Jessica Gould, Eric Hoeprich, Diego Cantalupi, Christoph Hammer
Monday, March 13th 8:00pm
The Abigail Adams Smith Auditorium, 417 East 61st Street between First and York
Less than a month ago, our last concert shared the sounds of the Venetian Ghetto, constructed in 1516 for the purpose of segregating Jews from Christians. The musical result, with texts from one side of the wall and music from the Other, was almost certainly unintended by its builders. It was also unmistakable. Increased curiosity and inter-religious mixing led the Jewish Salamone Rossi to set Hebrew texts to Christian polyphony, in the process setting himself up for near certain ostracism, while Barbara Strozzi’s uncannily Semitic-sounding motets gave a distinct, and perhaps subversive, spin on some of the most Catholic texts she could get her hands on.
In 1797, the nearly thousand-year reign of La Serenissima, the mighty Venetian Republic, empire of trade, melting pot of tribes, bearer of the dubious honor of having created the world’s first ghetto, came to an abrupt end with the triumph of Napoleon.
The French entry into Venice, 1797
The Ghetto, destroyed by Napoleon
Across Europe, Liberté, Egalité et Fraternité smashed ghettos, expanded opera houses, simplified libretti, and turned up the volume. The art form concocted by an exclusive coterie of Florentine nobles who fancied themselves the heirs of the Greeks was now set on a distinctly populist path. With a transformation sparked by the fall of the Old Order, opera served no longer the rarified tastes of sequestered aristocrats in their intimate palace theaters, but masses of common people who required an ideological soundtrack to affirm their burgeoning identities as citizens of nations rather than subjects of duchies, small-r republicans, individual humans rather than exemplars of archetypes.
As the nineteenth century progressed, this metamorphosis would culminate in operatic styles that were specific to, and voices of, two newly minted nations –Italy and Germany, with Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner as Master Builders, High Priests, and opposing forces. This concert takes us from the Twilight, or the Crepuscolo and Götterdämmerung, of the world that Napoleon destroyed, and into the dawn of the one created by his armies – an era of Emancipation, Nationalism, and precarious liberation for those recently freed from the ghetto confines.
Napoleon Crossing the Alps, by Jacques-Louis David
Napoleon, although blessed with no musical talent whatsoever, was a great lover of music, and held a special place in his heart for Italian repertoire, particularly opera. As early as 1791, he wrote:
“For every age and in every situation, music consoles, pleases, disturbs delightfully… We should not therefore proscribe music: it is the man of feeling's tender companion, it inspires his emotions. It increases the number of his enjoyments, and as he savours all the minute details of the charming melody, he is more deeply affected by the delights of the emotion…”
His friends and peers found his enthusiasm for music but lack of ability striking enough to comment:
“Napoleon's voice was most unmusical, nor do I think he had any ear for music; for neither on this occasion, nor in any of his subsequent attempts at singing, could I ever discover what tune it was he was executing. He was, nevertheless, a good judge of music, if any Englishwoman may say so, after his sweeping denunciation of our claims to that science, probably from having constantly listened to the best performers.”
And despite his dedication to the spread of French ideals across the known world,
“He expressed a great dislike to French music, which, he said, was almost as bad as the English, and that the Italians were the only people who could produce an opera.”
One Italian composer who held Bonaparte’s attention was Domenico Maria Puccini of Lucca, grandfather of Giacomo, Verdi’s heir and an operatic Titan of the Fin de Siecle. A Te Deum Domenico composed to honor Napoleon’s victory may have been honored with a musical quotation in his grandson’s opera Tosca. Of the few other compositions by Domenico that we know, there is a charming recently discovered song cycle, the Sei Canzonette.
Modestly linear yet fancifully ornamented songs for voice and guitar, the Canzonette were written at the time of Mozart but sound more like Bellini. This stylistic foreshadowing is perhaps less a testament to the composer’s precocity than an insight into the origins of Bel Canto in the folk music of Tuscany and other Italian regions. The specification of a guitar rather than an expensive and heavy keyboard instrument as accompaniment suggests that these songs were intended to be sung for casual occasions, perhaps outside, perhaps without ceremony, by people who had neither the time nor luxury for musical ritual.
Incipit of the Sei Canzonette of Domenico Maria Puccini
The simplicity of peasant life, anaesthetized of its hardships and prettified for the consumption of nobles, formed the fantasy for not only pastoral opera but many a royal indulgence. Most notorious among the latter were Marie Antoinette’s shepherd extravaganzas, complete with costumes, crooks, huts, and even sheep, all carried out, to great provocation of starving peasants, on the grounds of decadent Versailles. The Queen’s clueless gambols led to her demise, while the musical fantasy of Arcadia survived the Revolution and emerged as something a bit different on the other side of the Ancien Régime.
With the demise of the Old Order, the city and the factory surged, and the idea of “Progress” spurred industrialism. Teeming cities and changing rules made the pastoral chic once again. A form of nostalgia for a romanticized lost world became Romanticism – the elevation of Passion over Reason and Tempest over T-Square. The nascent aesthetic style known as the Romantic gave the formality of Classicism, with its Italianate balance and cool headed order, a run for its money. The fortepiano and eventually the modern piano, with enhanced ability for dynamic contrast, supplanted the harpsichord as Romantic music demanded more complex shapes for more deeply felt sentiments. The clarinet, descendent of the chalumeau and shawm, became a frequent voice of bucolic nostalgia, both as a solo and obbligato instrument.
Jan Ladislav Dussek
Giacomo Meyerbeer
Carl Maria von Weber
No sooner had the Queen’s head rolled that it seemed everyone wanted to find it and put it back. The Czech composer Jan Ladislav Dussek conjured a blow by blow narrative of her persecution, demise, and apotheosis in a highly sympathetic account for solo fortepiano, The Sufferings of Queen of France. It is in both the newly created concert halls and bourgeois salons of what will soon become Germany where we find works like the Hirtenlied, or Shepherd’s Song, of Giacomo Meyerbeer. Like Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer was comfortably well-off composer of Jewish origins whose career success enraged Richard Wagner into fits and fantasies of German pre-industrial racial purity. The Silvana Variations of Carl Maria von Weber, relative of Mozart’s widow Constanza, paints a beguiling picture of the very Arcadian fantasy that got the Queen killed in the first place.
Louis Spohr was born during Mozart’s lifetime, collaborated with Beethoven, and died a citizen of the newly created country of Germany. He enjoyed great renown in his own time, left a prolific artistic output, and it is our good fortune that he is enjoying a bit of a Renaissance in our own era after a period of undeserved obscurity. A violinist, his vocal music includes a number of operas and song cycles, including the Sechs deutsche Lieder for soprano, clarinet and fortepiano.
Every instance of the unhappy narrator’s longing is expressed in bucolic imagery, while the composition embraces proto-Wagnerian depths in its voicing of an unattainable world of lost contentment. The penultimate song text explores the pain of one who lives in the wrong reality, whose personal grief is only briefly alleviated by a momentary glimpse of a peaceful pastoral alternate truth:
Es gibt ein still Versinken
In eine innre Welt,
Wo Friedensauen winken,
Von Sternenglanz erhellt
There is a quiet sinking
Into an inner world
Where peaceful meadows beckon,
Lit by the gleam of stars
The final song of the cycle finishes off in a Ländler, a bucolic peasant dance, resolving the cataclysmic Sturm und Drang into a miniature pastoral idyll: