Recorded on 8–10 August 2013 in the Teatro La Fenice, Amandola, Ascoli Piceno, Italy, during the Perpianosolo Festival. Sound-engineer and editing: Andrea Lambertucci Page-turner: Andrea Paolini Piano: Steinway & Sons Model D Tuner: Michele Mainoldi Fabbrini Co-production with Perpianosolo Booklet texts: Rohan H. Stewart-MacDonald Design and layout: Paul Brooks, [email protected] Executive producer: Martin Anderson TOCC 0275 © 2014, Toccata Classics, London P 2014, Toccata Classics, London Come and explore unknown music with us by joining the Toccata Discovery Club. Membership brings you two free CDs, big discounts on all Toccata Classics recordings and Toccata Press books, early ordering on all Toccata releases and a host of other benefits, for a modest annual fee of £20. You start saving as soon as you join. You can sign up online at the Toccata Classics website at www.toccataclassics.com. Toccata Classics CDs are also available in the shops and can be ordered from our distributors around the world, a list of whom can be found at www.toccataclassics.com. If we have no representation in your country, please contact: Toccata Classics, 16 Dalkeith Court, Vincent Street, London SW1P 4HH, UK Tel: +44/0 207 821 5020 E-mail: [email protected] Vincenzo Paolini was born in Loreto (in the Province of Ancona, on the east coast of Italy) in 1979 and studied with Giuseppe Di Chiara at the Conservatorio G. Rossini in Pesaro, graduating in 2001 with honours, maximum results and a JAN LADISLAV DUSSEK: PIANO MUSIC mention of honour. He completed the exams for a classical by Rohan H. Stewart-MacDonald education (Latin and Greek) at the Liceo Classico Cappuccini in Ancona and then in 2007 took a degree in music (with first- The cover of this disc shows a mezzotint portrait of Jan Ladislav Dussek (1760–1812) published class honours) at the Conservatorio G. B. Pergolesi in Fermo by John Bland in London in 1793. Bland published prints of a number of prominent musicians of with Enrico Belli with maximum result. the day, including Joseph Haydn (1732–1809), Johann Peter Salomon (1745–1815), Ignaz Pleyel He went on to achieve a Masters in piano and Romantic (1757–1831) and Muzio Clementi (1752–1832). The inclusion of Dussek in this series reflects his piano at the Academia Incontri con Maestro in Imola, under contemporary prominence. In Alan Davison’s view, ‘the fact that Dussek is shown resplendent in the tutelage of Stefano Fiuzzi, and has perfected his skills in mezzotint would have signalled him as a noteworthy sitter. The portrait emphasises [Dussek’s] youth master-classes with Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Lazar Berman, and physical beauty’; and it matches one contemporary description of him as ‘a handsome man, good Cristina Ortiz and Piero Rattalino. dispositioned, mild and pleasing in his demeanour and agreeable’.1 In 2006, as a member of the Belli Piano Duo, he recorded the CD Mythical Dances with music of The prestige and glamour Dussek achieved in his lifetime – embodied in the Bland print – Stravinsky and George Crumb, released by Wergo (wer 6807 2). contrasts starkly with his comparative modern obscurity. With perhaps exaggerated pessimism, the In addition to his appearances in Italy, he has played in France, Germany and Lithuania, both as current Wikipedia entry asserts that ‘[n]either [Dussek’s] playing style nor his compositions […] had recitalist and soloist with orchestra. any notable lasting impact’ and that ‘his music […] is now virtually unknown’.2 Typically for his time, Dussek pursued a multifaceted peripatetic career that encompassed piano performance, composition, teaching, administration and publishing in his native Bohemia, the Netherlands, Paris and London. Jan Ladislav Dussek (1760–1812): A Bohemian Composer ‘en voyage’ through Europe, edited by Roberto His compositional output, strongly weighted towards the piano, includes a body of solo sonatas, a Illiano and Rohan H. Stewart-MacDonald plethora of miscellaneous piano works, chamber music (including a piano quartet, piano quintet and three string quartets) and about eighteen piano concertos. Dussek also wrote various works for the This first multi-author, multi-lingual study of Dussek aims to stimulate renewed debate about an unjustly harp, including a number of concertos: in August 1792 he married the famous Scottish harpist Sophia neglected figure. Dussek’s multifaceted, geographically diverse career is explored in order to shed new light Corri (1775–1831), a composer in her own right. on the interactions between the early nineteenth-century music business and those contemporary political events with which Dussek himself was closely associated, to an almost unique degree. The book’s fifteen 1 Alan Davison. ‘Portraits of Dussek from London and Paris’, in Roberto Illiano and Rohan H. Stewart-MacDonald (eds.), Jan chapters include new biographical information on Dussek himself; appraisals of several branches of his Ladislav Dussek (1760–1812): A Bohemian Composer ‘en voyage’ through Europe, Bologna, Ut Orpheus Edizioni, 2012 (Quaderni Clementiani, Vol. 4), p. 234, quoting Charlotte Louise Henrietta Papandiek (Albert), Court and Private Life in the Time of Queen compositional output, and explorations of reception, iconography and performance practice. Charlotte […], 2 vols., London, Richard Bentley & Son, 1887, vol. II, p. 186. The main biographical resource on Dussek is still Howard Allan Craw, A Biography and Thematic Catalog of the Works of J. L. Dussek (1760–1812), Ph.D. Diss., University of Southern More information at http://www.utorpheus.com/product_info.php?products_id=2661 California, Los Angeles, 1964. 