Three Travellers

For the first concert in this series, we began ‘Mozart on the Road: Part 1’ at Victoria Station, and found a house which the Mozarts had stayed in on their many travels. For this concert, we are starting from a different London terminus and setting out from St Pancras International. You only have to walk a few yards north of the station on Pancras Road to reach, on the right, Old St Pancras Church and its associated graveyard. This is one of the earliest Christian sites in the capital: the building itself is a nineteenth century confection, albeit ancient in style, but the atmospheric cemetery where Thomas

Hardy worked still retains its attractiveness as the largest green space in the busy area.

To your left as you enter is a tall memorial in the form of a sundial. And propped up on the ground on the left of that memorial is a faded plaque, honouring the composer Johann Christian Bach, who was buried in the churchyard on his death in 1782. His grave has long disappeared, probably a victim of the building of the Midland Railway in the nineteenth century, long before the massive Eurostar link arrived in the twentyfirst. But the memorial plaque remains: why is it here?

Johann Christian Bach, born in 1735 in Leipzig, the last surviving son of JS Bach and his second wife Anna Magdalena, is a leading example of how in the second half of the eighteenth century, travel and movement across Europe became a vital part of composers’ lives. We recall that Johann Sebastian himself never worked outside the small German state of Thuringia (though if legend is to be believed, he walked the 260 miles to Lübeck to hear Dietrich Buxtehude play the organ and direct his music). The Bach family, deriving from the exiled Hungarian Veit Bach, who came to Thuringia, was a tight-knit dynasty which met together annually in one or other of the local cities where they worked; they sang chorales and then folk songs, telling jokes and improvising a mixture of melodies in a quodlibet (a form which JS Bach immortalised in the last variation of his Goldberg Variations). The sense of close family identity among the Bachs of Sebastian’s generation is vivid and touching.

By contrast, Johann Christian made his career in Italy, where he became a Catholic, played the organ in Milan, and then travelled to London where he wrote operas, found favour with Queen Charlotte and entered the royal service. He met the young Mozart and had a significant influence on his emerging musical style. With the composer Carl Friedrich Abel he founded a famous (but not always financially successful) series, the Bach-Abel concerts in the Hanover Square Rooms. Just as Leopold Mozart had moved out of the centre of London to Chelsea for better air, so the ill Johann Christian moved to Paddington in the year before his death. When he died St Pancras Churchyard was the appropriate place for his grave, though contemporary reports suggest that he was soon forgotten as musical fashion changed.

His elder half-brother Carl Philip Emanuel (who was the fifth child of JS Bach’s first wife Maria Barbara) took a different route away from the family, and worked for Frederick the Great in Berlin for some thirty years. His devotion to his father was however considerable: he brought him to visit the flute-playing monarch Frederick in the famous incident which gave rise to Sebastian’s Musical Offering. He spent a great deal of time collating the family history and wrote the obituary of his father. There is one somewhat sarcastic note at the end of the invaluable family tree that Emanuel compiled: writing of his younger half-brother Johann Christian Bach, he says ‘among us, he has managed differently from honest old Veit!’

Was that a remark prompted by envy at JC Bach’s success in London, or simply a reflection on the very different ways of life that composers followed as the world changed in the eighteenth century?

Another, maybe apocryphal jesting remark was made by Johann Christian about his brother: ‘He lives to compose, I compose to live’ --which highlights the presence of the ‘London Bach’ in the commercial marketplace. In either case, these comments point up the differences in musical style developed by these two leading members of the Bach clan which we will hear demonstrated tonight: Johann Christian, fluent, attractive, productive; Carl Philip Emanuel, sharp, passionate, provocative. Those are over-simplifications, of course, there is considerable crossinfluence in their music, and the reputations of the two have fluctuated fascinatingly as their music has begun to be revived. The habitual view of the ‘serious’ writers of a previous generation was that CPE was the great original, whereas JC’s music was ‘facile and decadent’. But then the balance swung: Basil Lam once harshly wrote that CPE’s ‘paradoxes are the tooeasy surprises of a style where anything may happen’. I was very struck by the comments of HC Robbins Landon, who revised CS Terry’s pioneering biography of Johann Christian in 1967, that while Emanuel’s music had ‘bursts of fantasy and even genius’, it was Johann Christian who was ‘better balanced’, ‘far more in the mainstream’ and had a greater impact on the music of the time.

