genius makes its own rules
a research resource for THE TEMPEST and AMADEUS. they're still rocking us. today. right now. so get ready. and get reading.
Monday, April 11, 2011
BONNO
Like Bono.
Or close to it.
http://www.hoasm.org/XIIC/Bonno.html
Giuseppe Bonno (29 January 1711 – 15 April 1788) was an Austrian composer of Italian origin. (His name is sometimes given as Josef or Josephus Johannes Baptizta Bon.)
The son of a footman from Brescia who served at the Austrian court, he was born in Vienna and studied music with Johann Georg Reinhardt, imperial court organist, later Kapellmeister of St Stephen's. A gifted pupil, he was then sent to Naples in 1726 where he studied church music under Francesco Durante and opera under Leonardo Leo. He moved back to Vienna in 1736, becoming a court composer there, and working as Kapellmeister to the Prince of Saxe-Hildburghausen in the 1750s and 1760s. He died in Vienna.
Bonno's works are rarely heard today, but he was a prominent figure in Viennese musical life in his day and his works were often performed. He worked with two main librettists: Giovanni Claudio Pasquini and Metastasio. The latter was Bonno's contemporary in Vienna, and the composer wrote the first music for Metastasio's Il natale di Giove (also set by Hasse), Il vero omaggio, Il re pastore (later set by Hasse and Mozart), L'eroe cinese (also set by Hasse), L'isola disabitata (also set by Haydn) and L'Atenaide ovvero Gli affetti più generosi.
Most of his output was for vocal forces, including stage works, oratorios, masses and other sacred pieces.
These folks had a lot of time on their hands when the internet was just becoming a thing.
Interesting!
Throwback...
http://makuro.mak-sima.com/teksty/amadeus/contents.html
Good for a laugh, some general info., the the "characters" section is the most useful.
What the VIENNA is a KAPELLMEISTER?
Kapellmeister (pronounced [kaˈpɛlmaɪstɐ]) is a German word designating a person in charge of music-making. The word is a compound, consisting of the roots Kapelle (“choir”, “orchestra”, or literally, “chapel”) and Meister (“master”). The words Kapelle and Meister derive from the Latin: capellaand magister. Thus, originally, the word was used to refer to somebody in charge of music in a chapel. However, the term has evolved considerably in its meaning in response to changes in the musical profession.
Equivalent terms in other European languages: maestro di cappella (Italian), maître de chapelle (French), chapel master (English), kapelmeester(Dutch), mestre de capela (Portuguese), and maestro de capilla (Spanish).
In German-speaking countries during the approximate period 1500-1800, the word Kapellmeister often designated the director of music for a monarch or nobleman. For English speakers, it is this sense of the term that is most often encountered, since it appears frequently in biographical writing about composers who worked in German-speaking countries.Historical usage
A Kapellmeister position was a senior one and involved supervision of other musicians. Johann Sebastian Bach worked from 1717 to 1723 as Kapellmeister for Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen. Joseph Haydn worked for many years as Kapellmeister for the Eszterházy family, a high-ranking noble family of the Austrian Empire. George Frideric Handel also served as Kapellmeister for George, Elector of Hanover (who eventually becameGeorge I of Great Britain).
A Kapellmeister might also be the director of music for a church. Thus, Georg Reutter was the Kapellmeister at St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna, where his young choristers included both Joseph and Michael Haydn.
Becoming a Kapellmeister was a mark of success for professional musicians of this time. For instance, Joseph Haydn once remarked that he was glad his father (a wheelwright) had lived long enough to see his son become a Kapellmeister.[1]
By the end of the 18th century, many of the nobility had declined in their economic power relative to the newly prosperous middle class. Eventually, the maintenance of a Kapelle became too expensive for most nobles, which lead to a decline in the number of Kapellmeister positions. A well-known instance occurred in 1790, when Prince Anton Esterházy succeeded his father and dismissed almost all of the latter's extensive musical establishment.[2] But as Jones (2009) points out, Esterházy was hardly alone in doing this; during this same period, "the steady decline in the number of orchestras supported by aristocratic families represented a ... change that affected all composers and their works."[3] This was a difficult time for musicians, who needed to find new ways to support themselves. For instance, Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) never worked as a Kapellmeister, but was supported by a mixture of noble patronage, publication, and concert income.
