CD Review June 2018: Perkins – Abbate, Mozart’s Piano Duets Vol. 1 & Vol. 2

Forget, for a moment, modern life.

Switch off the lights, light some candles and the laser light which will perform your music… Choose your most comfortable and favourite sofa, help yourself to some true 18th century punch (each house had its own recipe for their guests at their music soirées) and enjoy your perfect 18th century soirée… with the music by Mozart, his friend and mentor J.C. Bach, his beloved rival M. Clementi and two highly skilled and sensitive performers leading us through this charming journey on very beautiful historical instruments: Julian Perkins and Emma Abbate.

Julian Perkins & Emma Abbate CD1: Mozart: Piano Duets Vol. 1 (Resonus Classics) CD2: Mozart: Piano Duets Vol. 2 (Resonus Classics) Julian Perkins (Official Site) Founder Director of Sounds Baroque. Artistic Director of Cambridge Handel Opera. Emma Abbate (Official Site) Professor at Guildhall School of Music & Drama. Staff coach at Royal Opera House (Covent Garden).

CONTENTS

1. All the charm of brilliant and beautiful cantabiles…
    2. Mozart and a special demanding repertoire for the 18th
century soirées spent with his friends…
    3. Mozart: Piano Duets Vol. 1.
Dedicated to Nannerl and Franziska von Jacquin.
    4. Mozart: Piano Duets Vol. 2.
A masterpiece, again Nannerl and possibly Pichler’s (?)
fragments with a World Premiere Recording.
    5. J.C. Bach – M. Clementi: A wise and correct habit.
    6. Mozart & Clementi again… a curiosity from Spring 1786.

_______________________________________________________________

1. All the charm of brilliant and beautiful cantabiles…
As you can see from the special story behind these works for piano 4-hands (and especially those by Mozart), all the pieces (apart from K19d and, in part, K381) can be considered, in general, difficult or rather demanding pieces, even though at different levels, with K381 (for Mozart) probably an easier work and K521 and K497 the most difficult ones, also in consideration of the very careful interpretation needed here.

The first impression you’ll have by listening to this marvellous series of CD Albums by Julian Perkins and Emma Abbate is the absolute charming beauty of their cantabiles and the authentic brilliant and lively Mozartian verve and spirit which breathes from every note. Their singing and almost operatic style of playing these works 4-hands is finely endowed with a joyous sprezzatura, which this kind of music always always requires, to be correctly performed.

Moreover you will really enjoy the fine and delicious variations created by the two pianists at any ritornello. An art this even more appreciated, since, even though the two performers correctly never go too far, it gives a fine and vivid hint of what probably was the actual lively and a bit free performance practice, during the music gatherings of Mozart and his friends.

The interpretation of these pieces reaches a splendid fusion of intents, which, thanks also to the accurate choice of proper historical instruments rich in a marvellously warm sound (especially those used for Mozart’s piano duets), creates a much enjoyable 18th century atmosphere and is well co-ordinated between the two players.
The accurate work in rendering a beautiful, brilliant and refined fraseggio makes a few tracks of these CDs particularly remarkable for their interpretation. You’ll certainly enjoy, in particular, the sonatas K381, K521,  J.C. Bach’s and Clementi’s Sonatas and the magnificent monumental K497, with its 1st movement cantabiles and dynamics, the delicious fraseggio of its 3rd movement and, above all, both the Adagio and the Andante rendered with such a magical timbre and a series of soft nuances of expression which well paints the subtle musical texture of this piece… and all this under the masterly hands of the duo Perkins-Abbate, a duo that demonstrates too well how the music by Mozart, Clementi and J.C. Bach must really sing.

Julian Perkins and Emma Abbate perfectly master all the technical and mechanical characteristics of the historical pianos used for these recordings, so that they are capable of achieving those peculiar suggestive tones and that peculiar warmth and softness and delicacy of sound… id est all those interpretative subtleties which are especially demanded by the very nature of the pieces themselves, and, in particular, those Mozart’s passages in K497 piano and pianissimo will resound in all their fascinating velvety beauty.

The Mozartian interpretation given by the duo Perkins-Abbate can well be seen within that glorious tradition of a few great Mozart interpreters such as Edwin Fischer and Alicia de Larrocha.

This beautiful Series of CD Albums will make you appreciate, one more time, some beautiful masterpieces by Mozart, J.C. Bach and Clementi, from their very special convivial or Geselligkeit repertoire, and probably, thanks to the two brilliant interpreters and their fine choices… in the most authentic soirée atmosphere possible.

2. Mozart and a special demanding repertoire for the 18th century soirées spent with his friends…
The very interesting choice made by Julian Perkins and Emma Abbate offers the possibility of exploring a special repertoire for piano (and a particularly difficult one, since it was usually thought, in origin, for an elite category of extra-skilled interpreters) and to cast some light, through the music itself and Perkins-Abbate’s interpretation, onto the tradition of social music gatherings in the 18th century and on the forms of musical practice and performance.

Quartets, quintets, trios, duos, duets, etc. i.e. chamber music in general played an important role in the social habits of the 18th century society. Music soirées (either soirées organized at some very notable stylish salon or simple gatherings of friends for playing some music among dinners, good food, spicy drinks, some dancing, much talking, music listening and music playing: according to the Irish tenor Michael Kelly, one of the first performers of Le Nozze di Figaro in 1786, a good punch, at these soirées, was the favourite drink of Mozart himself: «He was remarkably fond of punch»; and from other accounts we know also that Mozart adored dancing) were a fundamental part of the social life in the second half of the 18th century and the public demand for new music (to be consumed at the soirées with one’s friends, both amateur players and professional musicians doesn’t matter) was really abundant and important.

A few composers even managed to transform all this into a profitable business, like Kozeluch and his own publishing firm, the Musikalisches Magazin, founded in 1785.
Also Mozart had his part, and a considerable one, in this peculiar context of social habits. Apart from his quartets, the piano sonatas, the violin and piano sonatas, etc. production, he and his sister, when travelling across Europe (literally as child prodigies of Nature), managed to make a particular form of work for keyboard rather popular: the pieces for keyboard 4-hands, an interesting form of performance, which could well highlight the incredible capabilities of the two performers.
In June 1784 an English author, whose identity is still unknown, could assert about the origin of this genre of composition in England:
«The first instance of two persons performing on one instrument in this kingdom was exhibited in the year 1765 by little Mozart and his sister».
After this first period of marvellous public performances by the Wunderkind himself, this kind of repertoire remained a sort of firm label for Mozart and his sister throughout the 1770s and those people who wanted to meet Mozart, his sister and his father personally, and privately, could reach the house of the Mozarts at Salzburg and have the possibility of listening to Mozart and his sister playing piano duets.
Even the famous large family portrait by Johann Nepomuk della Croce, painted in 1780-1781, has Mozart and his sister playing piano duets together at the keyboard…

When Mozart left Salzburg to reach Vienna, many things changed drastically in the life of Mozart.

Nonetheless, as far as we know, the Viennese social gatherings gave the occasion to Wolfgang to approach the genre of the works for keyboard 4-hands (and that for 2 pianos) on a completely new basis: no more his sister at his side, but the composer, singer and pianist Marianne von Martinez and then Caroline Pichler and Franziska von Jacquin, the sister of his close friends, the von Jacquins, who usually organized Geselligkeit evenings (i.e. conviviality evenings) on Wednesday evenings are among the names we know associated to the piano 4-hands production and performance by Mozart. So these women, who, after 1781, usually played piano 4-hands works with Mozart in well known social contexts, were skilled performers belonging to notable families who regularly promoted music soirées in Vienna.
As for other music genres cultivated by Mozart, the great master never thought to simplify his art, his music to meet the trivial necessities of common music amateur players (as other composers of his era did) and even when he writes music for the principianti his art remains sublime and untouched in its masterly construction.

