Baroque Masters: Bach and Pachelbel

Baroque Masters: Bach and Pachelbel

Overture to Theodora, HWV 68

George Frideric Handel, born February 23, 1685, at Halle; died April 14, 1759, at London.

Premiere: Handel’s oratorio Theodora, with this overture, opened March 16, 1750 at London’s Covent Garden Theatre with the composer conducting.    

KSO Performance History: The present performance is the first of this overture by the KSO.    

     Theodora is unique among Handel’s religious oratorios. Its subject is not drawn from the Bible or Apocrypha, and it is his only oratorio set in Christian times after the resurrection of Christ. Situated in Roman-occupied Antioch (today, Hatay, Turkey), the oratorio recounts the martyrdom of Princess Theodora and the Roman officer Didymus during Roman Emperor Diocletian’s persecution of Christians early in the 4^th century. The libretto was by the Reverend Thomas Morell, who had supplied the composer with texts for Judas Maccabaeus (1747), and Alexander Balus and Joshua (1748), and would again for Handel’s last oratorio, Jephtha (1752). For Theodora, Morell’s primary source was the 1687 novel by Robert Boyle, The Martyrdom of Theodora and Didymus. Scholar Winton Dean, in his 1959 treatise on Handel’s Dramatic Oratorios and Masques,lamented Boyle’s “coy lingering over sex, and also over the details of the execution, [which] leaves an impression of prurient self-righteousness that is acutely distasteful;” however, Morell, at times, lifted Boyle’s text verbatim. Perhaps that explains why Handel’s production of Theodora lasted only three performances; but, more likely was the fact that much of London’s well-heeled crowd had fled the city when it experienced an earthquake with numerous aftershocks in February 1750.
     In at least five instances in Theodora, for neither the first nor last time, Handel borrowed music from others. “We are a long way from plagiarism here,” Winton Dean opined. “Handel has simply borrowed scraps of thematic material, as he might pick a theme for variations, generally improved them in detail, and used them as a basis for complex structures of his own.” One of these borrowings occurs in the Theodora overture, an unusual (for Handel in a stage work) three-movement curtain-raiser, all in the key of G minor. After a stately, dotted-rhythm Grave introduction, there follows a fleeting original Allegro as animated as any music Handel composed to preface a stage work. There follows a beautiful Trio and a concluding, invigorating Courante, a popular triple-meter dance of the day in both France and Italy. Both the Trio and the Courante were borrowed from Gottlieb Muffat, a musician contemporary to Handel connected with the Habsburg Court of Empress Maria Theresia at Vienna, being drawn, with no change in key or title, from his second suite (of six) in the collection entitled Componimenti musicali for cembalo published in Augsburg in about 1739.

Music from The Fairy Queen, Z. 629

Premiere: Thomas Betterton’s production of The Fairy Queen, an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream retaining much of the original dialogue, with music by Henry Purcell, opened May 2, 1692 in London at the Queen’s Theatre, Dorset Garden.

KSO Performance History: The present performance is the first by the KSO of any of Purcell’s music from The Fairy Queen.    

     Oliver Cromwell’s death in 1658, and the prompt crumbling of his puritanical Protectorate, restored more than just the British monarchy. The arts flowered in England as never before, and London’s theatres, financially ruined by Cromwell’s restrictions, staged a dramatic comeback just as Henry Purcell matured in his craft to become the musical doyen of London’s Restoration Theatre. Even after his untimely death at age 36, Purcell’s music continued to pervade the London musical stage until supplanted in the first decade of the 18^th century by Italian opera and the arrival in London of George Frideric Handel from the Continent.
     Preparations for the 1692 production of The Fairy Queen covered more than seven months. In the words of distinguished theatre professor Judith Milhous at City University of New York, The Fairy Queen was a “Restoration spectacular,” the last and costliest extravaganza mounted by the London production company consisting of director Thomas Betterton, Purcell, and choreographer Josiah Priest. Purcell did not set to music a single word of Shakespeare’s text. The production included A Midsummer Night’s Dream with only a few edits and cuts, in which was interspersed short masques throughout each of the five acts consisting of songs and dances, in addition to instrumental preludes, symphonies and overtures as entr’actes. Thus, the production was a complex and lengthy affair. London theatergoers loved it. However, the Dorset Garden production company, which previously enjoyed financial success, went broke from this ambitious project, even though Purcell’s career seemed unaffected.
     For concert-hall performances, Purcell’s instrumental music for The Fairy Queen has been collected by several editors. One edition, 19 numbers in two suites prepared by Hilmer Höckner, was published in 1963 by Bärenreiter of Kassel, Germany; and, it is this edition from which Maestro Lucas Richman has selected the nine numbers heard on this KSO program. The two more substantial numbers are the final two to be performed. The Dance for the Followers of Night comes as the drama reaches its most mysterious moment during the second-act slumbers of Titania, the fairy queen. English Purcell scholar Curtis Alexander Price, writing in 1984, calls this dance “arguably the most bizarre piece Purcell ever wrote. It is a double canon,” Price continued, “[a] contrapuntal strait-jacket [that] produces some very peculiar progressions.” The concluding Chaconne is the climax of Purcell’s fifth-act masque. Its eight-bar pattern has alternating endings, one an imperfect and the other a perfect cadence that produces a certain sense of asymmetry to a rigidly symmetrical musical form.

