Here is something you rarely see--or wait, there is a strong possibility this is something you never see! A whole recital of lieder by C. P. E. Bach? Yeah, I know! Who even knew he wrote lieder. But the folks at Wigmore Hall continue to bring us lots of interesting stuff. This is Dorothee Mields, soprano with Tobias Koch, fortepiano.
I talked last time about C. P. E. Bach's style in terms of its eccentricities and harmonic adventurousness. From a different angle, music historians refer to this new style as Empfindsamkeit or "sensibility". It was more, in a way, romantic than the unified style of his father, J. S. Bach. Instead of the objective and consistent older style, C. P. E. Bach created an introspective, variegated, sometimes fragmented music in which the rhythmic intensity and sudden contrasts had an integral place. Before the Romantic era proper, beginning around 1830, there were two harbingers to this style. The style of C. P. E. Bach and one phase of the music of Joseph Haydn, around 1770, that is usually described as "Sturm und Drang" (storm and stress) both exhibit qualities that would later on be described as essentially romantic (by E. T. A. Hoffmann).
A famous description of this kind of emotion in music comes from an essay on music criticism by Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg:
The rapidity with which the emotions change is common knowledge, for they are nothing but motion and restlessness.
That's a pretty good description of the music of C. P. E. Bach! In the case of both the empfindsamer style and the Sturm und Drang style, there is a literary connection. For Bach it was the poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock who was Bach's neighbor in Hamburg. For Haydn, though less directly, it was the play by Friedrich Maximillian Klinger titled Sturm und Drang, though Haydn's music came before the play.
One of the best examples of the empfindsamer style is the slow movement from the Prussian Sonata No. 1 in F. Although this movement has no key signature, it is, with a great deal of chromatic wandering, in F minor:
So why am I telling you all this? What's this got to do with the concerto? The style of this movement is very much like a stylized operatic aria, perhaps even an instrumental recitative. Aria style is very closely connected to the development of concerto style because in both cases the fundamental texture is that of a soloist, often highly ornamental, contrasting with an ensemble. The devices used in opera, the brilliant display and the emotional intensity, transferred over to the concerto.
One of the more popular keyboard concertos by C. P. E. Bach is the one in D minor, Wq 23:
The outer movements certainly demonstrate the impetuous intensity that I have been talking about. For another example, we can listen to the Concerto in F major. The second movement, Largo e sostenuto, shows more of the emotional style. It manages to be simultaneously agitated, touching and tempestuous. That movement begins around the 9 minute mark in this recording:
I hope that you might be getting more used to the style of C. P. E. Bach. I find that with time, it grows on you and is well worth your time. Only recently has his music started to see a bit of a revival and this year is the 300th anniversary of his birth in 1714.
The German music historian Hermann Abert has noted that in the mid-18th century there were two main approaches to instrumental music. One is a Viennese tradition which used a lot of thematic material and affective contrast. Think of J. C. Bach, whom we talked about last week, and his successor, Mozart. The other approach, a North German one, is found in the music of C. P. E. Bach. Charles Rosen talks about him in Sonata Forms:
The most prominent representative of the North German tradition was Philip Emanuel Bach, a composer whose interest in intimate and intense expression led him to explore the possibilities of dissonance and remote key relationships (i.e. dissonance on a higher structural level). Striking modulations in Scarlatti are generally more coloristic than expressive; in C. P. E. Bach, they have a remarkable and sometimes incoherent passion which is reflected in the intense and idiosyncratic character of his themes. The highly individualized motif or theme was to become central to sonata style. [Sonata Forms, p. 143]
Of course, the successor to this tradition was Joseph Haydn who is known for his use of many of the features of C. P. E. Bach's style including juxtaposition of remote keys, sudden silences and irregular phrase lengths. Rosen points out that it is the memorability of C. P. E. Bach's themes that allowed their transformation during development sections to be heard thus having a large influence on the development section of the sonata. Incidentally, while he had a short-term influence on Haydn, you might even notice some on another North German composer from Hamburg where C. P. E. Bach spent the last part of his career: Johannes Brahms.
Why this division between two sons of J. S. Bach, who was based in Leipzig in Saxony? J. C. Bach, like so many before him and Mozart after him, went to Italy to study. From age 21 he studied in Bologna. Later on he pursued his career in London. C. P. E. Bach, on the other hand, went north. His first employment was in Berlin and he spent the last and most prolific part of his career in the northern port of Hamburg.
C. P. E. Bach's concerto output was enormous: many times that of his symphonic output. He wrote numerous concertos for flute for his patron in Berlin, Frederick the Great, but also many for oboe and cello. But the largest category is for his own instrument: keyboard. He wrote about fifty concertos for one and two keyboards.
Today I want to look at his Concerto for Cello in A minor, Wq 170, written in 1750. This is a powerful, tempestuous piece with enormous rhythmic energy. Think Vivaldi, but painted in richer colors. Here is a performance:
There is not a good score online; all I could find was a so-so piano reduction, but here is that first, chromatic, angular theme:
Some things to note: the arpeggios get some of their drive from where the semitones are placed: as upbeats to the next harmony. That first idea takes up five measures and the next, a sequence, takes four, followed by two different three measure sequences. The total of this opening phrase: fifteen measures. The last measure on the page is the beginning of the next, six measure idea which finally has an irregular cadence (viiº 6/4 of D minor) on the minor iv chord in first inversion. If you want to think of all this, five different thematic ideas, as a single phrase, it is twenty-one measures long.
