Baroque Around the World – January 20, 2018
Concerto in C minor for Oboe, Violin Johann Sebastian Bach and String orchestra, BWV 1060 1685-1750
In addition to his enormous responsibilities in his final and most prestigious job as Kantor of the entire musical program at St. Thomas Church in Leipzig – where he produced weekly cantatas for the liturgical year, rehearsed the musicians, trained the boy choristers and taught Latin – Bach was also expected to put together the weekly concert of secular vocal and instrumental music for the Leipzig Collegium Musicum. The Collegium was a German university extra-curricular town-and-gown institution for which students and local musicians got together to perform at public gatherings. At least Bach got credit for this extra work since during his tenure in the post from 1729 to 1741, the institution was called the “Bachisches Collegium.” It was held in Zimmermann’s Coffee House, a high-class bourgeois establishment spacious enough to accommodate a large ensemble. Apparently, Zimmermann did not charge for these concerts, assuming that enough money was coming in from refreshments. Bach’s surviving harpsichord concertos – transcriptions of concertos for other instruments – and the surviving violin concertos were probably composed for the Collegium.
Although the oboe and its double reed cousins played a significant role in Bach’s music, especially in the cantatas, there are no surviving solo or chamber works for this family of instruments. Many decades of research, however, have shown that all of Bach’s keyboard concertos were his own arrangements of his works originally composed for either violin or oboe – or both together. The keyboard concertos have been used to reconstruct the concertos, presumably in their original form, and the opinion today is unanimous that the Concerto No.1 in C minor for Two Harpsichords and Strings, is a transcription of a concerto composed originally for oboe and violin. Its reconstruction posed no special difficulties.
The oboe is a descendant of the medieval shawm and, as with all double reed instruments, it requires a great deal of power to force air through the tiny opening in the reed. Accustomed as we are to hearing this concerto in its two-keyboard version, we lose the sense of the sheer lung and diaphragm power necessary to get through the seemingly endless serpentine phrases of this work. Bach's wind parts are surely one of the inspirations – no pun intended – for the oboist’s technique of circular breathing, a difficult skill of inhaling through the nose while exhaling through the mouth.
In this version of the Concerto, the violin part generally sounds subdued, since the soloist’s sound blends with the orchestral string instruments, while the oboe’s penetrating voice dominates the duo. As is typical of the Baroque concerto, each movement is based on a single theme, or ritornello, which is initially played by all the performers (ripieno) and then developed by the solo instrument(s)(concertino). In the energetic first movement, the oboe stands out among all the strings in the ritornello. In the solo sections, Bach maintains a running dialogue between the two instruments. He handles the dialogue differently in the second, slow movement, where each soloist weaves a line over the other sustained notes. In the third movement, the two soloists are pitted against the orchestra.
Suite from Les Indes galantes Jean-Philippe Rameau 1683-1764
Jean-Philippe Rameau was the leading French composer of keyboard music and opera during the late Baroque, and a renowned innovator in harmonic theory. In 1702, he began his two decades as organist in numerous churches around France, the last one at Clermont Cathedral where he secured his release from a 29-year contract by deliberately playing all the most unpleasing organ registrations and adding unresolved dissonances on a feast day.
Rameau moved to Paris in 1722 where he published the first of his many books on music theory, which brought him wide acclaim. His work eventually brought him to the attention of La Riche de la Pouplinière, a wealthy tax collector who devoted a considerable portion of his fortune to supporting musicians and who made Rameau head of his household orchestra. Rameau was known at the time primarily as a composer of keyboard music and cantatas, but when la Pouplinière learned of his protégé’s ambition to compose for the stage, he put him in touch with the librettist Simon-Joseph Pellegrin. Together they produced Hippolyte et Aricie in 1733, followed by a string of over 30 grand operas and spectacles for the Paris stage.
Rameau had a contentious character. His theory of harmony, which still forms the basis of the modern study of tonal harmony, embroiled him in disputes with the Encyclopedists, Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond D'Alembert, and especially with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Although widely respected and admired, Rameau was regarded as both unsociable and miserly.
In 1725, French settlers in Illinois sent six American Indian chiefs to Paris to meet with King Louis XV. Their tribal dance inspired Rameau in 1735 to compose music for a pastiche of “love stories” for one of the balletic spectacles so beloved of the French court. Each of the four acts celebrated a different exotic – not necessarily Indian – culture: Turkey, Peru, an unspecified Middle Eastern sultanate, and Native American.