That’s the reason, in any case, why Mozart’s music was not a particular best seller in score in that period, being de facto too sophisticated or even difficult for the average amateur player of the music soirées… (see, just an example among others, the problems with his Dissonance Quartet) and why Kozeluch became richer than Mozart in this peculiar branch of music mass production of the 18th century.
Nonetheless, as far as we know from various accounts on Mozart at the soirées (see Michael Kelly, Da Ponte, Caroline Pichler and others), when there was a soirée and Mozart was there with his friends, Mozart’s music was often in the programme of the music soirée (written music or improvised one were both common) and often with highly distinguished listeners (i.e. the great Neapolitan composer Paisiello) and highly distinguished performers (i.e. Haydn, Maximilian Stadler, Dittersdorf, Vanhal and others).
And we have also a curious anecdote on Mozart, playing piano duets during these conviviality evenings: at Caroline Pichler’s own salon, the highly talented lady pianist Pichler was playing some music at piano and suddenly Mozart sat at her side and stopped her playing and then started improvising a piano duet together (it seems he was reworking some music from his Figaro) and when they completed their improvisational duet piano performance, Mozart «began leaping and somersaulting about the room while meowing like a cat». Was Mozart happy with Pichler’s ability in improvisation 4-hands?… Being a piano duet improvisation a difficult art of its own not for the average common amateur music performer, such episode highlights the great talent of Caroline Pichler as pianist, that very Pichler who was considered «one of Vienna’s foremost lady pianists with a masterly touch, strong in execution, and undaunted by the greatest difficulties».
Those, who well know the complicated story behind most of Mozart’s music fragments apparently left unfinished, will discover, in this anecdote, the great master’s habit of jotting down some ideas derived from his own soirées musical improvisations of the kind described by Caroline Pichler. And therefore the famous fragments of Mozart’s piano 4-hands works still surviving belong to this very peculiar category of compositions: works, in reality, fully performed as improvisation during some music gathering, then written down on some music paper by Mozart as a pro memoria of some good ideas and then left without completion, even for years: the Clarinet Concerto K622 is a great example of this way of working.

But let’s see, in details, the Contents of the two CD Albums by Julian Perkins and Emma Abbate…

3. Mozart: Piano Duets Vol. 1. Dedicated to Nannerl and Franziska von Jacquin.
With their particular choice, Julian Perkins and Emma Abbate wanted to dedicate the first volume of the piano duets to two important figures in Mozart’s life: his sister and companion of professional concerts tours Nannerl Mozart and to Franziska von Jacquin (or in Mozartianese own language Sigra. Dinimininimi), that talented pianist pupil of Mozart (and sister of one of his closest friends Gottfried von Jacquin, in Mozartianese language HinkitiHonky), who often became the official and/or unofficial dedicatee of various difficult piano masterpieces by Mozart during his stay in Vienna in the 1780s.

In fact, Mozart’s pieces presented by the duo Perkins-Abbate in this first volume belong exactly to those two different periods of Mozart’s piano 4-hands music production: the Salzburg 1770s years with his sister Nannerl kept as a reference performer and the Vienna 1780s years mainly with his friend and pupil Franziska von Jacquin as reference performer…
… and, under a certain point of view, the story of piano 4-hands music production is really also the story of a few of the most famous lady pianists in history, from Nannerl Mozart to Caroline Pichler.

a. Nannerl (Salzburg) and Marianne von Martinez (Vienna)
The two duet sonatas K381 and K358 were written in 1772 and in 1773/1774 respectively. They were intended to be performed with Nannerl at Salzburg during various occasions, and, in particular, when someone wanted to meet the Mozarts in person at their home. The manuscripts of the two works remained in possession of Nannerl after his brother’s leaving for Vienna in 1781. However, Mozart kept copies of these works as a fundamental vademecum for his teaching activity and, when in Mannheim (1777-1778), he used these particular duets to be played only with the best students there. When in Vienna, Mozart managed to have these two pieces published by Artaria in 1783 among his first printed works and this is sufficient to understand the importance of such compositions for Mozart. Probably these works were among those performed 4-hands with Marianne von Martinez at her own very famous Viennese salon.

b. Franziska von Jacquin (Vienna)
As we have seen previously, Mozart’s relationship with important and skilled Viennese lady pianists led to piano duets performances during the so called conviviality evenings. Mozart’s connection to the family von Jacquin was profound and long lasting and his talented pupil Franziska became the ideal skilled performer of a few works by him. In particular, the Sonata 4-hands K521 (29 May 1787) must have had Franziska as a reference performer, since we still have Mozart’s own covering letter for this rather demanding composition:
«Give this sonata to your sister [i.e. Franziska] with my compliments and tell her to start working on it at once as it is rather difficult».
The suggestion of start working must imply that Mozart wanted to play this work with Franziska at some soirée…
However, the final published version appeared in 1788 as dedicated to another pupil of Mozart, Babette de Natorp, and to her sister Nanette. And again Mozart’s choice makes us understand that Mozart saw this kind of difficult works for piano 4-hands as a sort of official recognition of the particular technical command of the piano technique attained by his pupils: is it a reminiscence of his own musical path as a Wunderkind?

4. Mozart: Piano Duets Vol. 2. A masterpiece, again Nannerl and possibly Pichler’s (?) fragments with a World Premiere Recording.
With their second volume of piano duets, Julian Perkins and Emma Abbate decided to shift their interest onto the masterpiece of this collection of piano works 4-hands (K497) and onto a very interesting series of fragments (K357 in a new modern completion in a world premiere recording) and onto a fundamental doubtful work (the K19d), the two latter ones both important compositions to comprehend the technique, method of work and the most intimate world of sounds of the great master.

a. Sonata 4-hands K497 an extra-demanding masterpiece 
Both K521 and K497 belong to a professionally marvellous period for Mozart: that extremely prolific series of two years between Le Nozze di Figaro (1786) and Don Giovanni (1787). This K497 4-hands is universally recognized as one of the highest point of Mozart’s art, along with the most famous series of his Haydn Quartets and has been always scholarly praised for his excellent musical texture by such scholars as Alfred Einstein and Donald Francis Tovey. What is demanding here is not only the musical piece itself, but its very interpretation and once more we realize how Mozart considered such works for piano 4-hands not a mere trivial occasion of playing music with his friends, but rather, and without any compromise, a sort of artistic summa of piano technique. And that’s why, as Alfred Eistein pointed out, we find here the elements typical of Mozart’s orchestral works and of piano concertos with even pre-Beethovenian nuances and atmospheres.

b. Sonata K19d a fundamental influential work  
The Sonata K19d belongs to the London period (1765) and probably it was the piece used by Nannerl and little Wolfgang during their astonishing series of concerts as natural music prodigies. This Sonata is at the very centre of a scholarly dispute, since its paternity is not certain (we are not sure that child prodigy Mozart wrote this work in 1760s) and hence it has been recently moved among the works of doubtful authenticity. Nonetheless this very Sonata must have had a great influence on Mozart, because a clear and distinct echo of its brilliant finale movement Rondeau: Allegretto can be heard in the finale of the Gran Partita K361 (1781) and both in the finale of the piano sonatas per principianti K545 and K547a (both 1788). The fact that Mozart re-worked the finale of K19d (a piece which belonged to his youth and to the London year 1765) for his famous piano sonata per principianti must be surely somehow meaningful.

c. World Premiere Recording K357 completed by Robert D. Levin  
The two music fragments re-united and completed in the 19th century as K357 belong to that amazing huge corpus of music fragments and snippets left by Mozart. The art of completing such fragments left by Mozart unfinished (at least on paper, since probably he performed them in a full form during his concerts… or during the conviviality soirées, thanks to his incredible improvisational talent) has an old and long tradition which dates back to Mozart’s friends such as Maximilian Stadler and Süssmayr and to his wife Constanze.
The origin of these fragments can be easily found in that aforementioned anecdote by the excellent pianist Caroline Pichler on her duet with Mozart and in Mozart’s habit of improvising even works for piano 4-hands during the conviviality evenings…
The 19th century completion left by Andrè (1853) is characterized by a few philological problems. So, being Mozart’s original fragments (which belong to two different periods, 1787 and 1791) sufficiently rather long, the modern accurate work carried on by Levin restores the fragments of Mozart in a new completed form, this time respectful of the original compass of Mozart-era pianos and of Mozart’s own technique of composition.
Perkins and Abbate present here the world premiere recording of this completion by Levin and we hope that this completion will find its way towards popularity among international pianists.

5. J.C. Bach – M. Clementi: A wise and correct habit.
The inclusion of piano 4-hands works by J.C. Bach and by M. Clementi is a very wise choice by Julian Perkins and Emma Abbate.
And it must be said that fortunately it is an increasingly wise and correct habit from the modern generation of 18th century music performers, i.e. to have, for example, Kraus’s symphonies in the same CD Album with Haydn’s symphonies etc.
If in the era of Mozart there were many Kleinmeister of scarce quality, on the contrary, there were many great masters of that era, whose work for various and even bizarre reasons did not receive the right attention it deserved. Unfortunately what many people usually fail to correctly comprehend is that such composers like J.C. Bach, Vanhal, Dittersdorf, etc. developed their own personal Classical Era style already in the 1760s, when Mozart was only 5 years old and that child prodigy Mozart grew up studying and practicing in the style of these composers… even though the bad long habit of considering the music of the 18th century as a whole undifferentiated organism might lead to erroneously think the contrary!

So, thanks to the duo Perkins-Abbate, the two works by J.C. Bach and M. Clementi will be a nice discovery in this set of CD Albums and a motive of true enjoyment, being their sonatas 4-hands really delightful!

