
at Madrid’s Cerralbo Museum:
Cerralbo Museum: Cuarteto en Residencia
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Indeed, Manuel Quiroga had the chance to play on several instruments of the most famous makers. During different periods of his life he played on violins by Amati, Stradivari, Guadagnini and Guarneri del Gesù, some of them owned by him himself, some of them on loan from different benefactors and sponsors.
The so-called Royal Stradivarius collection of instruments (or Palatine Stradivarius) which we had the fortune to play belongs to Patrimonio Nacional (National Heritage of Spain), a public institution of the Spanish state that takes care of many collections that once where property of the Crown and now are state owned and managed…
-> The Strad presents the Decorated Stradivaris of Madrid Royal Palace
… These are a unique set of instruments, not only for being four of the only eleven decorated pieces in the world built by Antonio Stradivari, but particularly since they are the only group of instruments conceived by the famous maker as a set. Originally they would have been at least five: two violins, two violas and one cello, but one of the violas (this is a long story that deserves a book by itself!) was lost and what we have left is a pure string quartet of decorated instruments.
They are strictly kept at the Royal Palace of Madrid, under extreme measures of security and protection, and exhibited at the Royal collections to be seen and, sometimes, to be also heard, when played in concerts.
Interview Cuarteto Quiroga (Spanish+English Subtitles):
at 2 min 27 sec you can see Cuarteto Quiroga playing the Royal Stradivarius instruments and listen to their performance of Mozart Quartet K465.
We had the honour and privilege to be the first quartet-in-residence who performed on these instruments on a regular basis during almost four straight years, playing string quartet music by Boccherini, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Arriaga, Schubert, Brahms, Webern, Schönberg, Kurtág, and even premiering new music, like Cristóbal Halffter’s 10th String Quartet, dedicated in memoriam to Miguel de Cervantes and written for us, under a commission of Patrimonio Nacional.
In that period of time, through all these broad repertoire, we were not only fascinated by their wonderful sound quality, but also by how naturally the four instruments blended with one another, so that producing an homogeneous quartet sound, when needed, was effortless and a real joy for us. You could really feel that Stradivari had really conceived them to be played together!
As this Palatine Collection of decorated Stradivari is probably the most extraordinary set of instruments in the whole world, we would wish that they would be performed more often — of course, under the necessary caution of professional surveillance by expert violin makers — and enjoyed by the audiences of the world that have the chance to visit Madrid’s magnificent Royal Palace…
… Unfortunately the policies are over-restrictive and those instruments are treated more as objects for visual admiration than as tools to produce the most sublime sounds a string quartet can obtain. So we would wish for them to be more widely presented to the general public through recordings, videos and other audiovisual formats, since the heritage of this collection should be, fundamentally, a sonic one, not only a silent dream inside a glass case for visual display.
Our current instruments in the quartet are a mix of old a new makers. We can all tell you individually about them:
A. Hevia (violin): I have played many violins since I started playing as a young boy. Sometimes it is sad to say goodbye to an instrument that has been a crucial part of your life, a faithful companion for many years. The violin that has accompanied most of my life, since we started our Cuarteto Quiroga, is an extraordinary composite violin made in Milano in the 18th-century by two of the greatest Italian luthiers of that time: G. Grancino and C. F. Landolfi. I still love this violin, which I own, but, starting last year 2021, I have been playing on a modern instrument made in Vienna, by Julia Maria Pasch in 2021, and I am extremely happy with its sound and what it brings to our quartet.
C. Sierra (violin): I personally have the incredible chance to play, thanks to the incredible generosity of the heirs of Paola Modiano, on a very old instrument, made in 1682 by one of the greatest makers in history: Nicola Amati. It was owned, back in those days, by a legendary violinist and quartet player, Arnold Rosé. It is beautiful to think, where (as it happens mostly with many works we play now!) it was played before by Rosé, I mean this very instrument!,…
… in his string quartet, the Rosé Quartett of Vienna, responsible for giving life to music, which is very dear to us, and which we defend and program a lot: that of the composers of the so called Second Viennese School, Schönberg, Berg & Webern…
… It is a fantastic violin, a work of art, so extremely well crafted that, from a constructive point of view, it reaches utmost perfection. It has also a fantastic sound that has been developing extraordinarily through the years, opening more and more and becoming more alive day by day. That is, why we defend those instruments and we think that, like the Royal Stradivari of Madrid, such instruments should be played regularly: they are living creatures and leaving them in silence only damps their beauty and perverts the reason why they were built on the very first place.
J. Puchades (viola): I am very lucky to own two violas, made in 2006 and 2013 by the great living maker Stephan von Baehr, based in Paris. The 2006 one has an incredible projection, but the 2013 one is a bit warmer and more suitable for chamber music, which is why it is the one I currently play on, because it really fits well in the string quartet and has also a distinctive timbre, that favors the possibility of coming through the sound of my colleagues, when it is so needed.
H. Poggio (cello): My cello has been my instrument since I was 15 years old. It is a French one made in the atelier of Leon Bernardel in Paris, at the beginning of the 20th-century. It has a rich, rounded and clear sound with a particularly powerful projection in the lower strings, which makes it a wonderful instrument for a string quartet bass.
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(b) What your first tip or advice to a group of young musicians who want to start a new activity as a quartet?
Starting a string quartet it is not so complicated. But what is really difficult is to keep it up in the long term, as there are many challenges during the journey.
To become a professional ensemble we would advice the young players to make sure that the four members of the group understand and share the same level of commitment that requires embarking themselves in such a magnificent adventure. Finding the right partners, is always tricky, as they must be not only the ones whose playing you respect or even admire, but the people that can create a healthy working environment, being able to give and take criticism always in a generous way, with courtesy and a constantly constructive perspective…
… They must be willing to invest a lot of time, hard work, energy and probably money, a well as making decisions that will interfere with their personal life’s ones and plans; all of this without having, most likely the logistic nor economic support of institutions…
… This implies having an enormous respect for your colleagues’ needs. We always say that the happiness of each individual member is the happiness of the quartet. This is like a foundational law for our group. The young string quartet has to be ready to travel a lot and to spend many hours in learning, researching repertoires, rehearsing, practicing individually and studying as a group, as well as understanding their adventure also as an entrepreneurial endeavor…
… Another essential advice, during the first years of the group, is to seek the advice and guidance of one (or various) good teachers, experienced quartet players, that can guide them through the probably turbulent path of their beginnings, where so many questions arise and a huge amount of answers are possible and sometimes misleading…
… A true Maestro, a generous and socratic pedagogue, will help, through questions, to find the artistic personality of the new collective, which, in the case of a string quartet, must happen necessarily through the process of learning how to successfully communicate a musical speech that has been elaborated by four musicians with different personalities and backgrounds…
… An important thing to keep in mind is to not neglect the individual studies of their own instruments, so that each member can contribute, with their best technical preparation, to the group, being up to the technical challenges of the music and providing colleagues with support and response. String quartet is both a marvelous and a difficult world, so once an ensemble commits to it, technical issues of their own instruments should not get on the way. For all the above mentioned reasons, the fascinating adventure of string quartet can only be dealt with properly, when passion and love fuel the energy of the group: passion for the craft of conversational music and sincere, immense love for the vast, complex, wondrous repertoire that we quartet players have ahead of us.
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(c) You have worked also on modern and contemporary music: what path are you following in this?
String Quartets have always been champion defenders and supporters of contemporary music in all the moments of history, since this form of music making exists, stimulating thus composers to create new works and putting all their craft into action to broaden the repertoire.
Cuarteto Quiroga: Anton Webern, Rondo für Streichquartett
Therefore, we as well, as quartet, are committed to perform music written by living composers, because we understand it as a beautiful and natural duty, an instinctive must, and because we feel both performers and composers nourish each other with this mutual collaboration in ways that go way beyond describable.
We can say that we are always excited to premiere a new piece as well as to perform any contemporary piece (a piece from our era, from our time) for string quartet, out of the wonderful and enormous repertoire that already exists.
World Premiere of JOYCE, by Peter Eötvös, performed by Cuarteto Quiroga & Jörg Widmann, Live in HD
Besides, for us, living directly the process of creating a new piece, feeling and debating with the composer the challenges of notation, the complex relation between imagination and sonic realization, the space that exists between the moment a piece is conceived and how it can be delivered to an audience, helps us to approach the music of the old masters in a richer way, as we can perfectly well see in their music all the complex dialectics that exist in contemporary creation, and the enormous space between literalness and faithfulness, in which the fruitful seed of interpretation can germinate!
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(d) What your projects for the future?
Our most immediate engagements include:
1. performances of Absolute Jest by John Adams for string quartet and orchestra with the Symphony Orchestras of Asturias and Tenerife,
John Adams on Absolute Jest inspired by Beethoven’s last works
2. some concerts where we put in relation the complete Brahms’s string quartets (now that we celebrate the 125th anniversary of his death) with the three last ones of Beethoven (a project which finds its basis in our current residency at Madrid’s Círculo de Cámara),
3. a project for Beethovenhaus Bonn, where we put in context the choral influence in string quartet writing, through the works of Cristóbal de Morales, György Kurtág, Jörg Widmann and Ludwig van Beethoven,
4. the participation in the Barcelona String Quartet Biennial with our dear Veronika Hagen,
5. concerts in festivals of Germany, France, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, Belgium, Norway,…
6. … and also our coming recording, which will reflect upon the most extreme experiments of compression with the form of string quartet (bringing it almost to an atomic unity), through works by Haydn, Beethoven and Bartók…
… For the next seasons we are also preparing to celebrate more than two decades of existence as a string quartet, and for that a very special cycle of concerts will be then prepared… Stay tuned!
Cuarteto Quiroga performs L. van Beethoven: String Quartet n.16 Op.135 in F (Vivace)
Cuarteto Quiroga performs A. Schönberg, Streichquartett D Dur, Andantino grazioso
5. Your favourite work by Mozart and your favourite work by J. Haydn.
C. Sierra (violin): All their string quartets!… I just could never pick a single one!
H. Poggio (cello): Yes, so true! It is actually way too hard and almost unfair to choose just one piece from the spectacular and vast body of works both by Mozart and Haydn, they actually wrote for so many different genres! To mention just a few of them, I would pick, from Mozart, the Requiem K.626, Don Giovanni K.527, Piano concerto n.20 K.466 and, of course the string quartets he dedicated to Haydn.
From Haydn, some of my favorite works include The Creation, the London Symphonies, his first Cello Concerto, the Seven Last Words of Christ and the magnificent string quartets Op.76.
A. Hevia (violin): I totally agree, it is difficult or impossible to choose just one piece among the incredible catalogue of works. But if I have to choose (and leaving aside the quartets) I could agree with Helena on Mozart’s Requiem and Haydn’s Seven Last Words of Christ, in its string quartet version, of course!
J. Puchades (viola): As I agree on this impossible and unfair exercise, let me make choice based solely on my own biography: as a teenager I heard a zillion times Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante and I still love every beat of it… For Haydn, again leaving aside the quartets, I would also go for Die Schöpfung and the Seven Last Words.
C. Sierra (violin): Let me be then a bit of a dissonant weirdo. I recently discovered Mozart’s Kleine Gigue K.574. That is almost 20th-century music! Fascinating. And I would really like to make advocacy of the lesser-known quartets by Haydn: the Op.9, Op.17, the Op.42, so linked to Spain…
Mozart, Gigue in G major K574 (Alexander Lonquich)
6. Do you have in mind the name of some neglected composer of the 18th century you’d like to see re-evaluated?
H. Poggio (cello): The composers that belong to our CD Heritage: Boccherini, Canales, Almeida and Brunetti.
That is the main reason we decided to record some of their string quartets, but there are more Spanish composers of that century that deserve to be played and known by audiences such as Francesco Corselli (1705-1778; another italian established in Madrid), Antonio de Literes (1673-1747) or José Teixidor y Barceló (1750-1811), to mention just a few of them.
Cuarteto Quiroga: Op.24 No.3 G191 by Boccherini.
C. Sierra (violin): Indeed, the list of composers working in Spain is fascinating!
Let me then get out of our borders and cry out, very loudly, one great, awesome name: Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach!…
… Probably the wildest, boldest, craziest composer of that time. It is, for me, still both fascinating and irritating! the way he is still de facto kept out of the mainstream repertoire, often ignored, sometimes even neglected. His music is not only incredibly jawdropping, but also essential to understand the true aesthetic spirit of the Enlightenment.
C.P.E. Bach: a lively (and more correct?) rendering of Sanguineus und Melancholicus H. 579 Wq.161/1, that can be considered a sort of prototype of Genius Movement/Sturm und Drang program, where Sanguineus is Storm and Melancholicus is a typical aspect of Drang (des Herzens).
J. Puchades (viola): As a violist I could mention also a composers like Alessandro Rolla (also active in the beginning of the 19th-century) who wrote so many beautiful pieces for strings… and, wandering again in the 19th-century, Ferdinand Ries, whose string quintets I particularly adore.
A. Hevia (violin): Alright then, if we open the gates of the early stage of the next century, let me advocate for Arriaga, whose music is still purely classical and whose three quartets, written, when he was just 16 years!, should be really part of the repertoire of any quartet in the world! I sincerely believe that, if he had lived more than 19 years,… today,… he would have been among the greatest composers of his era!
7. Name a neglected piece of music of the 18th century you’d like to see performed in concert with more frequency.
A. Hevia (violin): May I insist on my early-19th-century-but-still-classical deviation? Arriaga String Quartets! Three masterpieces of the string quartet repertoire that are unfortunately rarely known and performed.
Arriaga: String Quartet No.3 in E flat major
Mov. 1
Mov. 2
Mov. 3
Mov. 4
H. Poggio (cello): To go back to the pure 18th-century, the Boccherini cello concertos are wonderful works that are rarely heard in concerts in comparison with all the other cello concertos, especially in comparison with those of his contemporary Haydn. I particularly like the no. 6 (G.479) and no. 9 (G.482) and believe they should all belong to the standard cello repertoire that is taught in music education institutions as well as played regularly at concert halls.
J. Puchades (viola): Keeping in the Concerto field, as violists we know very well the Hoffmeister D-major viola Concerto, but his B-flat major concerto is truly a marvel, full of inventiveness.
C. Sierra (violin): Now that Helena goes back to Madrid with Boccherini concerti, I would mention the cello concerto by Francisco Brunetti, Gaetano’s son: a truly nice piece!
I could, as curiosities and in consideration of this, also advocate all these wonderful pieces that Haydn wrote for weird instruments: Fugue for a Mechanical Clock, Concerti for Lira Organizzata, the incredible Baryton trios…
… But, seriously speaking, if I have to choose one single piece, that would be, no doubt, Boccherini’s Stabat Mater. How and why is that masterpiece not a more well-known work?… Or at least as respected as Pergolesi’s! Boccherini’s Stabat is simply a true masterpiece of sheer beauty.
Schloss Esterházy Official Video: the Baryton, favourite instrument played by Prince Esterházy himself and for which Haydn wrote hundreds of splendid compositions.
An extra-rare fully restored clock with organ built by George Pyke (1766): in the video, towards the end, you can hear the organ clock performing Der Wachtelschlag (i.e. Call of the Quail) written by Haydn for organ clock.
The baryton played live by Rainer Zipperling
8. Have you read a particular book on Mozart Era you consider important for the comprehension of the music of this period?
H. Poggio (cello): There are many books (treatises and methods) that inform us on the performance practice of that period, so, to pick up just two of them, I would mention one from the 18th-century and one from the present time.
1. A treatise on the fundamental principles of violin playing by Leopold Mozart is a crucial source for string players (but not only) on the way musicians thought and performed music at that time.
2. Classical and Romantic Performing Practice by Clive Brown is probably one of the biggest and most complete compilation of studies about historic performing practice and therefore it’s very useful.
A. Hevia (violin): I agree. Leopold Mozart’s Treatise on the Fundamental Principles of Violin Playing is probably the best source to be used to understand, how to approach the basis and grounds for performing Mozart’s music, although there are also other treatises which help us to understand the music making of that era. To mention a few: J. J. Quantz, C.P. E. Bach or J. G. Türk.
J. Puchades (viola): I couldn’t agree more. All these sources are essential to approach, with rigor, the music of this period!
C. Sierra (violin): To get out of treatises (let me add to the list J. Matthesson or J.J.Fux) I would suggest the reading of Charles Burney’s Present State of Music in France and Italy, a fascinating trip through the reality of music, seen through contemporary 18th-century eyes.
I also believe that it’s important to read the texts of Rousseau, B.J. Feijoo, Batteux, Voltaire or Kant (to metion only a few) about music and language, but not only, as well as the poetry of Goethe, the plays of Molière, or the fables of Samaniego,… all these books are of great help to better understand the spirit of that time and to better approach the subtext that is underneath this style of music.
Also, it is essential to learn about classical rhetoric, as this style of music was based on the grounds of spoken language, seeking fundamentally the art of eloquence. To get initiated in this world a good introduction can be found in Judy Tarling’s The Weapons of Rhetoric.
9. Name a movie or a documentary that can improve the comprehension of the music of this period.
H. Poggio (cello): I have seen it many times and I have always enjoyed it, I mean Milos Forman’s movie Amadeus. I find it quite carefully made and very respectful with the music itself.
It’s really a bit like a great Mozart’s Opera,…
… you have a good story to follow and a wonderful music to accompany the plot, so it is almost impossible not to enjoy it!
C. Sierra (violin): Indeed. Of course we all know that the story of that movie is not faithful to the historical truth, as Salieri had nothing to do with the Requiem and less even with Mozart’s death (and we can add also many other inaccuracies or eccentricities), but the beauty of this movie is certainly given by the fact, that it depicts the feeling of, how it must have been, when in direct confrontation with the incredible stature of Mozart’s music and of Mozart’s talent!
For me this movie is not mainly about Mozart’s life, but about the immensity of the shock, sometimes paralyzing, we all face when we confront true beauty!
Amadeus (1985), Director’s Cut version:
A nice music centred trailer created by a fan of the movie
10. Do you think there’s a special place to be visited that proved crucial to the evolution of the 18th century music?
A. Hevia (violin): The confluence of three great geniuses such as Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven in Vienna position this city as the epicenter of the development of European music.
H. Poggio (cello): Indeed, I have to agree…
… Since the great composers of the 18th-century that created and established a tradition and a musical legacy (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert) lived there at some point and it became one of the most important (but not the only one, let’s remember Madrid!) musical capital of Europe. Reading about the evolution of music in that culturally flourishing time is certainly revealing, but also visiting the city (museums, composer’s houses, palaces, etc.) may very well be a source of inspiration.
J. Puchades (viola): Well, this is all true, but I would invite people to visit Madrid, home of Boccherini, Brunetti, and so many other great composers… and indeed, as well, a true capital of musical action in the late 18th-century!
C. Sierra (violin): I would then like to suggest (having Vienna and Madrid already been mentioned) other points of interest: Ezsterháza Palace, in Fertöd, Hungary, or the city of Eisenstadt, as epicentres of Haydn’s creative life, are truly inspiring places. I would also suggest Mannheim and, without any doubt, always and forever,…
… Salzburg (Salzburg UNESCO)!
Thank you very much for having taken the time to answer our questions!
Thank you!
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Entrevista Enero 2022: 10 Preguntas con M.A. Marín
Miguel Angel Marín: Sitios Oficiales
Miguel Angel Marín Site: Miguel Angel Marín Official Site
Miguel Angel Marín: Fundación Juan March
Miguel Angel Marín: Miguel Angel Marín (UniRioja)
Miguel Angel Marín: Miguel Angel Marín (Twitter)
Miguel Angel Marín: MusicologiaUR (Twitter)
Miguel Angel Marín: Fundación Juan March (Twitter)
Miguel Angel Marín: Fundación Juan March (Biblioteca)
Miguel Angel Marín: Fundación Juan March (Channel)
Miguel Angel Marín & Fundación Juan March
Miguel Angel Marín: Video 1 Season 2021/22
Miguel Angel Marín: Video 2 Boccherini & Goya
Miguel Angel Marín: Video 3 History of Quartet
1. En 2020 ha publicado el libro Mozart’s Requiem in Pamplona (1844): estudio y edición musical, que presenta una muy peculiar partitura recién descubierta del Requiem de Mozart, preparada en España en el siglo XIX. Ahora ha organizado y organiza conciertos y conferencias sobre su descubrimiento. ¿Puede hablarnos de esta importante partitura y versión del Requiem de Mozart, de su descubrimiento, de su origen, de la asombrosa historia del mozartismo español que hay detrás y de su trascendencia científica?
Mozart fue un compositor admirado y bien conocido en la España del siglo XIX. Pese a la investigación tan potente que se ha realizado sobre este compositor, su presencia en España hasta la fecha apenas había sido estudiado.
El mejor reflejo de la influencia de Mozart en la vida musical española fue la enorme popularidad que alcanzó el Réquiem, obra que pronto logró la admiración de profesionales y aficionados.
Es conocido que, a partir de la publicación de la partitura en 1800, la obra comenzó a difundirse a gran velocidad por todos los rincones de Europa. Pero ¿qué papel tuvo el Requiem en España? Solo con mirar las fechas de la primera interpretación después de ese año en varias ciudades (no solo las importantes, sino también las de tamaño medio e incluso las pequeñas) ya se adivina la importancia que aquí tuvo: Berlín (1800), Londres (1801), Salzburgo (1801), Lisboa (1803), Praga (1803), Paris (1804), Douai (France, 1806), Madrid (c. 1806), Málaga (1808), Caracas (¿1808?), Orihuela (España, c. 1813), Olot (España, c. 1815), Birmingham (1817), Río de Janeiro (1819), Derby (Inglaterra, 1822), Oxford (1823), York (1823), Lille (1824), Nueva York (1835) o Filadelfia (1852).
Mi intención con esta investigación era comenzar a situar España en el mundo de la investigación mozartiana…
… Y la publicación de la fuente hasta ahora inédita conservada en la Catedral de Pamplona ha sido el primer paso (el segundo es mi nuevo libro que saldrá en 2022). La edición publicada por Reichenberger recupera este nuevo manuscrito conservado en Pamplona que contiene una versión ligeramente adaptada a las posibilidades locales. Es interesante saber que la norma durante todo el siglo XIX (y no solo en España!) fue interpretar el Requiem adaptándolo a las posibilidades y a las necesidades de cada ocasión. Lo que los oyentes del siglo XIX escucharon era bastante distinto de lo que hoy escuchamos nosotros, siendo en teoría la misma obra…
… Con muchísima frecuencia se sustituían unos instrumentos por otros, se interpretaban movimientos sueltos o se arreglaban para otra plantilla. Esta versión de Pamplona también tiene algunos cambios interesantes. Por ejemplo, algunos pasajes de los timbales se transfieren al contrabajo, los trombones (inexistentes en la ciudad en esos momentos) son sustituidos por trompas y el pasaje de las voces agudas con intervalos de séptima se reescribe por intervalos de segunda más fáciles de entonar (seguramente porque estas partes las cantaron niños y no mujeres, como fue la norma en la iglesia católica).
Premiere of Mozart’s Requiem – Pamplona 1844 version (2019)
Edition Reichenberger (Marín-Sagaseta)
Uno de los aspectos relevantes de esta investigación es que he podido reconstruir con bastante precisión la ocasión especial para la que se preparó esta interpretación: en 1844 se celebraron en Pamplona las exequias reales de la infanta Luisa Carlota de Borbón-Dos Sicilias…
… Esta infanta era la inminente suegra de la reina de España Isabel II, cuyo marido (el infante Francisco de Asis) había sido el máximo responsable militar en la ciudad de Pamplona. Este evento histórico para el devenir de la ciudad tuvo lugar en un momento crítico de la historia española, cuando había mucha inestabilidad en el trono y, como telón de fondo, se incrementaban las tensiones provocadas por las llamadas Guerras Carlistas que afectaron el norte de España…
… Es un hecho que, desde fechas tempranas, el Requiem de Mozart fue la música habitual para las honras fúnebres de reyes, aristócratas, militares y otros miembros distinguidos de la sociedad. También ocurrió esto mismo en España, tal y como ejemplifica este caso y demuestra las decenas de fuentes del Requiem dispersas por archivos españoles!
Disponible de Reichenberger de Miguel Angel Marín:
Mozart’s Requiem in Pamplona (1844): study and music edition
http://www.reichenberger.de/Pages/ch3.html
Instrumental music in late eighteenth-century Spain
http://www.reichenberger.de/Pages/dem21.html
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MIGUEL ANGEL MARIN: LIBROS, EDICIONES MUSICALES & ARTICULOS
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A-MOZART
BOOK:Mozart’s Requiem in Pamplona (1844): study and music edition (Kassel, 2020) [with A. Sagaseta]
-> Introduction in English and Spanish. Music edition of a newly found source of Mozart’s Requiem preserved at the Cathedral of Pamplona, which was copied for the royal obsequies of the Infanta Luisa Carlota de Borbón in 1844.
JOURNALISM:Program notes: “El joven Mozart y la ansiedad de componer óperas”. Lucio Silla de Mozart. Teatro Real (Madrid, 2017)
JOURNALISM:Program notes: “Clemencia para La Clemenza di Tito” Teatro Real. November 2016
B-HAYDN
BOOK: Joseph Haydn y el cuarteto de cuerda (Madrid, 2009)
BOOK CHAPTERS:“Haydn, Boccherini and the rise of the string quartet in late eighteenth-century Madrid”, in Ch. Heine y J. M. González Martínez (eds.), The String Quartet in Spain (Bern, 2017, pp. 53-120)
BOOK CHAPTERS:“Joseph Haydn y el clasicismo vienés en España”, en J. M. Leza (ed.), La música en el siglo XVIII, en Historia de la música en España e Hispanoamérica, vol. 4, (Madrid, FCE, 2014), 484-500
ARTICLES:Haydn en la iglesia: cuartetos de cuerda en instituciones eclesiásticas españolas, Revista de Musicología, 44:1, 2021
-> The realization several decades ago of the primary importance that Joseph Haydn had in Spanish musical life has hardly boosted research in this field. Haydn’s reception in Spain is a particularly intense and complex phenomenon that affected multiple genres, spaces, and institutions. This article focuses on the large group of almost fifty manuscripts and prints (many unknown) containing Haydn’ s quartets preserved in Spanish churches of varied institutional profiles. The article begins with a brief summary of the state of the art, followed by an overview of the works identified, the formats of the sources, and their geographical distribution. The second and third sections analyze the commercial networks through which these works and the market for music publications in manuscript. The last section raises the critical issue of the role that a genre of a secular and private nature could have in religious institutions with public ceremonies. This research shows, for the first time, that Haydn’s quartets found some space in the churches of Spain for their performance, a feature probably unique in the panorama of their European reception.
JOURNALISM:“La universalidad de la música de Haydn”, Audio Clásica, nº 145, (2009) 64-71
JOURNALISM:“Haydn, inventor del cuarteto de cuerda”, Scherzo, 239 (2009), 120-123
JOURNALISM: Program notes “Haydn y España: las Siete palabras”. Orquesta y Coro de la Comunidad de Madrid, Martin Haselböck, conductor (Madrid 2015)
JOURNALISM: Program notes “La producción temprana de Haydn y la tradición del Stabat Mater”. Europa Galante, Fabio Biondi, conductor (Cuenca 2009)
C-BOCCHERINI (1743-1805)
MUSIC EDITIONS:Luigi Boccherini. Clementina (Bolonia, 2013)
BOOK CHAPTERS:“Haydn, Boccherini and the rise of the string quartet in late eighteenth-century Madrid”, in Ch. Heine y J. M. González Martínez (eds.), The String Quartet in Spain (Bern, 2017, pp. 53-120)
BOOK CHAPTERS:“La zarzuela Clementina di Luigi Boccherini”, en Ramón de la Cruz: Clementina, ed. de N. Lepri (Florencia: Collana Secoli d’Oro Alinea, 2003), 15-36
ARTICLES: ‘Par su grâce naïve et pour ainsi dire primitive’: images of Boccherini through his early biographies, en C. Speck (ed.), Boccherini Studies, 1 (2007), 279-323
ARTICLES:“Music-selling in Boccherini’s Madrid”, Early Music, 33:2 (2005), 165-177
JOURNALISM: Program notes “Cuartetos y retratos. Boccherini y Goya”. Fundación Juan March (Madrid 2021)
JOURNALISM: “Los espejismos de la biografía”, Scherzo 194 (2005), 98-101 Dossier “Luigi Boccherini”, Issue February 2005
JOURNALISM:“Boccherini, il violoncello cosmopolita”, Giornale della musica, 215 (mayo 2005), 24-25
JOURNALISM: Program notes “Clementina de Boccherini: zarzuela “casera” en el teatro público”. Teatro de la Zarzuela, Andrea Marco, conductor y Mario Gas, stage director (Madrid 2015)
JOURNALISM: Program notes “Los espacios interpretativos de la música de Boccherini”. Lyra Baroque Orchestra con Jacques Ogg, conductor (Madrid, 2005)
BOOK REVIEW: Review of Marco Mangani: Luigi Boccherini
BOOK REVIEW: Review of Luigi Boccherini: Arie da concerto / Concert Arias G 544-559, C. Speck, ed.
