Once upon a time there
were four German composers named Schultz,
Schütz, Scheidt, and Schein. Anthony
Burgess might have called them the four
shüts. They all wrote the usual
church stuff. However, one of them,
Schultz, didn’t want to be one of the
four shüts any more, so he latinised
his name to Praetorius and struck off
on a lucrative new career arranging
and publishing pop tunes. After the
four whatevers, in the Germanys there
were Buxtehude, Fux and Schmelzer, the
X & Z guys. They, too, wrote the
usual church stuff, but also had fun
with drums and trumpets. (About the
same time in other countries we had
Purcell, Couperin and Corelli — heavy
on embedded Rs — each doing something
completely different.)
Just to finish off
the story, the next generation, the
High Baroque, is distinguished by all
of its most famous composers apparently
having been born in the same year—1685—although
upon examination this turns out not
to have been true: Vivaldi was actually
born in 1678. Coming next we had the
Precursors of Mozart, or the "Rococo"
Period; the Contemporaries of Mozart,
or the "Classical" Period;
and the Successors to Mozart, or the
"Romantic" Period. The then-following
"Modern" period could also
have been called the Mozart-be-damned
period or Dodecacophony. But by means
of the movie Amadeus Mozart returned
to earth apparently upon the Tower of
Babel for at this time we suddenly had
Neo-Romanticism, Post-Modernism, Feminist
deconstructionism, Minimalism, Pan-Modalism,
Post-Serialism, Aleatorism, and Anti-ism-ism.
Where we are now is anybody’s guess,
although I think Litigationism and Megamediaconglomeratism,
a.k.a. you-can’t-play-that-until-you-pay-me-ism,
might be applicable. Memorise all this
and you’ve got an automatic A in Music
History 101.
But, backing up to
Fux and Schmelzer, you can see my little
fairy tale is a little strained since,
although they were alive at the same
time, and would have been so for a longer
period had Schmelzer not died at the
musically portentous age of 37 years,
they were actually a generation apart.
However, even though his years weren’t
so different, Fux was no Vivaldi, either
in style or talent. Yet here we have
the answer to another mystery: we know
where Harnoncourt got the name for his
Viennese early music group.
At the time they began
recording, the Concentus Musicus played
almost entirely music from this period,
music previously considered awfully
staid and stodgy. But the one time I
saw them live on stage about this time
they infused their performances with
so much energy, so much plain old-fashioned
fun, that they brought the music,
and the audience, to life. After once
having seen and heard them play one
entered fully into this music with relish
and the rest is legend. Harnoncourt,
having traversed the whole of Bach,
etc., is now conducting Brahms and Bruckner,
even Smetana (!), and the Concentus
Musicus is a memory except on these
precious recordings, some of which were
released in North America as Vanguard
and Bach Guild LPs, particularly these
two which appeared together as a two-LP
set.
But what about the
music? It has some of the same mood
of nostalgic cheerfulness as the Respighi
Ancient Airs and Dances, having
a nice "historical" sound
with skilfully played old instruments,
and being rather the sort of thing you
might want to hear at dinner after a
busy day of torturing heretics and intriguing
to overrun your cousin’s provinces.
Even though he is not actually present,
you will hear many echoes of Buxtehude,
proving the aptness of my introductory
fairy tale. Thurston Dart had issued
an LP of "German String Music"
which included some music from about
this period, without, as the title implies,
any winds or brass, but having the same
mood and feeling as the strings-only
selections on this disk. None of this
music has a single tune you will find
yourself whistling in traffic the next
day, or a single dramatic moment or
ingeniously intense fugal passage which
would have you going back for repeated
hearings, although Fux, clearly the
better composer, comes closer to this
than Schmelzer. The "Intrada"
from the Serenada (Track 11)
on the Fux disk sounds like the Salzburg
Festival broadcast fanfare, in case
you ever wondered what that was; this
Serenada is probably the most
familiar work on these disks, having
been recorded several times. Concentus
Musicus do not use any drums or percussion
in this music although some other groups
have done so. This music is fun to listen
to and would be lots of fun to play,
IF you had the required virtuoso skills.
Paul Shoemaker
Concentus Musicus Wien/Nikolaus Harnoncourt