Even though written only in 1778 the Sonata in A major by J.C. Bach features many characteristics of his own style (in particular its Allegretto), that finely singing style that the young child prodigy Mozart, in 1765, had the possibility of studying with the composer in person in London and then, during the following years, through J.C. Bach’s scores. After 1765, J.C. Bach and Mozart remained always on friendly terms and in 1770 Mozart even officially became the pupil of the same famous teacher as J.C. Bach, that Padre Martini of Bologna, Italy (an authentic father of many great music composers), whose golden rule in composition was that «the beauty in music reveals itself naturally as a natural expression of masterly constructed parts», as Jommelli, another famous pupil of Padre Martini, put it more or less.

6. Mozart & Clementi again… a curiosity from Spring 1786.
The story of Mozart borrowing from Clementi’s piano works to create his famous overture for The Magic Flute in 1791 is well known and it is also well known how, according to Clementi, all this originated from Mozart’s reminiscences of their famous duel occurred ten years earlier in Vienna in 1781.
Now this may seem pure impression and fortuitous coincidence but Clementi’s Sonata Op. 14 No. 3 features in his Rondo: Allegro a well marked bar, which works as the conclusive seal of the whole piece and which curiously sounds like the extra-famous rhythmic motive of the Farfallone Amoroso from Le Nozze di Figaro.
The similarity here must be purely coincidental… A direct influence here may be probably very difficult and, above all, should be strictly historically and properly documented, but since this Sonata 4-hands by Clementi was first published in March 1786 and Mozart’s Figaro premiered in May 1786… well… what a striking coincidence!
Moreover this work by Clementi (performed on an ancient original square piano by Clementi & Co. London) is certainly among his best and liveliest products ever and the Adagio and the Rondo: Allegro are really two magnificent and very enjoyable masterpieces in their own right!

MozartCircle
S. & L.M. Jennarelli

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Iconography is in public domain or in fair use.

Impossible Interviews April 2018: Giovanni De’ Bardi the Father of Opera & of Football

Who is Giovanni de’ Bardi?

Giovanni de’ Bardi: Opera & Football
Member of one of the most important families in Florence linked to the family Medici and Lorenzo il Magnifico and famous for being the bankers of the Kings of England through the Middle Ages, just few know that Giovanni de’ Bardi is a fundamental figure in the history of music, since in 1576-1592 he decided to found the Modern Melodramma (and therefore the Modern Opera) and to develop the musical form of Monody (against Polyphony)…

And…

… seriously convinced to revive the ancient games of football of the Ancient Greeks and of the Ancient Romans, in 1580 Giovanni de’ Bardi first wrote the official rules of Calcio Fiorentino, founding thus the first Modern Football Game regulated by a precise code of rules, a first Modern Football Game with code of rules that will be the model to all the other forms of Modern Football Games from Soccer to Rugby and American Football…

de’ Bardi i.e. of the Bards: nomen omen
As for the case of Volta, also de’ Bardi is a meaningful surname.
Alessandro Volta is the modern pioneer of electricity (inventor of the electrical battery) and discoverer of methane at Lake Maggiore (in 1776: Mozart, Piano Concertos K.238 and K.246; Haydn, Symphony No. 61 and No. 66) and in the Apennine Mountains in Italy. But the most curious thing is that his surname Volta is a very ancient Etruscan name of a monster of the Tuscan Apennine Mountains, represented as a sort of killing monstrous wolf emerging from the wells and the depth of the earth like a natural gas (methane). And this Etruscan monster Volta was killed by electricity through a lightning hurled down from the sky after special prayers by the Etruscan priests of lightning (see Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia, II, 54, 140).
The Florentine surname Bardi/de’ Bardi comes from the very Celtic word Bardus, i.e. bard in English and bardo in Italian, a man who invents and plays music and sings, both a verse-maker and a music composer,… What a meaningful surname for the man, Giovanni de’ Bardi, who in the 16th century deliberately decided to found the Modern Opera and the Monody music, in the attempt to revive the ancient forms of Ancient Greek music.

de’ Bardi: the great bank & wool companies of Florence
The family de’ Bardi (or simply Bardi), in Florence since the 10th century AD, was one of the most important and powerful families in Florence. Through their commercial company, the Compagnia de’ Bardi, they ran important international banks and also factories for the treatment of wool, wool which usually arrived in Florence from England in great quantities.
The Compagnia de’ Bardi had many offices in Italy, in Europe, in Africa and Asia:
a-(Italy) Ancona, Aquila, Bari, Barletta, Castello di Castro, Genova, Napoli, Orvieto, Palermo, Pisa, Venezia;
b-(Europe) Avignone, Barcellona, Bruges, Cipro, Maiorca, Marsiglia, Nizza, Parigi, Rodi, Siviglia;
c-(Asia) Constantinopole, Jerusalem;
d-(Africa) Tunisi;
e-(Rome) one of three major banks of the Pope in Rome with Peruzzi and Acciaiuoli;
f-Bank of the King of England, of the King of France and of the King of Naples.
In Florence the Family de’ Bardi had 60 Family houses, of which 45 were located in Oltrarno. The city street of origin of their Family was the via de’ Bardi(Oltrarno) and their major palaces were Palazzo Canigiani (via de’ Bardi nn. 28-30, Florence) and Palazzo Bardi (via Benci n. 5, Florence).
In 1810 the main family de’ Bardi was extinct and their properties were incorporated in the properties of the famous family Guicciardini (the descendants of famous figures like Francesco Guicciardini; and again nomen omen the family name means Hunting horns).
The last surviving member of the Family de’ Bardi died in 1964 in Florence as Bardi Serzelli conte di Vernio, who lived in the Family Palace used by Giovanni de’ Bardi for his music Camerata in 1576-1592 and who left an important series of pictures to the Uffizi Gallery of Florence.

de’ Bardi in Florence: Dante Alighieri and Giovanni Boccaccio
The importance of the Family de’ Bardi was not only linked to their activity of major bankers, but also to a fundamental connection with two major figures of the Italian and International Literature: Dante Alighieri and Giovanni Boccaccio.
If Dante’s Beatrice (the central inspirational character of his books Vita Novaand Divina Commedia) is really Beatrice Portinari, Beatrice (called Bice) got married to Simone de’ Bardi (called Mone) as his first wife, when she was ca. 15 years old. As is well known, Beatrice died when she was still young (8 June 1290) and Mone de’ Bardi got married to his second wife, Sibilla (called Bilia) Deciaioli. Mone de’ Bardi had, at least, three children: Francesca, Bartolo and Gemma. Unfortunately, we do not know if Mone’s children were children also of Beatrice (his first wife) or of Sibilla (his second wife). However, the three children of Mone then got married to other members of the major Florence families, the Strozzi and the de’ Medici, so that Contessina de’ Bardi was the grand-mother of the great Lorenzo de’ Medici il Magnifico himself.

The father of Giovanni Boccaccio, that Giovanni Boccaccio, author of the Decameron and who, with Francesco Petrarca, opened in Florence the first modern University Course of Ancient Greek (the first European professor of Ancient Greek was Leonzio Pilato, pupil of Barlaam Calabro) and financed the first modern translations of the ancient Greek books and in this way opened the way to the European Humanism and the Renaissance, his father was a major official of the Bank of the Bardi in Naples, responsible for the management of the money of the King of Naples. How this Naples experience in his youth with his father, as bank official of the Bardi at the court of the King of Naples, was crucial to Giovanni Boccaccio’s life and to his literary works is well known.

Giovanni de’ Bardi: the founder of the modern football games
Giovanni de’ Bardi, was not only a member of the Florentine Aristocracy well trained in both Latin and Ancient Greek and Music Composition, but he was also a well known military commander, who had had an adventurous and tempestuous life in his youth spent in Florence.
As a military commander, Giovanni de’ Bardi took part in various campaigns in Europe and in the Mediterranean. He fought for the de’ Medici against Siena, then he was at the Siege of Malta in 1565 and, once nominated captain, he fought victoriously in Hungary for the Emperor Maximillian II.
His great interest in the antiquities and in the necessity of a fundamental military training led him to establish, once and for all, the rules for an ancient Florence football game, which he thought crucial to the training of the young aristocratic men of Florence to the military life.
In order to better achieve his intent, Giovanni de’ Bardi studied the historical origin of the ancient football game typical of Florence and so he tracked its origin in the Ancient Greece football games Episkyros (i.e. the Game of the Ball on the Skyros Central Line) and Phaininda (i.e. the Deceiving Game with the Ball) from which the Romans derived their own version of this football game, the Harpastum(i.e. the Game of Carrying the Ball Away). Being Florence an ancient Roman town established by Julius Caesar himself in 59 BC, there was/is a certain real possibility that the Roman game Harpastum just survived in Florence, across the Medieval centuries, as the ancient Florence football game.
This ancient football game is described in this way by Julius Pollux in his book Onomasticon (9, 104-105):
1-2 teams one before the other on a field;
2-the field divided in 2 halves by a central line, called skyros;
3-the game starts with the ball positioned on the skyros central line (after this the name of the game Epi-skyros);
4-there are 2 backlines behind each team;
5-one team wins by carrying the adversary team/ball beyond the adversaries’ own backline.