D-BRUNETTI
MUSIC EDITIONS:Gaetano Brunetti. Cuartetos de cuerda L184 – L199 (Madrid, 2012) [with J. Fonseca]
JOURNALISM: Program notes: “Gaetano Brunetti, músico de corte”, Fundación Juan March, November-December 2013
E-SCARLATTI
BOOK CHAPTERS:“Música para tecla: Scarlatti y sus contemporáneos”, en J. M. Leza (ed.), La música en el siglo XVIII, en Historia de la música en España e Hispanoamérica, vol. 4, (Madrid, FCE, 2014), 271-291
JOURNALISM:“The historical legacy of Domenico Scarlatti’s sonatas”, Goldberg. Early Music Magazine, nº 49 (2007), 20-39
JOURNALISM: Program notes “¿Español, flamenco, exótico? Las imágenes de Domenico Scarlatti”. Gabriele Carcano, piano (Madrid 2012)
JOURNALISM:“Las sonatas de Scarlatti como legado histórico”, Goldberg, 49 (2007), 20-29
F-CORELLI
BOOK CHAPTERS: “A la sombra de Corelli: componer para el violín”, en J. M. Leza (ed.), La música en el siglo XVIII, en Historia de la música en España e Hispanoamérica, vol. 4, (Madrid, FCE, 2014), 291-307
BOOK CHAPTERS: La recepción de Corelli en Madrid (ca. 1680 – ca. 1810)”, en G. Barnett, et al. (eds.), Arcangelo Corelli fra mito e realtà storica. Nuove prospettive d’indagine musicologica e interdisciplinare nel 350º anniversario della nascita (Firenze: Leo S. Olschki, 2007), 573-637
JOURNALISM: Program notes “El culto a Corelli”. Imaginarium, Enrico Onofre, violin and conductor (Madrid 2008)
G-PEREZ
ARTICLES: “La fortuna di David Perez nella Spagna: La circolazione delle arie”, Avidi Lumi, 14 (2002), 24-33
H-BEETHOVEN
JOURNALISM:¿Queremos más Beethoven?
I-VIVALDI
JOURNALISM: Program notes “La simplicidad sofisticada. A propósito de Vivaldi”. Orquesta y Coro de la Comunidad de Madrid, Enrico Onofri, violín y director (Madrid 2017)
J-DE LA PUENTE (1692-1754)
MUSIC EDITIONS:Juan Manuel de la Puente (1692-1754). Obras en romance (Madrid, 2003)
K-GARCIA FAJER (1730-1809)
BOOK: [ed.] La ópera en el templo. Estudios sobre el compositor Francisco Javier García Fajer (Logroño, 2010)
L-OTHER 18TH-CENTURY COMPOSERS
PAPERS: ANONYMOUS COMPOSERS, AGUSTÍN DE ECHEVERRÍA (DIED 1792), JOSÉ LIDÓN (1748–1821), FÉLIX MÁXIMO LÓPEZ (1742–1821), BARTOLOMEO LUSTRINI (FLOURISHED 1760) TESOROS DE ARÁNZAZU, VOLUME 1: ARIAS CON ÓRGANO OBLIGADO Elena López Jáuregui (soprano) / Norberto Broggini (organ) Verso, VRS 2077, 2009; one disc…
BOOK REVIEW:Review of Mariagrazia Melucci (ed.): Le cantate di Nicola Fago
M-MUSIC ANTHOLOGIES
MUSIC EDITIONS:Antología musical de la Catedral de Jaca en el siglo XVIII (Huesca, 2002)
N-ZARZUELA
MUSIC EDITIONS:Luigi Boccherini. Clementina (Bolonia, 2013)
BOOK CHAPTERS:“La zarzuela Clementina di Luigi Boccherini”, en Ramón de la Cruz: Clementina, ed. de N. Lepri (Florencia: Collana Secoli d’Oro Alinea, 2003), 15-36
JOURNALISM: Program notes “Clementina de Boccherini: zarzuela “casera” en el teatro público”. Teatro de la Zarzuela, Andrea Marco, conductor y Mario Gas, stage director (Madrid 2015)
BOOK CHAPTERS:Programar zarzuela en una sala de cámara: el caso de la Fundación Juan March (Madrid, 2020, pp. 166-173)
O-HISTORY OF QUARTET (ESPECIALLY IN 18TH-CENTURY SPAIN)
BOOK CHAPTERS:“El surgimiento del cuarteto de cuerda y la consolidación de la sonata”, en J. M. Leza (ed.), La música en el siglo XVIII, en Historia de la música en España e Hispanoamérica, vol. 4, (Madrid, FCE, 2014), 373-399
JOURNALISM: Program notes “El cuarteto de cuerda en el Clasicismo”. Cuarteto Quixot (Cádiz 2010)
JOURNALISM: Program notes: “Geschichte des spanischen Streichquartetts. Ein Abriss”. Instituto Cervantes de Múnich, November 2015
JOURNALISM:“¿Existió un cuarteto de cuerda español?”, Scherzo, 283 (2013), 86-88
JOURNALISM: Program notes: “Cuartetos neoclásicos españoles”, Fundación Juan March, December 2007
PAPERS:“Modelos compositivos para los primeros cuartetos españoles”, Congreso El cuarteto de cuerda en España desde finales del siglo XVIII hasta la actualidad, Granada, 20-22 March 2014
PAPERS:“El cuarteto de cuerda en España”, Seminario Estudos de Música Instrumental 1755 – 1840, Evora, 24 February 2012
P-MUSIC SEASONS & CONCERTS PROGRAMMING
ARTICLES:Challenging the Listener: How to Change Trends in Classical Music Programming
ARTICLES: [coautoría con I. Domínguez] “Aprender por objetivos: un modelo de conciertos didácticos en la Fundación Juan March”. Eufonía. Didáctica de la música, 64 (2015), 29-38
ARTICLES: “Tendencias y desafíos de la programación musical”, Brocar, 37, (2013), 87-104
JOURNALISM:“¿Quién escucha música clásica? Público, audiencia, oyente”, Scherzo, 312 (2015), 73-77
JOURNALISM: “Musicología aplicada al concierto. Tareas de programador”, Scherzo, 291 (2013), 73-76
PAPERS:“Challenging the listener: the music programmer as curator”, Performance Studies Network International Conference, Cambridge, 17-20 July 2014
PAPERS:“The challenges of the musicologist as programmer”, XIX Congress of the International Musicological Society, Rome, 1-7 July 2012
CONFERENCES: International Conference “Musicology applied to the concert: performance studies at work” (International University of Andalusia, Baeza-Spain, 1-3 December 2016) [Final program]
Q-PHD REVISIONS (ON 18TH-CENTURY MUSIC IN SPAIN)
PHD REVISION: Ana Lombardía: Violin music in mid-eighteenth-century Madrid. University of La Rioja (Sept. 2015)
PHD REVISION: Lluis Bertran: Espaces, sociabilités, répertoires. La musique dans les maisons particulières de Barcelone (1750-1800). U. de Poitiers – U. of La Rioja (December 2017). Co-supervision with Th. Favier
PHD REVISION: Josep Martínez Reinoso: La vida concertística en Madrid a finales del siglo XVIII. University of La Rioja (September 2017)
PHD REVISION: Héctor Santos: Música orquestal en contextos eclesiásticos en la España del siglo XVIII. University of La Rioja (July 2019)
R-HISTORY OF MUSIC (GENERAL & IN PARTICULAR OF 18TH-CENTURY SPAIN)
BOOK: [ed.] Instrumental music in late eighteenth-century Spain (Kassel, 2014) [with M. Bernadó]
BOOK: [ed.] Música y cultura urbana en la Edad Moderna (Valencia, 2005) [with A. Bombi y J. J. Carreras]
BOOK: [ed.] Concierto Barroco. Estudios sobre música, dramaturgia e historia cultural (Logroño, 2004) [with J. J. Carreras]
BOOK:Music on the margin. Urban musical life in eighteenth-century Jaca (Spain) (Kassel, 2002)
BOOK:Pliegos de villancicos en la British Library de Londres y en la University Library de Cambridge (Kassel, 2001) [with A. Torrente]
BOOK CHAPTERS:“La tradición organística eclesiástica”, en J. M. Leza (ed.), La música en el siglo XVIII, en Historia de la música en España e Hispanoamérica, vol. 4, (Madrid, FCE, 2014), 156-171
BOOK CHAPTERS:“Música para tecla: Scarlatti y sus contemporáneos”, en J. M. Leza (ed.), La música en el siglo XVIII, en Historia de la música en España e Hispanoamérica, vol. 4, (Madrid, FCE, 2014), 271-291
BOOK CHAPTERS: “A la sombra de Corelli: componer para el violín”, en J. M. Leza (ed.), La música en el siglo XVIII, en Historia de la música en España e Hispanoamérica, vol. 4, (Madrid, FCE, 2014), 291-307
BOOK CHAPTERS:“Repertorios orquestales: obertura, sinfonía y concierto”, en J. M. Leza (ed.), La música en el siglo XVIII, en Historia de la música en España e Hispanoamérica, vol. 4, (Madrid, FCE, 2014), 353-373
BOOK CHAPTERS:“El mercado de la música”, en J. M. Leza (ed.), La música en el siglo XVIII, en Historia de la música en España e Hispanoamérica, vol. 4, (Madrid, FCE, 2014), 439-461
BOOK CHAPTERS:“Escuchar la música: la academia, el concierto y sus públicos”, en J. M. Leza (ed.), La música en el siglo XVIII, en Historia de la música en España e Hispanoamérica, vol. 4, (Madrid, FCE, 2014), 461-484
BOOK CHAPTERS:“Hacia una bibliografía descriptiva de la música grabada en España durante la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII”, en B. Lolo y J. C. Gosálvez, eds., Imprenta y edición musical en España, (siglos XVIII-XX), (Madrid, UAM, 2012), 201-226 [with M. Bernadó]
BOOK CHAPTERS:“Familia, colegas y amigos. Los músicos catedralicios de la ciudad de Jaca durante el siglo XVIII”, en A. Bombi, J. J. Carreras y M. Á. Marín. (eds.), Música y cultura urbana en la Edad Moderna (Valencia: Universidad de Valencia, 2005), 115-144
BOOK CHAPTERS:“La difusión de la música desde una perspectiva transcultural”, en J. J. Carreras y M. Á. Marín (eds.), Concierto Barroco. Estudios sobre música, dramaturgia e historia cultural (Logroño: Universidad de La Rioja, 2004), 163-168
BOOK CHAPTERS:“¿Una historia imposible?. Música y devoción en Úbeda durante el Antiguo Régimen”, en A. Moreno Mendoza (ed.), Úbeda en el siglo XVI (Úbeda: Fundación Renacimiento, 2003), 141-166
BOOK CHAPTERS:“Arias de ópera en ciudades provincianas: las arias italianas conservadas en la Catedral de Jaca” en E. Casares y Á. Torrente (eds.), La ópera en España e Hispanoamérica. Una creación propia (Madrid, ICCMU, 2002), vol. 1, 375-94
ARTICLES:“Contar la historia desde la periferia: Música y ciudad desde la musicología urbana”, Neuma, 7:2 (2014), 10-30
ARTICLES:“Music-selling in Boccherini’s Madrid”, Early Music, 33:2 (2005), 165-177
ARTICLES: “Sound and urban life in a small Spanish town during the Ancient Regime”, Urban History, 29:1 (2002), 48-59
ARTICLES:“A propósito de la reutilización de textos de villancicos: dos colecciones desconocidas de pliegos impresos en la British Library, Londres (ss. XVII-XVIII)”, Revista de Musicología, 23:1 (2000), 103-30
ARTICLES:Music and musicians in provincial towns: The case of eigtheenth-century Jaca (Spain). Resumen de tesis doctoral (Londres, 2000)
ARTICLES:“A copiar la pureza’: música procedente de Madrid en la Catedral de Jaca”, Artigrama, 12 (1996-97), 257-76
JOURNALISM: Program notes “La estética del sometimiento”. Orquesta de RTVE, Pablo González, director (Madrid 2019)
JOURNALISM:“¿Qué es la ópera de cámara?: una mirada desde la historia”, Scherzo, 351, (mayo 2019), pp. 81-84
JOURNALISM: Program notes “Leipzig, 1848”. Orquesta y Coro de la Comunidad de Madrid, José Ramón Encinar, director (Madrid 2013)
JOURNALISM: Program notes “Narrar la historia de la música. Clasicismo y Romanticismo en Centroeuropa, ¿un mismo periodo”. Orquesta y Coro de la Comunidad de Madrid (Madrid 2012)
JOURNALISM: Program notes “La sinfonía clásica y sus públicos”. Orquesta y Coro Nacionales de España (Madrid 2010)
JOURNALISM: Program notes “De Londres a Venecia”. Bozen Baroque Orquestra, con Claudio Astronio, director (Valencia, 2007)
JOURNALISM: Program notes “Viena, París y el mundo de la sonata”. Christian Zacharias, piano (Granada 2006)
JOURNALISM: Program notes “Los mundos del Clasicismo”. Europa Galante, Fabio Biondi, conductor (Valencia, 2005)
JOURNALISM: Program notes “Esplendor musical en la Nápoles Virreinal”, Cappella della Pietà de’ Turchini (Cuenca, 2005)
JOURNALISM: Program notes “Nómadas del sonido. Migraciones musicales en el siglo XVIII” Fundación Caja Madrid, VIII Ciclo de Música Española “Los siglos de oro”. Camerata Anxanum (Madrid 2003), 2003
JOURNALISM: “Libros. Una apabullante minoría”, en Scherzo, 258 (2010)
JOURNALISM: Program notes: “Ad Libitum. La improvisación como procedimiento compositivo”, Fundación Juan March, November 2008
JOURNALISM: Program notes: “Música contemporánea para dos pianos”, Fundación Juan March, February 2008
JOURNALISM: School teaching guide “Los secretos del piano”. Fundación Juan March, 2007-08
PAPERS:“Contar la música desde los márgenes: España, el Clasicismo y la noción de centro – periferia”. Seminario en Investigación de Patrimonio Musical. Talca, Chile, 5-6 September 2014
PAPERS: International Conference “Interpretar la música ibérica del siglo XVIII”, Co-director, Barcelona, 14-16 July 2014
PAPERS: “Other Classicisms, other Centres: Iberian Styles in Late Eighteenth-Century Instrumental Music”, 49th Royal Musical Association Annual Conference, London, 19-21 September 2013
PAPERS:“Da obra à interpretação: desafíos para a recuperação da música iberoamericana do séc. XVIII”, round table in Instrumental music in the Iberian World, 1760-1820”, Lisbon, 14-16 June 2013
BOOK REVIEW: Review of The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening; Thorau & Ziemer (eds)
BOOK REVIEW:Review of A música instrumental no final do Antigo Regime: contextos, circulação e repertórios, ed. V. Sá & C. Fernandes
BOOK REVIEW: Review of Carlos Martínez Gil: La capilla de música de la Catedral de Toledo. Evolución de un concepto sonoro
BOOK REVIEW: Review of Michael Noone: Music and Musicians in the Escorial Liturgy under the Habsburgs, 1563-1700
BOOK REVIEW:Review of M. Boyd y J. J. Carreras (eds): Music in Spain during the eighteenth century
CONFERENCE REVIEW: Instrumental Music in Spain, 1750–1800: style, genre, market, Logroño 17–18 September 2009
CONFERENCE REVIEW: 17° Congreso de la Sociedad Internacional de Musicología: Lovaina (Bélgica) del 1 al 7 de agosto de 2002
CONFERENCE REVIEW:International Conference “Poder, Mecenazgo e Instituciones en la Música Mediterránea, 1400-1700” Ávila, 18-20 April 1997
2. Ha dedicado buena parte de su trabajo académico también a Haydn. Gracias a su temprana importancia percibida, las composiciones musicales de Haydn ya habían tenido una amplia y apreciada circulación rápida en España en el siglo XVIII. También ha publicado libros (Joseph Haydn y el cuarteto de cuerda, 2009) y artículos sobre este tema fundamental: ya en las décadas de 1770/1780 Haydn era considerado un importante referencia y modelo de la música en España y en todos los territorios hispanoamericanos, como usted mismo lo señala en sus obras! ¿Puede delinear la evolución de la fortuna musical de Joseph Haydn y su difusión en España y los territorios hispanoamericanos del siglo XVIII?
