In the 1785–1787 supplement to the Breitkopf catalogue were listed three viola concertos attributed to Pater Romanus Hoffstetter, a Benedictine monk in Amorbach who is currently at the center of the Haydn Op. 3 string quartets controversy. These works, some of the most technically difficult and compositionally-progressive written for this instrument during the Classical period, have been seen by performers and scholars as indications of the monk as a talented composer, who must also by the same virtue have been considered a performer of the first rank. All may not be what it seems, however, for the three works stand out from among his other compositions, mainly sacred music and string quartets, as anomalous, due to their advanced stylistic traits in terms of form, structure, harmony, and idiomatic use of the solo instrument. This paper follows a supposition that the attribution by Breitkopf, a firm which was not entirely accurate in their labeling of authorship, may have been suspect. It examines the documentary evidence of the main (and formerly) sole sources of the concertos, copies at the University Library in Lund, Sweden, where they were donated by an amateur violist about 1798, as well as the evidence of musical style, providing a trail of circumstantial evidence leading to the conclusion that points in the direction that Hoffstetter’s friend and colleague Joseph Martin Kraus may have been the actual composer. As this trail is presented, a final “smoking gun” in a recent rediscovery verifies the accuracy of this investigation, demonstrating the efficacy of historical documentary study and the ability of such to produce tangible historical revisions based upon the evidence.
The histories of the viola da gamba and the violoncello share many points of intersection. This is perhaps nowhere more evident than during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when, as a result of the gamba’s declining popularity, some gambists switched to playing the increasingly popular cello. One witness to this transitional process is the remarkable 412-strong collection of music-related artworks amassed by C.P.E. Bach, one of the earliest attempts to create a visual history of music. The collection was compiled during this transitional period in the history of bowed bass instruments, and in its subset of cellists and gambists, both instruments are almost equally represented. An examination of these extant images, as well as other images of the same musicians, reveals a symbolic language of virtuosic pictorial representation. The symbolism was idiomatic to a particular instrument type, directly influenced by the technique of that instrument, and thus did not directly translate between the viola da gamba and the violoncello. In the seventeenth century, viola da gamba technique developed an extraordinarily virtuosic vocabulary, with chordal playing becoming an essential stylistic component. By contrast, in the eighteenth century, as the violoncello gained popularity, the new gallant style tended to favor a melody-centric virtuosity and therefore the technique crept into the higher registers of the instrument. This paper will show how the symbolism developed in parallel to the development of these instrumental techniques, and how this vocabulary evolved with instrumental technique and persisted into 20th-century iconography of cellists and double bassists.
One of C. P. E. Bach’s most expressive works for keyboard, his Fantasia in F sharp minor, (Wq. 67/H. 300, 1787), is entitled “C. P. E. Bachs Empfindungen.” As the title suggests this work epitomizes what we now call the Empfindsamer Stil, which has conventionally been understood as a deeply personal compositional style that affects the listener with surprising turns of harmony, rhythm, and dynamics. But if C. P. E. Bach’s style is so personal, how, then, can we interpret his fantasias? The answer may not come from the perspective of the listener, as the definition of Empfindsamkeit may suggest; instead, an examination into the aesthetic philosophy that characterized the early German Enlightenment indicates that the role of the performer is paramount in understanding the genre of the free fantasia.
Johann Sulzer (1720–1779), a student of the philosopher Alexander Baumgarten (1714–1762), explored the psychological aspect of artistic creation and identified two forms of inspiration: the first, the “enthusiasm of the heart,” is an individual’s experience of physical sensations during a trance-like, psychological state, whereas the second, the “imaginative force,” uses the power of reason. This can be understood as a distinction between improvisatory music performance and the act of composing written music. Based on a closer reading of Sulzer’s philosophy, I will demonstrate that Empfindsamkeit is not merely a style of music composition; rather, it is a psychological state in which a performer experiences an overflow of physical sensations. From this perspective, both meaning and function of Bach’s F-sharp minor fantasy become clear: though it was composed with the imaginative force of inspiration, it is meant to evoke an enthusiasm in the heart of the performer in the development of their own Empfindungen.