According to the various sources we have, this kind of football game (already used in ancient Sparta, played by two teams of 12/14 men each and with a ball of leather inflated with air and called kenysphaira or follis) was very similar to modern Rugby with the addition of a few characteristics typical of Soccer (and, in general, it was a game even more violent than Rugby and American Football): and this is how Calcio Fiorentino (i.e. Florentine Kick Game) actually works. This kind of game was also praised by Galen in his treatise De parvae pilae exercitio(On the exercise with the small ball), as perfect for the physical exercise of the body.
Hence in 1580, following the authority of the ancient lexicographers, antiquarians, physicians and surgeons, Giovanni de’ Bardi finally established the fundamental 33 rules of the game of football with his book Discorso sopra il giuoco del Calcio Fiorentino, being the first in history to do so and creating thus a game similar both to Soccer and to Rugby/American Football.

Since de’ Bardi’s football game (Calcio Fiorentino) was the first football game governed by established rules and the Florentine cultural activities always being highly influential across Europe, we understand how the rules defined by de’ Bardi worked as a fundamental model and reference for any kind of modern football game.
Today Calcio Fiorentino is still played in Piazza Santa Croce (Florence) every year (see videos infra).

Since de’ Bardi, at the beginning, wanted the game to be an elite game for the aristocratic families (a sort of military exercise in the form of a football game, as the Harpastum was for the ancient Romans), families who usually were also in charge of the military activities of Florence, many important historical figures used to play Calcio Fiorentino throughout the centuries, even though it was a very violent, hard and tough game: among them there are three popes (Clemens VII, Leo XI, Urbanus VIII) and many political leaders and men from the Italian major aristocratic families (de’ Medici, Gonzaga, Barberini) and even the French princes of Condé (cadets of the House of Bourbon).

Read the Book on Football by Giovanni de’ Bardi (Florence 1580, .pdf file)

Videos on History and Tradition of Calcio Fiorentino

Giovanni de’ Bardi: the founder of modern opera
Giovanni de’ Bardi was also well trained in the art of music and his love for the Ancient Greek and Ancient Roman traditions led him to develop the art of music, by reviving the ancient musical forms as described in the ancient manuscripts: a typical behaviour of a man of the Renaissance, who cultivated the love for the Ancient texts and traditions, like the truest Humanist, inspired by the Florentine Petrarca’s and Boccaccio’s first activities in this field (see supra).

Thus Giovanni de’ Bardi, in a period between 1576 and 1592, started a series of musical activities carried on by a group of people who usually kept their sessions of cultural discussions and of music playing at de’ Bardi’s own palace in Florence, Palazzo Bardi (via de’ Benci n. 5, Florence). This group received the name of Camerata de’ Bardi or Florentine Camerata. It was made up by composers, music theorists and scholars and was led by Giovanni de’ Bardi himself (the patron and host), who was also a music composer (unfortunately most of his music works went lost and are still lost).

Among the major composers and theorists who worked with Giovanni de’ Bardi there were the most famous Vincenzo Galilei (the father of the astronomer Galileo Galilei), Giulio Caccini (the composer of the first operas ever written) and Pietro Strozzi. The musical activities of this group were inspired by the works and the ideas of the scholar Girolamo Mei, a specialist of Ancient Greek drama and music, and were summarized in a series of books and works crucial to the development of modern melodramma/opera/monody:
1-Giovanni de’ Bardi, Discorso mandato… a G. Caccini sopra la musica antica e ‘l cantar bene;
2-Vincenzo Galilei (dedicated to Giovanni de’ Bardi), Dialogo della musica antica et della moderna;
3-Pietro de’ Bardi (son of Giovanni de’ Bardi), Lettera a G. B. Doni (describing the activities of the Camerata de’ Bardi and the birth of melodramma/opera);
4-Giulio Caccini, Le Nuove Musiche (the most important and theoretical part is its introduction Prefazione about Plato’s and other Greek philosophers’ theories on music and singing and the necessity of creating a new type of music different from the polyphony: effetti… che non potevano farsi per il contrappunto nelle moderne musiche, i.e. effects… that it was not possible to create through the counterpoint in the modern music pieces; Giulio Caccini was also an important music teacher of the new monody style and had many pupils ready to wide spread the new techniques, among them also collaborators of Monteverdi himself)
5-Jacopo Peri, Introduction to the score of Euridice (ritrovare questa nuova maniera di canto… gli antichi greci, i quali cantavano sulle scene le tragedie intere, i.e. to find out this new form of singing… the Ancient Greeks, who used to sing entire tragedies on stage)

The efforts and studies carried on by the Camerata since 1573 were finally supported, in the 1590s, by a new rival Florentine cultural circle led by Jacopo Corsi, who managed to gather around himself the same scholars and theorists who were involved also in the Camerata activities.
In this way, the two rival groups led Jacopo Corsi himself, Jacopo Corsi’s composer, Jacopo Peri, and de’ Bardi’s poet Ottavio Rinuccini to collaborate in creating the first opera ever written Dafne (unfortunately a work still lost: there are just a few fragments left of this opera composed both by Jacopo Corsi and by Jacopo Peri) in 1597/1598 (premiere probably 26 December 1598, Palazzo Tornabuoni, Florence, the palace of Jacopo Corsi).
Two years later the collaboration of the two composers Jacopo Peri (patron Jacopo Corsi) and Giulio Caccini (patron Giovanni de’ Bardi) with de’ Bardi’s poet Rinuccini led to the premiere of the second opera in history and the earliest still surviving opera, Euridice (premiere 6 October 1600, Palazzo Pitti, Florence).

Full performance of the earliest opera survived: Euridice by Peri & Caccini

So, in this way, that man, Giovanni de’ Bardi, that John of the Bards, who had founded the modern football games in 1580, managed to found also modern opera, the art of to act singing (il recitar cantando, an expression invented and introduced in 1600 by one of the composers of his Camerata de’ Bardi, Emilio de’ Cavalieri)…

Works by Peri, Caccini and Monteverdi at Palazzo Bardi, Florence

Monody or polyphony: a dilemma from de’ Bardi to Gluck, Mozart & Wagner
To create the melodramma/opera the Camerata de’ Bardi had to develop the technique of the monody and did this, by following the instructions of the Ancient Greece philosophers and theorists. Therefore monody started acquiring a position of contrast to the traditional polyphony style of that period, a polyphony style perceived as highly complicated (up to the obscurity), a corrupt and twisted form of music, incapable of conveying real emotional effects to an audience (nonetheless, as far as we know, it seems that both de’ Bardi and Caccini, in the end, thought that that counterposition of the two styles had not to be so completely radical).
Moreover the ideas of simplicity and of perspicuity which were cultivated with the monody style (that’s to say a canto and an accompanied basso with some chordal harmony, leading, in the end, to a recitativo, arioso and aria style) created a sort of dilemma, which had a great highly influential role in the history of music: monody vs. polyphony or harmony vs. counterpoint or homophonic-melodic treatment vs. contrapuntal treatment, as Schoenberg put it?
If we comprehend this passage well, we’ll better understand why the aesthetic ideas behind major composers like Paisiello found music perspicuity a fundamental aspect of the work of a music composer and which theoretical ideas led Gluck to carry on a reform of opera which had to change the structure of opera itself into a sort of simplified (also musically speaking) aboriginal purity. How Wagner developed such ideas, also from Gluck, into his form of opera/theatre (recitar cantando) is well known.
And we comprehend also why composers like Haydn and Mozart, following the ideas of C.P.E Bach, cultivated and developed forms of music, which were fundamentally and theoretically an amazing, marvellous and highly developed combination of the two techniques, the homophonic technique and the contrapuntal one, and why a certain acrimony emerged in Vienna between the Haydn-Mozart group of people and the Gluck group of people (among them Gluck’s pupil and official successor Salieri) with those many various accusations carried against Mozart and his opera writing: too many notes, lack of respect for word, German rubbish, due to its open contrast to the Italian and Gluckian simplified purity.

__________________________________________________
WORKS BY DE’ BARDI
__________________________________________________

A) Theoretical writings on music by de’ Bardi:

• Discorso mandato… a G. Caccini sopra la musica antica e ‘l cantare bene

He left also many works on Literature.

