Tasmanian Symphony Chamber Players - Telemann's Don Quichotte
Pre-concert talk for Musica Viva
March 5, 2001
PURCELL Chacony in G minor
VIVALDI Concerto in A minor for two violins
MOZART Divertimento K136
HAYDN Concerto for harpsichord and violin
TELEMANN Don Quichotte Suite
I don’t know how many of you have access to the Internet. Those of you who do might like to try something amusing, when you get home or to your computer. Do you have some words in a foreign language that you’d like translated? Look up a site called Babel Fish. Put the foreign text in and see what you get. I’ll give you a sample: here are some of the words of a Bach Cantata, which were originally in German. Babel Fish has translated them into – is it English?
Ertoert us by your quality,
Arouse us by your Gnad;
Old humans insult,
That that may live again '
Probably here on these ground connections,
The sense and all Begerden
And G’danken hab’n to you.
Now you understand, perhaps, why the site is named after the Tower of Babel, where God said
Come let us there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.
Now here’s some music with words:
PLAY: LULLY Le Bourgeois gentilhomme: Turkish ceremony
This is from the scene in Molière’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme where the suitor for the would-be gentleman’s daughter’s hand pretends to be the son of the Grand Turk. It’s a pretend Turkish language. The music is by Lully.
The subject of my talk today is to be language, musical language and other language. I think you’ll guess why, if you think about the last work on tonight’s program, Telemann’s Don Quichotte Suite. This is music which relates to one of the most famous books of all time, Cervantes’ Don Quixote. There aren’t any words in tonight’s concert, because there aren’t any singers. Perhaps Geoffrey Lancaster will speak, but he’s really doing my job, giving you words about the music.
I remember one of my most vivid experiences of a concert of this kind, years ago. The music was Couperin’s Apotheosis of Lully. There’s Lully again! It was being performed in the Great Hall of the University of Sydney by Concentus Musicus of Vienna. The only words in Couperin’s programmatic piece about Lully’s arrival in heaven are the titles. Before each movement was played, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, who was playing in and directing the performance, spoke each title. This added enormously to my enjoyment of the performance.
PLAY: COUPERIN L’apothéose de Lulli
And so it could tonight, because Telemann’s Don Quichotte Suite is a piece of program music which has a lot to do with Couperin and Lully. So, for example, before this next piece of music is played, it is necessary to know that it illustrates the episode in Cervantes’ Don Quixote where the knight errant and his servant are staying in an inn, and for a bit of fun the local louts take Don Quixote’s servant Sancho Panza onto the roof and toss him in the air in a blanket:
PLAY: TELEMANN Don Quichotte: Sancho Panza tossed in a blanket.
The title that would be read out for this movement from Telemann’s Suite is ‘Sancho Panza berné’ – Sancho Panza tossed in a blanket. Notice it’s in French. But Don Quixote the book is in Spanish, isn’t it? And Telemann was a German composer. His music was composed in Hamburg and for a German-speaking audience. Now you see why we’re in a kind of musical Tower of Babel.
Let’s stay in Spain for a moment. If you’ve travelled there as a tourist, you may well have come across, as I did, one of the many places which claim to be the setting of an episode in Spain’s most famous book, Don Quixote. Mine was in Córdoba, in an inn quite near the famous Mosque-Cathedral, the Mezquita. Spaniards are quite sceptical about the claims, which certainly help marketing to the literate, but credulous tourist. The point is that Cervantes’ book has become part of the Spanish folklore, though few Spaniards have read it cover to cover – indeed few people anywhere have. And Don Quixote isn’t just part of Spanish folklore – after its publication in the last years of the 1600s, it quickly became famous all over Europe. So Telemann could assume that his audience knew about Quixote, the passionate reader of romances of chivalry, who came to confuse their stories with reality, and set out to right wrongs and to woo his fair Dulcinea, a simple girl of the people whom he mistook for a beautiful and noble lady. Then his servant, Sancho Panza, became a type of the sensible man of worldly appetites who tries but fails to keep his master sensible. The fame of the stories across the ages has attracted many musicians – but here’s a curious thing: in the list of works inspired by Don Quixote, which takes up a whole column in Grove’s Dictionary, very few are by Spanish composers. Until our own century, that is, when Spanish music recovered some of the greatness it had lost since before Cervantes’ time, and the greatest modern Spanish composer, Manuel de Falla, composed his marvellous Master Peter’s Puppet Show, where Don Quixote becomes convinced that the story of rescue of a damsel from the Moors is real, and attacks the puppets with his sword, wrecking the whole set-up:
PLAY: FALLA Master Peter’s Puppet Show – climax
Falla’s is a puppet opera. Opera seems the obvious place to look for Don Quixote, and the most famous opera about him is by the 19th century French composer Massenet. In the 18th century, there were Don Quixote operas, too, including one by Telemann himself. But to understand the music we hear tonight, we need to go back to Lully and his Bourgeois gentilhomme music. This was written about the same time as Don Quixote was published, and the kind of program music that went with Molière’s play created a craze which spread like wildfire all over Europe. The French were regarded as the inventors of program music and its best practitioners. Instead of the music being only about itself, it could refer to something outside itself, even stand for it or illustrate it. Not all musicians and commentators on music liked this kind of thing - in fact, they were often against it, particularly in Northern Europe.
