And the mystery composer is (naturally) Anton Titz!

This shouldn't surprise my friends. But the quality of the music might. It impressed Gluck, Prince Lobkowitz and Catherine the Great (Anton Titz's employer in Russia). And now, thanks to the power of the musical internets (and thanks to the IMSLP), his music can be enjoyed and played anywhere, and by anyone.

This edition is available on this page of the IMSLP. I also put a computer-generated recording of the whole thing there. I left off the second repeat of the Allegro agitato because I don't think that section needs to be repeated in this particular piece.



There are two more Violin Sonatas, so keep an eye on this space!

And, while you are waiting, you can read some posts I have written about Anton Titz through this link.

While we are waiting for approval from the IMSLP, here's an audio link to the first movement and part of the second movement that I generated from my Finale file.

Anton Ferdinand Titz String Quartets!!!

PDF files of Three of Anton Ferdinand Titz's String Quartets are, as of this week, in the IMSLP Petrucci Library! You can get them here. These are excellent pieces that were beautifully printed in 1802 (with a dedication to Alexander I of Russia).

I have been hoping for this moment for years. You can read all my Titz-related posts here, but please have a look at the music first. Download it. Print it. Play it. Perform it.

Curiouser and Curiouser

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.

Imperial Frustrations

I have been spending a lot of figurative time in the Russian Imperial Court of late. The interpersonal and political maneuvers of the "players" are fascinating, but I find it odder and odder that there is so little scholarship about music in the court. What I have found (and anyone who reads this blog knows that all roads lead to my fascination with Anton Ferdinand Titz) is either veiled (manuscripts that exist in only a few libraries) or simply wrong.

Take, for example, the 1708 Stradivarius known as the "Empress of Russia." This list, taken from the Cozio listing, shows the owners of the instrument.

There were two Empresses of Russia: Elizabeth (reigned from 1741-1762), the daughter of Peter I and aunt of Peter III, and Catherine II, who married Elizabeth's nephew, and became Empress in 1762 and reigned until 1796).

Pavel Berman has this bit of information on his website:

The violin takes it name from the daughter of Peter the Great and Catherine I of Russia who took power in 1741 in a military coup after a period of obscurity under the regency of Anna Leopoldovna, and was crowned the following year. Although herself not highly educated she inaugurated a period of cultural development, abolishing the death penalty in 1744, founding the University of St. Petersburg, and bringing the first Italian musicians to Russia, including the Neapolitan Francesco Araia who wrote the first true opera sung in Russian, Cephalus and Procris. The Empress gave this valuable violin to her secretary and lover, Gribersky. The instrument, also known as ‘Empress of Russia’ is from a private collection and is not normally played in public.

Who is Gribersky? According to Robert Massie (who I believe is well informed), Elizabeth did have a musical lover named Alexey Razumovsky. He played the bandura. Alexey Razumovsky's nephew Andrey, by the way, was the "Razumovsky" who commissioned Beethoven's Opus 59 Quartets. Maybe Alexey didn't do so well with the fiddle.

The Cozio list has Catherine II as the next owner of the instrument. Perhaps Elizabeth gave it to Catherine to give to her husband Peter, who was a violinist (and according to Catherine, who had no ear for music, a bad one). Maybe this was the instrument that Peter played. Who knows? Maybe Elizabeth gave it to Catherine to keep for Paul, Catherine's son and the person Elizabeth considered next in line for the throne after Peter. Paul, by the way, was the person who commissioned Haydn to write his Opus 33 Quartets. Paul studied violin with Titz.

I hope that someone reading this post might know more about music in imperial Russia than I do! Please contribute anything you can.

More (or less) About Music in Imperial Russia

I have learned from Robert K. Massie's biography of Catherine the Great (a great book I have just started reading) that Catherine the Great was one of those people for whom music gives no pleasure (Nobokov was such a person). Her husband Peter was also (according to her account, which might not be that reliable) a lousy violinist. How unthankful it must have been for Anton Ferdinand Titz to work for an employer (appointed for life, probably) who hated music.

Here are some recordings of music by Titz, and a short talk in German about him that are on YouTube;







And there are even a a few sonatas for violin and harpsichord. I encourage anyone with manuscripts of this music to either scan them into the Petrucci Library or send copies to me, and I will make modern editions to upload.

