PROGRAM NOTES

Vienna, that splendid city on the very edge of Europe, is best known today in music for two great epochs: the era of Mozart and Haydn in the 1780s, and the “Second Viennese School” of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern in the 1900s. But there was another, earlier, historical period in which Austrian music flourished. This was during the seventeenth century, when the court of the Holy Roman Emperors became the only serious European rival to the more famous court of Louis XIV in Versailles.

This very first Viennese school began with the patronage of the Hapsburg Emperor Ferdinand II, whose marriage to Eleanora Gonzaga of Mantua in 1622 brought the music of Monteverdi and his colleagues to Vienna. It continued to flourish under his successor Ferdinand III and reached a high point with the music-loving Leopold I, who came to the throne in 1658.

This highly cultured emperor managed to create a court in which the arts thrived, despite constant wars with the French and with the Ottoman Turks. Italian virtuosi sought refuge at his court, bringing with them the new stile moderno, full of the passionate give-and-take of friends in conversation. This new style found fertile soil in Austria, where Italian extravagance was grafted onto a German love of counterpoint and highly expressive harmonies.

Toward the end of the century, Vienna had its first native-born Kapellmeister, Johann Heinrich Schmeltzer. Before him, this influential job had only been held by Italians like Giovanni Valentini and Antonio Bertali. After working at the court for several decades, Schmeltzer finally attained the exalted rank of Kapellmeister in 1679. Alas, he held it only for a few months before he fell victim to the terrible plague that swept Vienna and Prague that year. His great mid-century collection of ensemble pieces, the Sacro-profanus concentus musicus, includes several sonorous five-part works, among them the highly atmospheric Sonata settima

The gifted composer and organist Giovanni Legrenzi was one Italian who, despite his best efforts, did not win a position in Vienna. He spent much of his career in cities like Bergamo and Ferrara. In 1665, thanks to a Ferrarese patron, he managed to have one of his operas performed in Vienna, and he even persuaded the Duke of Mantua to put in a good word for him at court as the next Kapellmeister. Unfortunately, the position was already filled by Antonio Bertali, who remained in the job until his death in 1669.

As part of his efforts to win favor in Vienna, Legrenzi named one of his books of sonatas La cetra after Emperor Leopold’s emblem; the word means both “The Scepter” and

“The Lyre.” Sonata terza from this collection is an excellent example of how the sonata was changing by mid-century, influenced by the lyricism of Venetian opera composers like Cavalli and Cesti. The passionate overlapping dissonances heard in the opening of this sonata were later to become a regular feature in the works of Arcangelo Corelli.

By contrast, the heartfelt opening of the Sonata à 3 by Andreas Oswald is very much in the high seventeenth-century ensemble sonata style. Here our program takes a brief detour northward: Oswald spent his career as a church organist in Weimar and Eisenach, two towns later associated with Johann Sebastian Bach. Most of Oswald’s surviving ensemble music is preserved in the Ludwig Partiturbuch, an important collection of seventeenthcentury German sonata repertoire. This sonata is particularly striking for its sonorous instrumentation of violin, trombone, and dulcian.

Among Emperor Leopold’s musicians in Vienna was the organist Johann Caspar Kerll, who first studied with Valentini before traveling to Rome to study with Carissimi. Kerll served as Kapellmeister at the Munich court until 1673, when a violent dispute with the Italian opera singers there prompted him to move to Vienna. He became one of Leopold’s court organists five years later. After an eventful decade in Vienna, where he lived through both the great plague of 1679 and the Ottoman siege of 1683, he returned to Munich for the last years of his career. We have a number of splendid masses by Kerll and some very influential collections of keyboard music which provided Handel (among others) with endless inspiration. Only a very few ensemble sonatas of his survive, including the gorgeous Sonata à tre, where the viola da gamba is treated as an equal solist with the violins. This sonata appears in the huge collection of music assembled in Uppsala by Gustav Düben, for use by the Swedish court—another example of how the music of this first Viennese School traveled far and wide across Europe.

One of the most important Italians to come north was the “valoroso nel’violino” Antonio

Bertali, who arrived in Vienna around 1624 and became Kapellmeister to the Emperor in 1649. His Sonata à 3 is a striking example of his highly theatrical style, with its heartfelt adagio that frames a truly rocking ciaccona. This sonata turns up in at least two sources. We use the version that appears in Book II of his Prothimia suavissima. The sonata can also be found in the Düben collection.

Johann Heinrich Schmeltzer’s fame reached far beyond Vienna. By the mid-1660s, he was in correspondence with Karl LichtensteinCastelcorno, the Prince-Bishop of Olmütz and son of Emperor Ferdinand II. Karl kept an elaborate musical establishment at his court in the town of Kremsier (modern-day Kroměříž). He commissioned several works from Schmeltzer including the festive Sonata la Carolietta, probably written in celebration of the Prince-Bishop’s name-day.

The keyboard works of Johann Caspar Kerll show off his mastery of the two great national styles of the time. He composed both extravagant Italian toccatas and elegant French dance suites. His elaborate Passagaglia is a great example of how the South Germans incorporated Italian virtuosity into this classic French form (and how they altered French words to fit their Southern accent!).

Johann Jacob Fux is best known today for his guide to counterpoint, the Gradus ad Parnassum. His own climb to the Parnassus of the Viennese court is slightly mysterious; he received a thorough Jesuit education at Graz, but his matriculation document remarks that he “fled away secretly” before graduating. By the 1690s, he seems to have been working for the Archbishop of Hungary, who was a good friend of Emperor Leopold. Fux dedicated a Mass to the Emperor in 1695, and soon thereafter began working for the Imperial court. He remained in service through three emperors, providing everything from masses and oratorios to chamber music to operas, while also deeply involved in the court administration.

Fux’s music, like his career, traces a generational shift. Some of his chamber works like the

Sonata à 4 are very much in the mode of the seventeenth-century sonata, but by the end of his career he was creating High Baroque trio sonatas. A remarkable figure, Fux deserves far more recognition for his music than he has yet received.

Kerll’s Sonata à 2 appears in a huge anthology of 157 trio sonatas assembled by a cleric, Franz Rost, probably for the use of the Margrave of Baden-Baden. In this sonata, Kerll explores the extravagance of the sonata concertata, with extended solos for both violins, but places all this virtuosity in a characteristically South German lyric melancholy.

With Johann Rosenmüller, we come to a major composer whose unexpected life events led to some interesting musical developments. Rosenmüller was the leading musical figure in Leipzig in his day, and was set to begin his new post as Thomaskantor (the position Bach took