Concerto in A Minor for Bassoon, Strings and Continuo, RV 498

Premiere: The date and circumstances of the composition and first performance of this concerto are unknown.

KSO Performance History: The present performance is the first of this concerto by the KSO.      

     The 39 concertos Antonio Vivaldi left for bassoon are an extraordinary legacy: no composer bequeathed a richer repertory to the instrument. The only source for all 39 is the composer’s personal collection, consisting of about 450 of his autograph scores at the time of his death, now in the National University Library at Turin, Italy. No other trace of a single Vivaldi bassoon concerto has been found, and there is not a clue as to the artist or artists for whom he wrote them, probably between 1725 and 1737. He did not compose them for performance by any of the musicians or music students at the Pio Ospedale della Pietà, the Venetian orphanage for girls with which Vivaldi was connected from about 1705 to 1730. The Pietà had no instructors and, hence, no students, on the instrument.
     In 1737, Vivaldi pulled together six of his bassoon concertos, whether for a putative publication or to fulfill a commission is unknown. In any event, these six concertos were obviously prized by the composer, and the sixth one in the set is the present Bassoon Concerto in A Minor. In its opening, pulsing Allegro, the bassoon strives for one special effect after another; but, the composer cautions that, despite this sometimes dense ornamentation, the deliberate pace established at the beginning is to be scrupulously maintained throughout (piano sempre). The central F-major Larghetto begins with a scene-setting ripieno, giving way to a bassoon aria of immense beauty. With a dramatic pause, the ripieno returns to conclude the scene as it began. The final Allegro is more virtuosic display, this time dramatically supported by modulations (from E minor to A minor to E major) where they do not often occur in a Vivaldi bassoon concerto – in the ripieno - specifically, the third one just prior to the bassoon’s final concertante episode. 

Canon and Gigue in D Major

Johann Pachelbel, baptized September 1, 1653, at Nuremberg; buried March 9, 1706, at Nuremberg.

Premiere: The date and circumstances of the composition and first performance of this music are unknown. 

KSO Performance History: The canon alone was first performed by strings of the KSO on September 30, 1979 at a free Concert on the Mall at Knoxville’s Market Square led by the orchestra’s Fifth Conductor and Music Director, Zoltan Rozsnyai. Thereafter, under Maestro Rozsnyai, the orchestra performed Pachelbel’s Canon as an encore on its Chamber Classics Series (which began in 1981) and occasionally at other chamber orchestra performances in the East Tennessee area, such as on March 26, 1984 at a concert sponsored by the Chamber Music Society of Morristown at All Saints’ Episcopal Church in that city. The present performance appears to be the first of both the Canon and Gigue on a KSO subscription concert.