Surely now, with the increasing diversification of the repertory and the abandonment of the idea of a single, right way forward for music, we can regard both of them as making a distinctive contribution to the broadening of idiom, in the fascinating melting-pot that was the music of mideighteenth-century Europe, as the ‘classical’ style emerged gradually and fitfully from the ‘baroque’. It would be hard to find a better example of Emanuel’s thrilling impact than the opening of his F major Symphony (one of four published in 1780): a unison line for the strings, a trill, a diminished seventh, and a pause. What next? The same again, building with jagged edges to an outburst from the orchestra that conjures up the world of the Sturm und drang, storm and stress, echoing the literary movement of the time. The energy is relentless, broken only by aspiring chromatic phrases for the violins. Then listen for the sudden astonishing end to the movement as it collapses into glassy slow notes to change key and prepare the short central Larghetto that follows, led off unusually by the violas. Through to the final Presto, with its sudden dynamic contrasts, stops and starts, these surprises are all superbly well-planned. Less startling, though equally well-judged and innovative, is the Cello Concerto in A major, written in Potsdam in 1753, and perhaps intended not for the court of Frederick the Great but for musical societies in Potsdam or Berlin. The innovation here is that writing concertos for the cello was unusual for the time (Vivaldi, that great concerto generator, wrote some for cello but more for the bassoon as solo bass instrument), and the writer Johann Quantz had warned that ‘those who wish to distinguish themselves in this manner must be provided by nature with fingers that are long and have strong tendons, permitting an extended stretch’. Simon Heighes has suggested the Bohemian cellist Ignaz Mara, a member of Frederick the Great’s chamber music group, as a possible performer since he was reportedly ‘an excellent soloist on his instrument, his tone and execution extremely impressive’.

One curiosity of the concerto is that it survives in other versions, for flute and for keyboard, but it now seems likely that these were derived from this cello original, which is ideally well suited to the instrument. Its somewhat galant style provides a direct comparison with Johann Christian’s Sinfonia Concertante in B flat that follows. This is a fascinating survival since the score was thought for a long time to be lost, and was not able to be included in the modern published collection of those sinfonias which are among Johann Christian’s most distinctive contributions to the idiom of the time. A copy surfaced in 1996; Ernest Warburton, who found and edited it, placed it in the late 1770s, written for the Bach-Abel concerts in London, with probable soloists Wilhelm Cramer (violin) and James Cervetto (cello). An intriguing similarity to Emanuel’s concerto is that the central Larghetto is begun by the violas and second violins, while here the solo cello remains silent throughout, leaving the violin to weave its eloquence in deeply-felt solos; this is not superficial music.

While the Bachs made their impact around Europe, Wolfgang Mozart was working up to his own dramatic move from his home town of Salzburg to the challenges of a freelance life in Vienna. The same year as Emanuel’s Symphony in F was published, Mozart completed his Symphony No 34 in C on 29 August, and the next year took it with him to Vienna. If this exuberant piece is a farewell to Salzburg and its restrictive atmosphere, it does not sound like it. Indeed it breathes the same open, accessible spirit as JC Bach’s music, while echoing some of CPE Bach’s subtlety. The balance of the themes and their development in the first movement is well managed: there is a long and brooding section which veers into the minor key and ends in A flat before the movement gradually pulls itself together again. One author called this section ‘Schumannesque’; in our context we can hear it as Mozart pushing the bounds of the tonal structure of his music in the most exciting way. The central Andante di molto is a sotto voce eloquent duet for the violins, while the final Allegro vivace is a perpetuum mobile whose whirring exuberance propels Mozart into a new life, and music into a new age.