When a group calls themselves “The Sebastians,” as this ensemble already winning accolades in Early Music Competitions in 2011 has done, the average concert-goer might assume either they’re all (or mostly) members of the Sebastian Family (like the Ying Quartet) or they’re all named Sebastian Something-or-Other, or perhaps (like the Emerson Quartet) honoring a favorite someone, say Sebastian Irgendeiner.
But most likely, you’d assume they’re honoring one of the Greatest Composers of All Time, Johann Sebastian Bach, whereas simply calling themselves “The Bachs” would include a whole lot of Bachs, many of whom were musicians ranging back to the grandfather of musician Veit Bach (born around 1550) and included Veit’s grandson Phillipus Bach, known to us primarily as “Lips” Bach (No.65 on the Genealogical Tree), listed as a musician (was he a trumpet player?) – his father, just plain “Lips” Bach, born around 1555, was listed as a carpetmaker. Even Henry Louis Gates Jr. would have to spend a lot of time sorting this one out.
The famous one, at least to us, is Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), who’s No.24 on The Tree, and he had at least four children who were all recognized as composers, not just musicians, and in their own generation better known than their now ubiquitous father. (That would be two sons to first wife, Maria Barbara, two more to his second wife, Anna Magdalena.) Even grandson Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst Bach was a respected composer who died in 1845 (the year Wagner premiered Tannhäuser). The Last of the Bachs was apparently Johann Philip Bach, a court organist in Meinigen who died in 1846 at the age of 94 (he was No.85 on the Bach Tree).
Further proof, if needed, is the phone number listed for The Sebastians on their website: 262–345-BACH.
But there will be no Bach on this program. There won’t even be any Bachs on the program you can hear at Market Square Church in downtown Harrisburg on Wednesday, Nov. 5th. But there will be music by Bach’s famous colleague, George Frederick Handel which while an excellent resource for any Early Music ensemble would not require them to change their name to The Fredericks.
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In the past, concert programs of chamber music, depending on the ensemble, would include a variety of works usually contrasting by style or period – the opening Classical work (Mozart or Haydn), something remotely contemporary (when I was growing up, Bartók was still considered new, but then he’d died only 20 years earlier), and then a major work of the Romantic Era (usually Beethoven). Early Music Groups were more limited in scope, especially as Baroque music fell off the grid for standard modern instrument ensembles in the 1960s and ‘70s. But then concerts during the 18th Century were usually New Music, and the Newest Music was often the “big draw” on a program in the 19th Century when people considered Brahms old-fashioned and Wagner avant-garde. Rimsky-Korsakov, in his autobiography, recalls Balakirev in the 1880s wasting his time on his “Ancient Music” concerts which featured symphonies by Haydn and Mozart (who wanted to hear that old stuff?).
So here we have a program examining the musical life of one location – London – in one particular era – between 1715 and 1747 – that, while mixing German, Italian, and English composers, remembering they were all active in London during that time. Then throw into the mix a wildly popular dance tune “covered” by Vivaldi in 1705, an Old Chestnut indeed, and, as Sebastian harpsichordist Jeffrey Grossman points out in his program notes, “a fitting conclusion for a program about a city (and an age) that thrived on reinvention, cosmopolitan flair, and a touch of chaos.”
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| (not a Bach) |
George Frederick Handel in 1726 (see left)
Recreating the soundscape of Handel’s London – he was and remains still the most significant composer of the time and the location – brings to mind some other “invention” we, sitting in modern-day concert venues, take for granted: the Public Concert.
Establishments like the Vauxhall Gardens – “pleasure gardens,” as these were generally known – promoted the latest in English music, and many well-known pieces were often first played there. Thomas Arne, who was Vauxhall’s musical director from 1745–1777, was responsible for the patriotic song Rule Britannia, as well as a version of God Save The King. The music you could hear was quite varied: concertos or cantatas, ballads or marches, symphonies or dance music and of course popular songs complete with illustrated song sheets so you could sing along.