The case of Mozart
Mozart never was a Kapellmeister in the sense given above. In 1787 he was given a paid position in the court of the Austrian Emperor, asKammercompositeur ("chamber composer"), but authority in matters musical at the court was exercised primarily by Antonio Salieri. However, in reviews, diaries, and advertising, Mozart was commonly referred to as "(Herr) Kapellmeister Mozart". It seems that Mozart's prestige, along with the fact that he frequently appeared in public directing other musicians, led to the use of "Kapellmeister" as a term of respect.
In April 1791, Mozart did apply to become the Kapellmeister at St. Stephen's Cathedral, and was in fact designated by the City Council to take over this job following the death of the then-ailing incumbent, Leopold Hofmann. However, this never took place, since Mozart died (December 1791) before Hofmann did (1793).
Contemporary usage
In contemporary German, the term “Kapellmeister” has become less common in favor of the term Dirigent (“conductor”). When used today, however, it designates the director or chief conductor of an orchestra or choir. It suggests involvement in orchestra or choir policy (for example, selecting repertoire, concert schedules, choosing guest conductors and so on) as well as conducting. In military settings it refers to a bandmaster.[6] The music director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra traditionally holds the old-fashioned title Gewandhauskapellmeister.[7][8] In other German opera houses, the term generally refers to a deputy conductor reporting to the Generalmusikdirektor (General Music Director, usually also the chief conductor). An opera company may have several Kapellmeisters, ranked as Erste Kapellmeister, Zweite Kapellmeister, etc.
Similar terms and equivalents
The word Hofkapellmeister specified that the Kapellmeister worked at a nobleman's court (Hof); a Konzertmeister held a somewhat less senior position.[9]
Classical composers who worked in Kapellmeister positions
(ordered chronologically by date of birth)
- Arnold von Bruck (c. 1500–1554) was Kapellmeister in Vienna for Archduke Ferdinand from 1527 to 1545.
- Jacob Regnart (1540s – 1599) was Kapellmeister at Innsbruck from 1585 to about 1596.
- Michael Praetorius (1571–1621) was Kapellmeister at Wolfenbüttel from 1604.
- Heinrich Schuetz (1585–1673) was Kapellmeister to Johan Georg I, Elector of Saxony from 1619.
- Samuel Scheidt (1587–1653) was Kapellmeister to the Margrave of Brandenburg.
- Heinrich Ignaz Biber (1644–1704) was Kapellmeister in Salzburg from 1684.
- Georg Muffat (1653–1704) was Kapellmeister to the bishop of Passau from 1690 to his death.
- Agostino Steffani (1653–1728) was Kapellmeister from 1688 to 1698 at the court of Hanover.
- Johann Caspar Ferdinand Fischer (died 1746) was Kapellmeister to Ludwig Wilhelm of Baden from at least 1695.
- Johann Ludwig Bach (1677–1731), a second cousin of J. S. Bach, was Kapellmeister at Meiningen.
- Georg Philipp Telemann (1681–1767) served as Kapellmeister for 16 years, starting in 1705, for the court of Count Erdmann II in Hamburg.
- Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) worked from 1717 to 1723 as Kapellmeister for Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen.
- George Frideric Handel (1685–1759) served as Kapellmeister from 1710 to 1712 for George, Elector of Hanover.
- Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757) was maestro di cappella at St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome from 1715 to 1719.
- Johann Friedrich Fasch (1688–1758) was Kapellmeister from 1722 at Zerbst.
- Carlo Grua (ca. 1700–1773) was Kapellmeister at the court of Mannheim under the Electorship of Karl III Philip.
- Carl Heinrich Graun (1704–1759) was Kapellmeister starting in 1740 for Frederick II of Prussia (Frederick the Great)
- Giuseppe Bonno (1711–1788) was Kapellmeister to the Prince of Saxe-Hildburghausen in the 1750s and 1760s.
- Giacomo Matteo Ignazio Cirri (1711–1787) was Kapellmeister (Maestro di Cappella) in the Cathedral of Forlì, in Italy, from 1759.
- Ludwig van Beethoven (Lodewijk) (1712–1773), grandfather of the celebrated composer Ludwig van Beethoven, served as Kapellmeister in the Electoral court of Bonn.
- Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714–1788) also worked in Frederick II's court, but not as Kapellmeister. He later became Telemann's successor as Kapellmeister at Hamburg, starting in 1768.
- Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714–1787) was Kapellmeister starting 1754 for Maria Theresa of Austria in Vienna.
- Niccolò Jommelli (1714–1774) served Duke Karl-Eugen of Württemberg in Stuttgart from 1753 to 1768.
- Giovanni Battista Cirri (1724–1808) was Kapellmeister (Maestro di Cappella) in the Cathedral of Forlì, in Italy: from 1780, with Ignazio Cirri; after his death, alone.
- Christian Cannabich (1731–1798), Kapellmeister of the legendary Mannheim court orchestra from 1774.
- Joseph Haydn (1732–1809) had two Kapellmeister positions: first, from (probably) 1757 to 1761 for Count Morzin, then from 1761 on for theEszterházy family, a high-ranking noble family of the Austrian Empire. (He was Vice-Kapellmeister from 1761 to 1766.)
- Johann Georg Albrechtsberger (1736–1809) was Kapellmeister at St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna.
- Michael Haydn (1737–1806) was Kapellmeister at Großwardein and, starting in 1762, at Salzburg.
- Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf (1739–1799) was Kapellmeister to the Prince-Bishop of Breslau from 1770 to 1795.
- Andrea Luchesi (1741–1801) was the last Kapellmeister in the Electoral court of Bonn from 1774 to 1794.
- Antonio Salieri (1750–1825) was Royal and Imperial Kapellmeister to Joseph II of Austria from 1788 to 1824.
- Joseph Martin Kraus (1756–1792) was Kapellmeister (Ordinarie Capellmästere) in Stockholm at the court of king Gustav III of Sweden.
- Christian Kalkbrenner (1755–1806) was Kapellmeister of the Prussian Queen (1789) and since 1790 Kapellmeiter of Prince Henry of Prussia atRheinsberg castle.
Monday, February 28, 2011
BIG FOUR.
Who are your big 4 musicians? Tell me!
January 10, 2011
The Big 4 Of Vienna: One Faces Elimination
By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
For any attempt to determine the top 10 classical composers in history, like the one we embarked on in the Arts & Leisure section on Sunday, the Viennese Classical period presents a special challenge. If such a list is to be comprehensive, let alone geographically diverse, how could 4 of the 10 slots go to composers — Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert — who worked in Vienna during, say, the 75 years from 1750 to 1825? What on earth was going on there to foster such achievement?
The only Vienna native of the four was Schubert. Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809), the son of a wheelwright, was born in lower Austria. But by the age of 8 he was a choirboy at St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna. He was booted out of the choir when his voice changed in his late teens, and he became a freelance composer, performer and teacher. So during his childhood and young adult years, Haydn was immersed in the greatest music of Germanic culture.
At 29 he went to work for Prince Paul Esterhazy, who died and was succeeded in 1762 by his brother Nikolaus, a passionate music lover. Haydn spent nearly 30 years presiding over the musical activities at the prince’s palace 30 miles outside Vienna, as well as at the summer residence over the border in Hungary. Still, during these decades Haydn was a regular visitor to Vienna, where he presented his works, soaked up musical life, made friends (with Mozart, among others) and joined a Masonic lodge. In 1790, the prince having died, Haydn moved back to Vienna, a beloved master (Papa Haydn) and popular composer.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791), though born in Salzburg, spent extended periods of his childhood as a prodigy on tour throughout Europe. The arduous trips undermined his health and nearly killed him a couple of times. When these ventures failed to produce a patron or coveted position, Leopold Mozart compelled his son to buckle down and settle in Salzburg. But Wolfgang, itching to get to the big city, made his break at 25 and lived in Vienna until his death, through periods of triumph and exasperation, writing his greatest works during his last, heady decade.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) was born in Bonn, Germany, the son of a drunken, abusive court singer. He tried to escape to Vienna at 16 but had to return to stabilize the family because of his mother’s deteriorating health. Six years later he was back in Vienna, and he never left. He soon became a towering figure there, his path-breaking works both intriguing and baffling listeners, including his former teacher Haydn.
Franz Schubert (1797-1828) was born in Vienna to an impoverished schoolteacher and briefly became a teacher, until he threw himself into music and lived as a struggling freelance composer at a time that the patronage system was breaking down. Still, Schubert had a support system of friends and musicians who adored him and were sure they had a genius in their midst.
So what was going on in Vienna to make it such a hotbed of musical creativity? Do not presume that cultural life was especially enlightened or that the average Viennese music lover was uncommonly sophisticated. As Harvey Sachs points out in his recent book, “The Ninth: Beethoven and the World in 1824,” terms like “crossover,” “kitsch” and “dumbing down” could easily have been applied to the Vienna of Beethoven’s day, and the typical citizen “clamored to hear the forebears of today’s virtuoso firebrands, schlockmongers and half-pop, half-serious opera singers.”