Recent times have seen a burgeoning of scholarly interest in the communicative mechanisms of later eighteenth-century musical style, whether viewed from topical, rhetorical or schematic perspectives. On a larger scale, form and formal function have become renewed objects of enquiry, and have naturally entailed a focus on the cadence. In the words of William Caplin, “in no other repertoire does cadential articulation ... assume such major significance for formal expression.” If cadences are fundamental for formal expression in the music of this time, I would argue that they also play a crucial role in the management of social tension, within a style that is marked by its sociable ethos. A conspicuous pattern involves cadential points that act to simplify the style and calm the tone of the discourse. They often follow passages that are heated or brilliant, as if to return the level of utterance to something that is more universally accessible. I will draw examples of this phenomenon from instrumental works by Dittersdorf, Kraus, Mozart and Pleyel. This discursive category might seem to represent nothing more than Schoenberg’s “liquidation,” in which characteristic elements give way to conventional ones to enforce the closure of a phrase. But from my perspective such a process involves no lessening of character or interest. It may bring about the reinvigoration of formula, of everyday language, but on other occasions the result is even simpler, involving a reduction to sub-formulaic musical material. What is being dramatized is a kind of musical behaviour that negotiates between categorical and concessive tendencies.
As a teenager in Charleston, South Carolina, Louisa Wells collected song sheets imported from London and bound them into her own songbook before fleeing the city during the American Revolution. She retained her bound volume of sheet music to the end of her life, and her songbook was purchased in 1992 by the Music Division of the Library of Congress. The 109 individual songs exemplify the music that Louisa played and cherished as a young woman. With the exception of a keyboard rondo, Louisa’s music consists of texted songs with a figured bass or keyboard accompaniment. The presence of three previously uncatalogued works demonstrates the value and significance of Louisa’s song sheets.
Louisa recorded her perilous departure from the American colonies in The Journey of a Voyage from Charleston, S. C., to London undertaken during the American Revolution by a Daughter of an eminent American Loyalist. Her father left for England at the outbreak of the war, and Louisa was banished from Charleston as a Loyalist three years later. Her account includes episodes of dangerous weather, leaking ships, captivity, and deprivation. Louisa’s handwritten memoir was printed in 1906 by the New York Historical Society, and is now recognized as an exceptional example of nonfiction by an eighteenth-century North American woman writer, as well as a unique primary source for American history. Her song collection holds similar value for the evidence it provides for music making in colonial Charleston, as demonstrated by presentation of specific examples from the songbook and memoir.
In the second London notebook, Haydn transcribed music he heard sung—or rather shouted—in the streets by “a gang of rowdy fellows” (ein Rott stropirter Kerls). Elements of this melody suggest its relative antiquity or origins in folk culture: it uses the hypomixolydian mode; its cadence features a lowered seventh degree with an ornamental under-third motion; several measures employ Lombardic (“Scotch snap”) rhythms; and its continually repeated seven-bar phrase creates no hint of antecedent-consequent organization. This striking tune has not been identified in the Haydn literature, nor does it survive in the standard collections of traditional songs and ballads. Haydn’s memorandum has long seemed the only account of this music and its unruly manner of performance.
An investigation of eighteenth-century hymnals, however, indicates that this song coexisted with a modernized form: in 1749 hymnbooks began printing a melody that strongly resembles Haydn’s, albeit purged of its distinctive archaisms. This updated version is still found in modern hymnals, but it was once also performed—somewhat startlingly—to words satirizing one of Britain’s religious minorities. Indeed, the tune was so strongly associated with the ruling social order that it was sung at Protestant rallies in Ireland until the twentieth century. According to George Bernard Shaw, merely whistling it could provoke violence. These bellicose associations help contextualize Haydn’s encounter with the related version and its vociferous performers: the song was evidently intended to taunt nonconformists, and the Catholic composer may have experienced a direct, and previously unsuspected, confrontation with England’s religious prejudices.