The composer most associated with Vauxhall was George Frederick Handel. Many of his pieces were performed in the gardens during the 1730s and 1740s, including the Vauxhall Hornpipe, written especially for the venue and one of the Big Hits of the Year (not to be confused with the more famous one in his Water Music Suite). Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks, composed for King George II in 1749, was first rehearsed in the Vauxhall Gardens on 21 April 1749, and it’s said some 12,000 Londoners rushed to hear it. This reportedly caused a three hour traffic jam as carriages tried to cross London Bridge, the only bridge within the city, to get there.
But the fad for such “entertainment palaces” went back further and had more humble roots in simple music rooms in the local taverns. But when people found they could make money by performing there and selling tickets to a potential audience, the practice soon went up-scale: better places in better locations (in better neighborhoods) meant a better class of audience and, hence, more money. Some of these were managed by the musicians themselves, but eventually entrepreneurs – impresarios – took over the business. Perhaps the most famous of these would be another German immigrant, Johann Peter Salomon who, in 1791, set up a series of concerts featuring the world-renowned composer (“straight from Vienna!”), Franz Joseph Haydn, promising brand new symphonies written especially for them and capitalizing on the popularity of his earlier symphonies.
A concert room at York House (the London home of the Archbishops of York), just off the famous Strand, was built specifically for concerts in 1680, the first of its kind designed for the general public. Many of Handel’s works were first heard here, especially the oratorios he began producing during the Lenten Season when opera was forbidden and his singers and musicians needed something to earn them some money. Other musicians working in London might rent these rooms (or “halls”) and offer a series of concerts and many of them brought the latest music from the Continent to entice the crowds. Francesco Geminiani – we’ll hear more of him, later – announced a series of twenty “subscription concerts” starting in December, 1731. When Leopold Mozart brought his children to London in 1765 to milk the crowds, they would perform in people’s houses but also give public concerts at some of these same music rooms (Leopold was always conscious of the expense of renting the hall being subtracted from the potential income).
Much of this, however, is in the future as far as Handel’s Day was concerned, but he was involved in it, it was a prosperous if risky business (he himself had several successful seasons, a few that were less so, and some that were downright disastrous), and the other composers on this program were all part of the scene: this is what Londoners could hear on a regular basis.
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In Europe at that time (that is, The Continent, to distinguish it from England, the Island), music (at least the “concert music” we think of today) was essentially the realm of the aristocracy: being a vast quilt of small principalities, Germany had hundreds of “aristocratic courts” which employed musicians for orchestras and opera theaters, where the audiences were usually the reigning princes and their family and friends, including other, lesser aristocrats who were regarded as courtly satellites. In large nation-states like France and Spain, these courts were centered in the capital city which happened to be wherever the King resided. In a place like Austria, Vienna was the capital of the Austrian Empire, but Austria was just a part of the Holy Roman Empire (in the 18th Century, the Emperor was often the same thing as the ruler of Austria). But in Germany, there were dozens of larger states like Prussia and Bavaria, but hundreds of smaller states, some merely city-states: the rulers of Hanover, an important Electorate (its ruler could vote to choose the Holy Roman Emperor which was not a hereditary office), had their court in the city of Hanover, located about 100 miles south of Hamburg. In 1708, the newly ratified Prince Elector was Georg Ludwig.
About 150 miles southeast of Hanover is the city of Halle, in the 1700s part of Saxony, but at various times part of the Margraviate of Brandenburg or Magdeburg, depending on who married whom and inherited what from where. Here was born a future musician named Georg Friedrich Händel – note the umlaut which in German makes it “Hendl” not, as the English would butcherize it, HAWN-d’l. Unlike any of the Bachs, Handel was not born into a family of musicians and the usual mythology, the product of a 1760 biography by John Mainwaring, that not only was his father adamantly opposed to his son’s becoming a music (as the eldest surviving son, he was destined to inherited his practice as the town’s barber-surgeon, whom you could go to have a haircut and get a tooth pulled), the boy taught himself music by smuggling a small and notoriously quiet keyboard instrument called a clavichord into the attic where he would sneak off to in the middle of the night while the rest of the family slept. The source of this tale was probably Handel’s friend and copyist, J.C. Smith, but since Handel had died in 1759, he was not available to corroborate one of the most persistent stories of his childhood.