2 ‘Jan Ladislav Dussek’, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Ladislav_Dussek>, p. 1 (accessed 15 August 2014). 2 15 The Douze Études mélodiques and the Op. 76 Fantaisie belong to very different stages of Dussek’s career; Recent scholars have explored the complex interaction between political events relating to the and whereas the Douze Études was connected to the amateur market through its didactic orientation and Napoleonic wars, concomitant social change and the ever-altering contours of the musical marketplace.3 the (partial) simplification of style that entailed, the Fantaisie is indubitably ‘professional’ piano music, of Close study of a figure like Dussek, taking into account the trajectory of his career, its varying branches, the kind Dussek would have performed himself. The ‘progressive’ structure of Op. 16 nonetheless allows and the vicissitudes he experienced, sheds further light on the cross-fertilisation between politics, considerable scope for compositional enterprise; and Op. 76, with its carefully balanced and logically war, society, musical consumption and the history of the piano as an instrument and as a medium for constructed array of eighteenth-century forms, provides indisputable evidence that the ‘proto-Romantic’ social and intellectual intercourse. Dussek was one of several prominent musicians who fled France qualities of Dussek’s style were firmly stationed on ‘Classical’ foundations. Eric Blom tempered his own in the lead-up to the revolution. Like the composer-violinist Giovanni Battista Viotti (1755–1824), he observation about the Sonatas Op. 35 foreshadowing ‘Romanticism’ as follows: made for London. The decade that he spent in the British capital (c. 1788–99) was arguably the most successful and important period of his career; but he made an abrupt departure for Hamburg in about not the German romanticism of fantastic fairy lore, still less the idealized licence of the French 1799. This volte face was connected with the failure of a music-publishing and retail business in which Romantics, nor the ironic self-analysis and self-torture of Byron, Heine and Lermontov, and least of all he had been collaborating with his father-in-law, Domenico Corri, Italian composer, impresario, music the grisly horrors of the Symphonie fantastique or the wolve’s glen in Freischütz. […] He will not go out, publisher and voice teacher (1746–1825). A recently discovered document in the National Archive shows like Weber, into a stormy night when the oak creaks, the owl hoots and ragged clouds flit across a pale that, following his departure, Dussek would have been detained by the authorities had he returned to moon, but he does […] care for the sunny landscapes among which Weber’s muse loves to roam […].36 England – as he clearly intended to do. The immediate reason was probably accumulated debt: Sir, An independent scholar, Rohan H. Stewart-MacDonald studied at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, Should an Alien named John Lewis Duseck […] land at your Port, I am directed […] to desire that you between 1993 and 2001. Since completing his PhD he has specialised in British music of the eighteenth and will take particular care to secure any papers he may bring with him, and forward them immediately nineteenth centuries, publishing the book New Perspectives on the Keyboard Sonatas of Muzio Clementi to this office for examination. I am also to desire that the Alien in question may be detained until you in 2006 (Quaderni Clementiani, Vol. ii, Ut Orpheus Edizioni, Bologna). In 2012, with Roberto Illiano, he shall receive further directions concerning him.4 co-edited and contributed to the multi-author, multi-lingual Jan Ladislav Dussek: A Bohemian Composer One of several factors leading to the failure of Corri, Dussek & Co. – including Dussek’s lack of financial ‘en voyage’ through Europe (Quaderni Clementiani, Vol. iv, Ut Orpheus Edizioni, Bologna). He reviews acumen and his growing disinterest in the firm – was the contraction of musical activity in London regularly for journals at home and abroad and is an honorary member of the Centro Studi Opera Omnia during the 1790s. What Simon McVeigh has called a ‘tapering of London’s musical life’ resulted from the Luigi Boccherini in Lucca. He also performs regularly as a solo pianist, with programmes that combine weakening of the economy by the war with France that began in February 1793 and lasted until the defeat Classical repertory with his own arrangements of mid-twentieth-century American popular music.