La difusión de la obra de Joseph Haydn alcanzó, ya en vida del compositor, una dimensión desconocida para cualquier otro compositor de su tiempo!
Esto sobre todo se aplica a la música instrumental. Esta particular condición se explica no solo por ser un gran compositor. También porque hubo una serie de cambios revolucionarios en los sistemas de producción y consumo de la música que tuvieron lugar a finales del siglo XVIII que Haydn supo aprovechar con mucha inteligencia. Pero fueron igualmente determinantes otros dos elementos específicos de este autor. Haydn supo componer obras concebidas con genio para seducir tanto a profesionales como a aficionados, ampliando así el horizonte de su mercado. Además, la revisión de su contrato con su mecenas Nicolaus Esterházy en 1779 le abrió la posibilidad de negociar la venta de su música a los editores. A partir de entonces, Haydn se liberó de las ataduras del sistema de mecenazgo del Antiguo Régimen para aprovechar de lleno el potencial del comercio editorial.
Desde hace tiempo existe una noción de que Haydn tuvo una relación estrecha con algunos mecenas e instituciones en España. Pero la investigación es relativamente escasa y solo ofrece una visión fragmentaria sobre la difusión de su música en este país.
Junto a trabajos pioneros de Robert Stevenson y Stephen Fisher, en los últimos veinte años se han publicado algunos estudios, la mayoría centrados en los que podríamos considerar los hitos haydnianos en su relación con España: las conexiones con la corte, su vinculación con las familias aristocráticas madrileñas (en particular la Condesa-Duquesa de Benavente y el XIII Duque de Alba) y el encargo gaditano de Las Siete Últimas Palabras de Cristo en la Cruz…
… Las evidencias son ya más que suficientes para confirmar que la recepción española de Haydn es un fenómeno particularmente complejo que afecta en paralelo a géneros, espacios e instituciones,…
… por lo que necesitamos impulsar estudios más sistemáticos que expliquen, al menos, los siguientes cuatro grandes interrogantes:
(a) la función y el alcance de las fuentes conservadas o documentadas y qué variantes y adaptaciones muestran;
(b) la reconstrucción de los canales, comerciales o privados, y sus conexión con puntos de venta europeos por los que las obras de Haydn se difundieron por España;
(c) la influencia decisiva de su obra ejercida en los autores locales; y
(d) el impacto en la configuración del ideario estético e intelectual de oyentes y aficionados.
El esclarecimiento de estas cuatro cuestiones arrojaría luz para entender en toda su dimensión la presencia colosal de Haydn en España, ya detectada en una fecha relativamente temprana como comienzos de la década de 1770.
Mi investigación, iniciada en 2009 con el libro sobre los cuartetos de Haydn, se ha centrado en algunas de estas cuatro grandes interrogantes, poniendo el foco en el cuarteto de cuerda, sin duda uno de los géneros en los que Haydn dejó una huella más profunda.
A través de distintas publicaciones, he tratado de precisar de qué modo concreto sus cuartetos llegaron a España y qué impacto tuvieron en los compositores afincados aquí que se enfrentaron a este género, tales como Gaetano Brunetti, João Pedro Almeida (1744-1817) y Manuel Canales (1747-1786)…
… En este proceso, el otro gigante del cuarteto fue Luigi Boccherini, aclamado por igual entre los aficionados y los profesionales a finales del siglo XVIII y equiparado entonces a la figura de Haydn. El hecho de que Boccherini escribiera su imponente corpus de cuartetos desde España invita a repensar algunos de las convenciones de la narrativa de la historia del cuarteto…
… Esto es lo que he tratado de hacer con mis publicaciones!
3. Para Reichenberger ha editado La música instrumental en la España de finales del siglo XVIII (2014), luego, entre otros estudios, ha preparado la edición de la partitura de la zarzuela de 1786 Clementina G540 de Boccherini y de los cuartetos de cuerda L184-L199 de G. Brunetti y usted ha escrito varios trabajos sobre las colecciones musicales españolas del siglo XVIII, sobre los compositores predilectos, los géneros musicales predilectos y otros aspectos del mundo musical en la España del siglo XVIII. Sería muy interesante que nuestros lectores se adentraran en tan maravilloso (y todavía un poco misterioso) universo musical español del siglo XVIII a través de una reconstrucción hecha por un especialista excepcional, como usted: cuáles son los grandes compositores queridos, cuáles los grandes géneros musicales, qué las orquestas, qué la música de cámara y qué las óperas y las zarzuelas?
La historia de la música en España, al igual que la de otros países, ha sentido siempre una cierta presión por el canon vienés.
Los manuales de historia de la música han establecido la idea de que el Clasicismo vienés –sobre todo los géneros instrumentales— se tienen que equiparar a toda la actividad compositiva de finales del siglo XVIII, olvidando que no se trata de un periodo histórico de aplicación universal, sino de un estilo compositivo originado en torno a Viena y que, por razones estéticas e historiográficas, acabó siendo considerado de forma retrospectiva y algo generalizadora como el estilo de finales del siglo XVIII.
Esta visión ha eclipsado otras prácticas compositivas y a otros autores de gran valor, que se han evaluado siempre por su cercanía o lejanía estilística con ese modelo vienés de perfección idealizada, en vez de analizarse en sus propios términos.
A. La Sinfonía
A partir de este planteamiento, mi propuesta para descubrir el maravilloso mundo musical de finales del siglo XVIII en España pone el énfasis en compositores que posiblemente serán desconocidos para la mayoría de los aficionados a la música de este periodo.
En el ámbito de la música orquestal, en particular (y además de Boccherini y Brunetti), me gustaría enfatizar la importancia de la producción deCarlos Baguer (1768-1808) y Ramón Garay (1761-1823), que hicieron una contribución sustantiva al género con un corpus notable de sinfonías. Muchas de sus sinfonías han sido grabadas en tiempos recientes. Como cabe esperar, la impronta de Haydn es palpable, combinadas con elementos de color local.
B. Música de Cámara
En el ámbito de la música de cámara, me interesa mucho el devenir específico del cuarteto de cuerda, que resultó en algunas obras de enorme interés.
Además deBoccherini, Brunetti, Almeida y Canales,de los que hablamos previamente, el Cuarteto Quiroga acaba de publicar un CD titulado
The music in Madrid in the time of Goya
con cuatro cuartetos compuestos en Madrid a finales del siglo XVIIII de excepcional valor:
https://cobrarecords.com/catalogue/albums/cobra0067-heritage/.
Teaser, Brunetti String Quartet L.185
Cuarteto Quiroga
Brunetti L.185 / CD Heritage
world premiere recording
Cuarteto Quiroga
C. La Música Teatral
Por último, en el ámbito de la música teatral son todavía muchos los títulos que nos quedan por descubrir.
La cultura del teatro musical estuvo muy presente en España durante toda la Edad Moderna (como muestra un dramaturgo tan importante como Calderón de la Barca, cuyas obras, por cierto, casi siempre incluían música). A finales del siglo XVIII hubo una particular eclosión de géneros populares, como la zarzuela, pero todavía no han llegado a ocupar un lugar destacable en las programaciones actuales. Ente los títulos que conocemos, la zarzuela Clementina de Luigi Boccherini es uno de los más destacados por la combinación única de mezclar una tradición compositiva italiana con una dramaturgia teatral española. De esta obra contamos con alguna grabación particularmente bien interpretada, como la que dirigió el director español Pablo Heras-Casado (para el sello Música Antigua de Aranjuez, 2010), que permite apreciar la delicadeza del estilo boccheriniano.
Y no estamos hablando de José de Nebra, Martín y Soler y García…
D. La Música Sagrada
Hablamos de la importancia de la música sagrada española previamente con Mozart, Haydn, pero también debemos recordar a otros compositores que trabajaron en España, como Boccherini, José de Nebra, Almeida Mota, de nuevo Baguer y Garay, Fajer (1730-1809) y muchos otros, como también lo he demostrado a través de mis trabajos y estudios sobre los archivos eclesiásticos españoles.
Conforme la investigación continúe avanzando, muchos de estos tesoros todavía desconocidos irán siendo publicados, lo que permitirá revisar algunas de las ideas equivocadas que todavía persisten sobre la pobreza de la música en la España de la ilustración.
El Quarteto Quiroga interpreta una pieza de Boccherini
El Prado pone música al 2 de mayo bajo la mirada de Goya
4. Entre sus muchas e importantes colaboraciones recordamos, en particular, sus artículos sobre Mozart y sus óperas para el Teatro Real de Madrid y su intensa actividad con la Fundación Juan March de Madrid, como Director del Programa de Música. ¿Puede hablarnos de este tipo de colaboraciones con el Teatro Real y la Fundación Juan March: cuáles son sus logros, cuáles son la organización de estudios/ensayos y la programación de conciertos de música, cuáles son sus principios fundamentales para desarrollar sus actividades y cuáles son sus proyectos de futuro? La historia detallada de la música española del siglo XVIII también está en el centro mismo de su trabajo como profesor en la Universidad de La Rioja: ¿qué proyectos ha supervisado hasta ahora, cuál es su relación con las personas que trabajan en dichos proyectos académicos? ¿Cuándo y cómo empezó su pasión por la música del siglo XVIII?
Mi perfil profesional es un tanto particular, en tanto que mi carrera transita entre dos ámbitos: como académico y como programador de música.
Mi formación está anclada en el ámbito de la musicología, tras mis estudios en las Universidades de Salamanca, Zaragoza (Spain) y Cardiff (Wales) para culminar mi formación con la tesis doctoral en Royal Holloway University of London. Desde el comienzo opté por centrarme en el siglo XVIII como campo de investigación. Mi ingreso como profesor de musicología en la Universidad de La Rioja en 2000 me ha permitido desarrollar esta línea a través de la docencia y de la investigación. Gracias a varios proyectos de R&D concedidos por el Ministerio español hemos logrados crear un buen equipo de trabajo, al tiempo que varios estudiantes han realizado sus tesis doctorales bajo mi supervisión. Dos décadas de trabajo intenso han dado muchos resultados.
Ver sección PHD Revisions.
Pero haya sido mi pasión por la divulgación y la programación musical la parte de mi carrera que me ha permitido llevar mi investigación fuera del mundo académico.
Desde casi el comienzo de mi carrera estaba convencido de la importancia que suponía para la musicología poder transferir a la sociedad los resultados de la investigación. Durante estas dos décadas he tenido la fortuna de colaborar con una quincena de instituciones musicales españolas (como el Teatro Real de Madrid) redactando notas al programa de conciertos o, en algún caso, asesorando sobre su programación. Estos textos son más difíciles de escribir de lo que a veces uno puede creer…
… Pero para mí son muy relevantes porque nos permiten influir directamente en cómo los oyentes perciben esta música! Es particularmente importante cuando se trata de música desconocida, a la que los melómanos se enfrentan por primera vez.
Mi nombramiento como Director del Programa de Música de la Fundación Juan March en 2009 supuso un punto de inflexión determinante en mi carrera, porque ahora tenía la posibilidad de diseñar programas de conciertos. La Fundación Juan March es una institución muy particular, entre otros aspectos porque sigue una filosofía filantrópica pura desligada de las dinámicas de mercado. Esta posición privilegia permite programar buenas obras de música que, por las razones que sea, son desconocidas o infrecuentes en la sala de conciertos. Durante las últimas doce temporadas he podido desarrollar con mi equipo muchos proyectos que experimentan con formas innovadores de programar y de escuchar, renovando el formato del concierto (que es, por cierto, una herencia de finales del siglo XVIII que ha cambiado relativamente poco desde entonces).
Los interesados en conocer algunos de estos proyectos innovadores pueden visitar nuestra web:
https://www2.march.es/musica/temporada-musica/.
Fundación Juan March: Temporada 2021/2022
con grandes proyectos sobre Mozart (Mozart a través de sus cartas: November 2021-May 2022) y Rossini, Brunetti, etc.
Season 2021/2022 Libro de temporada
Season 2021/2022 Cronograma de temporada
También puedes descubrir y seguir nuestros videos y eventos de Canal March TV – Youtube:
March TV Channel Videos & Events (YouTube)
La principal conclusión que he sacado de todos estos años de combinar la investigación académica con la divulgación musical es que una formación musicológica es la mejor herramienta para hacer acciones de divulgación que sean eficaces y bien informadas.
Juan March Foundation TV Channel (YouTube version):
1. Beethoven, 12 Variations on Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen from Mozart’s The Magic Flute (1796);
2. Beethoven, 7 Variations on Bei Männern welche Liebe fühlen from Mozart’s The Magic Flute (1801).
5. Su obra favorita de Mozart y su obra favorita de J. Haydn.
Mi obra favorita de Mozart es el primer movimiento de la Sonata en Fa mayor KV 332, por la simple razón de que la trabajé con mucha devoción en mis tiempos de estudiante de piano conservatorio.
Entre las obras de Haydn, me quedo con la Adagio Fantasía del Cuarteto op. 76 nº 6, donde está ya encapsulada la desintegración de la tonalidad más de un siglo antes de que ocurriera.
6. ¿Tiene usted en mente el nombre de algún otro compositor descuidado del siglo XVIII que le gustaría ver reevaluado?
Definitivamente ese compositor sería Gaetano Brunetti (1744-1798; imslp), músico al servicio del rey Carlos IV, quien le prohibió que su música saliera del Palacio Real.
No menciono a Luigi Boccherini porque quiero pensar que no es un compositor olvidado, aunque su música todavía tiene relativamente poca presencia en la sala de conciertos.
7. Es dificil no pensar que, detrás de la Sinfonia Il Maniatico, puede haber algún tipo de broma sobre Boccherini. Según la investigación de archivo de Belgray, Brunetti y Bocherini estaban en términos amistosos, no rivales.