A famous late example is Haydn’s comments on aspects of the librettos of The Creation and The Seasons, provided for him by Baron van Swieten with suggestions for musical setting. Representing animals, like frogs, for example, Haydn derided as ‘Frenchified trash’. And you can read in your program notes that critics said the same thing about works like Telemann’s Don Quichotte, 50 years earlier. ‘In all his works there was a great fault which he had learnt from the French: he was so much in love with musical painting that he frequently got stuck to a particular picturesque word or thought, and lost himself in trying to paint things which no music can possibly express.’ The French had a whole repertoire of instrumental musical types that represented particular things or feelings. One of the masters of this type of music, from whom Telemann would have learnt much, was Jean-Philippe Rameau. Since Telemann’s music is an ironic commentary in keeping with the spirit of Cervantes, where Don Quixote’s take on the world is most often askew, rather than playing you the movement where Don Quixote is wakened from sleep, which you’ll hear in the concert, anyway, I thought [Start example] I’d play a ‘sommeil’ – sleep music – and a Réveil, an awakening, by Rameau:
PLAY: RAMEAU Anacréon, Scene III
So far I’ve been concentrating on the ‘Don Quichotte’ part of Telemann’s title. Now let’s look at the other part: Suite. Here’s where Lully comes in again: a Suite was really an Ouverture, which means opening, and Suite – the following sequence of movements. And what kind of movements? Dances, that’s what. Telemann knew that the French had begun writing this kind of music to accompany the ballets they loved in their stage shows.
That’s what the Turkish scene in Bourgeois gentilhomme was. And even when there was no dancing, the dances still had illustrative and naturalistic suggestions. You can prove that by reading the titles of Telemann’s suite movements as you listen. After the French-style overture, a series of illustrative dance movements, but for the concert, not the stage. Telemann was a master of this, as his contemporary Matheson said ‘Nowhere are proper dance melodies and their true character to be found more than in the music of the French and their clever imitators, of whom Telemann is the chief’.
This made Telemann popular. It was part of the mania for imitating things French which swept through the upper classes in Germany in the 18th century, leading rulers to build mini-Versailles and everyone to ape French manners and even speak French in preference to German. And even in mercantile Hamburg the would-be-gentlemen enjoyed Frenchified music. Actually Telemann was so versatile that he could and did turn his hand to every kind of music. There’s so much of it. The trouble is, unless like me you were a recorder player as a child and got to know his music by playing it, most people haven’t had the time to sort out what Telemann’s best pieces are. If they had, there’s no reason why there shouldn’t be a Telemann craze like the Vivaldi craze, if baroque music goes on being very popular. Telemann was unlucky that his contemporaries in Germany included Bach and Handel!
The Germans used to say superciliously that England was ‘das Land ohne Musik’ – the country without music. That’s because they were limiting their comparison to the era from Beethoven to Wagner and Strauss. In defence, the Brits went back to Purcell, as well they might.
The piece by Purcell which begins tonight’s concert in its revised order is the earliest to be composed. It’s a good place to start, and not only because it came from the same period as Don Quixote. To the historically aware, this Chacony by Purcell shows how dance music evolved into what we call ‘absolute’ music. When the word Chaconne pops up, most musical people probably think of something like this
PLAY: BACH Partita in D minor for solo violin: Chaconne
Reaching into our musical education, we think that a piece like this ‘THE’ Bach Chaconne, is variations over a ground bass. But they probably should rather have thought of something like this:
PLAY: RAMEAU Dardanus: Chaconne
That’s the dance concluding Rameau’s opera Dardanus: everyone on stage in elaborate costumes and headdresses. What both these pieces have in common with the Purcell Chacony is that they are in triple time and they involve varying a harmonic pattern, or ground, as the basis of the composition. All three, in their way are grand and impressive, though Purcell’s in a subtle way, is meditative rather than proclamatory:
PLAY: PURCELL Chacony.
All these Chaconnes can be traced back to a wild American dance which the Conquistadors brought back to Spain. In Europe they went through the best kind of non-Babel Fish translation, and came out very different from each other, but all making perfect musical sense.
So Purcell’s Chacony, opening the program, is a searching exploration of music’s possibilities, and tells you you’re expected to listen very carefully. It’s a dance, but it also points away from dance music as such. We won’t return to dance-inspired music for a while. And that, in a sense, is because we’re going to Italy. That’s where Mozart and Haydn went to get their texts which they then put through the translator into their own language. And so did Bach, but that’s another story, because his piece now won’t be played.
We could have started with Bach just the same, to hear how the Babel-Fish translation worked for him, because the concerto by Vivaldi we hear tonight was translated, as it were, by Bach, into a piece for solo harpsichord. But let’s rather concentrate on what attracted Bach so much to this music. He, Bach, hadn’t actually been to Italy. Some of us have, and perhaps know the place where this Vivaldi Concerto for Two Violins was first played. You know that shot you see in so many tourist brochures, looking across the lagoon in Venice, with the Doge’s palace on the right, and across the entrance to the Grand Canal, the splendid baroque dome of the Salute church, built to celebrate Venice’s deliverance from the plague? That picture is taken on the Riva degli Schiavoni, and a little further along, behind us, is the Church of the Pietà, in whose orphanage for girls Vivaldi taught and was director of the music. [Start example] It’s rather nice, as we hear the music tonight played by a predominantly female band and with two women as soloists, to think of the girls of the Pietà giving the original performance:
PLAY: VIVALDI Concerto for two violins
‘The transcendent music here in Venice is that of the hospitals. There are four, devoted to illegitimate or orphan girls…they train them exclusively to excell in music. And so they sing like angels, and play the violin, the cello, the bassoon; in short, there is no big instrument that can frighten them…There is nothing more fascinating than to see a young and pretty novice in white with pomegranate blossoms nestled in her hair just over her ear, conducting the orchestra and beating time with all the grace and precision you can imagine’.
The same French observer reported that Vivaldi had claimed that he could compose a concerto with all its parts faster than a copyist could write it down. In our own century, when Vivaldi was rediscovered, we faced an embarrassment of riches, and the Italian composer Dallapiccola, bad tempered, suggested that Vivaldi had composed the same concerto 500 times. Bach knew better, and in the case of tonight’s concerto, he chose a superlatively good one. But what we can learn from this is that the great secret of the appeal of Italian music - and Vivaldi was one of the best Italian composers - was that it used a formula superlatively well. The musical ideas speak extremely clearly and idiomatically. The music seems to grow naturally out of the medium, as music for strings, but it has such substance and strong ideas that it still sounds great when it is translated into another medium by another genius, Bach (no Babel Fish automatic translator he). But notice that in gaining its clarity and its athleticism, this music has to strip down, by comparison with the intricate harmonies of Purcell’s Chacony. With Mozart’s Divertimento, the stripping down has gone one stage further.
Recently Sydney was treated in its annual Festival to a four-hour-long opera Mozart composed when he was 14 years old. It’s called Mitridate, and it was commissioned for an opera house in Milan. Remarkable music for a composer so young, but I don’t think we’ll be hearing it again soon, and we probably wouldn’t be hearing it at all if it wasn’t by Mozart. The string pieces he composed at about the same time, with the same public in Italy in mind, are a different matter. Among the music of Mozart’s early teens, they have remained favourites. I think you’ll recognise tonight’s, which begins like this:
PLAY: MOZART K.136: beginning
That performance is by a string quartet – 2 violins, viola, and cello. It won’t be played by that combination tonight, and therein lies a story… You only have to listen and enjoy. I have to read and prepare, for the notes and the talk. I find it amusing, really, that so much ink has been used wondering exactly what these pieces by Mozart are – there’s a group of four of them. You might think it’s easy: look at the title: Divertimento. That’s an Italian name used in the 18th century for a piece of music for pleasure, which is not a symphony. Actually Mozart didn’t call them anything: the title Divertimento was added later by someone else. Still, they are like other pieces Mozart called Divertimento. In the Mozart catalogues, they are grouped with the Serenades, also lighter entertainment music. But as soon as we get to something that can be called Serenade, we find a distinctive feature – a Minuet, or more likely two of them. But these Divertimenti have no minuet: they’re in three movements, in the pattern fast-slow-fast, like an Italian opera overture of the same time. How many instruments are the so-called Divertimenti written for, and which instruments? We’re not sure.
The writing seems soloistic – perhaps they’re a kind of string quartet, as in the recording we heard. But Geoffrey Lancaster doesn’t think so: he apparently thinks they’re like the Serenades, in a particular respect: instead of a cello, the bass instrument is a double bass. Serenades acknowledged their origins as music played in the streets, perhaps under the loved-one’s window. The players arrived playing as they walked along, stopped at a given place, and when they had played their music, marched off again, still playing. That’s why many of Mozart’s Serenades have marches associated with them. You can’t play the cello while you’re marching – it has to be gripped between the legs. But the 18th century double bass could be strapped to the player and played on the march.
This convention was observed even when the music was played indoors, in winter: no cellos, but double basses instead. So perhaps, as we look at the stage, what Geoffrey Lancaster is telling us is that this is Mozart the writer of serenades for Salzburg, giving us a piece with a very Italian accent, but in an instrumentation that would have been more familiar in Salzburg than in Milan. The medium is not quite the message, here at least. But there won’t be any Babel-like confusion!
That leaves just one piece to be talked about, and in a way it is the least predictable. I guess you look at your program, work out who composed the next piece, and form an idea in your mind of what it might sound like. That would work quite well for Purcell, Vivaldi, and even Telemann’s pieces – they seem to speak the language of the period, as well as of each composer. But I wonder, if the name Haydn wasn’t on his concerto for harpsichord, violin and strings, would you guess it was by Haydn? When Haydn died in Vienna in 1809, he was in his mid-70s – an old man indeed in terms of the life expectancy of the time.
By the time he stopped composing, a few years earlier, he was by far the most celebrated composer in his European world, but this celebrity now rested on his last style – that of the ‘London’ symphonies, the late string quartets, and the oratorios The Creation and The Seasons. The piece we hear tonight comes from over 35 years earlier, perhaps almost 50 years – music was very different then, and so was Haydn. The piece we hear is titled Concerto, but we shouldn’t expect something like a Mozart piano concerto, with its brilliant interplay between soloist and orchestra, and tight structure. Nor should we expect features like those found in Vivaldi’s Concerto for two violins. In the 1760s, when Haydn’s piece was composed, ‘concerto’ seems to have meant a relatively informal but soloistic piece – so that Mozart could call one of his ‘Concerto OR Divertimento’.
The point is to give prominence to the solo instrument – two of them in this case. There must have been an occasion when Haydn wanted to feature himself on harpsichord together with a violinist. The trouble is, he doesn’t seem to have been able to remember what occasion it was. At the very end of his life, he told his biographer he remembered writing a concerto for keyboard and one solo violin ‘for his sister-in-law when she took the veil’. In that case, the keyboard instrument would have been organ – which would look the same in the music, since Austrian organs usually didn’t have a pedal board. And it would make a great story. You see, Haydn was in love with this woman, but instead of marrying him she decided to become a nun, and he wrote a concerto for the ceremony. But probably this one:
PLAY: HAYDN Organ Concerto in C
Haydn, disappointed in love, married the novice nun’s sister on the rebound, and lived unhappily ever after!
So we don’t know why Haydn wrote a concerto for harpsichord and violin, nor exactly when, but the style suggests the 1760s. The style is one in which many composers in Austria were writing – a blend of Italianate and German idioms. If you can spot which are which, you’ll be wonderfully equipped to listen to the mixture of languages in this concert. Why play this concerto which could almost be said to be Haydn before he became Haydn? Well, if you’re putting on a concert with tonight’s forces, you can cast Geoffrey Lancaster as Haydn and Barbara Jane Gilby as his concert-master soloist. Neat. I conclude with a commercial. The title Musica Viva has given to this concert is that of a CD by tonight’s performers on the ABC Classics label [Show], Spirit of the Baroque. The fact that only one piece on the CD, the Purcell, is in tonight’s concert, proves that like all adventurous musicians, the Tasmanian Symphony Chamber Players and Geoffrey Lancaster are moving on and exploring new repertoire.
Indeed, the Mozart and Haydn tonight almost take us out of the Baroque into the Classical period – but enough of arbitrary text-book periodisation. The imprint of the Spirit of the Baroque is all over tonight’s program, but what does that mean? – I wonder what Babel Fish would make of it? The point is, I think, the wonderful diversity of musical languages and translations to a particular time, place, and musician. Unlike Babel Fish, these translations will be right. Like Babel Fish, they will be entertaining, especially in Don Quichotte, where I think you’ll twig, if you haven’t already, what the music of the concert has been saying all along.
Presented at a Musica Viva Tasmanian Symphony Chamber Players concert at Sydney Opera House, 5 March 2001