When the cello enters it has an entirely new theme, a lyrical one to contrast with the orchestra's, firmly in A minor:
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This goes on for a while, then the orchestra returns with its opening theme, but this time in the subdominant, D minor. In a Baroque concerto, the ritornello would always come back in the tonic, but that system is breaking down. The new kind of concerto in the classical style will take a different kind of approach that I will get into in some detail in future posts. For the moment, let's just notice how little the dominant has been emphasized so far. No significant cadence on the tonic in the opening section, the cello solo starts in A minor, but cadences, as I said, on D minor. A lot of this opening movement wanders between A minor, E minor and D minor -- sometimes within a single measure! The only prominent cadences are to first inversion chords. Even at the cadence setting up the cadenza there is no standard cadence:
How odd is this? In the Classical period, every cadenza by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven begins with the orchestra and soloist sitting on a V7 chord, usually with a trill. What we have here is a tonic! But the preceding chord is equally odd: D# A C F# is viiº7 of V, but here it prepares the tonic. (UPDATE: True, the underlying skeleton, considering the measure before, is V to i, but the V is underemphasized, mostly in first inversion, and it is that odd viiº7 of V that gets the accent.)
C. P. E. Bach, though acknowledged as an important influence by both Mozart and Beethoven, is really going in a completely different direction than they did, harmonically. His is the path not taken: more obscure harmonically, without the clear definition afforded by the Classical tension between dominant and tonic found in Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Like Domenico Scarlatti, he is carving out a territory all his own that will not be taken into the mainstream after his death--at least not the harmonic structure.
Richard Taruskin's five-volume history of music, the Oxford History of Western Music, keeps giving me ideas for posts. In discussing Schubert's Unfinished Symphony he mentions the very few other symphonies in this key. Let's have a look at them.
You would think that there would be scads of symphonies in this key, only two sharps away from A minor, but no. The only previous one by a major composer is one of a group of six written by C. P. E. Bach in 1773 for Baron van Swieten. It is in three movements, Allegretto, Larghetto and Presto. It is not a lengthy work and is for strings alone.
The decade of the 1770s was noted for its "storm and stress" mood in music. The symphony had traditionally been rather a cheerful, convivial kind of music. But composers soon started to use the resources of the orchestra to paint some darker moods. Still, until the 19th century, symphonies in minor keys are relatively rare. Mozart's 40th Symphony in G minor stands out for that reason. In 1772 Joseph Haydn wrote a symphony in B major and cast the second movement in B minor. The work is scored for two oboes, bassoon, two horns and strings. Here is the whole symphony. The second movement, Poco Adagio starts around the 5:30 mark. It is in the style of a siciliana.
Given that fairly modest background to the idea of a symphony in B minor, Schubert's Unfinished stands out even more strongly. Every composer, at least in those days, probably had a few unfinished symphonies in his drawer. When you start to compose quite often the music just doesn't unfold as it should, or you get side-tracked into some dull ideas or just lose your way. So there they sit, sketches of potential works. Schubert had a few unfinished symphonies of his own. But TheUnfinished is a bit different. There is a manuscript full score of the first two movements, two pages of a Scherzo, a piano sketch of the rest of the Scherzo and that's it. The nickname "Unfinished" may be just that, a nickname for a piece that Schubert decided was complete after just two movements. It was written in 1822, before the "Great C Major" that I discussed in these twoposts. Like a number of Schubert's larger works it was never performed during his life. The Unfinished wasn't even published until 1866!
The symphony begins with a mysterious "preface theme" in the low strings. In the score it is phrased in two-measure groups, but it is just as easily heard as 2 + 3 + 3 as I have bracketed it in the example below. Here is the opening group of themes from the first movement:
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Despite the fact that the nearest model for Schubert in the symphony genre was Beethoven, and despite the fact that Beethoven did use "preface themes" (usually to replace a slow introduction), this sounds nothing like Beethoven. That opening theme in the bass is very mysterious. You could say, "yes, but Beethoven had a very mysterious beginning to his 9th Symphony in D minor, did he not?" Yep, but the 9th Symphony of Beethoven was written in 1824, two years after this one! This symphony, apart from being in a very unusual key, has also very unusual themes. The texture here, with the strings accompanying the winds in the third theme above, owes little to Mozart and Beethoven, but we find it in Rossini, in the overture to the Barber of Seville, for example. Now let's listen to the music. Here is the whole Unfinished with the score:
There is just a touch of the operatic in the first movement, especially in the forzando chords in the full orchestra that from time to time punctuate the texture, followed by suspenseful pizzicati. Twice we return to that bass "preface theme" and each time it seems more ominous. What Schubert is doing here is inventing how to create romantic subjectivity in music. This was first done in the smaller forms, the songs and impromptus heard in the salons where Schubert achieved his success. Now he is moving it to the larger concert hall. He had no immediate influence because no-one heard this music until the second half of the century, but when they did, it made a huge impact on the romantic symphonists like Brahms and even Mahler.
There was one other symphonist who felt the impact of the Unfinished and that was Tchaikovsky whose 6th symphony is not only in B minor, but also ends with a slow movement! Here it is:
