But what has Bach's influence been on other musicians, as performers and as composers (insert book-length digression, here)?
It is the core of Francisco Fullana's latest recording, released just two months ago, and would seem to be a perfect project for a violinist living in isolation during the Pandemic: music for a single player, inspired by the works Johann Sebastian Bach composed for solo violin.
The second of three Summermusic concerts, Francisco Fullana's program begins at 7:30 Saturday evening at St. Michael Lutheran Church on the 1st block of State Street (between Front & 2nd Streets) in downtown Harrisburg. There is parking along State Street and also some limited space on two small lots behind the church (while there'll be no race to create headaches for us, it is Saturday night, so be prepared). As for Covid19 Protocols, we respectfully request anyone in the audience not already fully vaccinated wear a mask.
So, since the shadow is Bach's and his music is the progenitor of so much more than the music on this program, what else to do but begin with Bach, just as he starts his program for Summermusic on Saturday night.
While I could (and usually do) go on ad infinitem (or depending on your viewpoint, ad nauseam) about Bach and his music, if you're interested in more historic detail about Bach's Sonatas & Partitas, you can check this post from 2017 for an all-Bach program with Kristof Baráti (scroll down to get to the historical background bits).
And instead of examining each work on the program in “concert order,” I've decided to make some different connections, beginning with the most obvious. While Bach's Solo Violin Sonatas & Partitas may stretch across the centuries in this music, here is an example of how the E Major Partita, specifically its Preludio, inspired a great violinist of the early-20th Century, Eugene Ysaÿe:
Two centuries later, in 1920 – in the aftermath of World War I's devastation as Europe tried pulling itself out of the rubble – the Belgian Ysaÿe wrote six sonatas for solo violin of his own and dedicated each of them to a different colleague. The 2nd, sometimes subtitled Obsession, was dedicated to Jacques Thibaud and, not coincidentally, it starts off with more than a nod to Bach's Partita No. 3 in E Major!
The first time I ever heard this, I thought “oh, there's been a change in the program” but then, once the music started stopping and starting again, always in a different place, it reminded me of bad radio reception and I realized it was indeed the obsessive mind of a violinist going back and forth, in and out of a piece he's working on, spending hours practicing it, as it then begins to unfold in new and unexpected ways.
As Ysaÿe explained, "I have played everything from Bach to Debussy” – who'd died in 1918 – “for real art should be international." In these sonatas, Ysaÿe used now familiar fingerprints of early-20th Century style ranging from Debussy's whole-tone scales, dissonances that might be familiar from the earlier works of Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Bartók, even “quarter tones” which have to be approached very carefully or a listener may think “but he's playing out-of-tune!” It's not so much up-dating Bach for the 20th Century since Bach doesn't need to be “made relevant,” but reflecting Bach into the 20th Century and adding his style, his fingerprints, to the mix of influences available to a modern-day composer.
But virtuosity is not just the ability to play fast notes flashily. Ysaÿe employed virtuoso bow as well as left-hand techniques throughout, believing “at the present day the tools of violin mastery, of expression, technique, mechanism, are far more necessary than in days gone by. In fact they are indispensable, if the spirit is to express itself without restraint.” So, just as Bach did so significantly two centuries earlier, Ysaÿe's set of sonatas places high technical demands on its performers. Yet Ysaÿe recurrently warns violinists that they should never forget to play instead of becoming preoccupied with technical elements; a violin master "must be a violinist, a thinker, a poet, a human being, he must have known hope, love, passion and despair, he must have run the gamut of the emotions in order to express them all in his playing."
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Bach composed his Sonatas and Partitas around 1720 – it's impossible to be much more specific – during an age of incredible violinists and composers for the violin like Corelli and Vivaldi. But it was also an age of incredible violin-makers like Antonio Stradivari, perhaps the best-known (he died in 1737), and one of the greatest, Guarneri del Gesù (who died in 1744).
The violin that Francisco Fullana currently performs on is a 1735 Guarneri del Gesù instrument from 1735 known as the “Mary Portman” (after one of its owners) but which also was one that belonged to the great violinist and composer of the early-20th Century, Fritz Kreisler (sometimes, you'll see the violin referred to as “the Ex-Kreisler,” though he owned several fine violins over the course of his career). So it's fitting that Fullana includes a bit of Kreisler's music on this program, in this case his “Recitative and Scherzo, Op.6” with it's dark introduction with its Bach-like harmonies followed by pyrotechnical yet light-hearted brilliance. Published in 1911, Kreisler dedicated it to his good friend and colleague, Eugene Ysaÿe. (Then, in 1920, Ysaÿe dedicated the 4th of his sonatas to Kreisler.)
Listening to this, the link not only to Bach but also to an earlier century's master is obvious: Nicolò Paganini who was one of the greatest virtuosos in an age of touring virtuosos (indeed, he continued touring even after his death, one of the more gruesome sidebars in music history).