B) Compositions by de’ Bardi:

Unfortunately most of his works went lost. Here the surviving works:
• Miseri habitator (intermedii del 1589)
• Lauro, ohimé Lauro (1582)

At imslp.org de’ Bardi’s works (but the man in a portrait by Raffaello at IMSLP is Baldassare Castiglione and not Giovanni de’ Bardi):
Giovanni de’ Bardi at IMSLP.

CD Spotlight April 2018: 2 Piano Concertos by the Son of Mozart

Franz Xaver Mozart F.X. Mozart, the son of Mozart born in 1791, was a good and talented musician. Unfortunately being Mozart his father created serious difficulties to his career both as musician and as composer. Let’s re-discover his works a few of them considered even by young Liszt for some time. Howard Shelley Sinfonieorchester St. Gallen Hyperion Records

CD Spotlight January 2018: Rosetti Concertos for Horn & for Two Horns

 

Concertos for Horn & Two Horns The Series of Concertos for Horns by Rosetti acquired a certain notoriety for their beautiful quality and because Mozart noticed them and used a few of them as models for his own Horn Concertos. Klaus Wallendorf & Sarah Willis Johannes Moesus Bayerische Kammerphilharmonie CPO Records

Interview December 2017: 10 Questions with M. S. Zimmer & W. Holsbergen

  
Zimmer-Holsbergen: Official Sites
Zimmer-Holsbergen Site: The Unheard Beethoven

Zimmer-Holsbergen: CD Albums
Zimmer-Holsbergen : Beethoven: The Forgotten Works for String Quartet
Zimmer-Holsbergen : Beethoven: Fantasies for Piano

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This month a very curious and interesting journey through the extra-rarities, the many snippets and sketches and the various intriguing unfinished works left by L. van Beethoven, which all constitute an incredible really voluminous corpus (ca. some hundreds of neglected works by the great master!) and the many contemporary projects to prepare or reconstruct new performance editions for the modern Concert Halls…

1. Your project and your work on Beethoven certainly reached a particular status of recognition, when it left the Internet to reach the Concert Halls. First of all, with the great Leonard Slatkin, conducting the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington in 2001 and then in 2011 with the Naxos Records Belgian conductor Patrick Baton. Can you tell us about your experience and some major anecdotes on the live premieres and such a special passage from the Internet to Concert Halls?

                                          Mark S. Zimmer

I still remember well the phone call I received from our friend and supporter James F. Green, who is also on the board of the American Beethoven Society. He had, unbeknownst to us, leaned on some supporters of the National Symphony, and somehow received an audience with Maestro Slatkin, in order to show him the score of the Macbeth Overture as realized from Beethoven’s sketches by Willem. As Jim tells it, Slatkin was receptive, agreed to look at the score, and thumbed through it saying, «this is good… I like this… I think we have room in our opening concert of the fall». It’s far beyond what Jim had expected and certainly a massive surprise to us. It’s amazing what doors can be opened with just a little persistence. It’s really a tribute to Slatkin’s willingness to try new things and make an impression.

The premiere was shaping up to be a major event, with dignitaries and ambassadors from across the globe penciled in to attend. Unfortunately, the concert was scheduled for September 2011, and the premiere was just over a week away when the World Trade Center was hit in New York. All flights were shut down, and it looked as though the concert might even be cancelled. It was exceedingly doubtful that Willem would be able to make it, coming from Europe. Finally the concert was confirmed, and some rules were loosened to permit air travel, and both Willem and I were able to attend. On my flight to Washington DC there was only one other passenger, a fellow on crutches, so I figured I could take him if he caused any trouble. But the trip was uneventful for me.

Once in Washington, I met up with Green and Willem, and also met a number of other Unheard Beethoven supporters: the late musicologist Avishai Kallai from Israel, writer Gail Altman, Annie Moss Moore the creator of the sadly now-defunct Beethoven recording database, pianist and musicologist Susan Kagan, William Meredith then the director of the San Jose Ira F. Brilliant Beethoven Center, and others. It was an amazing time, and it was incredibly thrilling to attend the rehearsal of the orchestra as they worked their way through the Macbeth; it was clear that the basses in particular enjoyed the meaty parts that Willem had written for them. While I’d heard the synthesized version from our website many time, to finally hear it with a live orchestra was simply overwhelming. It was the second time I’d met Willem face to face, but we had spent so much time talking over the Internet it was like we were brothers immediately.

I attended all three performances of the Macbeth by the National Symphony, and it was a wonderful experience. The ABS had also arranged for some of us to venture to the National Archives and actually handle (with white gloves) some Beethoven manuscripts. It’s such a connection with history to physically touch the papers that Beethoven himself wrote upon. I happily translated in my best woeful singing voice what was written there and conducted in my white gloves, to the amusement of the other spectators.

Willem had more involvement with Patrick Baton than I did.

We also had another live presentation at the Kennedy Center about ten years after the Macbeth premiere, where Willem’s realization of the second movement of the lost oboe concerto Hess 12 was presented, with H. David Meyers as the soloist.

The Unheard Beethoven:
Beethoven, Choral Fantasy Op. 80 (New Version World Premiere)
After Beethoven’s own sketches (Hess 16)
Conductor Patrick Baton
Liege, March 2011 (first 3 min. 36)

                                            ____________

                                         Willem Holsbergen

As Mark said, I was on the first plane from Europe after the 09.11. There were many Americans on board, who had been stranded in Europe for 5 days, because all flights had been cancelled. When we flew over New York, the Americans went to the windows looking for the disappeared Towers. A solemn moment. An inaudible, silent gasp went through the plane…

… Later on, when I reached Washington, of course, I never believed the theory that a group of Avantgarde composers had carried out the attack, and that their actual aim had been… the very Kennedy Center, just to sabotage the premiere. That’s just too silly… these people would never have been able to carry it through…

Anyhow one… I must really call him a journalist!?… (but we must really call him this way…!?) had been making a lot of noise for several weeks, protesting against the performance. He said that the time allocated to the Macbeth ought to have gone to a contemporary piece… But he totally missed the point that the Macbeth, by its very nature, could equally be called a contemporary piece, indeed, that is precisely its raison d’être…

What he actually meant to say is that the emotional states expressed in that piece, and the use of 19th century skills, are strictly forbidden by the rules of the Avantgarde ideology, and… that these should be kept repressed…!?!?!?

As for Patrick Baton, he is a very intelligent musician, and passionate about the music he performs. I enjoyed our conversations very much. He has a rare insight, and the ability to get to the essence very quickly.

We did a special version of Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy, Op. 80. The piece starts with a long introduction for piano solo. The interesting thing, however, is that Beethoven sketched a string accompaniment for that intro, probably after he had published the score. These string parts are numbered as Hess 16, and Baton did the world premiere of that version. The main takeaway from the event was that the introduction does indeed sound much better with the strings.

So, pianists planning to perform the Choral Fantasy should really take that into consideration… Not doing so is, frankly, a real musical shame.

Belgian TV announcing
Beethoven: New Choral Fantasy Hess 16 World Premiere
Liege, March 2011

The Unheard Beethoven:
Oboe Concerto (Hess 12) World Premiere
Patrick Baton (Conductor), Nathalie Rompen (Oboe)
Liege, March 2011 

2. What’s the origin of your project? How have you been developing it through the years? What have been the great challenges and the great accomplishments, you experienced during these years?

                                          Mark S. Zimmer

The project began in a haphazard sort of way back in the 1990s. I was fresh to the Internet and had discovered DALNet, an Internet Relay Chat host, through an acquaintance who was using it to talk with friends about a mutual interest in carnival glass. I got onto it as well and wondered if there was a Beethoven discussion on the internet. In fact, there was a #beethoven channel, which was either run by Willem or he was one of the major participants, under the name of ‘xickx.’ We both were inveterate collectors of Beethoven recordings, and at some point the discussion turned to the complete works of Beethoven, and whether it was possible to amass a collection of recordings that would in some sense be complete. As a frustrated librarian and historian (I’m actually an attorney since neither of those things pays very well), I dove into the question with gusto.
The first issue was, what exactly constitutes the complete works?

Obviously, there are the 138 works with opus numbers, but there were at that time 205 more WoO (Werke ohne Opuszahl, or Works without Opus numbers) in the Kinsky-Halm catalogue. And then we found out about Willy Hess’s catalogues of Beethoven’s works, which in its 335 works overlapped somewhat with Kinsky-Halm’s catalogue. Thankfully, I live in Madison, home of the University of Wisconsin, and they have a splendid music library that has copies of both Kinsky-Halm (and its supplements) and the Hess catalogue. Then we found out that Giovanni Biamonti had in 1968 assembled an even more complete catalogue, with many more works, some of them fragmentary, some of them complete, that had been missed by both of the others, running up to… 849 numbers!
So complete was obviously a moving target that was elusive.