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Nombre una obra musical abandonada del siglo XVIII que le gustaría ver interpretada en concierto con más frecuencia.
El compositor Manuel Blasco de Nebra (1750-1784; imslp), sobrino de José de Nebra (1702-1768; imslp), murió, por desgracia, bastante joven. Pero dejó un legado impresionante de sonatas para teclado. Hay varias grabaciones disponibles en el mercado (algunas incluso aclamada por la critica: Gramophone/The Guardian/The Independent), pero es muy poco lo que se interpreta en público.
Lo mismo le ocurre a Sebastián de Albero (1722-1756; imslp), que es un poco anterior al Clasicismo, pero tiene una sonatas increibles.
8. Ciertamente la música de estos compositores (y de Brunetti y de Boccherini) ya presentaba elementos del Movimiento Internacional de Genios (luego rebautizado Sturm und Drang y luego otra vez Romanticismo).
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¿Además de sus libros, ha leído algún libro en particular sobre la era de Mozart que considere importante para la comprensión de la música de este período?
El libro que más me impresionó y major me ayudó a entender la música de este periodo es Haydn’s Farewell Symphony and the Idea of Classical Style Through-Composition and Cyclic Integration in his Instrumental Music de James Webster (Cambridge, 1991).
A pesar del título, habla de un modo muy amplio sobre la música instrumental de Haydn. Aunque tiene ya tres décadas, no he visto un modo más claro y sagaz de explicar los procedimientos compositivos de Haydn.
9. Nombre una película o un documental que pueda mejorar la comprensión de la música de este período.
Creo que la famosa película Amadeus de Miloš Forman sigue teniendo valor, aunque perpetúe algunos de los mitos mozartianos.
En el ámbito del documental, la serie The genius of Beethoven de la BBC realmente merece la pena por su rigor histórico.
10. ¿Cree usted que hay un lugar especial que resultara crucial en la evolución de la música del siglo XVIII?
Para los melómanos más convencionales, por supuesto Viena es el lugar a visitar, porque está repleto de referencias sobre las vidas de Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven y Schubert. Uno puede andar por Viena a través de sus biografías.
Pero para los melómanos más curiosos recomendaría el Palacio Real de Madrid o algunos de los palacios de los Reales Sitios, como Aranjuez o El Escorial.
El rey más melómono que nunca ha tenido España, Carlos IV (1748-1819: Reino 1788-1808), verdaderamente inundó de música todas estos lugares.
Muchas gracias por haber tomado el tiempo para responder a nuestras preguntas!
Gracias!
Copyright © 2022 MozartCircle. All rights reserved. MozartCircle exclusive property.
Iconography is in public domain or in fair use.
Interview January 2022: 10 Questions with M.A. Marín
Miguel Angel Marín: Official Sites
Miguel Angel Marín Site: Miguel Angel Marín Official Site
Miguel Angel Marín: Fundación Juan March
Miguel Angel Marín: Miguel Angel Marín (UniRioja)
Miguel Angel Marín: Miguel Angel Marín (Twitter)
Miguel Angel Marín: MusicologiaUR (Twitter)
Miguel Angel Marín: Fundación Juan March (Twitter)
Miguel Angel Marín: Fundación Juan March (Biblioteca)
Miguel Angel Marín: Fundación Juan March (Channel)
Miguel Angel Marín & Fundación Juan March
Miguel Angel Marín: Video 1 Season 2021/22
Miguel Angel Marín: Video 2 Boccherini & Goya
Miguel Angel Marín: Video 3 History of Quartet
1. In 2020 you have published the book Mozart’s Requiem in Pamplona (1844): study and music edition, presenting a very peculiar newly found score of Mozart’s Requiem, prepared in Spain in the 19th-century. Now you have organized and are organizing concerts and conferences about your discovery. Can you tell us about this important score and version of Mozart’s Requiem, about its discovery, its origin, the amazing story of Spanish Mozartianism behind it and its scientific significance?
Mozart was an admired and well-known composer in 19th-century Spain. However, despite the powerful research that has been done on this composer, his presence in Spain had hardly been studied to date.
The best reflection of Mozart’s influence on Spanish musical life was the enormous popularity of the Requiem, a work that soon won the admiration of professionals and amateurs alike.
It is well known that, after its publication in 1800, the work began to spread rapidly throughout Europe. But what role did the Requiem play in Spain? Just by looking at the dates of the first performance after 1800 in several cities (not only the important ones, but also the medium-sized ones and even the small ones) one can already guess the importance it had here: Berlin (1800), London (1801), Salzburg (1801), Lisbon (1803), Prague (1803), Paris (1804), Douai (France, 1806), Madrid (c. 1806), Malaga (1808), Caracas (1808?), Orihuela (Spain c. 1813), Olot (Spain c. 1815), Birmingham (1817), Rio de Janeiro (1819), Derby (England, 1822), Oxford (1823), York (1823), Lille (1824), New York (1835) or Philadelphia (1852).
My intention with this research was to begin to integrate Spain in the world of Mozartian research…
… And the publication of the hitherto unpublished source preserved in the Cathedral of Pamplona has been the first step (the second is a new book by me to be published in 2022). The edition published by Reichenberger recovers this new manuscript preserved in Pamplona which contains a version slightly adapted to local possibilities. It is interesting to know that the norm throughout the 19th-century (and not only in Spain!) was to interpret the Requiem adapting it to the possibilities and needs of each occasion. What the listeners of the 19th-century heard was quite different from what we hear today, being in theory the same work…
… Very often some instruments were substituted for others, single movements were played or arranged for another staff. This Pamplona version also has some interesting changes. For example, some features of the timpani are played by the double bass, the trombones (nonexistent in the city at that time) are replaced by horns and the passage of the high voices with intervals of seventh is rewritten by intervals of second (probably because these parts were sung by children and not by women, as was the norm in the Catholic church).
Premiere of Mozart’s Requiem – Pamplona 1844 version (2019)
Edition Reichenberger (Marín-Sagaseta)
One of the relevant aspects of this research is that I have been able to reconstruct quite accurately the special occasion for which this interpretation was prepared: in 1844 the royal funeral of the Infanta Luisa Carlota de Borbón-Dos Sicilias was held in Pamplona…
… This infanta was the imminent mother-in-law of the Queen of Spain Isabella II, whose husband (the infante Francisco de Asis) had been the highest military leader in the city of Pamplona. This historic event for the future of the city took place at a critical moment in Spanish history, when there was much instability on the throne and, as a backdrop, the tensions caused by the so-called Carlist Wars that affected the north of Spain were increasing…
… It is a fact that, from an early date, Mozart’s Requiem was the customary music for the funeral honors of kings, aristocrats, military and other distinguished members of society. This was also the case in Spain, as exemplified by this case and demonstrated by the dozens of Requiem sources scattered throughout Spanish archives!
Available from Reichenberger by Miguel Angel Marín:
Mozart’s Requiem in Pamplona (1844): study and music edition
http://www.reichenberger.de/Pages/ch3.html
Instrumental music in late eighteenth-century Spain
http://www.reichenberger.de/Pages/dem21.html
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MIGUEL ANGEL MARIN’S BOOKS, MUSIC EDITIONS & PAPERS
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A-MOZART
BOOK:Mozart’s Requiem in Pamplona (1844): study and music edition (Kassel, 2020) [with A. Sagaseta]
-> Introduction in English and Spanish. Music edition of a newly found source of Mozart’s Requiem preserved at the Cathedral of Pamplona, which was copied for the royal obsequies of the Infanta Luisa Carlota de Borbón in 1844.
JOURNALISM:Program notes: “El joven Mozart y la ansiedad de componer óperas”. Lucio Silla de Mozart. Teatro Real (Madrid, 2017)
JOURNALISM:Program notes: “Clemencia para La Clemenza di Tito” Teatro Real. November 2016
B-HAYDN
BOOK: Joseph Haydn y el cuarteto de cuerda (Madrid, 2009)
BOOK CHAPTERS:“Haydn, Boccherini and the rise of the string quartet in late eighteenth-century Madrid”, in Ch. Heine y J. M. González Martínez (eds.), The String Quartet in Spain (Bern, 2017, pp. 53-120)
BOOK CHAPTERS:“Joseph Haydn y el clasicismo vienés en España”, en J. M. Leza (ed.), La música en el siglo XVIII, en Historia de la música en España e Hispanoamérica, vol. 4, (Madrid, FCE, 2014), 484-500
ARTICLES:Haydn en la iglesia: cuartetos de cuerda en instituciones eclesiásticas españolas, Revista de Musicología, 44:1, 2021
-> The realization several decades ago of the primary importance that Joseph Haydn had in Spanish musical life has hardly boosted research in this field. Haydn’s reception in Spain is a particularly intense and complex phenomenon that affected multiple genres, spaces, and institutions. This article focuses on the large group of almost fifty manuscripts and prints (many unknown) containing Haydn’ s quartets preserved in Spanish churches of varied institutional profiles. The article begins with a brief summary of the state of the art, followed by an overview of the works identified, the formats of the sources, and their geographical distribution. The second and third sections analyze the commercial networks through which these works and the market for music publications in manuscript. The last section raises the critical issue of the role that a genre of a secular and private nature could have in religious institutions with public ceremonies. This research shows, for the first time, that Haydn’s quartets found some space in the churches of Spain for their performance, a feature probably unique in the panorama of their European reception.
JOURNALISM:“La universalidad de la música de Haydn”, Audio Clásica, nº 145, (2009) 64-71
JOURNALISM:“Haydn, inventor del cuarteto de cuerda”, Scherzo, 239 (2009), 120-123
JOURNALISM: Program notes “Haydn y España: las Siete palabras”. Orquesta y Coro de la Comunidad de Madrid, Martin Haselböck, conductor (Madrid 2015)
JOURNALISM: Program notes “La producción temprana de Haydn y la tradición del Stabat Mater”. Europa Galante, Fabio Biondi, conductor (Cuenca 2009)
C-BOCCHERINI (1743-1805)
MUSIC EDITIONS:Luigi Boccherini. Clementina (Bolonia, 2013)
BOOK CHAPTERS:“Haydn, Boccherini and the rise of the string quartet in late eighteenth-century Madrid”, in Ch. Heine y J. M. González Martínez (eds.), The String Quartet in Spain (Bern, 2017, pp. 53-120)
BOOK CHAPTERS:“La zarzuela Clementina di Luigi Boccherini”, en Ramón de la Cruz: Clementina, ed. de N. Lepri (Florencia: Collana Secoli d’Oro Alinea, 2003), 15-36
ARTICLES: ‘Par su grâce naïve et pour ainsi dire primitive’: images of Boccherini through his early biographies, en C. Speck (ed.), Boccherini Studies, 1 (2007), 279-323
ARTICLES:“Music-selling in Boccherini’s Madrid”, Early Music, 33:2 (2005), 165-177
JOURNALISM: Program notes “Cuartetos y retratos. Boccherini y Goya”. Fundación Juan March (Madrid 2021)
JOURNALISM: “Los espejismos de la biografía”, Scherzo 194 (2005), 98-101 Dossier “Luigi Boccherini”, Issue February 2005
JOURNALISM:“Boccherini, il violoncello cosmopolita”, Giornale della musica, 215 (mayo 2005), 24-25
JOURNALISM: Program notes “Clementina de Boccherini: zarzuela “casera” en el teatro público”. Teatro de la Zarzuela, Andrea Marco, conductor y Mario Gas, stage director (Madrid 2015)
JOURNALISM: Program notes “Los espacios interpretativos de la música de Boccherini”. Lyra Baroque Orchestra con Jacques Ogg, conductor (Madrid, 2005)
BOOK REVIEW: Review of Marco Mangani: Luigi Boccherini
BOOK REVIEW: Review of Luigi Boccherini: Arie da concerto / Concert Arias G 544-559, C. Speck, ed.
D-BRUNETTI
MUSIC EDITIONS:Gaetano Brunetti. Cuartetos de cuerda L184 – L199 (Madrid, 2012) [with J. Fonseca]
JOURNALISM: Program notes: “Gaetano Brunetti, músico de corte”, Fundación Juan March, November-December 2013
E-SCARLATTI
BOOK CHAPTERS:“Música para tecla: Scarlatti y sus contemporáneos”, en J. M. Leza (ed.), La música en el siglo XVIII, en Historia de la música en España e Hispanoamérica, vol. 4, (Madrid, FCE, 2014), 271-291
JOURNALISM:“The historical legacy of Domenico Scarlatti’s sonatas”, Goldberg. Early Music Magazine, nº 49 (2007), 20-39
JOURNALISM: Program notes “¿Español, flamenco, exótico? Las imágenes de Domenico Scarlatti”. Gabriele Carcano, piano (Madrid 2012)
JOURNALISM:“Las sonatas de Scarlatti como legado histórico”, Goldberg, 49 (2007), 20-29
F-CORELLI
BOOK CHAPTERS: “A la sombra de Corelli: componer para el violín”, en J. M. Leza (ed.), La música en el siglo XVIII, en Historia de la música en España e Hispanoamérica, vol. 4, (Madrid, FCE, 2014), 291-307
BOOK CHAPTERS: La recepción de Corelli en Madrid (ca. 1680 – ca. 1810)”, en G. Barnett, et al. (eds.), Arcangelo Corelli fra mito e realtà storica. Nuove prospettive d’indagine musicologica e interdisciplinare nel 350º anniversario della nascita (Firenze: Leo S. Olschki, 2007), 573-637
JOURNALISM: Program notes “El culto a Corelli”. Imaginarium, Enrico Onofre, violin and conductor (Madrid 2008)
G-PEREZ
ARTICLES: “La fortuna di David Perez nella Spagna: La circolazione delle arie”, Avidi Lumi, 14 (2002), 24-33
H-BEETHOVEN
JOURNALISM:¿Queremos más Beethoven?