Regardless, while he accompanied his father on a trip to nearby Weissenfels, the boy (between 7 and 9 years old) was noticed (somehow) by the local Duke as a promising musician: the story (another story) goes that the boy sneaked into the ducal chapel and played the pipe organ so well that said Duke recommended to the boy’s father, when he was found, his son should be given musical instruction. Thus, Händel Senior gave in and found a church organist to teach his son, in fact the only teacher Händel Junior ever had. From there, compressing time and space, he ended up in Hamburg, home of Georg Philip Telemann whom he’d met as a fellow student at the University in Halle. Initially oriented to the old-fashioned world of fugues through being a church musician, he came under the influence of Hamburg’s Italian opera house.
At some point, probably around 1708, he was invited by a member of the Medici Family of Florence to visit Italy where he learned the Italian Style first-hand and wrote several Italian operas and cantatas of his own. He went to Rome where opera was banned by the Papal States, so he wrote religious music in the Italian Style instead (ever-practical in re-inventing himself whenever needed). He had so much success in both sacred and secular styles, he was dubbed Il caro sassone (the dear Saxon) and seemed destined for an operatic career – in Italy.
Then, in 1710, he’s off to become the Court Kapellmeister (the music director) for the Prince-Elector Georg Ludwig in Hanover, and the following year has a great success with his opera, Rinaldo, which made use of several pieces he’d written in the Italian style while working in Hamburg (Handel was a regular self-plagiarizer, and a frequent plagiarizer in general whenever someone else’s idea struck his fancy). There are various opinions why Handel left a good job in Hanover: some say he wanted to study more in Italy (but he’d already done that) and since he overstayed his welcome, turning a brief “leave-of-absence” into a longer one, the Prince-Elector fired him (after all, his job was to write music for the Hanoverian Court); the more likely choice was Handel went to England, invited by the British Ambassador to Venice whom he’d met there, and when he failed to return to Hanover, the Prince-Elector fired him. Handel had been received favourably at Queen Anne’s court in London (she commissioned frequent works from him), so now he decided to stay, either unaware or oblivious to the fact the childless Queen Anne’s heir-apparent was her second cousin by way of a descendant of the first Stuart king, James I (also James VI, King of Scotland), Anne’s grandfather. This cousin happened to be Prince-Elector Georg Ludwig of Hanover! – who, in 1714, now became King of Great Britain as well (he would hold both titles till his death in 1727).
So young Mr. Handel found himself in what the Brits would call a “sticky wicket.” His new boss, if he hoped for any court appointment here, was his old boss who’d fired him only a few years before. Whatever animosity might have existed, the new King, George I, requested a suite of pieces to be played at a Royal Outing which happened to take place on the River Thames on July 17th, 1717, while the Royal Barge plied it was up the Thames to Chelsea then back to London in the course of the evening, accompanied by a barge holding 50 musicians to play Handel’s music, a collection of dances forever known, for good reason, as “The Water Music.” In fact, King George enjoyed it so much, he had it played three times in all, twice up and once again back down the river. Not sure how the musicians felt, playing almost continuously from around 8pm till past midnight with only a bit of time off for the Royal Potty Break at Chelsea, but then that was long before the days of unionization.
However, there will also be no Water Music on the program, either: but it will open with the overture to his opera, Rodelinda, written in 1725.
A stately opening march with dotted rhythms “in the French style” is followed by a presto fugato (much imitative scurrying about) complete with a stately minuet to conclude. Unlike overtures we associate with 19th Century operas which either prefigure the story (think Wagner’s Flying Dutchman) or make use of major themes to whet our appetite for what we’ll hear later in the opera. Even Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro basically only sets the mood for the comedy to come. What Handel offers us is a three-part suite that gives the listener some pleasant music to enjoy while everybody finds their seats and settles down for the three-hour opera about to begin.
