John Christian Bach: Mozarfs Friend and Mentor Heinz Gartner

8 6 BOOKS Strauss's incredibly generous remark that "yes, she was all over the place [as Salome] — but wasn't she fabulous?" (p. 116). When Douglas writes that "here and there..., in his desire to extract the maximum effect from the text, Chali- apin does undeniable violence to the legato line, as well as paying scant heed to the difference between dotted and undotted notes" (p. 39), one senses that, at least with such dramatically vivid and tonally splendid singing, smudged hemidemisemiquavers don't automatically catapult Douglas into paroxysms of perfectionist outrage. There arc a few trifling slips inMore Legendary Voices, as in any book. But one delightful yarn in the Jeritza chapter defies credulity. Douglas avers that during Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/oq/article/13/1/86/1472402 by guest on 27 September 2021 a performance of Die Waikurr in Vienna in 1925, Jeritza was in the wings, waiting to come on as Sieglinde, while Maria Olszcwska and Emil Schipper sang the Fricka-Wotan duet. Olszewska, who was engaged to Schipper, suspected that there had been some hanky-panky between her fiance" and the glamorous soprano. According to Olszewska, Jeritza made audibly derogatory remarks during the duet. When she wouldn't obey hissed orders to stop, the story goes Olszewska spat at her, and the missile hit Ermine (really Hcrmine) Kittel, who was also standing in the wings, in full costume and waiting to go on as a Valkyrie. But because Sieglinde doesn't come onstage in act 2 until after the long Wotan-Brunnhilde colloquy that follows the Wotan-Fricka scene, and because her sister Valkyries don't appear until act 3, Jeritza's and Kind's offstage presence is doubtful. Thus what Douglas calls the Great Vienna Spitting Inci- dent of 1925 would seem to fall into that largest of all prima donna-story cate- gories, the delicious realm of se rum I vero, e ben trovato. William Albright NOTE 1. Nigel Douglas, Legendary Voices (London: Andre1 Deutsch, 1992). Sec Henry Pleasants's review of this book in The Optra Quarterly, voL n, no. 3 (1995), PP-I37~39- John Christian Bach: Mozarfs Friend and Mentor Heinz Gartner Translated by Reinhard G. Pauly Portland, Oregon: Amadeus Press, 1994 413 pages, $29.9$ This translation of a book originally published in Germany in 1989 offers a pleas- ing account of the life of the London Bach, who represented a link between the age of his father, Sebastian Bach (with whom he briefly studied), and that of Mozart (to whom he gave encouragement, advice, and, by way of his music, compositional inspiration). Based mostly on secondary sources, Gartner's work BOOKS 87 is a product of synthesis rather than of archival or musical exploration. Music lovers rather than specialists will find this handsome, well-illustrated, and rea- sonably priced book most useful, but opera lovers may be disappointed by the relatively little attention accorded Bach's extraordinarily rich operatic ocuvre. Bach was only nineteen years old when he left Germany for Italy; it is thus regrettable (but, given the author's nationality, not surprising) that fully one- third of the book is devoted to the composer's early years in Leipzig and Berlin. A single chapter covers the crucial Italian years, 1754-62, when Bach reached artistic maturity. Just over half the book deals with his life in London and his trips abroad to present operas in Paris and Mannheim. In reaction, perhaps, to Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/oq/article/13/1/86/1472402 by guest on 27 September 2021 Bach's rather colorless personality, Gartner directs much of his attention to the famous men who surrounded the composer: his father; his brother Emanuel; his mentor, Padre Martini; his London friends Carl Friedrich Abel and the painter Gainsborough; and his young admirer Mozart. The resulting panorama of eighteenth-century life and culture is marred by occasional inaccuracies. Gartner's statement that "few Englishmen at the time [the 1760s] still remembered his [Christian's] father's name" (p. 171) wrongly implies that Sebastian Bach had earned a reputation in England during his life- time and had been subsequently forgotten. Equally misleading is the claim, made in the course of a discussion of Bach's serious opera Temistocle, that the "high point of a typical opera production was the finale, for which the set might represent a festively decorated temple where a solemn sacrifice or triumphal chorus would be featured" (p. 285). Finales were a regular part of comic operas only, and comic finales bore no resemblance to the one described by Gartner. The finales in Temistocle are indeed among its most atypical, innovative features, but Gartner, strangely, never mentions them. This book belongs to an odd but very popular literary genre: the musical biography that says little about the music. Gartner's discussion of Bach's operas rarely goes beyond a summary of the plot. His rare attempts to describe or eval- uate music arc sometimes unsatisfactory. For example, about Bach's first published composition, a song, Gartner writes: "The melody is basically simple but docs contain ornamentation. It consists of twenty-six measures; the marking at the beginning is angenebm (agreeable, pleasant)" (p. 92). During his short career Bach devoted most of his waking hours to writing and performing music. A biography that does not address that music closely, repeatedly, and with more insight than Gartner displays in the description just quoted cannot hope to pro- vide us with an accurate picture of the man who wrote it. John A. Rice.

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