1837, Vol. 2 If I Could Have Seen the World from the Perspective of Any
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A Year in Classical Music: 1837, vol. 2 If I could have seen the world from the perspective of any one classical musician, if it were for the sake of being able to meet as many of Europe’s legendary musicians as possible, I think I’d choose Johann Nepomuk Hummel. A former child prodigy in piano and composition, he’d lived and studied with none other than Mozart from 1786 to 1788. After that, as Haydn’s activities declined at the Esterhazy palace after the turn of the 19th century, Hummel replaced him as music director and composer in residence there. Many considered him to be the best pianist of his time, even better than Beethoven, and Hummel was a pallbearer at Beethoven’s funeral along with Franz Schubert. Schubert dedicated the great masterpieces that were his last three piano sonatas to Hummel (but both Hummel and Schubert were dead by the time of their publication, so the publisher rededicated them to Robert Schumann). The young Robert Schumann had approached Hummel for lessons, and during his later years Hummel kept a warm friendship with Frédéric Chopin. Hummel would have become piano teacher of the ten year old Franz Liszt, except that Liszt’s father was unable to afford Hummel’s fee, which was one of the highest in Vienna by that time. But Hummel’s students had included Czerny, Thalberg, von Henselt, and Mendelssohn, all of whom were leading pianist-composers by 1837. Yet for all his skill, Hummel seems to have been born just a little too early or a little too late to have written music to equal that of his famous peers. Just as he was coming of age at the end of the 1700’s, the high Classicism of his mentors Haydn and Mozart was becoming outdated, and Hummel didn’t possess the individualistic audacity that allowed Beethoven to build a new, avant-garde style all his own out of the old techniques of Classicism. Then as the Romantics took center stage, Hummel saw his style of post-Classicism become less and less relevant, farther and farther removed from the spirit of the times. By the 1830’s there was little demand for his music and Hummel found himself mostly out of work. In 1837, he composed one last piece of music, and then, toward the end of the year, he died at his home at Weimar. By then, Hummel had for some time been seen as the last surviving member of the old school of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert. His death meant the passing of the last musician representing the old world of the Enlightenment, the old world of aristocratic, pre-industrial Europe. Mozart’s Requiem was performed at his funeral. Hummel’s last composition was the Ballet Music for “Das Zauberglöcken.” It’s orchestral ballet music, written as an extended finale for a special performance of an opera, La Clochette (or The Bell) by Ferdinand Hérold. Hérold was a French composer who’d written in a style much like Hummel’s, a post-Classicism that incorporated elements of the early Romantic style. Hummel’s ballet music for the opera is direct and colorful, fun to hear. With its grand, tongue in cheek theatrical gestures it made me think of Rossini. You can hear Hummel’s Ballet Music for “Das Zauberglöcken on an all-Hummel album by The London Mozart Players under Howard Shelley, recorded in the year 2000. It also includes performances of Hummel’s Trumpet Concerto and Mandolin Concerto. In volume one I discussed Italian opera in 1837, with the work of Donizetti and Mercadante. I mentioned Paris as the epicenter of the arts in Europe, with Rossini and Cherubini having relocated to the French capital, and I touched on French grand opera with Meyerbeer and Les Hugenot. So we’ve seen the importance of Italian opera and French opera, but what of German opera? Soon all of Europe would know Wagner, who would change everything, but in 1837 German opera was only of local interest — not at all like fashionable and internationally popular Italian opera. German opera as a distinct nationalistic style had only recently gotten started, in 1821, with Weber’s Die Freischütz. Speaking of Wagner, he’d been born at Leipzig, in Saxony, in 1813 — only a few generations after Leipzig had been J.S. Bach’s town. The same year Wagner was born at Leipzig, The Battle of the Nations had been fought there; it’s also sometimes called The Battle of Leipzig. The Battle of the Nations was an important step toward to the eventual defeat of Napoleon, and was the largest military battle in European history before the First World War. It involved more than 