Anton Ferdinand Titz in the Petrucci Library

I have spent the past two days in a heightened state of musical-archaeological bliss. A very kind person scanned the manuscript of an otherwise unknown (not even mentioned in Grove) Duo for Violin and Cello by Anton Ferdinand Titz into the Petrucci Library. I'm not sure if the piece has ever been played before (even in Titz's lifetime) because the parts were filled with errors that would have made it unplayable from the manuscript. What a treat it was to correct them, and what a thrill it is to hear this wonderful whimsical piece.

Look at the cover page. Titz lettered it himself. Look at the backwards capital F!



You can hear a synthesized audio file here. Here's a link to the PDF file.

Previous Titz-related posts:

Doesn't This Make You Curious?
The Dedicatee of Haydn's Opus 33 Quartets

New Year's Rant on the Simultaneous Rarity and Plentitude of Genius

Some of the benefits of being able to access on-line libraries like the WIMA or the Petrucci Library, sharing musical performances through YouTube, and having relatively few complications related to making recordings of new music or music in the public domain (aside from figuring out how to pay for making them), is that we are now able to understand that there have been a far greater number of people of what we like to call "genius" than we ever thought possible.

Most of us measure ourselves against people who can do and have done wonderful things. "I could never do that" is the usual response that someone might have after reading about or hearing about someone who "accomplished" something. There are exceptions, but the "never could" often turns itself into a "never will." Perhaps we spend so much energy measuring that it takes up too much of our time and our creative energy. My response is simply not to measure. It saves a great deal of time, and makes more room for creativity and the pleasure I get from seeing, hearing, and reading wonderful music and literature.

Success in music has become intertwined with the accepted capitalist view of success. It seems that we have to keep making more music in order to show any sort of cultural "profit," that is, if there is anybody who cares. Sometimes, when life circumstances make it difficult to keep accomplishing, a composer might not feel able to "produce." A composer without the regular stimulation from people who want to play and hear his or her music might not be as motivated to write as a composer who knows that the music he or she is writing will be played by people who want to play it, and heard by people who want to hear it.

I'm starting to believe that most music goes unheard.

At the beginning of my musical adulthood, the list of later 18th-century and early 19th-century composers (composers of the Classical Period, if you will) numbered in the scores. As of today, the Petrucci library lists 553, and these were 553 composers who had their music published. I imagine that number will double soon, since music from library collections all over the world is constantly being scanned into their on-line library.

A few composers, like Marianne Auenbrugger and Francesco Zappa (I couldn't resist that name) published only one piece (as far as we know), and some well-known composers were more prolific than anyone would have imagined, like Johann Nepomuk Hummel (this list reflects just a fraction of his total output). There were also prolific (and excellent) composers like Anton Ferdinand Titz who wrote music that didn't survive the consequences of time (as well as wars, revolutions, and natural enemies like fire, water, and decomposition).

A chunk of time spent in a library (of any kind--on line or physical) can show that creativity is part of the human spirit, but it also reveals how limited we all are. As a culture we have become a society of consumers of ready-made products. We have limited room in our virtual homes for all the treasures of the past (and the present) that we have at our fingertips, and we have proportionately limited time to enjoy them. Many of us lack to the skills, whether they be language skills or music reading skills, to evaluate what we find. This deficit exists within a greater popular culture that regularly asks opinions from "non-experts" on matters having to do with government and musical ability, and then accepts those opinions as being worthwhile data for measurement. Cable news reporters include audience surveys in their newscasts, newspapers regularly ask their readership to respond to on-line questionnaires, and then as "consumers" we are constantly urged to equate quantity of response with the quality of the product (performance, idea, candidate).

Perhaps it is a good thing that the world of "classical music" (or at least my world of "classical music") tends to function separately from "everything else."

Haydn Opus 33

I love the Haydn Opus 33 quartets. They were my first personal encounter with Haydn as a string player, and it wasn't long after starting to rehearse them that I began to think about trying to write for string quartet (the first step on my own journey as a composer). They were a true gateway drug for me, and the above recording made by the Cuarteto Casals that I have been listening to renews all my admiration for these pieces. Or maybe its obsession. This is my favorite recording to date of Opus 33, and I thought I'd share it here.

The liner notes mention that Haydn wrote these quartets almost ten years after writing his Opus 20 Quartets. I like to think that Titz had something to do with his return to writing string quartets.