This dissertation examines how female opera singers collaborated with fellow singers, actresses, audiences, and composers, in order to create professional careers within expanding networks of musicians in early eighteenth-century England. During Queen Anne’s reign, London’s stages became spaces in which contemporary anxieties over women’s place in professional spheres collided with the emergent reality of female celebrity. For female singers, collaborative relationships legitimized their new positions as professional musicians and allowed them to engage in novel displays of public performance that breached the social boundaries of their sex; as a result, these women became highly visible contributors to England’s musical culture. Through their onstage characters and offstage celebrity personae, female singers gained social agency as they began to earn inordinate sums of money, to acquire more artistic control over the roles they played, and to manage their own public images by marketing themselves to particular audiences. My project considers the collaborative musical productions (including pasticcios, public concerts, newly composed operas, and English masques) in which female singers participated in order to elucidate how these women shaped and influenced the development of English and Italian vocal and theatrical music in the early eighteenth century.
The purpose of this project is to reconstruct musical performances given by female singers in order to reveal how these women mediated between musical culture and society in early eighteenth-century London. To achieve a thorough understanding of their influence, my project uses a wide variety of secondary sources that bring together multiple disciplines of scholarship, including musicology, theater studies, English cultural history, and women’s studies. Manuscript and printed music allows me to reconstruct the voices of these singers and their performances, showing how they marketed themselves to London audiences. Other archival sources, including newspaper advertisements, satirical pamphlets, personal correspondence, theater account books and salary lists, and even business contracts written by the singers themselves, demonstrate how the public encountered these women as celebrities, and how this affected both the creation and performance of English and Italian opera music. Currently, my biggest challenge is how to organize each chapter around the archival sources while maintaining a focus on the relationship between singers and their music.
Although Franz Xaver Süssmayr (1766–1803) is remembered today almost exclusively for his completion of Mozart’s Requiem, he was a popular and respected composer in his own right: Beethoven and Paganini composed variations on his themes; one of his singspiels, Der Spiegel von Arkadien (1794), was performed throughout the continent and was favorably compared with Die Zauberflöte and Don Giovanni; and his ballet scores made frequent appearances in European theaters well into the nineteenth century.
In the Hapsburg lands one of Süssmayr’s most successful works was his secular cantata, Der Retter in Gefahr (“The Rescuer in Danger”), premiered in 1796 at a benefit for the Viennese Freywilligen Korps. Employing a libretto by Johann Rautenstrauch, it is an assertive piece of pro-Austrian, pro-Kaiser, anti-French propaganda art. The cantata enjoyed immediate popularity in Vienna and was performed, in whole or in part, throughout the Napoleonic era.
This presentation—in the form of a lecture recital—will include an overview of the circumstances surrounding the cantata’s composition, notable performers involved in its premiere, and a brief description of the extant sources (from holdings at the British Museum, the National Széchényi Library in Budapest, the Sibley Library, and the Stanford University Library) upon which the presenter’s new performing edition is based. Highlights of the work will be performed by the 40-voice Erskine College Choraleers, with soloists.
During the early years of Maria Theresa’s reign, the Habsburg monarchy faced the greatest crisis of its modern history: a war of succession that briefly stripped it of its imperial status and threatened its political relevance. Against this background, scholars have tended to cast musical life around the court of Vienna during the 1740s solely in terms of a precipitous post-Baroque decline. However, a salient case of sustained musical vitality and development within this milieu is offered by the missa solemnis repertoire, which occupied a central place in its soundscape and incorporated the shift of musical values that took place during these years.
This paper shows how missae solemnes composed for state liturgies served to reinforce the idea of Habsburg constancy by adapting the traditional modes of musical triumphalism to the straitened political circumstances and more reserved ritual of the time. The resulting style retains Baroque elements while exhibiting greater formal unity, more refined text declamation, and a more subtle use of concertante instruments. These characteristics lead to the style of later mass composers such as Albrechtsberger and Haydn. I offer examples from masses by Reutter (Jr.), Predieri, and Wagenseil, based on manuscript sources of the Viennese Hofkapelle archive, that were performed in major liturgies of the court and St. Stephan’s Cathedral during these years. I discuss how such masses responded to Vienna’s Baroque musical heritage as well as its contemporary vicissitudes, and how, by demonstrating ideals of Austrian piety and power, they played an important cultural role amid the turbulent transition of the new regime.