There were rumors he obtained his phenomenal talent by selling his soul to the devil, which, good PR or not, he did little to refute. His collection of 24 caprices for solo violin, written in three sets over the course of his career between 1802 and 1817 (various sources disagree, however). Each one is an etude (or study) focusing on one technical aspect (like double-stopped trills, chordal writing, rapid changes between strings and registers, and different bowing techniques). The most famous of them is the last, a set of variations on a simple theme and rather than focusing on one technical difficulty, seems to be more an “All-of-the-Above” Etude. It is generally regarded as one of the most difficult single pieces for the violin in the repertoire.
In Paganini's day, no one could play like him and he was the equivalent of a rock star, adored by the public (Schubert complained how few people attended his concert because everybody was at Paganini's recital instead). He also carefully guarded his music, never publishing it to make it accessible to anyone else who'd try to play it. It says something for the technical level of today's violinists that conservatory students world-wide routinely study and perform them.
Born into a family of educators, Francisco Fullana graduated from the Royal Conservatory of Madrid, and received Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from The Juilliard School following studies in addition to holding an Artist Diploma from the USC Thornton School of Music, where he worked with the renowned violinist Midori.
By the way, she first recorded the complete Paganini Caprices when she was 21.
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Paul Hindemith is a composer less often performed these days but he was once considered one of the most significant voices in modern music. Without getting into the whole history, this Sonata for Solo Violin is a relatively early work and an example of the facility with which he composed – which may have resulted in his “flooding the market” with a lot of music that was soon regarded as “facile.” There was a famous story how, arriving in London to perform a new viola concerto of his, King George V died the night before the concert which was subsequently canceled. However, the conductor wanted to broadcast something with Hindemith's involvement for the broadcast in tribute to the King's death, but they couldn't find anything suitable. So Hindemith offered to compose something especially for the occasion. So, between 11am and 5pm, he composed his “Trauermusik” (Funeral Music) for viola and strings, which was copied, rehearsed and then broadcast live that evening.
While such duties are part and parcel for a court composer – Bach would've had to write a whole funeral cantata but probably still wouldn't be expected to produce it the next night – it's not the sort of thing most composers could handle in more recent times, especially given the romantic conception of Inspiration and struggling over just the right note (Mozart could compose with little effort; Beethoven would struggle, sometimes for years, over a symphony; Debussy argued that one impresario wanted a piece in a few weeks, I believe it was, but he said “it takes me that long to decide between this chord or that chord!”)
Enter Hindemith's Sonata for Solo Violin, Op. 31, No. 2, which was written in a few hours on April 7th, 1924, while riding on the train from Hannover to Frankfort. It was a beautiful day and he jotted down on the first page of the manuscript the words “What lovely weather outside,” which may have inspired the unexpected appearance of Mozart's child-like song, “Come, sweet May” as a theme for the last movement's set of variations. Granted the work is under ten minutes long, but still, as you listen to it, imagine if you could always make such constructive use of your time!
(this performance, with score, uses Frank Peter Zimmermann's recording.)
As for the influence of Bach, Hindemith, even as one of the brasher young composers of the 20th Century, had a firm foundation in his own, easily recognizable harmonic idiom and an overall contrapuntal style firmly rooted in the works of Bach, often by way of the late-Romantic heavily Bach-influenced Max Reger. The complexity of his harmonic language (by way of Bach's more chromatic works, like the famous “Chromatic Fantasy & Fugue”) is one thing that, in this sonata, makes the appearance of Mozart's simplistic theme so striking and, perhaps like the weather on a beautiful day, smile-worthy.
There is little music more complex in Bach's output than “The Musical Offering,” a collection of different types of canons and fugues, including quite a few you need to solve riddles before you can figure out how to play them. The concluding Ricercar in Six Voices is regarded as one of the most complex fugues in captivity.
“Old Bach,” near the end of his life and long after he'd been considered old-fashioned and out of style (composers themselves, even his sons referred to Dad as “The Old Pigtail”), had been invited to visit the Prussian king, Frederick the Great's court in Berlin in 1747. The King was himself a talented flutist and composer, conservative in style (he would soon detest the new-fangled classicism of Haydn) and asked Bach to improvise on various keyboard instruments in the royal collection, including a new invention, the fortepiano (the transition between the harpsichord and the modern piano). As a subject for improvisation, the King handed Bach a theme which he wanted turned into a various fugues in various possible solutions. With its upward minor triad, it's downward leap of a diminished 7th, then a creepy-crawly half-step descent to the rounding-off into the tonic cadence, this became known as “The Royal Theme” – in German, Das königliches Thema – and the resulting work, ending with the Ricercar in 6 Voices (a complex fugue, even by Bach's standards), was dedicated to the king: Regis Iussu Cantio Et Reliqua Canonica Arte Resoluta (“the theme given by the king, with additions, resolved in the canonic style) the first letters of each word spelling out the word RICERCAR, which originally meant “to search.” In addition to other riddles, one of the canons is headed Quaerendo invenietis – “Seek and ye shall find.”