But it was shocking to us how many of these works had never been recorded!

At that time, the vast majority of the folksong arrangements had never been recorded, many of the piano bagatelles, some of the lieder and choral works, and many others. In addition, the recordings of some of the others were quite rare and hard to come across. I combed through the library’s old Schwann catalogues covering the entire LP era trying to track down recordings. I had standing orders with a number of record search services to find the more elusive items. For several years Willem and I swapped cassette tapes of recordings across the Atlantic in those pre-MP3 days, in an effort to fill in the holes in each others’ collections.

In the end, we were still left with a great many Beethoven compositions that we would never be able to hear. Willem then introduced me to midi sequencers, which allowed one to synthesize a crude version of a composition so you could hear something of what it would sound like; he shared a number of his efforts and it seemed like a great idea. In the meantime, I was also in touch with the San Jose Beethoven Center and its gloriously helpful librarian/archivist Patricia Elliott Stroh, about getting scores for a number of Beethoven pieces that hadn’t been recorded. We began synthesizing them and sharing them with each other and the participants on DALnet. I no longer remember what Willem’s first efforts were, but I remember that mine were the string quintet version of WoO 62, the last thing of substance Beethoven wrote, and his setting of Erlkönig, WoO 131, written decades before Schubert’s famous settings but nevertheless quite similar indeed.

As we proceeded, getting copies of scores from the UW-Madison Music Library, which had a set of Hess’s Supplement to the Gesamtausgabe, and more scores of rarities from San Jose, we soon had close to 100 midi files. While it was fun to swap them and share them on DALnet, it was clear that there was an opportunity being lost there, and it would be nice to share them more widely…
I think Willem suggested a permanent website to host them. I had a friend, Steve Lange, who did website design and hosting, and asked if he’d be willing to help us out. He was more than willing—I think his exact reaction was something like: «This is exactly what the Internet should be about». We puzzled about a name for a while and came up with The Unheard Beethoven, which is a little clunky, but certainly distinctive, since it both suggests what people are missing and plays off Beethoven’s own deafness.

It took a few months, but Steve got us up and running and we’ve been adding things in fits and starts ever since. The website still resides at http://unheardbeethoven.org after nearly 20 years.
At some point Steve Lange got another job and no longer was doing website design; he tried to help us over the years but eventually he had to turn it over to another fellow who did some nice work for us. Unfortunately he had some personal problems and we had difficulty reaching him.
That was unsatisfactory, and we asked Steve for help again. He suggested another of his friends, composer Kevin McLeod (who provides a massive library of his royalty-free music at https://incompetech.com/music/ ). Kevin was wanting to do more web design and he agreed to help us bring The Unheard Beethoven back to life in the 21st century. Kevin got us set up with a new website in February of 2013, running on a WordPress framework that allows us to (mostly) do all the updating we want ourselves.

We celebrated by converting many of the MIDI files to mp3s to take advantage of the greater bandwidth availability and the ubiquity of the format… not to mention improved sound quality, since we could use our sample libraries that were much superior to the run of the mill libraries that our users generally had, in order to generate the mp3s.

Among the new features of the new site, probably The Unheard Blog is one of the features we like best, since it allows us (and guest writers) to spout off about topics that we are interested in.
We’ve been adding things steadily and there’s still more in the works; I’m currently working on the recently-published volumes of Beethoven’s counterpoint studies with Haydn and Albrechtsberger; they’re not the most interesting things in the world (especially the studies with Haydn), but the knowledge of fugue and counterpoint that Beethoven developed in these works is vital to the understanding of the fascination that the fugue held for him throughout his life. And of course, precious few of these fugues and exercises have ever been recorded, so much of this will be new to listeners.

                                            ____________

                                         Willem Holsbergen

The great challenge in completing the sketches has been to feel one’s way into the emotional states of these sketches.

In some cases the emotions are pretty obvious, in other cases not at all. It is wrong to think that if you just rake together some notes you get melodies expressing wonderful things, and that is certainly not always the case in the Beethoven sketches.

You have to be able to recognize the synergetic effects between the notes, and then become aware of the emotional charge of these effects. This is essentially the same way I work on my own melodies in their early stages. However, in the case of Beethoven the additional challenge is to get emotional states that are at his level (while in my own work I have, in principle, the right to go for whatever trivialities I choose). Sometimes small changes in the notes are required to get any synergetic effects at all, which is then considered controversial by those who do not understand how these things work. By the way, recognizing the synergetic effects was in the old days loosely referred to as having an ear for melody.

Once you know the emotional charge, then things will come together, and what has to be done at the technical level becomes obvious. The technical issues are trivial compared to the first stage, but can still be quite challenging. Of course a lot can be said about these issues, but going into that would be somewhat beyond the scope of this interview. Anyone who is interested should write to us at the Unheard Beethoven, and we will discuss it there.

3. A fundamental part of your project is also dedicated to the Seldom-Heard Beethoven, an important reference tool for any musician interested in the music by Beethoven. In fact, while now the Complete Mozart Edition has two great monumental products as reference, which are both easily available to anyone, the old Complete Beethoven Edition 1997 (Deutsche Grammophon) and the following projects by other classical music record labels are neither easily available nor so complete, after all. Can you trace out a state-of-the-art about the recordings of Beethoven’s works and their availability?

                                          Mark S. Zimmer

It’s correct that the Complete Beethoven Edition of 1997, while it was good, was woefully incomplete and now it’s long out of print and can be quite expensive to acquire (not to mention that it was never cheap in the first place; I paid close to a thousand dollars for it the first week it came out, but I was ecstatic to be able to do so since it offered the first more or less complete recording of the folksongs and many other items that were never before recorded, so for that we owe Deutsche Grammophon a great deal of thanks).

Much of the slack since that now twenty-years-old set has been picked up by Brilliant Classics, which has had at least three different versions of its Beethoven Edition box over the years, which not only covers much of the ground that DG had done for a tenth of the price, but has also added new recordings. Their set of the confusing Italian part-songs Beethoven wrote for Salieri is to date the best, and is more or less complete; they also have added the very first complete recording of the lied Der Bardengeist WoO 142, previously available only in badly truncated and incomplete recordings.
There was also an inexpensive complete set of CDs from Cascade Records that had a number of problems (missing the first bar of the First Symphony being but one of them), and we understand that a number of licensors never were paid. But it also includes as of this writing the only commercial release of Erlkönig WoO 131 (in Reinhold Becker’s completion, not our version that adheres more closely to Beethoven’s continuity draft).

Over the years we have also been pleased to be a resource to boutique labels such as Monument Records from Washington DC, and Inedita Records from Italy. Both catalogues are sadly now slowly going out of print, but between them they released a great many Beethoven works that had never been recorded. So they are an important resource for collectors as well.

There was also a recording of never-before recorded orchestral works, including some realizations by Willem, made by Stefan Sanderling and the Orchestre de Bretagne for the ASV label. Unfortunately, just before it was released ASV fell into financial trouble and it never came out…

… My understanding is that Universal Music (which now owns DG, Decca, Philips and other labels) now controls the ASV catalogue, so perhaps we will see that CD someday. I’ve heard it and it’s quite wonderful; it’s really a loss that Universal hasn’t seen fit to do anything with it.
Given that Beethoven’s 250th birthday is coming up in the year 2020, I feel confident that we can expect some major releases from various labels.

I’d like to hope we see a truly comprehensive megabox of Beethoven along the lines of the splendid Mozart 225 box from DG/Decca released last year.

In fact, we have been contacted by one label (I don’t know that we are at liberty to specify which) to try to help them make the most complete release possible of Beethoven’s works, and we’re excited at the opportunity. If we are able to do that and make The Unheard Beethoven unnecessary, then I for one will be overjoyed that we’ve succeeded in our mission.

                                            ____________

                                         Willem Holsbergen

I’m afraid that my only contribution to the Seldom-Heard-Beethoven page has been to encourage Mark to go ahead with an update, at a moment he was doubting whether it was worth the effort.

 
4. You have established a long collaboration with the Ira F. Brilliant Beethoven Center at San Jose State University. Since both Mozart and Beethoven were great improvisers, many of their sketches of music were material for actual improvisation and so for what were, in reality, complete full-length performances. It is a fact that the work carried out by Constanze Mozart and her collaborators, the Abbé Stadler, in particular, after 1791, was also intended to make many works by Mozart, just left in fragments, available again for performance. Your project seems to have had the same target and to have carried on a sort of work, no-one actually did for Beethoven,… as, instead, Constanze and the others had done for Mozart. What have been the interest of modern composers and conductors in your work of collecting Beethoven’s fragments in this particular way? How many completion works have you published? How is it possible to receive a performing score for those completion works? And, in conclusion, what’s the actual situation of the 10th Symphony today, after so many attempts of reconstruction?