     A prolific composer employed from the age of sixteen as a church organist in cathedrals in Vienna and in other cities that are today in central Germany, Pachelbel and his work were enormously popular in his time and would have been known to all of the other composers represented on this KSO program. First published in 1919, Pachelbel’s Canonhas been a popular piece over the years, subject to arrangements for many instrumental combinations, reaching a ubiquitous presence on popular music charts in this country in the 1970s. The Canon and Gigue were published together in 1925 pretty much as Pachelbel left them, and it is refreshing to hear both pieces in this form.
    The Canon is a masterful set of twenty-eight inventive, unforgettable variations over a recurring two-bar, eight-note ostinato or ground bass. The resulting music is at once as charming as it is ingenious. The comparatively shorter, livelier Gigueis Pachelbel’s take on one of the most popular dances throughout Europe during the Baroque era which, in Germany, was often written in a more fugato style than, say, in England, France or Italy.
     It is interesting to report that one of Pachelbel’s children, son Charles Theodore (1690-1750), made quite a name for himself in the British American colonies as a church organist in Boston, Newport, New York and Charleston.

Cantata: Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht, BWV 211 (“Coffee Cantata”)

Johann Sebastian Bach, born March 21, 1685, at Eisenach; died July 28, 1750, at Leipzig.

Premiere: Although the date and circumstances of the composition and first performance of this cantata are undocumented, it was probably composed in mid-1734 and soon thereafter performed by Leipzig’s Collegium Musicum, of which the composer was the director, at Gottfried Zimmermann’s Café (coffee house) on Catherinenstraße, Leipzig’s most prestigious avenue just off the main market square in an area destroyed in World War II.

KSO Performance History: This is the KSO’s first performance of Bach’s Coffee Cantata. 

Instrumentation: Soprano, tenor and bass soloists are accompanied by flute, strings and continuo.

     For the remainder of his life, from 1723 Johann Bach served as Kantor of Leipzig’s St. Thomas School and as director musices of the city’s Lutheran churches. In June 1729, he also became director of Collegium Musicum, a popular concert organization founded by one of Bach’s predecessors in his Lutheran church post, Georg Philipp Telemann, in 1702 and which, by Bach’s time, performed weekly at a trendy Leipzig watering hole, Gottfried Zimmerman’s coffee house. Coffee became a popular beverage in Europe about the time Bach came of age and, though many in the society of his time and place frowned on its consumption, the composer was probably “hooked” on it – at least he professed to enjoy it immensely. And, obviously, given the venue of the Collegium Musicum concerts, Bach never had to drink his coffee alone.  
     Bach’s Coffee Cantata, though it reflects a far more humorous man than for which this composer is usually credited, contains text by the librettist for many of Bach’s sacred cantatas, a colleague often considered to be even more humorless, Christian Henrici (who published under the name Picander). Clearly, the fun these men had with their friends from day to day has been largely lost through the prism of time. The present work reminds just how much like us they surely must have been, and how familial relationships are as predictable today as ever.
    

The Narrator introduces Herr Schlendrian (German for “humdrum”) and Lieschen, father and daughter. It is soon apparent that the friction between them stems from Lieschen’s coffee habit. In her first aria, accompanied only by flute and continuo, Lieschen passionately embraces love of coffee, “lovelier than a thousand kisses, milder than muscatel wine;” and, if anyone wants to give her a treat, make it coffee! In recitative, as her father recounts the privileges that he could withhold, Lieschen’s consistent response is: “Just leave me my coffee!” Only when her father withholds the prospect that she can take a husband does Lieschen agree that she won’t drink coffee at all; but, as we learn in the Narrator’s recitative before the final Trio, Lieschen imposes a caveat. No suitor is to call on her unless he agrees, in the written marriage contract, that Lieschen be permitted to make coffee whenever she wants. In the concluding Trio, the obvious is clearly confessed: since mothers and grandmothers hold dear their coffee, daughters can’t be blamed for doing the same!

Ellen Connors, bassoon

Principal bassoonist Ellen Connors earned her undergraduate degree from the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University where she studied with Benjamin Kamins.  While at Rice she won a prestigious Watson Fellowship and spent the following year in Europe and Asia studying folk music. She received her Master of Music degree from the Yale School of Music in 2009 studying with Frank Morelli.  Last spring she performed in Korea and China with the Schola Cantorum of Yale under the leadership of Simon Carrington. Ellen has been a fellow at the Tanglewood and Aspen music festivals and has participated in summer programs at Sarasota, Domaine Forget and the Chautauqua Institute.  She has worked under the baton of such acclaimed conductors as James Levine, Bernard Haitink, Helmuth Rilling, Peter Oundjian, Sir Andrew Davis and Itzhak Perlman.  Ellen is a native of Grand Rapids, Michigan.