The little masters

May 23, 9:54 AMSF Classical Music ExaminerScott Foglesong

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Where the ground is fertile and well-watered, stuff grows. The seeds will come -- blown in on the wind, dormant in the soil, deliberately planted. It doesn't matter: soil primed for growing will produce life.

A society cultivates a fertile field for music by making a life in music appealing to people of talent and ambition, by promoting jobs and income in the field, by supporting quality musical education for professionals and audiences alike, by providing wide and varied audiences, and by exerting minimal governmental control over musical styles and content while perhaps offering discreet subsidy, either directly or in the form of government grants and commissions.

Certain cultures have done a much better job than others. Consider both England and the United States during the 19th century: boos and raspberries to both. The societal energy focused elsewhere, mostly empire building and the like. Thus the native composers were scattered and scrawny; the music was mostly imported.

Try to imagine Ludwig van Beethoven born, not in Bonn in 1770, but in Philadelphia in 1830. Would he have gone into music at all? I really doubt it: there was no future there. Quality music education was non-existent nor was there a market for native American composers. Beethoven could have gone to Europe for his education -- but the odds are overwhelming he would have stayed there; any visits to America might have been as a guest soloist on tour, or less.

Even a superficial glance over the history of music reveals geographic and temporal pockets of achievement: the great composers have a tendency to clump in certain areas at certain times. It seems almost downright ridiculous sometimes -- Handel and Bach born the same year, within spitting distance of each other; Haydn and Mozart reaching their compositional peak together despite a generation's different, both living in the general vicinity of Vienna; Schumann, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Chopin, Wagner all born around 1810-ish; all those wonderful Broadway composers flourishing in the 1920s and 1930s; Korngold, Steiner, Waxman, Tiomkin, et al., in and around Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s.

It goes on but you get my drift. These periods and places are fertile, offering employment, support, and growth.

I wonder if there was any ground more fertile than Austria/Germany/Bohemia during the Enlightenment, that short but critically important era, roughly the second half of the eighteenth century. The "big three" Viennese Classical composers (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven) each would qualify as a giant in any era or place. Put the three together and you've got glory indeed.

Which is why, to my mind, so many of the other very fine composers of the Viennese Classical have been almost -- not quite -- forgotten by most music lovers. Many of them were more than good enough to qualify as true masters, and were considered as such in their own day. Bright lights indeed, but obliterated by those three suns.

We call them the kleinmeisters, or "little masters" -- a rather ungracious term, in my opinion, but it gets the point across.

Over the course of several articles I'd like to introduce you to those of the kleinmeisters who have elicited my interest and admiration.

Today's poster-boy kleinmeisters: Johann Baptist Vanhal and Antonio Salieri.

Vanhal (left) and Salieri (right)

Johann Baptist Vanhal

Vanhal belongs in the upper reaches of the kleinmeister layer, really poking his head up into the stratosphere of the true biggies. His symphonies in particular are worth exploring in depth and at length; some of them partake of the sturm und drang style of the late 1760s, while others represent the full flowering of the Viennese Classical at its best. Fortunately quite a few have been recorded:

Naxos has four volumes of the symphonies out in 18CC, from various conductors and orchestras: Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3, Volume 4. Matthias Bamert and the London Mozart Players provide a fine selection of symphonies in their "Contemporaries of Mozart" volume on Vanhal.

Vanhal was quite the concerto composer; in fact, his wind concertos have kept his name alive in woodwind circles. Consider his fine bassoon concertos, Mozartian violin concertos, and his doublebass concerto, one of the few extant examples for this typically orchestra-bound instrument.

Vanhal's church music is worth exploring. Consider this album featuring two of his masses.

Vanhal's chamber music is broad, with an emphasis on winds -- he shared an interest in the clarinet with Mozart, for example. I'm quite fond of this album of flute quartets (flute + string trio), from Naxos.

Antonio Salieri

Poor maligned Salieri -- the villian of Peter Schaffer's Amadeus -- was a first-rate composer and all-around dandy musician, much more of a colleague and friend to Mozart than is generally recognized, and a great teacher who could count Beethoven, Schubert, and Mendelssohn amongst his pupils. Primarily an opera composer, he also graced the world with some very fine symphonic music.

I love Cecilia Bartoli's The Salieri Album, a fine sampler of his varied aria styles. Bamert and the London Mozart Players gifted us with a Salieri volume as well in "Contemporaries of Mozart". The album includes the La Folia variations, a Beethoven-era orchestral jewel on that same bass-line-plus-tune that has inspired so many variation sets from the Renaissance onwards.

His opera Falstaff has been recorded several times, and there's this DVD from Stuttgart as well. One of his most successful operas, Axur Re d'ormus (with a libretto from Lorenzo da Ponte) is available in a fine recording from René Clemencic.

Salieri was a prolific composer of sacred music, not anywhere near enough of which is available on record.