                                          Mark S. Zimmer

This is really a better question for Willem since he does the heavy lifting for the reconstructions and realizations; I’ve dabbled with it a little but he has a unique ability to see the sketches through Beethoven’s eyes and at the same time use his own imagination within the constraints of the classical style and Beethoven’s compositional attitudes to come up with completions and realizations that are both convincing and true to the spirit of Beethoven.

One of the projects we have had ongoing for some years is related to an improvisation that Beethoven did as a teenager in Bonn against the chant of the Lamentations of Jeremiah during Holy Week. His sketches for that still survive and we’ve made several attempts at getting them into a performing state, but they really point out just how harmonically adventurous Beethoven could be. In that particular instance, as Wegeler relates the tale, the young Beethoven asked the tenor who was engaged to sing the Lamentations whether he minded if Ludwig attempted to throw him off with his harmonizations. The tenor, not realizing who he was dealing with, laughed and told the boy to try his best. That evening, as the tenor began singing, Ludwig went into the most wild and outrageous harmonizations and soon the tenor was red-faced and spluttering with rage. After he complained to the Elector, Beethoven received a gentle chiding not to do that again to their guests.

In any event, once we have that in a workable form it will really open some eyes as to what Beethoven’s imagination was capable of. I’d like to see that put into finished form within the next two years, before the 250th birthday.

We’ve also hosted completions by others, one of the most important being Nicholas Cook’s performing edition of the first movement of the incomplete Piano Concerto No. 6 in D, Hess 15 (not to be confused with the piano concerto arrangement by Beethoven of the Violin Concerto Op.61, which is sometimes referred to as Piano Concerto No. 6). That completion had a brief bit of notoriety, and then seemed to have vanished until we found Cook’s journal article. We contacted Dr. Cook for a copy of the score, which he generously provided, and put it on the website, where I’m pleased to say it has generated some interest and resulted in its being recorded on the Inedita Records label by Robert Diem Tigani with Maurizio Paciarello on piano.

Some notable names such as Slatkin, Sanderling, Tigani, Steven Beck, the Covington String Quartet and others as noted have been willing to give these realizations a chance, and for that we’re grateful.
They’re obviously not Beethoven, but they do give us an insight into what Beethoven was thinking.
The Tenth Symphony is something we haven’t tackled, although there are quite a few sketches extant, and as you say a number of versions, Barry Cooper’s being the best known. We also have on the website two different composers’ attempts at a realization of the symphony, which differ vastly from each other and from Cooper’s efforts. Given the quality of Cooper’s realization, we’re content to keep that on the back burner and concentrate on pieces that haven’t seen the light of day… But the differences of opinion as to where the composer was going to go with the piece are pretty startling to say the least.
                                            ____________

                                         Willem Holsbergen

Of course, the completion of Mozart’s Requiem by Süssmayr was critized by a certain Gottfried Weber in the 1820s. He said: «Wouldn’t it be terrible if we mistook a stupidity by Süssmayr for a stroke of genius by Mozart? And wouldn’t we then look foolish?». His weakness was, obviously, that he, for one, couldn’t tell the difference, because otherwise there is no need to worry. Abbé Stadler wrote several articles defending Süssmayr’s completion, and Beethoven wrote a letter to Stadler, saying that he fully agreed with him.

From modern composers of the old Avantgarde school the reaction has ranged from total indifference, to hostility at best.

The younger generation is more interested.

But their problem is that their education is conforming them to the 20th century paradigm, so they are not sure whether they are allowed to take an interest.

Many sense that what they are looking for can be found by us, but often they are still a bit scared. I hope that I’ve been able to teach some of them things of value, and point them in the right direction.
You can get performing scores by asking us for it. If an edition for the requested piece doesn’t exist, we will produce one.

However, I’ll do it only under the strict condition that you understand that you perform a completion because of its own intrinsic merits, and place the performance or recording in the context of the 21st century. We cannot go back to an imaginary 18th or 19th century, nor should we want to, but these fundamental values ought to be revived in our era.

 
5. If it is possible to add a few words on this subject… After all, you well know that, beside the intricate Requiem affair and also thanks to the letters of Constanze, we are aware of the fact that she tried, in many occasions, to have Mozart’s scores back into a performance version… and sometimes trying to relying on the memories of those who heard the actual performance or who played the parts. That’s why modern scholarship has some suspicion also on a few masterpieces by Mozart: some Horn concertos, for example, and even the Clarinet Concerto K. 622 may be objects of some suspicion (see, in particular, Benjamin Perl, The Doubtful Authenticity of Mozart’s Horn Concerto K. 412, and Mozart Studies 2006, editor Simon P. Keefe, passim). So are they real completed compositions by Mozart or performance editions reconstructed by his friends and collaborators? And, beside Constanze’s problem with money and after so many years of much praising on such pieces, can we really really say that Constanze was really wrong in wishing such masterpieces to be in a completed performance form, instead of leaving such works as not usable and useless sketches on paper?…
It’s really an interesting subject, which requires much consideration…
Moreover we know that in classical music a culture of sketches completion and music reelaboration always existed and has been always part of the musical common practice. Apart from the variations technique and the improvisation fugues on themes or sketches, just consider Hummel’s famous own arrangements of Mozart’s works (sometimes trying to render an idea of an actual musical performance which was a bit different from the written score), the musical paraphrases and all those pieces of music which can be called transfiguration works (see MozartCircle Interviews July 2017)…
                                            ____________
Your favourite work by Beethoven, by Mozart, by J. Haydn.

                                          Mark S. Zimmer

My favourite work by Beethoven tends to change from time to time; it’s usually one of the Third Symphony, the Waldstein sonata op.53, Rage over a Lost Penny op.128, or the Appassionata op.57. Others frequently in the running are the string trio op.3, Piano Concerto No. 3, the Violin sonata No. 5 Spring, and the Coriolan Overture. Today it’s the Waldstein. You might get a different answer tomorrow.

I’m similarly undecided about Haydn. Any of the London symphonies could qualify at one time or another. I’m a big fan of his The Creation and The Seasons as well. I love his string quartets en masse and would have a difficult time picking one of them. But I think today’s answer is the trumpet concerto.

With Mozart, the answer is easy. As much as I love Beethoven, Mozart’s Ave verum corpus K.618 is the most sublimely beautiful and perfect piece of music ever written by anyone, anywhere, any time, ever. The music Mozart wrote just before he died is so amazing that one dearly wishes he had managed to hang on for at least another year to see what else he would do.

                                            ____________

                                         Willem Holsbergen

Of course, there is no answer to this question: these guys wrote so many works of the highest quality, that it would be something of an insult to pick just one out. So, I will not do that, and instead mention some works I’ve recently been going through, and point out the details that impressed me.

For Beethoven, I’d like to mention his Sonatas Op. 2. They are really good, and I consider them unsurpassed by anyone in the 19th century (let alone 20th century) in the handling of the structures. Listen to the finale of Op. 2 No. 2 in A. Do note how exaggerated the arpeggio is with which it opens, followed by a fall of more than an octave in the melody. Yes, it is elegant and charming, but the effect is that of making someone a compliment which is somewhat over the top, and may therefore be ironic, and border on the insulting. At each repeat the exaggerations become worse and worse, which then result in the explosion of the middle section. Did the recipient of our compliment notice the insults? So we have here a subtle balance between elegance and humor, which is delightful, and I don’t think there are many other pieces playing a similar game.

A Mozart piece I admire greatly, is his Fugue in C minor, KV. 426 (=KV.546). It is chockablock with all sorts of canons, which makes this piece an intellectual tour de force. But even more important is that, beyond the intellectualism, every bar is filled with deep emotion. Truly the greatest fugue since Bach. It seems that many Mozart fans do not particularly care for this piece, but to fully appreciate his genius, one has to be aware of this other side of his… dark emotions and frightfully intellectual.
Haydn plays a fine joke at the end of the slow movement of his Symphony  No. 97; he is clearly imitating a steam engine! It starts slowly, then picks up speed. You can hear the safety valves (flutes), and some sort of brakes which are very noisy when the engine comes to a slow stop. Haydn must have met a good many industrialists in London, who made their money with their industrial steam engines in their factories, so they will have been very pleased with this joke.

 

6. Do you have in mind the name of some neglected composer of the 18th century you’d like to see re-evaluated?

                                          Mark S. Zimmer

Leopold Kozeluch would be a good candidate.

Over the years quite a few of his compositions have been misattributed to Beethoven. Anyone who can confuse the musicologists that badly as to being the composer of a Beethoven-quality work has to be worth reconsidering.