Two vexed issues have long featured in discussions of 18th-century Viennese church music: the banning of trumpets and timpani in church in 1753 and the effects of Emperor Joseph II’s reforms of the 1780s. Newly uncovered evidence of musical practices at the Ursuline convent shed new light on Viennese attitudes and reactions.
The convent’s diary records that the nuns observed the ban of 1753 immediately and completely. The ban may have been no surprise: in the preceding years, convent ceremonies had become simpler, and court participation decreased. The diary also chronicles the convent’s problems in obtaining the services of trumpeters and timpanists around this time. The decline of clarino playing may have played a role in the ban, rather than the other way around.
A cache of parts from the Ursuline convent, preserved in the archive of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, reveals that the convent obtained new music until about 1770, and performed a large repertory into the early 1780s. But there was an increasing
tendency to repeat old favorites when possible, and adaptations were necessary. The severe criticisms of nuns’ music-making in Ueber die Kirchenmusik in Wien reflect the decline of the Viennese convents—to the music-loving Viennese, nuns’ poor music was emblematic of the problems of convents in general, providing one more reason why they should disappear. The reforms of the 1780s dissolved six of the seven female convents in the city. While the Ursuline convent survived, elaborate musical performance was abandoned with mixed feelings, but without much resistance.
By 1589, Tomás Luis de Victoria’s Motecta festorum totius anni (1585) was among the varied musical holdings of the Mexico City Cathedral. One particular motet, Duo seraphim (designated for performance on the Feast of St. Michael Archangel), had an especially long and interesting performance history, adapted by successive generations of eighteenth-century chapelmasters for use in their own compositions. Antonio de Salazar (fl.1688–1715) transformed the structure of the motet into a responsory for inclusion in a cycle of responsories for the Feast of the Holy Trinity. Later in the century, Matheo Tollis de la Rocca (fl.1756–1781) updated Salazar’s responsory cycle to include a pair of violins in the galant style, as well as a basso continuo line.
In my paper, I study the nature of the changes that each composer made, analyze how these changes affected the work, and contemplate the performance history and practices of each adaptation. I draw from period sources that include information about this specific feast and work, including a funeral sermon (1683) and the Mexico City Cathedral ceremonial (1751) to determine and explain how each composer changed the work to suit the performance needs of their time. Examining the piece(s) through the lens of Lydia Goehr’s ideas about musical authorship illuminates the composers’ processes and possible motives. The case of Duo seraphim clearly demonstrates the continued use of stile antico music throughout the period and creates a link that connects the entire history of music in viceregal Mexico City Cathedral.
During the French Revolution, the march became one of the most important musical genres, capable of expressing the energy, the determination, and the unity of the French people. Works of this kind developed a set of musical features that would influence the evolution of the aesthetics of music, as exemplified by Gossec’s Marche funèbre (1793) which, according to certain specialists, is quoted in the Funeral March of Beethoven’s Third Symphony.
While historiography has commonly associated the development of the march with the Revolutionary uprising, this paper studies several examples in sacred works from the 1770s by Giroust, Lesueur and Roze, from three complementary perspectives. One such approach, arising from Lesueur’s own theoretical writings, deals with dramaturgy, showing how the integration of episodes involving active groups of soldiers or true believers aimed to revitalize the French motet, whose nature had traditionally been lyrical rather than dramatic. The second approach analyzes those musical features in these marches which express solemnity and energy, while the third focuses on the spiritual dimension, by showing how these movements highlight such features as the opposition of the Good and the Wicked or the aspiration towards spiritual unity.
Finally, in demonstrating how these works reveal the religious roots of a popular conception of the Sublime, I challenge the received opinion of a decline in French sacred music at this time.
Haydn’s L’incontro improvviso (1775), a reworking of Gluck’s La Rencontre imprévue (1764), was composed as part of the festivities surrounding the four-day visit to Eszterháza of Archduke Ferdinand, Habsburg governor of Milan, and his wife, Maria Beatrice d’Este. With its overture in “Turkish” style, Egyptian setting, and standard abduction plot, the opera was in keeping with the exotic theme characterizing the courtly spectacles for the royal visit. “Castagno, castagna,” a patently orientalized begging song that the scheming Calender performs for the slave Osmin, among other unsuspecting victims, has often been cited as a textbook example of alla turca style.
