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March 2006 Program Notes
Works for Flute and Keyboard
by Mary Burke
Tonight's program features works for flute and keyboard from the latter decades of the 18th century, a period when the Baroque style was in the process of giving way to the Classical. This era also saw an evolution in the role of composers, who moved away from fixed court or church positions toward greater independence and creative freedom. Some of tonight's composers worked in the older tradition of employment, others broke away from it—and all of them encountered some amount of trouble along the way.
Dysfunctional relationships with one's boss must be as old as human history, but they take on soul-crushing weight when the boss is a monarch with the power of life and death over employees. Imprisonment was a very real possibility, as J.S. Bach learned when he attempted to resign from an early post with Duke Wilhelm Ernst of Saxe-Weimar and found himself jailed for a couple of weeks. (Presumably an ecclesiastical employer could go even further and threaten a person with eternal damnation.) The fact that brilliant musicians were treated as servants also strikes us today as appalling, though of course we have the benefit of several centuries' hindsight, and rather different ideas of the status of artists.
J.S. Bach's musical sons managed to avoid jail time, but they certainly encountered various hitches in their professional lives. Wilhelm Friedemann, the oldest son, quickly developed into an excellent keyboard player, with considerable talent for composition and improvisation. Unfortunately, his temperament was not conducive to success in a steady church or court post; he tended to abandon compositions out of frustration, or never quite got around to copying them out. His style was a bit too daring for many tastes (though highly regarded by others). In addition, contemporary reports indicate that he was regarded as a rather difficult person, quite apart from his apparent lack of mental discipline; he lost financial support from Princess Anna Amalia of Prussia because of his involvement in a plot to get another composer fired. After many years of indifferent success as a freelancer, he died in abject poverty, even selling off his whole music library (which included many works inherited from his father). Carl Philipp Emanuel, also a brilliant keyboardist and composer, did have the discipline necessary to hold down a job—unfortunately, it was a stultifying, dead-end job. He spent some 30 years in the service of Frederick the Great of Prussia, valued as a player but largely dismissed as a composer. He did apply for other, more rewarding, positions elsewhere, but Frederick didn't release him until 1767, when he won the post of city music director of Hamburg following Telemann's death.
Johann Christian Bach, on the other hand, broke completely away from Germany and from the church/court routine, and made a fairly independent career for himself. He moved to Milan at the age of twenty to study, and took to opera almost immediately. He rapidly established himself in this genre, and followed a string of commissions to London in 1762; there he enjoyed substantial success with opera productions, publications, and the famed Bach-Abel concert series, as well as becoming music master to Queen Charlotte. Though he enjoyed financial success and generally good relations with colleagues, he was still prey to the vagaries of fashion and the box office. The last decade or so of his life saw a decline in his fortunes as his music waned in popularity, and a final blow came when a servant embezzled a great deal of his money.
Franz Anton Hoffmeister achieved a different kind of independence, setting himself up in the music publishing business in the burgeoning market of Vienna in 1783. Around 1800, he and Ambrosius Kühnel founded another house that eventually became C.F. Peters of Leipzig. He was not a born businessman, however, and endured some financial strife; he had to sell off a number of his titles to Artaria to keep afloat in Vienna. In the end, though, this day job enabled him to spend his last years as a full-time musician, and a fairly successful one.
Mozart's rollercoaster career is of course legendary, and perhaps the most tragic example of how a stellar talent can fall victim to the caprices of aristocrats and fashions. His relationship with Hieronimo Colloredo, the Archbishop of Salzburg, stands as one of history's more egregious examples of poor labor relations. Mozart, who had had a much easier time working for Colloredo's predecessor, chafed under the new boss' strictness and demands, and felt unappreciated (true enough); moreover, he longed to leave Salzburg to write operas. If he had been more tactful, or perhaps more devious, he might have been able to get an amicable release from the job. As it was, he basically provoked Colloredo into dismissing him, culminating in a heated confrontation with the archbishop's chef de cuisine, who berated the composer and ejected him forcibly from the house ("with a kick in the arse," as Mozart put it with his customary delicacy). So in the end, Mozart won his freedom and went to Vienna, where he was a success....briefly. He could beat the Archbishop, but he couldn't beat fashion or the politics of the arts community, and ultimately died a pauper.
Some grim tales, to be sure—and yet, these composers all wrote as if they hadn't a care in the world. We hope that their music will leave you feeling more optimistic than their life stories.
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