Yet clearly there were musically astute listeners, as well as informed monarchs and patrons, who got what was going on.
Haydn, who was widely celebrated during the 200th anniversary of his death in 2009, is often called the father of the symphony, as it came to be known. I’d throw in the father of the string quartet and the piano sonata. Haydn was a pioneer in figuring out how to write a sizable multimovement instrumental piece that sounded organized and whole, an entity. The system of sophisticated tonal harmony had developed to the point where a genius like Haydn could figure out how to process themes and manipulate major and minor keys to dramatic effect throughout the many sections of a long work.
Moreover, Haydn was the first great master of what is called motivic development, in which bits and pieces of music — a few notes, a melodic twist, a rhythmic gesture — become the building blocks for an entire symphony in several movements.
Haydn passed on this technique to his recalcitrant student Beethoven, who, for all his notions of having invented himself, was deeply indebted to Haydn. Beethoven took the technique of motivic development even further. If you were going to make a case for Beethoven as the greatest composer in history, you would base it on his ability to make a long work, like the “Eroica” Symphony, seem like a musical monument in motion. For all the episodic shifts and turns of this piece, as it plows through four dramatically contrasting movements, most of the music is generated from a handful of motifs that you hear at the beginning.
Then, in his late phase, Beethoven entered a realm that transcended eras and periods. By then completely deaf, Beethoven touched the mystical. Every time I play the first piece from the Six Bagatelles (Op. 126), Beethoven’s last work for piano, I am stunned all over again. This seemingly modest little piece (as its title implies), just a single page of music, with its deceptively simple melody, is wondrous strange, almost cosmic.
Mozart knew all about motivic development too. But the technique did not come as naturally to him. He was a theater man at heart. It’s inspiring to see the sketches for the Mozart operas, in which all he writes are the vocal lines fitted to the words, and a bass line below, with a few chords here and there. Clearly, setting the text and getting the dramatic structure of the opera was the first task and the hard part. Filling in all the rest came later, which, for Mozart, was a fairly easy if time-consuming process.
When Mozart wanted to write a symphony or chamber work in the Haydn manner, as a motif-driven entity, he could certainly do it. Think of his last three symphonies or the six quartets he dedicated to Haydn. But it took great effort, as he admitted in the moving dedication of those quartets.
Still, even Mozart’s sonatas and symphonies are full of operatic touches. When I was in music school, I was always baffled when fellow pianists who claimed to love the Mozart piano concertos and sonatas said that they had no real feeling for the operas, not being opera buffs. How can you play, say, Mozart’s Sonata in D (K. 311) without being immersed in the Mozart operas? The Rondo comes across like some duet from “The Marriage of Figaro.” In the main theme you can almost hear Susanna, as she coyly tries to charm her way out of a tight spot with her doting, jealous Figaro, who voices his suspicions in gruff bursts leading to the second theme.
The argument for Mozart as the greatest composer ever would be based on his astounding versatility: he is at the top, both as a maker of opera and as a composer of symphonic and chamber works. That he died at 35 was horrible. On the other hand, he had an early start. And how do you top “Don Giovanni” and the “Jupiter” Symphony?
But that Schubert died at 31 is for me the greatest loss in music history. Even though he wrote an astonishing number of works, in so many ways he was just getting going. In his last years he started to restudy counterpoint, because he thought his skills were insufficient.
In his mature piano sonatas, chamber works and songs, Schubert, like Beethoven, entered some mystic place beyond era and cultural context. Think of the Sonata in A minor (D. 784), which in the opening movement veers with no warning from an eerily self-contained main theme through bursts of crazed chords and tremolos to a deceptively tranquil second theme, flowing by like some wistful folk song, only to be interrupted by slashing fortissimo chords.
If only for the hundreds of his songs that dominate the song repertory today and continue to stun, entrance and delight audiences, Schubert should make the cut. Right?
Yet one of these Vienna masters will have to be eliminated if we are going to leave spots for the giants of the 19th and 20th centuries. Might it be Haydn? Part of his legacy was carried on by his student Beethoven and his younger friend Mozart. I know musicians and critics who would howl at the idea that Haydn, who pioneered the string quartet and wrote some of the greatest works in that genre, would not be among the top 5, let alone the top 10. What to do? For now, let’s put it off.