These musicians play the Opus 33 Quartets like dramatic works--wordless operas with plots, sub-plots, comic relief, deep pathos, and lots of characters (as well as lots of character). Haydn (reportedly) was not crazy about writing operas. He was good at it (of course--he was Haydn and he was a pro), but it seems he didn't think much of himself as an opera composer. But like a brilliant mime, he could convey every dramatic nuance he wanted (and then some) without words.

Perhaps it was, in part, the operatic quality of these Quartets that impressed Mozart (who did enjoy writing operas) enough to come out of his own 8-year-string-quartet hiatus, and write a set of six quartets himself (and dedicate them to the great composer who inspired him). It seems that the first time Mozart and Haydn met was when they read the "Haydn" Quartets together. The rest is history.

The Dedicatee of Haydn's Opus 33 Quartets

This is Paul I of Russia, who served at Emperor of Russia from 1796 until 1801, when he was assassinated. He was the son of Catherine the Great and the father of Alexander I, who, it turns out, was a violin student of Anton Ferdinand Titz. If you think Titz was an odd duck, look at this article about Paul.

In 1781 Haydn dedicated his Opus 33 Quartets to then Duke Paul, who spent 1781-1782 in the West. I find it unusually interesting that the set of quartets Titz wrote in 1781 also used the kind of equality among the four voices of the string quartet that Haydn used in his Opus 33.

Doesn't this make you curious?

I admit that my original interest in this CD was because of the composer's name, but I also was intrigued by the idea of this person, who lived from 1742 until 1810, being a composer for the Imperial Court of St. Petersburg. Up until this morning I thought that "western classical" music in Russia began with Glinka. Knowing about Anton Ferdinand Titz changes everything completely, especially since the music is terrific. This is definitely not the milquetoast Viennese Classical music that people come across from time to time when doing research for dissertations. This is forward-thinking music in the spirit of Haydn and Boccherini, but with a completely original compositional voice. Although Titz was not Russian by birth, he was the first Viennese Classical composer to write in Russia. That he used Russian folk material in his quartets is just a little more icing on the cake of historical re-thinking.

Here's his biography from Grove:

(b Nuremberg, c1742; d St Petersburg, 25 Dec 1810/6 Jan 1811). German violinist and composer, active in Russia. He was orphaned at an early age and was taught painting in Nuremberg by Johann C. and Barbara R. Dietzsch, his uncle and aunt. By the age of 16 he was a violinist at St Sebaldus’s church there. After an unhappy love affair a few years later he went to Vienna, where he played in the opera orchestra and may have studied with Haydn. In 1771 he became a member of the Hofkapelle in St Petersburg; Catherine the Great paid him the highest salary of any of her court musicians. He also taught at the theatre school, gave the future Tsar Aleksandr I violin lessons, directed a court chamber orchestra (which included the clarinettist Joseph Beer and other outstanding musicians), and performed publicly, for instance in 1782, but most of his performances were at court, as a violinist and viola d'amore player. Later in life he suffered a mental disorder that sometimes prevented him from working, but he was encouraged and protected by Senator A.G. Teplov, a St Petersburg amateur musician. He dedicated three string quartets to Teplov and three more to Aleksandr I.

Titz was particularly admired for his sensitive playing of adagio passages, but by the time Spohr met him in St Petersburg in 1803 his technical assurance had gone. His compositions are mainly chamber works in the Viennese Classical style; his string quartets strive for a large dramatic compass and the three upper parts have considerable independence. He also wrote some small vocal works (now lost), including Le pigeon bleu et noir gémit, a romance that was popular in Russian salons until the mid-19th century. He has often been confused with the Dresden violinist Ludwig Tietz.

The liner notes for this CD also include a quotation from the 60-year-old Ludwig Spohr.

"I also saw and listened to Titz, the famous mad violinist. We found a man of about forty with a glowing face and pleasant appearance. You could not tell he suffered from mental confusion. So we were all the more surprised when he asked each of us: 'My most gracious monarch, how are you feeling?' He then proceeded to relate to us a tall tale, containing very little common sense, and complained bitterly about an evil wizard, who was jealous of his violin playing and cursed his middle finger on his left hand so that he could no longer play, but he then said he thought he might be able to reverse the curse."

The music for the 12 quartets recorded by the Hoffmeister Quartet was discovered in the Academic Regional Library in Ulyanovsk by Andrey Reshetin. A modern edition has been made of the first quartet, and it was published in 2000. I hope that all the music will be made available for other quartets to play, perhaps through the Petrucci Library. I also wonder if Titz wrote anything for the viola d'amore?