Which brings us to this work by Korean-born composer, Isang Yun, composed directly under the shadow of Bach's Offering, written in 1976 when Yun was living in Berlin (not far from Frederick's palace). He called it “Königliches Thema” and it became a bridge, of sorts, between the cultures of his adopted Germany and his native Korea.
Yun made his home in West Germany since 1964 – except for that period, after having been kidnapped from his Berlin home in 1967 and imprisoned in South Korea, tortured on charges of espionage, and, after attempting suicide, forced to confess, then threatened with a death sentence which was commuted to a life sentence. After a worldwide petition had been signed by 200 artists ranging from Herbert von Karajan to Igor Stravinsky, Yun was released in 1969; he returned to West Berlin, became a German citizen in 1971, and never returned to South Korea.
This work for solo violin was composed in 1976.
From the note supplied by Yun's publisher, Boosey & Hawkes: “Yun took [this] as an opportunity to give Bach's theme a 'walk through the Asiatic tradition' while setting it in twelve-tone sonorities. At the end of the piece Yun returns to the original theme, transposed to a higher octave, which for Yun signifies a higher level, and only slightly but nevertheless decisively modified through typical Korean musical gestures.”
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Last on the blog (though not last on the program) are two pieces by Spanish composers.
In the previous posts for the Jasper Quartet's program, we got into various aspects of the African-American and the Native-American cultural experiences as reflected in the compositions of FlorencePrice and Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate.
With Spanish music, those Americans of the Western European persuasion might first think of pieces like Ravel's Bolero or Debussy's Iberia (works by French composers, by the way, though Ravel was, on his mother's side, Basque), and also authentic Spaniards like Albeniz (especially his Asturias) or Falla (the “Three-Cornered Hat”) and Roderigo's Concierto de Aranjuez – and assume that to be Spanish, the music must reflect the rhythms and melodies of the Spanish folk traditions. And while some of this – like Bartók – can be absorbed into a composer's creative style without being overt, there are other influences in the wider world that can play a part without necessarily “sounding” it. And this being a program built on the cornerstone of Bach's enduring influence, these next two works are a musical offering to explain how Bach is reflected in the works of two modern Spanish composers.
The title of Salvador Brotons' Variaciones sobre un tema barroco (Variations on a Baroque Theme) may seem unassuming, a work for solo violin written in 2017. It's not really an original theme in a Baroque style – and it's also not Bach. The theme is taken from a zarzuela (the Spanish equivalent of an operetta or comic opera) based on the classic Greek legend of Acis and Galatea, produced in 1708 by Antonio de Literes. A Mallorcan-born composer, Literes had become the Music Director of the Royal Court in 1697 and died in Madrid in 1747. But the influences of great Italian violinists like Corelli and the solo violin music of Bach are unmistakable.
Brotons, born in Barcelona in 1959, earned his doctorate at Florida State University on a Fulbright Scholarship, then taught and conducted at Portland (OR) State University before returning to Spain. Currently based in Barcelona with an international career as a conductor, Brotons has over 140 works and 16 recordings in his catalog.
In this “audio” from Fullana's previous recording “Through the Lens of Time,” he plays Brotons' gentle tribute to the age of the Spanish Baroque under King Philip V, years before Bach had become Bach.
Francisco Fullana was born on the island of Mallorca, one of the Balearic Islands off the Catalan coast. Though following an international career, one of his “gigs” is as the Resident Artist of the Orchestra of the Balearic Islands. When asked “what piece of music “reminds you of Mallorca when you play it?”, he responded that “Maestro Salvador Brotons, who has always had a very special relationship with the island, is writing a piece for the violin for me that will be included in my new CD with the English label Orchid Classics and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. It will be a piece that reflects the island, its landscapes and its history, and I really can’t wait for it to be finished in the coming months.”
In one sense, the inspiration for Joan Valent's Chaconne for solo violin, entitled Punta Campanello, goes back even further than 1700. Like Fullana, Valent (Joan is the Catalan form of Juan) was born on Mallorca (or Majorca), he discovered at the age of 11 he wanted to become a composer (he'd already been playing the piano since he was 4). Like Brotons, he studied in Barcelona, then also went on to study in the United States, in his case at UCLA, then lived and worked in California for a number of years. Now based again in Mallorca, he pursues an international career in both concert music and film.
Valent's latest album, Poetic Logbook, begins with this solo violin piece he calls simply Punta Campanella. This is an actual place on the Amalfi coast, the tip of the peninsula of Sorrento south of Naples as it overlooks the Island of Capri. The first stop of Valent's own geographical and literary journey, the place is long associated with Homer's Odyssey, the presumed location where Ulysses confronted the Sirens.
So, as journeys go, we come back to Bach. Somehow, it seems, it always comes back to Bach.
– Dick Strawser
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