600,000 soldiers, around 100,000 of whom died — twice as many as at Gettysburg, the bloodiest battle in the American Civil War. Napoleon was gradually being pushed back to France after his disastrous invasion of Russia. He had been attempting to reestablish his hold on German lands, but the Battle of the Nations ended French presence east of the Rhine from that time forward. In 1833, twenty years after Wagner’s birth and the Battle of the Nations at Leipzig, the thirty-two year old Albert Lortzing had moved there. He worked as a singer and actor in stage productions at the Stadttheater there. But he was also a composer, and in 1835 he had written his first full-length comic opera, Die beiden Schützen, which means The Two Shooters. He had trouble getting it produced, though, because he was known only as an actor and singer, and this made it hard for him to get people to take him seriously as a professional composer. Lortzing finally managed to stage Die beiden Schützen in February of 1837. It was a success, and so he set to work right away writing his next opera, Zar und Zimmerman, which was first staged in December of ’37. Zar und Zimmerman means The Tsar and the Carpenter. (You’ll be interested to know that Donizetti had set the same story to music ten years earlier, in his opera Il Borgomastro di Saardam.) The plot is based on the biography of Tsar Peter the Great, who as a young man in the late 1600’s had gone to Holland in disguise, working anonymously as a commoner in a shipyard so he could learn how to build ships. In the opera, there are two Russians named Peter working in the shipyards: Tsar Peter, and Peter Ivanov. There’s been an uprising in Moscow since the Tsar left, and soldiers have come to town trying to find the Tsar. So they’re looking for a carpenter’s apprentice named Peter, which leads people to think that Peter Ivanov is the Tsar. While they’re looking for him the town is locked down and the port is closed, so that the real Tsar can’t leave for home. In the end, after the appropriate hijinks, Tsar Peter is able to leave for Moscow to take care of the rebellion, and the mistaken identity ends up allowing Peter Ivanov to marry his sweetheart, the young Marie. Zar und Zimmerman was indifferently received at its Leipzig premiere, but after a production in Berlin a couple of years later it became very popular and was performed all over Germany. Today it’s recognized as a masterpiece of German comic opera, and Lortzing’s finest work. I listened to two recordings of Zar und Zimmerman. The first, made in 1965, stars two great German singers as the two Peters: baritone Hermann Prey as the Tsar, and tenor Peter Schreier as Peter Ivanov. The second is from 1987, starring Wolfgang Brendel and Deon van der Walt as the Peters, and American soprano Barbara Bonney as Marie. For as much as I’m drawn to the singing of Prey and Schreier, the latter record, with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra under Heinz Fricke, brings a dancelike energy to the score that I find more attractive. Besides that, Barbara Bonney gives a better musical portrayal of the very young woman in Marie, and Kurt Moll is fun to hear as the Burgomaster — in the spoken dialog his bass seems absolutely bottomless. But it’s the lighter and more dancelike feel that Fricke helps bring to the score that’s most important to my ears. Next to the Italian bel canto opera of the time, Lortzing’s German spieloper style sounds a little square. Hearing Lortzing’s Zar und Zimmerman alongside the operas by Donizetti and Mercadante I just covered in volume one, it’s not hard to understand why it was Italian opera, not German, that was all the rage internationally. 1837 was a hard year in Frédéric Chopin’s private life. The year before, in 1836, he had proposed marriage to Maria Wodziński, a beautiful, charming, intelligent young woman he’d met while traveling in Dresden. But her parents did not immediately consent, being concerned among other things about Chopin’s poor health — he was just 27 years old that year, but the tuberculosis that would kill him thirteen years later was already in its early stages. His hopes were dashed in the summer of 1837, when Maria’s mother wrote to Chopin to inform him their family had finally decided not to consent to the marriage. Chopin had been living in Paris since 1831 and was the toast of the great city; he’d led a charmed life there and had always seemed a superficial personality, joking and carefree. By the fall of ’37, though, beset with illness and heartbreak, he had changed quite a lot — he seemed thoughtful, serious, sad.