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And so our London Concert begins: There then follows a trio sonata by William Boyce dating from 1747; a transcription (more than a “cover,” more like “fan-fiction” riffing on a popular aria from Handel’s 1711 opera, Rinaldo, by the virtuoso harpsichordist William Babell; and, after intermission, another trio sonata by another English composer known only as “Mrs. Philharmonica” who is marked biographically as “flourishing c.1715.”
In fact that’s about all that is known biographically about Mrs. Philharmonica, if she’s mentioned at all (frankly, I’ve never heard of her before seeing this program!). While who she was remains a mystery: given the times, women were “not allowed” to pursue careers as, among many other things, musicians and writers. So they usually chose male pseudonyms: think of Middlemarch by Mary Ann Evans (better known as George Eliot). But in music, if a woman’s works were published, it might be like Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel who had a few songs her more famous brother Felix published under his own name. There’s a lot of controversy here, but given the nature of the program, let it suffice that when Mendelssohn played some of his songs while visiting Queen Victoria, Mendelssohn was pleased to report to his sister that the Queens favorite song of the lot had been one she had composed.
Mrs. Philharmonica published everything we know of her in 1715: a set of six trio sonatas, and a set of six divertimenti which were essentially lighter fare than the more serious trio sonata (though written for the same instruments). 1715 – a very brief career, regardless, considering Handel’s output just on this program ranged from 1711 to 1739 and he continued to compose until his death in 1759. (For those who may be chronologically challenged, Handel, a Baroque Composer, died when Mozart, a Classical Composer, was already 3 years old.)
So who was she? Was she a professional musician who dared to compose (if she was a professional composer, I hope she had a day job)? It’s unlikely a man would choose the name for a pseudonym, but then it was also frowned upon for aristocrats to publish their own works. Was it some 18th Century version of P.D.Q. Bach, an inside joke? But, as Jeffrey Grossman’s program notes tell us, “her music speaks with elegance and originality, and reminds of that London’s musical life extended beyond the big names we remember today.” And one thing that would’ve been difficult in a world interested in the latest Big Thing would’ve been “to be original,” as it almost always is in a world full of Big Names. If she were interested in making a few bucks from her music, she would’ve been better off imitating whatever was the Going Rage that season – probably Mr. Handel’s music. So, enjoy the mystery and some quiet introspection while listening to what remains of Mrs. Philharmonica, both woman and composer.
While The Sebastians will be playing the first of her trio sonatas, here's a performance, by way of sample, of an excerpt from her third:
With William Boyce, we’re on more familiar territory, biographically speaking. Almost entirely London-bound, he began his musical life as a boy chorister at St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1719 where, 60 years later, he would be buried directly under the dome. As a musician, he served as an organist and began composing in the 1730s, writing songs for some of the more popular music venues’ series of concerts, mostly light-hearted fare suitable for places officially known as “Pleasure Palaces” rather than Concert Halls. In 1747 he had published his first purely instrumental composition, a set of "Twelve Sonatas for Two Violins and a Bass" (a.k.a. Trio Sonatas) and these proved so popular, diarist Charles Burney wrote they were "not only in constant use, as Chamber music, in private concerts ... but in our theatres, as act-tunes [i.e. intermezzi] and public gardens, as favourite pieces, during many years."
He wrote tons of secular songs and religious anthems, sets of church services and other liturgical music, a slew of theatrical works including what we might call “incidental music” used between scenes and acts as necessary. Many of these were gathered together to create a series of eight symphonies in 1760, perhaps his most familiar works today. In more recent news, we heard the opening movement of his Symphony No. 1 at the conclusion of Prince Harry and Megan Markle’s wedding in 2018; and his coronation anthem, The King Shall Rejoice, written for King George III in 1761, was performed at the coronation of King Charles III in 2023.
Here is his Trio Sonata in A Minor, the first of a set of twelve published in 1747, and performed by the ensemble Orpheus musicus, a Spanish ensemble here performing in the Age of Covid, hence the masks (interestingly, the harpsichordist is named Alfonso Sebastián.)