The seeming simplicity of this aria, however, masks an underlying contextual complexity that is itself a commentary on both the trend of exoticism as well as the very act of performance. “Castagno, castagna” is a multi-layered performance and therefore must be read within the context of performance. In fact, the performer in question here is an imposter—the Calender is a fraudulent mendicant dervish of dubious moral
standing. The aria may therefore be considered meta-performative: the Calender is actually performing a song for another character, and Haydn gives the work an air of artificiality that distances it from the rest of the opera’s music. To consider it simply as conforming to the imitative aesthetics of the eighteenth century—as simply employing the topic of the Turkish as a coloristic gesture—is to overlook the depth of Haydn’s characterization.
Among the many smaller courts that dotted the map of eighteenth-century Germany, that of the Prince Kraft Ernst of Oettingen-Wallerstein was noted in particular for its excellent music. A man of intellect and good taste, the young prince was an ardent admirer of beauty with a special interest in fine books and works of art, but his special passion was for music. Kraft Ernst gathered at his small court some of the foremost musicians of his day, and by the 1780s, the Wallerstein Hofkapelle was recognized for its musical excellence. Kraft Ernst was especially fond of the music of Franz Joseph Haydn, and he made it a point to add to his music collection as many of Haydn’s works as possible.
Aware of the Kraft Ernst’s fascination with his music, in December 1781 Haydn wrote to the prince, whom he referred to as a “great patron and connoisseur of music,” to offer him six new string quartets (later published as Op. 33) at a special subscription price. This letter initiated an association between Haydn and the Wallerstein Hofkapelle that continued until 1789. Kraft Ernst commissioned music from Haydn and entertained him as his special guest during the composer’s first journey to London. Using documents from the Oettingen-Wallerstein archives, this paper traces Haydn’s relationship with the Kapelle during the 1780s. From this we learn much about Haydn as a businessman and his interaction with the nobility as well as the dissemination of music in this period.
According to Alfred Brendel, music from the “classical period” lends itself to comic effects because of its “solid and self-sufficient forms and structures”; the composer can surprise the listener, who is confidently awaiting a certain sort of outcome, with “breaches of convention”. Laughing at a good joke is a celebration of the human mind’s ability to resolve a paradox, through the act of appreciating an irony. So, what characterizes purely musical humor, as opposed to verbal or dramatic humor? Certainly, the element of surprise, common to all humor is a component, since musical development, based on establishing an idea through repetition, and then varying unexpectedly can be ironic and amusing. However, the result can be subjective since sometimes a sudden departure from a trusted formal structure can also be strange or even disturbing.
In the case of Haydn’s music (and his solo keyboard sonatas more particularly within the context of this proposal), somehow we universally understand his robust humor as being funny and ultimately take pleasure in the punch lines, even, or perhaps, especially after being teased from every side. How does his diligent and earnest writing belie his love of practical jokes? What methods of his compositional craft can be codified?
In my lecture-recital, I will use excerpts from the piano sonatas to show specific examples of compositional and musical techniques that create humor: delayed resolution
or diversion, obsessive repetition or “stuttering,” change of subject, amputation or “memory lapse,” dynamic surprise and “temper tantrums,” melodrama and musical “giggling,” to name a few.
In the theatre in Stockholm, as elsewhere, music was a part of most theatrical performances, but the close integration of the sung parts with the spoken narrative had not yet become a norm of the skådespel med sång (play with singing). To claim any one moment as the beginning of a theatrical revolution is a risky matter, but if a date were to be chosen for eighteenth-century Stockholm, it might as well be June 19, 1776, the first performance there of an opéra-comique by Grétry, Lucile (1769), with words by Marmontel. The six performances of Lucile did not change the situation overnight, to be sure, but it is also clear that new public expectations of the form had begun to develop. While such a movement may have occurred eventually, the immense popularity of Grétry’s opéras-comiques made a deep impact upon the theatre-going public and, therefore, upon the managers who chose the pieces they put before that public and, thence, upon those who provided the fare for those managers to choose among. I propose to show this development in two aspects. First, I shall show how Grétry’s opéras-comiques were adapted practically for the Swedish stage and, second, I shall look quickly at the shift brought about by the central position in the repertory Grétry’s plays quickly acquired.