I-VIVALDI
JOURNALISM: Program notes “La simplicidad sofisticada. A propósito de Vivaldi”. Orquesta y Coro de la Comunidad de Madrid, Enrico Onofri, violín y director (Madrid 2017)
J-DE LA PUENTE (1692-1754)
MUSIC EDITIONS:Juan Manuel de la Puente (1692-1754). Obras en romance (Madrid, 2003)
K-GARCIA FAJER (1730-1809)
BOOK: [ed.] La ópera en el templo. Estudios sobre el compositor Francisco Javier García Fajer (Logroño, 2010)
L-OTHER 18TH-CENTURY COMPOSERS
PAPERS: ANONYMOUS COMPOSERS, AGUSTÍN DE ECHEVERRÍA (DIED 1792), JOSÉ LIDÓN (1748–1821), FÉLIX MÁXIMO LÓPEZ (1742–1821), BARTOLOMEO LUSTRINI (FLOURISHED 1760) TESOROS DE ARÁNZAZU, VOLUME 1: ARIAS CON ÓRGANO OBLIGADO Elena López Jáuregui (soprano) / Norberto Broggini (organ) Verso, VRS 2077, 2009; one disc…
BOOK REVIEW:Review of Mariagrazia Melucci (ed.): Le cantate di Nicola Fago
M-MUSIC ANTHOLOGIES
MUSIC EDITIONS:Antología musical de la Catedral de Jaca en el siglo XVIII (Huesca, 2002)
N-ZARZUELA
MUSIC EDITIONS:Luigi Boccherini. Clementina (Bolonia, 2013)
BOOK CHAPTERS:“La zarzuela Clementina di Luigi Boccherini”, en Ramón de la Cruz: Clementina, ed. de N. Lepri (Florencia: Collana Secoli d’Oro Alinea, 2003), 15-36
JOURNALISM: Program notes “Clementina de Boccherini: zarzuela “casera” en el teatro público”. Teatro de la Zarzuela, Andrea Marco, conductor y Mario Gas, stage director (Madrid 2015)
BOOK CHAPTERS:Programar zarzuela en una sala de cámara: el caso de la Fundación Juan March (Madrid, 2020, pp. 166-173)
O-HISTORY OF QUARTET (ESPECIALLY IN 18TH-CENTURY SPAIN)
BOOK CHAPTERS:“El surgimiento del cuarteto de cuerda y la consolidación de la sonata”, en J. M. Leza (ed.), La música en el siglo XVIII, en Historia de la música en España e Hispanoamérica, vol. 4, (Madrid, FCE, 2014), 373-399
JOURNALISM: Program notes “El cuarteto de cuerda en el Clasicismo”. Cuarteto Quixot (Cádiz 2010)
JOURNALISM: Program notes: “Geschichte des spanischen Streichquartetts. Ein Abriss”. Instituto Cervantes de Múnich, November 2015
JOURNALISM:“¿Existió un cuarteto de cuerda español?”, Scherzo, 283 (2013), 86-88
JOURNALISM: Program notes: “Cuartetos neoclásicos españoles”, Fundación Juan March, December 2007
PAPERS:“Modelos compositivos para los primeros cuartetos españoles”, Congreso El cuarteto de cuerda en España desde finales del siglo XVIII hasta la actualidad, Granada, 20-22 March 2014
PAPERS:“El cuarteto de cuerda en España”, Seminario Estudos de Música Instrumental 1755 – 1840, Evora, 24 February 2012
P-MUSIC SEASONS & CONCERTS PROGRAMMING
ARTICLES:Challenging the Listener: How to Change Trends in Classical Music Programming
ARTICLES: [coautoría con I. Domínguez] “Aprender por objetivos: un modelo de conciertos didácticos en la Fundación Juan March”. Eufonía. Didáctica de la música, 64 (2015), 29-38
ARTICLES: “Tendencias y desafíos de la programación musical”, Brocar, 37, (2013), 87-104
JOURNALISM:“¿Quién escucha música clásica? Público, audiencia, oyente”, Scherzo, 312 (2015), 73-77
JOURNALISM: “Musicología aplicada al concierto. Tareas de programador”, Scherzo, 291 (2013), 73-76
PAPERS:“Challenging the listener: the music programmer as curator”, Performance Studies Network International Conference, Cambridge, 17-20 July 2014
PAPERS:“The challenges of the musicologist as programmer”, XIX Congress of the International Musicological Society, Rome, 1-7 July 2012
CONFERENCES: International Conference “Musicology applied to the concert: performance studies at work” (International University of Andalusia, Baeza-Spain, 1-3 December 2016) [Final program]
Q-PHD REVISIONS (ON 18TH-CENTURY MUSIC IN SPAIN)
PHD REVISION: Ana Lombardía: Violin music in mid-eighteenth-century Madrid. University of La Rioja (Sept. 2015)
PHD REVISION: Lluis Bertran: Espaces, sociabilités, répertoires. La musique dans les maisons particulières de Barcelone (1750-1800). U. de Poitiers – U. of La Rioja (December 2017). Co-supervision with Th. Favier
PHD REVISION: Josep Martínez Reinoso: La vida concertística en Madrid a finales del siglo XVIII. University of La Rioja (September 2017)
PHD REVISION: Héctor Santos: Música orquestal en contextos eclesiásticos en la España del siglo XVIII. University of La Rioja (July 2019)
R-HISTORY OF MUSIC (GENERAL & IN PARTICULAR OF 18TH-CENTURY SPAIN)
BOOK: [ed.] Instrumental music in late eighteenth-century Spain (Kassel, 2014) [with M. Bernadó]
BOOK: [ed.] Música y cultura urbana en la Edad Moderna (Valencia, 2005) [with A. Bombi y J. J. Carreras]
BOOK: [ed.] Concierto Barroco. Estudios sobre música, dramaturgia e historia cultural (Logroño, 2004) [with J. J. Carreras]
BOOK:Music on the margin. Urban musical life in eighteenth-century Jaca (Spain) (Kassel, 2002)
BOOK:Pliegos de villancicos en la British Library de Londres y en la University Library de Cambridge (Kassel, 2001) [with A. Torrente]
BOOK CHAPTERS:“La tradición organística eclesiástica”, en J. M. Leza (ed.), La música en el siglo XVIII, en Historia de la música en España e Hispanoamérica, vol. 4, (Madrid, FCE, 2014), 156-171
BOOK CHAPTERS:“Música para tecla: Scarlatti y sus contemporáneos”, en J. M. Leza (ed.), La música en el siglo XVIII, en Historia de la música en España e Hispanoamérica, vol. 4, (Madrid, FCE, 2014), 271-291
BOOK CHAPTERS: “A la sombra de Corelli: componer para el violín”, en J. M. Leza (ed.), La música en el siglo XVIII, en Historia de la música en España e Hispanoamérica, vol. 4, (Madrid, FCE, 2014), 291-307
BOOK CHAPTERS:“Repertorios orquestales: obertura, sinfonía y concierto”, en J. M. Leza (ed.), La música en el siglo XVIII, en Historia de la música en España e Hispanoamérica, vol. 4, (Madrid, FCE, 2014), 353-373
BOOK CHAPTERS:“El mercado de la música”, en J. M. Leza (ed.), La música en el siglo XVIII, en Historia de la música en España e Hispanoamérica, vol. 4, (Madrid, FCE, 2014), 439-461
BOOK CHAPTERS:“Escuchar la música: la academia, el concierto y sus públicos”, en J. M. Leza (ed.), La música en el siglo XVIII, en Historia de la música en España e Hispanoamérica, vol. 4, (Madrid, FCE, 2014), 461-484
BOOK CHAPTERS:“Hacia una bibliografía descriptiva de la música grabada en España durante la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII”, en B. Lolo y J. C. Gosálvez, eds., Imprenta y edición musical en España, (siglos XVIII-XX), (Madrid, UAM, 2012), 201-226 [with M. Bernadó]
BOOK CHAPTERS:“Familia, colegas y amigos. Los músicos catedralicios de la ciudad de Jaca durante el siglo XVIII”, en A. Bombi, J. J. Carreras y M. Á. Marín. (eds.), Música y cultura urbana en la Edad Moderna (Valencia: Universidad de Valencia, 2005), 115-144
BOOK CHAPTERS:“La difusión de la música desde una perspectiva transcultural”, en J. J. Carreras y M. Á. Marín (eds.), Concierto Barroco. Estudios sobre música, dramaturgia e historia cultural (Logroño: Universidad de La Rioja, 2004), 163-168
BOOK CHAPTERS:“¿Una historia imposible?. Música y devoción en Úbeda durante el Antiguo Régimen”, en A. Moreno Mendoza (ed.), Úbeda en el siglo XVI (Úbeda: Fundación Renacimiento, 2003), 141-166
BOOK CHAPTERS:“Arias de ópera en ciudades provincianas: las arias italianas conservadas en la Catedral de Jaca” en E. Casares y Á. Torrente (eds.), La ópera en España e Hispanoamérica. Una creación propia (Madrid, ICCMU, 2002), vol. 1, 375-94
ARTICLES:“Contar la historia desde la periferia: Música y ciudad desde la musicología urbana”, Neuma, 7:2 (2014), 10-30
ARTICLES:“Music-selling in Boccherini’s Madrid”, Early Music, 33:2 (2005), 165-177
ARTICLES: “Sound and urban life in a small Spanish town during the Ancient Regime”, Urban History, 29:1 (2002), 48-59
ARTICLES:“A propósito de la reutilización de textos de villancicos: dos colecciones desconocidas de pliegos impresos en la British Library, Londres (ss. XVII-XVIII)”, Revista de Musicología, 23:1 (2000), 103-30
ARTICLES:Music and musicians in provincial towns: The case of eigtheenth-century Jaca (Spain). Resumen de tesis doctoral (Londres, 2000)
ARTICLES:“A copiar la pureza’: música procedente de Madrid en la Catedral de Jaca”, Artigrama, 12 (1996-97), 257-76
JOURNALISM: Program notes “La estética del sometimiento”. Orquesta de RTVE, Pablo González, director (Madrid 2019)
JOURNALISM:“¿Qué es la ópera de cámara?: una mirada desde la historia”, Scherzo, 351, (mayo 2019), pp. 81-84
JOURNALISM: Program notes “Leipzig, 1848”. Orquesta y Coro de la Comunidad de Madrid, José Ramón Encinar, director (Madrid 2013)
JOURNALISM: Program notes “Narrar la historia de la música. Clasicismo y Romanticismo en Centroeuropa, ¿un mismo periodo”. Orquesta y Coro de la Comunidad de Madrid (Madrid 2012)
JOURNALISM: Program notes “La sinfonía clásica y sus públicos”. Orquesta y Coro Nacionales de España (Madrid 2010)
JOURNALISM: Program notes “De Londres a Venecia”. Bozen Baroque Orquestra, con Claudio Astronio, director (Valencia, 2007)
JOURNALISM: Program notes “Viena, París y el mundo de la sonata”. Christian Zacharias, piano (Granada 2006)
JOURNALISM: Program notes “Los mundos del Clasicismo”. Europa Galante, Fabio Biondi, conductor (Valencia, 2005)
JOURNALISM: Program notes “Esplendor musical en la Nápoles Virreinal”, Cappella della Pietà de’ Turchini (Cuenca, 2005)
JOURNALISM: Program notes “Nómadas del sonido. Migraciones musicales en el siglo XVIII” Fundación Caja Madrid, VIII Ciclo de Música Española “Los siglos de oro”. Camerata Anxanum (Madrid 2003), 2003
JOURNALISM: “Libros. Una apabullante minoría”, en Scherzo, 258 (2010)
JOURNALISM: Program notes: “Ad Libitum. La improvisación como procedimiento compositivo”, Fundación Juan March, November 2008
JOURNALISM: Program notes: “Música contemporánea para dos pianos”, Fundación Juan March, February 2008
JOURNALISM: School teaching guide “Los secretos del piano”. Fundación Juan March, 2007-08
PAPERS:“Contar la música desde los márgenes: España, el Clasicismo y la noción de centro – periferia”. Seminario en Investigación de Patrimonio Musical. Talca, Chile, 5-6 September 2014
PAPERS: International Conference “Interpretar la música ibérica del siglo XVIII”, Co-director, Barcelona, 14-16 July 2014
PAPERS: “Other Classicisms, other Centres: Iberian Styles in Late Eighteenth-Century Instrumental Music”, 49th Royal Musical Association Annual Conference, London, 19-21 September 2013
PAPERS:“Da obra à interpretação: desafíos para a recuperação da música iberoamericana do séc. XVIII”, round table in Instrumental music in the Iberian World, 1760-1820”, Lisbon, 14-16 June 2013
BOOK REVIEW: Review of The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening; Thorau & Ziemer (eds)
BOOK REVIEW:Review of A música instrumental no final do Antigo Regime: contextos, circulação e repertórios, ed. V. Sá & C. Fernandes
BOOK REVIEW: Review of Carlos Martínez Gil: La capilla de música de la Catedral de Toledo. Evolución de un concepto sonoro
BOOK REVIEW: Review of Michael Noone: Music and Musicians in the Escorial Liturgy under the Habsburgs, 1563-1700
BOOK REVIEW:Review of M. Boyd y J. J. Carreras (eds): Music in Spain during the eighteenth century
CONFERENCE REVIEW: Instrumental Music in Spain, 1750–1800: style, genre, market, Logroño 17–18 September 2009
CONFERENCE REVIEW: 17° Congreso de la Sociedad Internacional de Musicología: Lovaina (Bélgica) del 1 al 7 de agosto de 2002
CONFERENCE REVIEW:International Conference “Poder, Mecenazgo e Instituciones en la Música Mediterránea, 1400-1700” Ávila, 18-20 April 1997
2. You have dedicated a good part of your academic work also to Haydn. Thanks to their early perceived importance, Haydn’s music compositions had already had a wide and appreciated rapid circulation in Spain in the 18th-century. You have also published books (Joseph Haydn y el cuarteto de cuerda, 2009) and papers on this fundamental subject: already in 1770s/1780s Haydn was considered an important music reference and model in Spain and in all the Spanish American Territories, as you yourself pointed out in your works! Can you delineate the evolution of Joseph Haydn’s music fortune and dissemination across the Spain and the Spanish American Territories of the 18th-century?
The dissemination of Joseph Haydn’s work reached, already during the composer’s lifetime, a dimension unknown to any other composer of his time!
This applies above all to instrumental music. This particular condition is explained not only by the fact that he was a great composer. Also because there were a series of revolutionary changes in the systems of production and consumption of music that took place at the end of the 18th-century that Haydn knew how to take advantage of with great intelligence. But two other elements specific to this composer were also decisive. Haydn knew how to compose works conceived with genius to seduce both professionals and amateurs, thus broadening the horizon of his market. Moreover, the revision of his contract with his patron Nicolaus Esterházy in 1779 opened up the possibility of negotiating the sale of his music to publishers. From then on, Haydn freed himself from the shackles of the Ancien Régime patronage system to take full advantage of the potential of the publishing trade.
There had long been a notion that Haydn had a close relationship with some patrons and institutions in Spain.But research is relatively scarce and offers only a fragmentary view of the dissemination of his music in this country.
Along with pioneering works by Robert Stevenson and Stephen Fisher, in the last twenty years some studies have been published, most of them focused on what we could consider Haydn’s milestones in his relationship with Spain: his connections with the court, his links with the aristocratic families of Madrid (in particular the Countess-Duchess of Benavente and the XIII Duke of Alba) and the Cadiz commission of The Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross…
… the evidence is already more than enough to confirm that the Spanish reception of Haydn is a particularly complex phenomenon that affects in parallel genres, spaces and institutions,…
… so we need to promote more systematic studies that explain, at least, the following four major questions:
(a) the function and scope of the preserved or documented sources and what variants and adaptations they show;
(b) the reconstruction of the channels, commercial or private, and their connection with European outlets through which Haydn’s works spread through Spain;
(c) the decisive influence of his work exerted on local authors; and
(d) the impact on the configuration of the aesthetic and intellectual ideology of listeners and aficionados.