Perhaps it’s time to mention the Curious Case of When Four Musicians Make a Trio. In the Baroque age, perhaps the most popular instrumental form was the Trio Sonata which consisted of two violins and continuo. The numerical configuration is compounded by the fact “continuo” involved two instruments, a harpsichord along with a cello to reinforce the bass-line. Hence, four! (Looking at the cover photo on the video, I’m not sure who the fifth person is; perhaps the driver of the van or the schlepper of the harpsichord?) However, things were a little flexible regarding who played what: more precisely it would’ve been two “melody” instruments, perhaps instead two flutes, or a violin and a flute; the keyboard instrument was usually a harpsichord (or some equivalent of one) in a household situation, but in a church, they would make use of the organ; if the melody instruments were strings, then a cello played the bass-line; if winds, then a bassoon; if an organ, a double bass would replace the cello. It’s kind of a pot-luck ensemble.
Speaking of Trio Sonatas, there’s an excerpt from one by Handel himself to open the second half of the program. Written in 1739, the set of Trio Sonatas, Op. 5, falls into an odd category that involves his publisher John Walsh and just to make it confusing for a musicological layperson like myself, there are two John Walshes, father and son. It becomes easier when dealing with Walsh’s publications of 1739 since Walsh Sr. has by now been dead three years…
It’s not a question of being unscrupulous but rather of taking advantage of a situation for commercial gain and while there is no record Handel himself objected to the practice, there is no record he was involved in the “creation” of many of his published works. It seems, since Mr. Handel was well-known for recycling much of his own music “as needed,” Walsh Sr. figured why not assemble “new pieces” out of all these wonderful bits of smaller pieces and arrange them for the domestic market? How many of Handel’s early trio sonatas, for instance, were actually written as such doesn’t matter when you consider all the music was written by Handel: Walsh was just being a little creative with arranging them with an eye to household sales. So no, unlike some less scrupulous publishers who published forgeries of famous composers’ “works,” Walsh Sr. was publishing Handel’s music, and, perhaps, as long as the composer received money from his art, why complain? After all, when Walsh Sr. died in 1733, he left behind £20-30,000 (quite a fortune); when Jr. died in 1766, the company was worth £40,000.
Walsh Jr. published a set of such trio sonatas in 1739 and, unlike some of the publications issued by his father without Handel’s direct involvement, four of these sonatas – and, oddly, there are seven of them, not the usual six – “feature” new music, so apparently Handel was more directly involved with it than in the past. Several movements were “adapted without substantial alteration” from his earlier Chandos Anthems and various sets of dance music composed for his Covent Garden operas.
Here is a “vintage” performance by The Sebastians as of 2014 at Trinity Church in New York City. If you’re wondering where the violist came from, whether the addition of the part was a performance decision (he seems to be more than doubling the continuo bass-line of the cello) or, given Mr. Walsh’s creative flexibility, perhaps he decided the more instruments, the better the profits… (Further performances on YouTube might include two violins versus a continuo including two harmony instruments, a harpsichord and a theorbo, plus cello and double bass with the viola.) Incidentally, the Sebastians’ video contains the whole Op.5 No. 4 sonata, but I’ve cued it up at the Passacaille (that is, a passacaglia) and it will continue into the subsequent two movements, a lively gigue and a stately minuet to conclude. Well worth it to take the time to start at the beginning but only the passacaglia – a set of variations over a repeating “thematic” idea in the bass – is on their Market Square Concerts program.
Of William Babell, diarist Charles Burney wrote that he “acquired great celebrity by wire-drawing the favourite songs of the opera of Rinaldo, and others of the same period, into showy and brilliant lessons” [what we would today call suites], “which by mere rapidity of finger in playing single sounds, without the assistance of taste, expression, harmony or modulation, enabled the performer to astonish ignorance, and acquire the reputation of a great player at a small expence … Mr Babel … at once gratifies idleness and vanity.” (No, Charles, what do you really think? I love that “without the assistance of taste”!)