I’d also like to see Luigi Cherubini reevaluated. He was one of Beethoven’s few contemporaries that Ludwig actually respected and admired, and that has to count for something. There was a recording of Cherubini’s string quartets by Hausmusik London that’s just spectacularly good. His opera Medea/Medée has managed to stay alive thanks in large part to the classic performances of the title role by Maria Callas, and the overture sounds like it could be a Beethoven composition. I’d like to hear a lot more from him. Maybe it’s time for The Unheard Cherubini if The Unheard Beethoven becomes superfluous at some point.

                                            ____________

                                         Willem Holsbergen

Well, of course I could mention Méhul, who was a transition figure from the classical to the romantic era, like Beethoven, but totally independent from him.

His overtures and symphonies are really intriguing, like La Chasse du Jeune Henri. He is master of good melody, which gives his music great authenticity, although his melodies seem dryer than, say, Mozart’s: perhaps not quite capable to express the full range of human emotions.

Staging a complete Méhul opera may therefore be a good idea, but given the said limitation of his melody, it may not be an entirely enjoyable experience (but I love to be proven wrong here, I haven’t seen any of the scores).

Also, some of his libretti are really bad, with nothing happening at all, as one critic puts it. Mozart was very lucky with his Da Ponte. (Or perhaps Da Ponte became Da Ponte thanks to Mozart).

7. Name a neglected piece of music of the 18th century you’d like to see performed in concert with more frequency.

                                          Mark S. Zimmer

Beethoven’s String Trio Op.3 doesn’t get the attention it deserves.

It’s really a remarkable piece that even more than the Opus 1 Trios and Opus 2 Piano Sonatas announces to the world that music has changed forever, and you had better deal with it.
In it I hear the seeds of the Romantic era, quite clearly being planted.

                                            ____________

                                         Willem Holsbergen

Charles Avison (1707-1790) arranged a selection Scarlatti Sonatas into 12 Concerti Grossi. Roy Goodman, with the Brandenburg Consort, did a fantastic job recording these concerti, back in the 90s, I think. These works, in this arrangement, are to me just as enjoyable as Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos and Handel’s 12 Concerti Grossi Op.6. I hope that some violinists will make them part of their repertoire, and start performing them regularly. It may also be a smart career move for them.

HOWEVER, I must say that this giving thumbs up for this or that composer, or this or that composition from the 18th century, might be a good occasion for further rethinking our relationship with our own contemporary classical music… I mean… that for our spiritual nutrition we are apparently depending on these composers of a previous era. This dependency might be a bit shameful (or helpful? See, infra, my considerations on Charles Rosen’s books), because… well, does it demonstrate that, probably, we are no longer able to create this vital quality ourselves?

You see, in the 18th (and 19th) century music emotion and intellect went hand in hand, indeed, strengthening each other. What I mean is that by the late 20th century, intellect and emotion have become separated quite rigorously; the so-called serious music has become almost exclusively intellectual, to the detriment of the emotional states, while in pop-music any form of intelligence has been removed, allowing for only the most childish emotions. This signifies a deep collective neurosis.
And it should be clear to anyone who is slightly aware of this complex, that part of the solution is to be found in the work of those composers and artists, who are trying to bring about a reconciliation of these psychological functions.

This restoration of the balance should help raise the emotional state of the planet, and possibly start curing the collective neurosis: the unwanted heritage of the last century.
The 21st century has begun. Luckily some have already made the transition, but still too many haven’t.

 
8. Have you read a particular book on Mozart Era you consider important for the comprehension of the music of this period?

                                          Mark S. Zimmer

Jan Swafford’s 2014 biography, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph to me has some of the most original thinking on Beethoven that we’ve seen since Thayer.

His discussion of the intellectual background of Neefe, Beethoven’s first teacher, his enormous influence on Beethoven’s worldview lays a convincing and expansive foundation for understanding Beethoven’s work.

I know Willem is a huge fan of Charles Rosen’s writings in The Classical Style so I’ll leave that one to him.
                                            ____________

                                         Willem Holsbergen

As Mark said, I find Charles Rosen’s The Classical Style and Sonata Forms essential for any deeper understanding of this period.

However, the issues in these books go well beyond merely understanding that period, since they are, to me, highly important for the regeneration of the classical style in the 21st century.

First, you must realize that structure in music, as in poetry, is part of the content: it matters not only WHAT you say, but also HOW you say it.

This is somewhat analogous to how in physics space and time are intertwined. There is a big difference in the handling of the form by Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven, and the masters of late Romantic era.

In the first decades of the 20st century, the form had become, if you want, a vehicle to express mainly an obsession with death, as if announcing its own demise, which did of course occur at that time.
That, while in the hands of the classical masters the form had been full of vitality, buzzing with energy, expressing a wide range of different emotions in a single piece. Moving from one emotional state to another gave the composers the power to continuously refresh and renew the music.
Indeed, this magical property can be heard as a spiritual fountain of eternal youth. Mozart and Beethoven are the great masters of this magic.

So what had happened in those 120 years, going from eternal youth to death? The official music history tells us that this was a century of continuous progress: composers got better at everything all the time, better at harmony, better at orchestration, better at melody…. (oh, ooops!). Obviously there is something wrong with this narrative…

The books by Charles Rosen are a good first step in reaching a more objective and balanced understanding of this process. First we must know how the masters of the first Viennese school actually understood their own forms, as opposed to how these were perceived by later composers and critics. Only then we can see how in a series of little steps, which by themselves may have been pretty harmless, gradually the original understanding evaporated. Only then are we free to make our own decisions on these matters, a fact which is of vital importance for the new music.

 
9. Name a movie or a documentary that can improve the comprehension of the music of this period.

                                          Mark S. Zimmer

That’s pretty difficult since so many movies tend to romanticize or worse fantasize impossible and ridiculous things onto the screen (such as the wretched Immortal Beloved, which wastes Gary Oldman’s fine performance on a stupid and obviously wrong solution to the mysterious riddle, or the thoroughly execrable Copying Beethoven). I’m willing to cut some slack for Amadeus because it’s forthrightly a fictional treatment of the story (as told through the memories/delusions of the aged and demented Salieri) and it’s a gorgeous film; nevertheless I can’t in any way recommend it as improving the comprehension of the music of the classical period.

The one film that I think captures the music of the period is the BBC production entitled Eroica (2003), depicting the rehearsals for the first performance of the Third Symphony. I think it does as well as possible at giving a glimpse of what the situation must have been like, and to my knowledge it’s more or less accurate. That the music is provided by John Eliot Gardiner and his Orchestre Révolutionaire et Romantique is a wonderful bonus. The performances are first-rate, and it’s quite absorbing from start to finish, so it has my vote.
                                            ____________

                                         Willem Holsbergen

I agree with Mark that the 2003 BBC movie Eroica is the best. The guy who wrote the script did actually investigate his subject! Wow, that really makes a difference.

I used to like Amadeus, but now I find the depiction of Mozart as some punk idiot quite intolerable. Something far better should be possible.

Another movie, which is not about this period, but nevertheless good, is Delius, Song of Summer, by Ken Russell, from 1966. It is about the collaboration between Eric Fenby and Frederick Delius. In his last years Delius was paralyzed and blind, and could no longer work. A young music student, Fenby, offers his services to help Delius finishing his last works. The film is important because of its authenticity: it is based on the book Fenby later wrote, and he was also involved in the production of the movie. One high point in the movie is when Fenby turns on the radio, which is playing Beethoven’s Fifth. Delius then starts a diatribe: Listen my boy, scales, arpeggios! Fillings, my boy, fillings, don’t bother your young head about symphonies! Beethoven, Bruckner and Mahler and that lot with their long driveling note-spinnings! A complete waste of time. A few bars of sincerely felt original music is worth whole pages of that kind of drivel. Throw it away! Forget the immortals! I finished with them years ago!

It should be obvious what is going on here: a minor master ridicules his great predecessors, in order to make himself appear more important, at least in his own eyes.

If he had merely said that he, Delius, was unable to produce anything of value with Beethoven’s technical means, then that would have been a correct and objective statement.

He is also correct in that one has to distance oneself from the great masters in order to find the space for one’s own creativity. But his emotions show that we are dealing here with a neurosis… Also, it should be pointed out that this defence mechanism has been used throughout the 20th century, endlessly repeated by many in all sorts of forms, aimed at whatever demi-god that had gone under their skin… This way much of the deeper understanding has disappeared from our culture.

10. Do you think there’s a special place to be visited that proved crucial to the evolution of the 18th century music?

                                          Mark S. Zimmer

I’ve never been to Vienna myself, but I have to think that would be the one place. Between Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert etc. etc. etc. there’s something about that place that makes it a fertile ground like none other. I’d like to get there, as well as to Bonn, some day.

                                            ____________

                                         Willem Holsbergen

Yes, the scores of the great masters.

 

Thank you very much for having taken the time to answer our questions!

Thank you!

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