The clarification of these four questions would shed light to understand in all its dimension the colossal presence of Haydn in Spain, already detected at a relatively early date as the beginning of the 1770s.
My research, begun in 2009 with the book on Haydn’s quartets, has focused on some of these four major questions, focusing on the string quartet, undoubtedly one of the genres in which Haydn left the deepest mark.
Through different publications, I have tried to specify in what specific way his quartets arrived in Spain and what impact they had on the composers based here who tackled this genre, such as Gaetano Brunetti, João Pedro Almeida (1744-1817) and Manuel Canales (1747-1786)…
… In this process, the other giant of the quartet was Luigi Boccherini, acclaimed by amateurs and professionals alike in the late 18th-century and then equated with the figure of Haydn. The fact that Boccherini wrote his imposing corpus of quartets from Spain invites a rethinking of some of the conventions of the narrative of quartet history…
… And this is what I have tried to do with my publications!
3. For Reichenberger you have edited Instrumental music in late eighteenth-century Spain (2014), then, among other studies, you have prepared the score edition of the 1786 zarzuela Clementina G540 by Boccherini and of the string quartets L184-L199 by G. Brunetti and you have written various works on the Spanish music collections of the 18th-century, on the favourite composers, the favourite music genres and other aspects of the music world in the Spain of the 18th-century. It would be really interesting for our readers to be introduced to such marvellous (and still a bit mysterious) Spanish music universe of the 18th-century through a reconstruction made by an exceptional specialist, like you: what the major beloved composers, what the major music genres, what the orchestras, what the chamber music and what the operas and the zarzuelas?
The history of music in Spain, like that of other countries, has always felt a certain pressure from the Viennese canon.
Music history textbooks have established the idea that Viennese Classicism (especially the instrumental genres) must be equated with all compositional activity in the late 18th century, forgetting that it is not a historical period of universal application, but a compositional style that originated around Vienna and that, for aesthetic and historiographical reasons, ended up being retrospectively and somewhat generalizingly considered as the style of the late 18th-century.
Joao Pedro de Almeida Mota,
Cuarteto de cuerda op. 6, nº2, en Re Menor. Finale.
Cuarteto Quiroga
This vision has eclipsed other compositional practices and other authors of great value, who have always been evaluated by their stylistic closeness or remoteness to that Viennese model of idealized perfection, instead of being analyzed in their own terms.
A. The Symphony
From this approach, my proposal to discover the wonderful musical world of the late 18th-century in Spain emphasizes composers who are probably unknown to most music lovers of this period.
In the field of orchestral music, in particular (and beside Boccherini and Brunetti), I’d like to underline the importance of the production by Carlos Baguer (1768-1808) and Ramón Garay (1761-1823), who made a substantial contribution to the genre with a remarkable corpus of symphonies. Many of their symphonies have been recorded in recent times. As might be expected, the imprint of Haydn is palpable, combined with elements of local color.
B. The Chamber Music
In the field of chamber music, I am very interested in the specific development of the string quartet, which resulted in some works of enormous interest.
Beside Boccherini, Brunetti, Almeida and Canales, we’ve talked about previously, the Cuarteto Quiroga has just released a CD entitled
The music in Madrid in the time of Goya
with four quartets composed in Madrid at the end of the 18th-century of exceptional value:
https://cobrarecords.com/catalogue/albums/cobra0067-heritage/.
Teaser, Brunetti String Quartet L.185
Cuarteto Quiroga
Brunetti L.185 / CD Heritage
world premiere recording
Cuarteto Quiroga
C. The Theatrical Music
Finally, in the realm of theatrical music, there are still many titles to be discovered.
The culture of musical theater was very present in Spain throughout the Modern Age (as shown by such an important playwright as Calderón de la Barca, whose plays almost always included music). At the end of the 18th-century there was a particular emergence of popular genres, like the zarzuela, but they have not yet come to occupy a prominent place in current programming. Among the titles we know, Luigi Boccherini’s zarzuela Clementina is one of the most outstanding for its unique combination of blending an Italian compositional tradition with a Spanish theatrical dramaturgy. We have some particularly well-performed recordings of this work, such as the one conducted by the Spanish conductor Pablo Heras-Casado (label Música Antigua de Aranjuez, 2010), which allows us to appreciate the delicacy of Boccherini’s style.
And we are not talking about José de Nebra, Martín y Soler and García…
D. Sacred Music
We’ve talked about the importance of Spanish Sacred Music previously with Mozart, Haydn, but we must remember also other in Spain working composers, such as Boccherini, José de Nebra, Almeida Mota, again Baguer and Garay, Fajer (1730-1809) and many others, as I’ve also demonstrated through my works and studies on the Spanish ecclesiastical archives.
As research continues to progress, many of these as yet unknown treasures will be published, allowing us to revise some of the misconceptions that still persist about the poverty of music in Spain during the Enlightenment.
El Quarteto Quiroga interpreta una pieza de Boccherini
El Prado pone música al 2 de mayo bajo la mirada de Goya
4. Among your many important collaborations, we remember, in particular, your articles on Mozart and his operas for the Teatro Real de Madrid and your intense activity with the Madrid Juan March Foundation, as Director of Music Program. Can you tell us about such collaborations with the Teatro Real and the Fundación Juan March: what your achievements, what the organization of studies/essays and the programming of music concerts, what your main principles in developing your activities and what your future projects? The detailed history of the 18th-century-Spain music is also at the very centre of your work as Professor at La Rioja University: what projects have you supervised so far, what your relationship with the people working on such academic projects? When and how did your passion for the 18th-century music start?
My professional profile is somewhat particular, as my career moves between two areas: as an academic and as a music programmer.
My training is anchored in the field of musicology, after my studies at the Universities of Salamanca, Zaragoza (Spain) and Cardiff (Wales) to culminate my training with a doctoral thesis at Royal Holloway University of London. From the beginning I chose to focus on the 18th century as a field of research.My entry as professor of musicology at the University of La Rioja in 2000 has allowed me to develop this line through teaching and research. Thanks to several R&D projects granted by the Spanish Ministry we have managed to create a good working team, while several students have completed their doctoral theses under my supervision. Two decades of intense work have yielded many results.
See section PHD Revisions.
But it has been my passion for outreach and music programming the part of my career that has allowed me to take my research outside the academic world.
From almost the beginning of my career I was convinced of the importance for musicology of being able to transfer the results of our studies to society. During these two decades I have had the good fortune to collaborate with some 15 Spanish musical institutions (like the Madrid Teatro Real), writing concert program notes or, in some cases, advising on their programming. These texts are more difficult to write than one might sometimes think…
… But for me they are very relevant because they allow us to directly influence how listeners perceive this music! It is particularly important when it comes to unfamiliar music, which music lovers are confronted with for the first time.
My appointment as Director of the Music Program of the Fundación Juan March in 2009 was a decisive turning point in my career, because now I had the possibility to design concert programs. The Fundación Juan March is a very particular institution, among other things because it follows a purely philanthropic philosophy detached from market dynamics. This privileged position allows us to program good works of music that, for whatever reason, are unknown or infrequent in the concert hall. During the last twelve seasons I have been able to develop along with my team many different projects that experiment with innovative ways of programming and listening, renewing the concert format (which is, by the way, a legacy of the late 18th-century that has changed relatively little since then).
Those interested in learning about some of these innovative projects can visit our website:
https://www2.march.es/musica/temporada-musica/.
Juan March Foundation: Season 2021/2022
with major projects on Mozart (Mozart a través de sus cartas: November 2021-May 2022) and Rossini, Brunetti, etc.
Season 2021/2022 Program
Season 2021/2022 Chronogram
You can also discover and follow our Videos and Events of Canal March TV at
Youtube (with Spanish subtitles available):
March TV Channel Videos & Events (YouTube)
The main conclusion I have drawn from all these years of combining academic research with musical dissemination is that a musicological education is the best tool for effective and well-informed dissemination actions!
Juan March Foundation TV Channel (YouTube version):
1. Beethoven, 12 Variations on Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen from Mozart’s The Magic Flute (1796);
2. Beethoven, 7 Variations on Bei Männern welche Liebe fühlen from Mozart’s The Magic Flute (1801).
5. Your favourite work by Mozart and your favourite work by J. Haydn.
My favorite Mozart work is the first movement of the Sonata in F major KV 332, for the simple reason that I studied it with great devotion in my conservatory days.
Among Haydn’s works, I would choose the Adagio Fantasia from the Quartet op. 76 no. 6, where the disintegration of tonality is already encapsulated more than a century before it happened.
6. Do you have in mind the name of some neglected composer of the 18th century you’d like to see re-evaluated?
That composer would definitely be Gaetano Brunetti (1744-1798; imslp), a musician in the service of King Charles IV, who forbade his music to leave the Royal Palace.
I do not mention Luigi Boccherini because I would like to think that he is not a forgotten composer, although his music still has relatively little presence in the concert hall.
7. It’s difficult not to think, that behind the Symphony Il Maniatico there may be some sort of joke on Boccherini. According to Belgray’s archival research, Brunetti and Boccherini were rather on friendly terms, not rivals.
_______________
Name a neglected piece of music of the 18th century you’d like to see performed in concert with more frequency.
The composer Manuel Blasco de Nebra (1750-1784; imslp), nephew of José de Nebra (1702-1768; imslp), died, unfortunately, quite young. But he left an impressive legacy of keyboard sonatas. There are several recordings available on the market (some even critically acclaimed: Gramophone/The Guardian/The Independent), but very little is performed in public.
The same goes for Sebastián de Albero (1722-1756; imslp), who predates Classicism, but has some incredible sonatas.
8. Certainly the music by these composers (and by Brunetti and Boccherini) already featured elements of the International Genius Movement (then relabelled Sturm und Drang and then again Romanticism).
_______________
Beside your books, have you read a particular book on Mozart Era you consider important for the comprehension of the music of this period?
The book that impressed me the most and helped me the most to understand the music of this period is Haydn’s Farewell Symphony and the Idea of Classical Style Through-Composition and Cyclic Integration in his Instrumental Music by James Webster (Cambridge, 1991).
Despite its title, it speaks very broadly about Haydn’s instrumental music. Although it is now three decades old, I have not seen a clearer and smarter way of explaining Haydn’s compositional procedures.
9. Name a movie or a documentary that can improve the comprehension of the music of this period.
I think Miloš Forman’s famous film Amadeus still has value, even if it perpetuates some of the Mozartian myths.
On the documentary side, the BBC’s The genius of Beethoven series is really worthwhile for its historical rigor.
10. Do you think there’s a special place to be visited that proved crucial to the evolution of the 18th century music?
For more conventional music lovers, Vienna is of course the place to visit, because it is replete with references to the lives of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. One can walk around Vienna through their biographies.
But for the most curious music lovers I would recommend the Royal Palace in Madrid or some of the palaces of the Royal Sites, such as Aranjuez or El Escorial.
The most music-loving king that Spain has ever had, Charles IV (1748-1819: Reign 1788-1808), really flooded all these places with music!
Thank you very much for having taken the time to answer our questions!
Thank you!
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Interview January 2020: 10 Questions with L. Samama
Leo Samama: Official Sites
Leo Samama Site: Leo Samama Official Site
Leo Samama: Leo Samama (SoundCloud)
Leo Samama: Leo Samama (Twitter)
Leo Samama: Leo Samama (LinkedIn)
Leo Samama: Leo Samama (Donemus)
Leo Samama: CD Albums
Leo Samama: I fear not wave nor wind!
Leo Samama: Fresh, sweet & sturdy
Leo Samama: En Hollande
1. In 2003 you published, with Arie Peddemors, the book Mozart and the Netherlands. A Bicentenarian Retrospect, an important and interesting collection of various scholarly papers on the multifarious aspects of the relationship Mozart and The Netherlands from 1765/1766 to the 21st Century. Can you tell us about the story behind the preparation of this beautiful book? What is the origin? What the process of selection and choice of papers and sections? What is the relation with the authors?
Arie Peddemors, then president of the Nederlandse Mozartvereniging, called me at a certain moment with the question to help him with the preparation of this book. I knew him since the early nineties, when he asked me to lecture together with professor Marius Flothuis and other colleagues at the yearly Mozart Week in Zeist. For the book, Peddemors had already approached several musicologists (mostly contributors of the Pro Mozart Magazine) to send in recent papers or the texts of recent lectures.
One of the best-known specialists of the music of Mozart, Marius Flothuis, whom I knew suite quite well since my early childhood, died two years before, in 2001, and left his research on Mozart’s Requiem, and the articles Joseph – Wolfgang – Michael [on Mozart and the Haydn Brothers] and Amadeus at his best – According to Mozart to us to edit if necessary. Only the text on Mozart’s Requiem needed some thorough editing.
Most other authors were (and still are) colleagues and friends, all noted specialists in the field of Mozart research: among them the pianists Bart van Oort and Frans Schreuder (Epta Frans Schreuder Prize, Epta Honorary Members), the musicologists Bastiaan Blomhert, Nancy van der Elst and Paul van Reijen, Jan Jaap Haspels, Emile Wennekes, and Rudolf Angermüller.
Thus, the choice was in fact rather simple. The topics were partly new, partly the result of many years of editing Pro Mozart. Most of the lay-out for the book was done by Arie Peddemors, who was also a specialist in lists – he had quite a collection of these, not only with all Mozart’s compositions, and all recordings of a certain piece by Mozart, but also cities visited, books on specific topics, etc. I was in charge of the final editing of the main articles, Arie Peddemors of the lists and additions to these.
We were of course lucky to have been able to organise regular lectures on Mozart during our festival week in Zeist, and professor Flothuis had been writing on Mozart since the late 1930s. Peddemors, in fact, was the only person contributing to Mozart and The Netherlands who was not trained in music, although he was by all means a fanatic music lover, a fine amateur pianist and a professional archaeologist.
__________________________________________________
LEO SAMAMA: A LIFE IN MUSIC
__________________________________________________
Leo Samama (b. 1951) graduated from the University of Utrecht in Musicology and studied composition and orchestral conducting. Samama taught History of Music and Culture at the Utrecht Conservatory 1977-1988, Musical criticism in theory and practice at the Royal Conservatory The Hague 1987-1988 and Music of the Twentieth Century and Musical Criticism at Utrecht University 1988-1991. He was a critic for De Volkskrant 1978-1984, a correspondent for the NRC Handelsblad 1986-1990.
Leo Samama sat on the board of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam as the orchestra’s artistic advisor 1988-1994 and as artistic administrator (2001); 1991-1993 he was head of the orchestra’s artistic department. 1988-1993, he was artistic adviser to the Centrum Nederlandse Muziek, an organisation specialising in the promotion of Dutch music, and 1992-1994 an advisor to the NCRV broadcasting company. He was head of the artistic department of the Residentie Orchestra The Hague 1996-2003 and its artistic administrator since 2004, and general manager of the Netherlands Chamber Choir 2003-2010. He is co-founder of the Netherlands String Quartet Academy and the European network for professional chamber choirs TENSO. Samama has given radio broadcasts and guest lectures all over the country and throughout Europe.