More than just a transcription, arrangement or even a fantasia (or a “fanfiction”tasia) on Handel’s theme, this, Babell claimed, was his version of how he’d heard Handel himself improvise upon the tune. Here, Robin Bigwood plays a monster harpsichord modeled on a 1740 three-manual instrument:
(Here is a recording by Christopher Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient Music of the original aria with soprano Luba Organasova as Armida; for another more famous aria from the same opera, here is Lascia ch’io pianga with mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli).
Mr. Babell, who knew Handel well enough to claim he’d studied with him, also studied with Johann Christoph Pepusch, a Berlin-born musician who, at 14, had been appointed music teacher to the future king, Friedrich Wilhelm I, but resigned his position in 1698 after witnessing the execution without trial of an officer charged with insubordination and decided he would prefer to “put himself under the protection of a government founded on better principles.” First visiting Amsterdam, he eventually settled in England in 1704 where he made a living as a violist in the theater orchestra at Drury Lane, then becoming the orchestra’s harpsichordist. Later, he became a “music theorist” teaching theory and counterpoint, as well as an organist, and in 1713 was given a DMus degree from Oxford. A few years later, Dr. Pepusch became the music director for future Duke of Chandos who had a fine musical establishment at his home, Cannons, and composed a Magnificat and several anthems for the chapel there. Recent German ex-patriot composer George Frederick Handel was also a composer-in-residence there starting in 1717 when he became composing a set of eleven anthems.
Though primarily involved in the theater, in 1726 Pepusch founded a group of amateur and professional musicians he called the Academy of Vocal Music, renamed the Academy of Ancient Music in 1735 which remained active and popular in London until 1826 (its name, at least, resurfaced in 1973, newly re-founded by Christopher Hogwood). The ever-present Charles Burney’s opinion of Pepusch has colored his legacy, “posterity,” according to Grove’s Dictionary, looking “upon Pepusch as an academic pedant who opposed Handel’s cause in England,” especially regarding the Italian Style of his “serious operas” with their often mythologically unfathomable plots. But after Handel’s success with Rinaldo in 1725 (remember its overture, which opened the program), perhaps it was too much for the Anti-Handel Faction who produced an opera – or rather anti-opera – called The Beggar’s Opera and turned to another German composer, known now as John Christopher Pepusch, to arrange popular street ballads for it – not, mind, to compose original arias. Instead of gods and ancient heroes in contrived and convoluted plots sung in Italian, these were songs that the audience would likely already know and could hum along with, sung by poor people and criminals who populated a run-down part of London, lampooning the upper-class immortals of opera seria and satirizing English politics and its attitude toward poverty and justice. Initially so successful it ran for 62 performances, a record in England in its day, it continued to be popular ever since, a 1920 revival running for 1,463 performances (also, then, a record) and then turned into a modern version of the story with Berthold Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Three-Penny Opera in 1928.
Here is Pepusch's Overture for The Beggar's Opera performed by a group (speaking of names) calling themselves The Harmonious Society of Tickle-Fiddle Gentlemen:
Curiously, there seems to be no foundation for an intense rivalry between Handel and Pepusch, though the popularity of The Beggar’s Opera did manage to ruin a few seasons of his trying to get new operas performed by the Royal Academy, London’s principal opera house. Pepusch still subscribed to (that is, became a financial supporter) several new Handel operas after 1728 and continued to arrange for performances of Handel’s music by his own Academy of Ancient Music.
For Pepusch, though, The Beggar’s Opera did not open a whole new career. If anything, it prompted him to retire from composing altogether, and, as if expiating for his sins of vulgar popularity, dedicate himself to his theoretical studies and writings until he died in 1752.
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Perhaps the Anti-Handel Faction behind The Beggar’s Opera was activated by Handel’s having officially become a naturalized British subject in 1727, making him now eligible to be appointed as Composer for the Chapel Royal. In June, the king, while on a visit to his home in Hanover – he was still the Prince-Elector there – suffered a stroke while traveling in a carriage and died there two days later. His son became George II amidst much political turmoil in England – he and his father had always been at odds about many issues – and for his coronation in October, Handel composed the coronation anthem, Zadok the Priest which has been sung prior to the anointing of the sovereign at the coronation of every British monarch since its composition (if you have 5 minutes, listen to it as it was performed at Westminster Abbey in a more recent coronation, that of King Charles III in May, 2023.)