Johan Helmich Roman (1694–1768) has been referred to as “the Handel of Sweden,” and rightfully so. Travelling to England from 1715 to 1721 to continue his musical studies, he met and was greatly influenced by Handel, who was at that time expanding upon his composition for the stage. Roman was well known for imitating different national styles of composition, at times simply creating arrangements of extant works, and other times deliberately composing new music with a specific composer in mind, with music labeled “alla Corelli” or “alla Marcello,” and so on. After meeting Handel he had a number of his anthems and oratorios brought to Sweden, and had their English texts translated into Swedish.
It is no surprise, then, that we see and hear Handel’s influence in Roman’s Twelve Sonatas for Flute or Violin and Harpsichord, published in 1727. While Handel’s chamber sonatas tended to follow the sonata da chiesa four-movement plan, Roman’s tend to vary in the number of movements and generally have a character more like the sonata da
camera. Nonetheless, Roman successfully incorporates Handel’s tendency to create florid and shapely melodic lines, all the while supported by well-directed harmonic underpinnings.
In this lecture-recital we will play a number of Roman’s sonatas, noting the similarities and differences in Roman’s and Handel’s respective styles, as well as discussing the process of creating modern performing arrangements, since these sonatas are largely extant only in the two-staff format, with melodic line on the top and figured bass on the bottom.
Gregor Joseph Werner’s Curious Musical Calendar (1748) is a collection of twelve multi-movement suites, one for each month of the year. The entire collection depicts various aspects of the year of its composition, employing overtly representational effects as well as many abstract, purely musical devices. Of particular interest are the minuet movements from each suite, where the number of measures of the two binary-form sections corresponds to the changing lengths of day and night throughout the year. For instance, the January minuet contains sections of nine and fifteen measures corresponding to the hours of daylight and night-time, while the February minuet contains sections of ten and fourteen measures. The oddly-measured sections and lopsided proportional relationships that often occur present a significant challenge to the composer, namely, to write music strictly adhering to the pre-compositional design while allowing the listener to effortlessly forget the difficulty of the exercise.
The Curious Musical Calendar is a veritable compendium of techniques of
phrase rhythm, including numerous instances of phrase expansion, parenthetical insertion, repeated hyperbeats, ritmo di tre battute, etc. This paper examines details of phrase rhythm and metrical design in the sixteen minuets of the collection, drawing upon the writings of Cone, Rothstein, and others. The minuets can be classified into three broad categories: (1) pieces with sections of even-numbered measures employing typical
four-bar grouping; (2) pieces with sections of even-numbered measures employing
slight deviations from an underlying basic grouping; and (3) pieces with sections of odd-numbered measures employing more extended deviations.
The Dresden composer Gottlob Harrer (1703–1755) composed several sinfonias in the 1730s and 1740s that employ topoi as an important way to address the social situations surrounding their premieres. In one of these, he was asked “by express command” of his patron Count Heinrich von Brühl to “interweave” the march of the military company stationed at Hubertusburg into a sinfonia. But what is an eighteenth-century march? Most recent interpretations of topoi have to do with social dance gestures in instrumental music. But an actual march is military music, and is far removed from the social graces of the dance hall and concert room. So which type of march is found in Harrer’s sinfonia? Both, actually, which gives this work a remarkable duality that makes social role and class the topos of the work as much as the march idiom itself. Juxtaposing the social and military march in the framework of sinfonia figurations creates a work with multiple gestures and affects. These likely would have affected the reception of the work, depending on whether the listener had ever responded to actual military marches, or was only familiar with the abstracted social march. The musical gestures heard spoke to the classes gathered to hear the work, as well as made a statement about classes excluded from hearing the work, especially common soldiers of the military whose presence in the room only existed in the imaginations of the listener.
.jpg)