As a musicologist he has written books on diverse topics. His study on Dutch music in the 20th Century (1986, 2006) is a standard. Samama’s books The Meaning of Music (2014, 2016), The String Quartet (2018) and Alphons Diepenbrock, A Vocal Composer (2012) have been hugely successful. In the Netherlands, some eighty hours of university lectures have been recorded and released on CD and streaming audio. As a composer he has written over one hundred works, that have been performed all over the world, recorded on radio and CD.
In 2010 Leo Samama was knighted as an Officer of the Order of Orange-Nassau for his contribution to Dutch musical life.
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LEO SAMAMA’S WORKS & THE OFFICIAL SITE
__________________________________________________
a. Publications (read/download .pdf)
b. Compositions (read/download .pdf)
c. Leo Samama’s Official Site:
1. Leo Samama Composer
2. Leo Samama Musicologist
3. Leo Samama Lectures
A. Leo Samama on SoundCloud
Piano Sonata No.2, opus 36, “En Voyage”, performed by Ronald Brautigam, recorded by NCRV Radio, 1991
soundcloud.com/leosamama/pianosonate-2
B. Leo Samama on SoundCloud
En Hollande, Opus 56, for soprano and string quartet, has been recorded here by Nienke Oostenrijk and the Daniel Quartet. The text has been taken from Verlaine’s Quinze jours en Hollande.
soundcloud.com/leosamama/opus-56-samama-en-hollande
Leo Samama talks about the Fontys Academy of Music and Performing Arts
(in Dutch with English subtitles)
2. You have worked also as general editor of Pro Mozart Magazine, the official magazine of Dutch Mozart Society. Can you tell us about this activity? How it started and how it was carried on through the years. You have also published Mozart: A lecture about his life and work for Home Academy : what is your interest in Mozart as a man and a composer and what is your vision of him, within the context of the 1st Vienna School (for Home Academy you have produced also lectures on Beethoven and Schubert)?
Unfortunately, I can be quite short about this first item. I have been asked only a few times to take over the final editing of Pro Mozart. In the years 1999 – 2006. Arie Peddemors was so busy with his own research as an archaeologist and as the new president of the Nederlandse Mozart-Vereniging, that he asked me to help him. However, I was as busy as he was, in my case as of 2001 as the artistic administrator ad interim of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and since 2004 of the Residentie Orkest in The Hague, with Evgenii Svetlanov as our chief-conductor. Thus, we split a bit all work. Peddemors choose the articles or the lectures to be converted by the authors into articles, and I did the final editing of the texts.
By the way, the recorded university lectures (all in Dutch!) came a bit later, from 2006 onwards, starting indeed with four hours on Mozart (2006 was a Mozart year!), and reaching in 2019 (in December) some 80 hours on a different composers (life and works) and diverse philosophical topics.
____________
My interest in Mozart dates from my early childhood years and is quite private too. In 1957, when I was 6 years old, the lady living opposite of our house was dying. She was in those days a famous Hammerklavier performer, Alice Heksch, specialized in Mozart’s music. Her children stayed in my parents’ house during the day, in order not to disturb their mother too much. In those same days my parents had given me a recording of Mozart’s life told for children by a famous French actor, Gérard Philippe. The recording was called La vie de Mozart and it told in detail also the death of young Mozart’s mother, in Paris 1778. With underneath the music of the Piano Sonata in A minor. For decades, the combination of someone dying and this dramatic music could not be separated… Later when I was eleven a received another essential Mozart recording, that is still with me: Mozart’s Piano Concerto in D minor performed by Sviatoslav Richter.
Mozart was a unique composer, especially since for us he seems to have been the ultimate genius, who like an angel could compose without much effort…
… At least, that is the 19th Century image we have made of him. In reality Mozart was – like Beethoven and Schubert – a very hard worker, who, as Haydn once said to his father, had an incredible knowledge of the science of music, and who knew himself he had accomplished this knowledge on a level very few would ever reach.
Mozart was a composer living on the brink of an aristocratic and a bourgeois society, who was well aware that without a fixed job on some court (by preference in one of the capitals of Europe), he had to forge a bond with a rather unknown audience of mostly laymen who did not ask for his music, but had to pay for the tickets to go to his concerts. For them he had to write music that kept the middle between head and heart, meant for Kenner und Nichtkenner, as his father advised him. Exactly that makes his music, that is so much imbedded into the world of opera (also his string quartets and sonatas are opera), still today expressive and dramatic, alive and intriguing. He was in fact the first romantic composer, the first who knew how to get hold of an audience of more or less anonymous Nichtkenner.
Haydn did the same in London with his symphonies and in Vienna with his oratorios. Beethoven made even a clear division between music for a dedicated audience of aristocrats and Kenner (the sonatas and quartets) and for the general laymen (most symphonies and the concertos).
Although Mozart and Haydn influenced each other mutually, and Beethoven received Mozart’s spirit out of the hands of Haydn (as count Waldstein advised him to do), all three were equally influenced by a multitude of other composers, predecessors and contemporaries alike. Many of these influences did not come from Vienna at all, but from the Balkan (Haydn), Italy, France and Southern Germany (Mozart), from France and Italy (Beethoven), from Moravia, Bohemia and Germany (Schubert).
Thus, the first Vienna School does not exist; it is, as so much, an invention of late 19th Century musicology!
3. So true! It is a fact that Mozart and Haydn, already in 1786, were publicly considered like the Klopstock and the Gellert of music. This parallel drawn between the two couples of artists had a fundamental normative meaning for its time. As a matter of fact, Gellert (1715-1769) and then Klopstock (1724-1803) had fundamentally changed and developed the German language, by creating new literary, linguistic and artistic standards and models that would be carried on and further refined by Schiller, Goethe, and others. Therefore the identification Haydn=Gellert and Mozart=Klopstock meant that Haydn (the so called London snuffbox!) and Mozart (the so called Paris snuffbox!) were already considered themselves normative models for music, and not only in Austria or in the German Nations but also in a much wider European context (and in the case of Haydn we well know what London snuffbox really meant!). At this point, perhaps, the term Haydn & Mozart Era (or Mozart & Haydn Era) may be, probably, a better choice…
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In your book Mozart and the Netherlands. A Bicentenarian Retrospect (2003) you published an extremely interesting article on the treatment of music fragments/style derived from Mozart’s music by other composers after 1791 on and with a detailed analysis of this kind of treatment by the composers and the contemporary composers of the 20th century and you yourself pointed out that this matter has really many multiple facets and that there were certainly still many things to say on this subject. Now, after 16 years, in 2019/2020, what is your vision of the treatment and re-use of Mozart’s music and style in the production of contemporary music?
Again, the answer is in the mentioned article itself.
Since the late 1980s the whole idea of avantgarde (dodecaphonic, serialist, postserialist, aleatoric, etc.) was slowly demolished by neo-romantic, neo-tonal and new age music. Or as Adorno would have said: regression (when he mentioned Stravinsky versus Schönberg).
Of course, Mozart is still there; and his music is still an important influence on many composers, however not stylistically, but technically: every tone counts, all material should be used ad fundum, never write what can’t be heard, always be expressive (composing is communicating!), tell stories not theories.
The use of quotations and allusions is not en vogue in our days anymore. Or maybe I should formulate this differently: the old rules of unity of time, place and action do not exist anymore in contemporary music. Composers allude, quote and mix styles and techniques as freely as they wish…
…The one single highway in the arts during many centuries has been replaced by a multitude of roads and routes.
The one single certainty one had regarding the development of music (e.g. from Haydn to Mozart to Beethoven and on via Schubert and Schumann to Brahms) seems to have been a sign of partial blindness and has been replaced in the late 20th Century by many different certainties, a labyrinth of possibilities, each of them equally true and equally important. Generally, we use for this situation the denominator postmodern, although that too is a mere invention of researchers and not of the artists themselves.
What I wrote in my article on the treatment of Mozart’s music by composers before 1980 is in 2019 a document of no more than historical value. But the philosophical basis is still useful: all art is the result of the world we live in, which is the result of what we have made of that world. We humans make the world that makes us… Thus, all art is political, is part of the politeia. That was one of the results of a study far larger than only the chapter on Mozart that I wrote in the late 1980s, covering the art of referring in music (oeuvre de reférence) philosophically and historically, and finally all the way until the late 1980s (including the music of among others Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Luciano Berio, George Rochberg and Alfred Schnittke).
C. Leo Samama on SoundCloud
This piece is a prequel to either the Brahms Serenade, which I arranged for winds, or the Dvorak Serenade for winds. Performance by the Netherlands Wind Ensemble.
soundcloud.com/leosamama/opus-52-samama-overture-to-a-serenade
D. Leo Samama on SoundCloud
Concertante for viola, flute, string orchestra and percussion, performed by Yuko Inoue with the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra under Otto Ketting, 1983.
soundcloud.com/leosamama/spleen-et-ideal-1
4. As a contemporary composer you have written many works. Among them there are also a few which may have, curiously, a direct link to Mozart or Haydn (at least, in the choice of the instruments): your Clarinet Concerto Op. 74, Clarinet Quintet Op. 51 and the String Quartets Op. 59, Op. 79, Op. 85; and in the CD Fresh, Sweet & Sturdy your composition Syrènes Op. 87 was chosen with works by Haydn and Gershwin. In 1982 you also published a book on Beethoven’s piano sonatas: do you think Mozart, Beethoven and the 1st Vienna School (or, better, as we have seen before, the Haydn & Mozart Era) may have had also a role in your being a contemporary composer and in your music? What are your projects for the future? And what is the importance of The Netherlands in your work as a scholar and as a contemporary composer?
On the first point my answer is quite elementary: that was purely coincidental and not a choice…
… My writing for the clarinet or for string quartet was simply the result of commissions by clarinettists and by string quartets. And Mozart and his music had no deal in these decisions. Nor does my saxophone quartet have any relation with either Haydn or Gershwin. Of course, sometimes I do try to bring different ideas and techniques together, especially in my earlier works until the early 1990s, where I have used quotes and allusions as so many of my contemporaries have done in the second half of the 20th Century.
However, if we really want to discern influences in music, then probably those of Frank Martin and Benjamin Britten (both from my teens), Olivier Messiaen (who was for many years a mentor and dear friend), my composition teacher Rudolf Escher and mentor around 1970, Bruno Maderna.
From the great composers of the past (even Josquin, Palestrina, Monteverdi, but certainly also Bach, Mozart, Beethoven or Schubert) I learned to always be expressive, to communicate in my music, to follow my own voice and use my material as economical as possible.
E. Leo Samama on SoundCloud
De solitude en solitude was composed in 1999 for the Leo Smit Stichting and dedicated to Eleonore Pameijer and Jeff Hamburg. The live performance is by Nienke Oostenrijk (soprano), Eleonore Pameijer (flute), Doris Hochscheid (cello), and Frans van Ruth (piano).
soundcloud.com/leosamama/de-solitude-en-solitude
F. Leo Samama on SoundCloud
The Concerto was written in 2005 for André Kerver and the Netherlands Symphony Orchestra (Orkest van het Oosten) and premiered that same year under Valery Petrenko.
soundcloud.com/leosamama/samama-klarinetconcert-opus-74
G. Leo Samama on SoundCloud
The Triptico for two guitars was written in 1978 and consists of three movements: Planh, Canzon and Danza. This recording has been made by the Groningen Guitar Duo, still one of the most lovely performance of this piece.
soundcloud.com/leosamama/samama-triptico-for-2-guitars
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The book on the Piano Sonatas by Beethoven was meant for the Beethoven cycle by Alfred Brendel at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw during the 1982/83 season. It was at same time the program book for these concerts and published for use outside the concert hall. However, the book was soon sold out and remained out of stock. Therefore, I have decided to rewrite and enlarge this book for 2020, for the Beethoven’s 250th Anniversary (1770-2020). After nearly forty years…
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As I explained above my work as a musicologist has only little influence on my work as a composer, with one exception, that I had the opportunity as a musicologist to meet and speak many composers of name around the world, write about their music and thus learned by far more about music than any musicological education could ever have offered. The other way around was as well the case: as a composer my view on music is always from the inside, from the point of view of a composer, and not so much from the point of view of theorists and musicologists who have seldom tried their hand on writing music themselves.
Part of this can be read not only in my books on composers or genres, but also in my personal philosophy of music, recorded in my book The Meaning of Music. Among my plans for the future are a sequel to this book, but also a book on the Lied, as a sequel to previous books as the Solo Concerto and The String Quartet (both written in Dutch). As a composer I mostly write what people ask me to write. Thus, for the next few years a handful of pieces are somewhere developing in my head. I hope that my busy schedule as a lecturer and as a member of diverse boards in the musical world, provide enough time to do what I am still dreaming of.
Finally, The Netherlands as such have no importance for my music. Of course, Dutch musicians do. But the general attitude by the Dutch government towards music in The Netherlands is rather negative and condescending. Compared to 20 years ago, the situation is even quite demoralizing. My own education and cultural background are more European than Dutch, being of mixed Tunisian, French, Italian and Dutch parentage, having been educated mixed Dutch and French, and having studied in the USA too. But as an artistic manager and founder of organisations in the field of music, I am of course quite Dutch, with a preference of building instead of dreaming only.
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LEO SAMAMA: THE SAMAMA FELLOWSHIP
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www.hollandbaroque.com/en/samama-fellowship
Samama Fellowship with Holland Baroque 2019/2020
Holland Baroque is an international ensemble based in The Netherlands playing over 60 concerts a year in Holland and abroad. We invite guests such as Giovanni Sollima, Reinbert de Leeuw, Lars Ulrik Mortensen, Alexis Kosssenko Hidemi Suzuki, Amandine Beyer and others.
Baroque music is the key, but we build bridges to other musical styles.
Several trainees have found their place as regular players in the ensemble or join the orchestra on a regular base since Holland Baroque started to offer this Training Course. Joining the Training Course is a chance to get to know the ensemble as well as improving your own skills and deepening your career as baroque musician.
Other projects by Leo Samama:
a. Netherlands String Quartet Academy (co-founder)
b. European network for professional chamber choirs TENSO (co-founder)
c. 150 Psalms & 150 Psalms Utrecht
Gramophone Article on Leo Samama
5. Your favourite work by Mozart and your favourite work by J. Haydn.
I have no favourite works by any composer, or better said: my favourite is virtually always the last piece I have heard.
A favourite work by a great composer feels like denying the other works to be favourites too. It is like children. None of them is your favourite, and all are!
However, I love Mozart’s opera Così fan tutte (and on 26 January 2020 we celebrate its 230th Anniversary!) and I am in awe for the finale of his Symphony in C (Jupiter), and Haydn’s Cello Concerto in D major next to Die Schöpfung.