Whether one could say London society was xenophobic or not – George I, who never learned to speak English, was never popular in England – it didn’t seem to mind the presence of composers who were German like Handel and Pepusch. And while English-born composers like Boyce were active and frequently performed, no one else on a list of some 50 such composers have survived the test of time to challenge Handel for his supremacy as a leading “English” composer. It has often been pointed out, even with names like Elgar and Vaughan Williams, the first English composer to achieve anything akin to international fame since Henry Purcell (who died in 1695) was Benjamin Britten whose career took off with the premiere of his opera Peter Grimes in 1945 and continued up until his death in 1976!
Other composers popular in London then included several Italians – why should Germans have all the fun? Pietro Castrucci, born in Rome, was a violinist who studied with the great Arcangelo Corelli, usually regarded as the finest violinist of the day who also composed some of the most influential sonatas and concertos of the early-1700s. Castrucci settled in London in 1715, two years after Corelli’s death, and there became the concertmaster of Handel’s opera company’s orchestra. It seems whenever Handel had an opera company – and he made and lost several fortunes in the opera business during his career – Castrucci remained his concertmaster until 1737. Like most virtuosos of the time, much like his master, Corelli, he also composed, and our program offers a Sonata for Violin & Continuo published in 1718. In 1739, the now aged Castrucci became one of the first beneficiaries of the Royal Society of Musicians’ “Fund for Decay'd Musicians” (ouch) which included names like Edward Purcell (eldest son of Henry Purcell), Thomas Arne (composer of the popular song, Rule Britannia), Boyce, Pepusch, and Handel among its original signatories. By the way, Castrucci died erroneously in 1746 but then officially in 1752 in Dublin, a pauper but buried with full ceremony.
Francesco Geminiani had enough of a pedigree, studying with both Corelli and Alessandro Scarlatti, two of Italy’s leading musicians, that when he traveled to London in 1714, he was already acclaimed as a virtuoso. When he performed some of his concertos before King George I the following season, the harpsichordist for the occasion was none other than the likewise recently arrived George Frederick Handel. He adapted many of Corelli’s trio and solo sonatas as concertos – the concerto grosso with a small group of soloists and a larger group as the orchestra (Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos are famous examples of the format) – and of his own such concertos and sonatas, a set of 6 for cello and continuo, were published while he was visiting Paris in 1746. He was called by no less a violinist than Giuseppe Tartini (he of The Devil’s Trill fame) Il furibondo (the Madman) “because of his expressive rhythms” and is best remembered for bringing “drama and lyricism to English chamber music.”
And perhaps a madman is sufficient transition to the concluding work on the program, Antonio Vivaldi’s Sonata Op. 1, No. 12, based on a popular dance all the rage in Europe, La folia. Over the years, some 150 composers wrote their own versions on the bass-line known as La folia, like Lully, Corelli, Geminiani, even Handel himself; even Bach used it in his Peasant Cantata. One of Antonio Salieri’s last works was a set of 26 variations on it for orchestra, one of his few solely instrumental works, and generally considered one of his best. Franz Liszt quoted it; Rachmaninoff wrote a set of variations on Corelli’s version of it. And so on.
Vivaldi was the famous “Red Priest” from Venice, a violinist and composer who, though a red-haired priest (and red-hair in Italy was considered a bad sign) with poor health, he left us a great deal of music, much of it written for the girls of the orphanage where he spent most of his career teaching. These days, it’s difficult to escape, if nothing else, his Four Seasons. His first collection of published works, a set of a dozen trio sonatas, appeared in Venice in 1705 and concluded with not the usual multi-movement suite-like form but a continuous set of variations on the Folia (or, as it’s sometimes spelled, Follia) bass-line.
So even though Vivaldi never made it to London (he did, however, die in Vienna where he was hoping to find a job), we bring the concert – and this post – to a conclusion with The Sebastians’ performance of Vivaldi’s La Folia.
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