Ouverture des Nations anciens et modernes, TWV 55:G4Georg Philipp Telemann 1681-1767
Fame and fortune in a creative artist’s lifetime do not necessary presage the judgment of posterity. Throughout Germany, Georg Philipp Telemann basked in the sunshine of success, far eclipsing his contemporary and sometimes competitor, Johann Sebastian Bach. In 1722, he was the first choice of the Elders of Leipzig for the position of city cantor, and only after Telemann turned the offer down, did Bach get the job.
But history has judged Telemann harshly, relegating most of his massive output – larger than Bach’s and Handel’s combined – to the archives (He composed over 1,400 cantatas and over 600 instrumental works alone!). Only in recent years has a fraction of his surviving compositions been published and experienced renewed popularity.
Telemann was a master at integrating the musical styles of the multiple countries that surrounded his native “Germany” (not unified until 1870). Combined with his predilection for tone painting, he turned several of his suites into musical grand tours, covering everywhere from Turkey to Moscow.
Here, in six ancient/modern paired movements, he covers the Germans, the Swedes, and the Danes, in addition to a pair of minuets (France?), an introduction and a concluding movement oddly called “Les vielles femmes,” (the old women). That being said, the piece opens with a stately overture in the French style followed by a “Handelian” Allegro. The next pair of minuets also have a courtly French flavor. To our modern ears, it is difficult to recognize any national characteristics of the succeeding movements, and it has been suggested that the work may have been composed for a festival somehow involving the three featured nations. The so-called “ancient” movements are slow, while the “modern” ones are fast, following the pattern set up in the “Ouverture.” The minor-mode final movement represents the clearest example of Telemann’s tone painting, as it imitates the halting gait of elderly women. Why he would have included such a movement in this work is a mystery – or perhaps it never really belonged with the rest of the piece.
From Giulio Cesare in EgittoGeorg Frideric Handel Piangerò la sorte mia (I will lament my fate) 1685-1759
Over the past three decades, Baroque opera has seen a remarkable resurgence. Leading the pack of composers is Georg Frideric Handel, and at the top of the list is his 1724 opera Giulio Cesare in Egitto, even making it to the stage of the normally conservative Metropolitan Opera.
Although Cleopatra had a few more years to scheme, eventually killing herself at the loss of her lover, Antony, she had previously taken up with Caesar while he was still a military phenomenon. After seducing him, she persuades him to take up her cause against her brother and rival for the Egyptian throne, Tolomeo. Fearing, incorrectly, that Caesar has died in the battle, Cleopatra laments her personal and political losses. It’s an enormously complicated plot, the equivalent of an historical novel that fictitiously insinuates itself into the domestic affairs and thoughts of participants in real events. As it turns out, however, Caesar has escaped with his life and returns to Alexandria to crown Cleopatra queen of Egypt.
From Cesare e Cleopatra Carl Heinrich Graun 1714-1759
Although his 33 operas are seldom performed today–even by early music aficionados–German composer and singer Carl Heinrich Graun was one of the most important composers of the mid eighteenth century. He composed within the same stylistic tradition as Handel, but the latter, with British royal patronage and his development of the dramatic oratorio, has pretty much shoved his compatriot into the shadows. Graun’s best-known operas are Montezuma (libretto by none other than King Frederick the Great) and Cesare e Cleopatra. His great-great-great grandson, Vladimir Nabokov, has maintained better staying power – but it’s only been less than a century.
The Death of Cleopatra Johann Mattheson 1681-1764
Can you imagine Christmas without Messiah? Well, if Johann Mattheson had actually killed Georg Fredrick Handel in that notorious on-stage duel in 1704, during a performance of Mattheson’s opera,The Death of Cleopatra might have ended with the death of Handel. The two composers had quarreled previously, but why their sword tips were not shielded for a stage duel is so unclear that the story has the ring of legend (or Hamlet). Apparently, a button on Handel’s coat deflected Mattheson’s epée, and the two were eventually reconciled.
Mattheson was best known in his own time and today as a music theorist, and his treatise on music and rhetoric is still consulted today by early music practitioners. He also composed eight operas, the manuscripts for which were looted by Soviet/Armenian soldiers during World War II and eventually returned tov Berlin.
The Death of Cleopatra is a scena, that is to say, a dramatic event that would have normally included a recitative and aria but which sometimes included more than one of both. This dramatic setup is the ancestor of the paired cavatina/cabaletta of Italian nineteenth-century opera.
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