Perhaps the problem with curiosity is that every time we find out something new (perhaps I should drop the "we" and speak for myself), er, I find out something new, it throws a wrench into everything that I thought was so. Every chronology, whether personal or historical, is subject to interpretation, and a new twist or insight can alter the map significantly.
Take the Classical Period. There's a hell of a lot of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven to learn, study, play, and play again. A lifetime's worth, or perhaps three. I used to feel like I had a handle on the gist of the period, and I used to think I had a good narrative to give to my students to help them understand the music, the people who wrote it, and the times they lived in.
Now Pleyel has entered my life, much the way Titz did: through string quartets they wrote during 1780s, and I find it difficult to look at music the way I did. It's as if an easy-to-see triangle has become a polyhedron, with sides that interact with one another in ways I will never understand.
(Some of those "sides" are named Boccherini, Dittersdorf, Stamitz, Gluck, Clementi, Vanhal, Titz, and Pleyel.)
Everyone knows the name of Pleyel. Heck. There is even a website for the piano company that Ignaz Pleyel opened in 1807. He was born the year after Mozart in a lower Austria (the town that is mentioned in the Wikipedia article seems no longer to exist), and seemed to be a middle child (he was the 24th of 38 children) of a school master and his very fertile and always-pregnant wife. 38 children. Imagine. If she started at 14, she would have had to have one child per year until the age of 52, and live to tell the tale. Now this is curious.
Anyway, Ignaz had excellent teachers (Vanhal and Haydn), and he got a good job in the French city of Strasbourg (the border city with the German name). In 1791 (the year that Mozart died, and a tough year for musicians in France--what, with the Revolution and all), Pleyel went to London. Haydn, Pleyel's old teacher, was in London, so Pleyel had some healthy competition. So did Haydn, for that matter. It certainly made musical life in London even more lively. Pleyel happened to return to Strasbourg during the Reign of Terror, and to escape being put in prison or being killed, he wrote music to celebrate the Republic. He became a French citizen, and moved to Paris to start a publishing business. He began by publishing a complete edition of Haydn's string quartets, and made his fortune by publishing music by Boccherini and Beethoven, among others.
This is all very impressive, but what I find most impressive is the quality of his "Prussian" String Quartets, which are available in the IMSLP. You need to follow some complicated directions to get the score to print out properly, but the parts are original, intact, and very readable, both visually and playing-wise.
Here are the first three, the second three, and the third group of three.
I hope you're curious.
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8 comments:
I'm going to have to find recordings of those quartets. I got some Cherubini last year and they are also interesting.
I agree with your general point as stated and also as implied: the way we're taught music history omits swathes of important context. Those composers deemed "minor" or "lesser," who provide context for those deemed "great" or "greater," are typically omitted from general music history books and classes, and so we miss much of what we need to know and hear to fully understand any particular period of music history.
I'll wave at Hummel, Moscheles, and their contemporaries in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. How can we begin to understand Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Schumann if we don't know those composers?
And whose music do we need to know to better understand Brahms? Just who WERE his contemporaries, for that matter?
Well, there are the Schumanns for two, and Joachim, and Liszt, and Tchaikovsky (Brahms hated him), and Wagner (Brahms copied parts for him).
I guess the thing about Brahms was that he was practically an original thinker--or as original a thinker as a musician can be. He left far more fingerprints of influence on his contemporaries then they seem to have left on him.
I remember learning all the possible harmonic material of the (what we now call) common-practice musical spectrum when I was in high school. When my theory teacher told us that we had studied all of the possibilities, my response was to ask him, "what about the harmonies that Brahms used?"
I'm sorry, my question was not clear. I should have asked this: Who were the now-unknown contemporaries of Brahms, the equivalents of Pleyel, Moscheles, Hummel, etc.?
Robert Fuchs, Heinrich Herzogenberg, Ethel Smyth, Friedrich Kiel (who taught Charles Villiers Stanford), Carl Reinecke, Hans Sitt, Theodor Kirchner, Gustav Jenner, Amanda Maier, Eduard Hanslick, Eduard Marxen, and Julius Röntgen are good people to start with.
I'm particularly fond of music by Fuchs, Stanford, Maier, Kirchner, and Reinecke. None of them are Brahms though. He was really a singular musical personality. A "one off."
eder 52Thanks!
I know some Reinecke and Stanford, and there's soem Rontgen floating around my house. I would add Rheinberger, a first-class choral composer, to the list.
And Wikipedia has a good list of minor and major Romantic-era composers.
The thing about the people in Brahms' circle is that they were all, with the exception of his teacher and of the Schumanns and Joachim, were really pretty much followers of Brahms.
Pleyel, on the other hand, served as an inspiration for Mozart while Mozart was writing his "Haydn" Quartets. Mozart even wrote to his father raving about Pleyel's Opus 1 string quartets.
The thing about the people in Brahms' circle is that they were all, with the exception of his teacher and of the Schumanns and Joachim, were really pretty much followers of Brahms.
Pleyel, on the other hand, served as an inspiration for Mozart while Mozart was writing his "Haydn" Quartets. Mozart even wrote to his father raving about Pleyel's Opus 1 string quartets.
Why, oh why weren't YOU the one writing music history textbooks when we were in school, Elaine? Isn't it amazing when a "secondary" composer slips in and rocks your world? And sites like IMSLP have finally made it easy and affordable to explore a full range of repertoire.
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