Rigmarole

Judith and Her Maidservant

“The emotions you are having are not your own. They are someone else’s.”

Bach - Cantata BWV 201, “Geschwinde, ihr wirbelnden Winde”

One thing about Bach that most people don’t realize was that he was considered too old fashioned for the time, and after his death the through the 18th century, he fell into obscurity. I was shocked too, that someone who is considered the greatest composer of all time, who we constantly rave about today, went completely unheard for a good hundred years after his death. Even though he wasn’t often played, he was at least studied by major composers [Mozart and Beethoven for example] and left his influence on their music. But as I said, Bach’s style, high baroque/rococo, was seen as completely backwards in the 1730s. One composer had wrote a lengthy essay about how new aesthetics called for simplicity and clarity and that the complexity of baroque music wasn’t beautiful. Bach was so offended he hired his own rhetorician to fight back and argue against those points, and the two essayists went back and fourth for a couple of YEARS over this feud. As if to have the last word, Bach channels his musical aesthetic arguments into this cantata. The story is about Phoebus/Apollo being challenged to a music contest by Pan. Phoebus is the god of sun and of reason and of music. Pan is the spirit of the earth, of carnal pleasures. Bach uses Phoebus to represent himself, and the defender of baroque aesthetics and of musical complexity. Pan is the representative of Bach’s contemporary critics, and he defends the new classical aesthetics and of musical simplicity. The strongest point Bach makes is in the form of a very complicated but genuinely funny musical joke. Near the beginning, Phoebus sings a lament over the death of his lover, Hyacinth, and the pain of his death is reflected through an 8 minute aria full of pathos and with multiple voices in the orchestra working off of each other in a dense polyphony. Right after, Pan comes on state and sings a very banal song about how he loves to hop around and sing, and the music is also in the classical aesthetics. I genuinely laughed when I heard “I love to dance and hop and sing” over a bland continuo, like Bach is saying with Baroque music I can explore human emotion, with Classical you can only be kind of entertained. Of course, in the cantata, Phoebus wins the contest, and so Bach declares Baroque music to be better [I mean of course he’s being unfair and biased, but this is him reacting to the haters]. In a final act of irony, the contemporaries are people whose names you only know if you are into music history and really dig to find them. Everyone knows who Bach is. Checkmate from beyond the grave.

Movements [after every movement is a reactive]:

1. Chorus

2. Aria [Momus]

3. Aria [Phoebus]

4. Aria [Pan]

5. Aria [Tmolus]

6. Aria [Midas]

7. Aria [Mercurius] and Reactive [Momus]

March is Women’s History Month! In honor of lovely ladies, I’m posting solely female musicians this month.

Artist: Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel

Song: März - Prealudium un Choral

Album: Das Jahr (The Year)

Fanny Hensel, née Mendelssohn (1805-1847) was a German pianist and composer, the sister of the composer Felix Mendelssohn and granddaughter of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. The siblings shared a great passion for music. Like Felix (who was born in 1809), Fanny showed prodigious musical ability as a child and began to write music.

However, Fanny was limited by prevailing attitudes of the time toward women, attitudes apparently shared by her father, who was tolerant, rather than supportive, of her activities as a composer. Her father wrote to her in 1820 “Music will perhaps become his [i.e. Felix’s] profession, while for you it can and must be only an ornament.” Although Felix was privately broadly supportive of her as a composer and a performer, he was cautious (professedly for family reasons) of her publishing her works under her own name. He wrote: “From my knowledge of Fanny I should say that she has neither inclination nor vocation for authorship. She is too much all that a woman ought to be for this. She regulates her house, and neither thinks of the public nor of the musical world, nor even of music at all, until her first duties are fulfilled. Publishing would only disturb her in these, and I cannot say that I approve of it.”

Felix did however arrange with her for some of her songs to be published under his name, three in his Op. 8 collection, and three more in his Op. 9. In 1842, this resulted in an embarrassing moment when Queen Victoria, receiving Felix at Buckingham Palace, expressed her intention of singing the composer her favorite of his songs, “Italien”, which Mendelssohn confessed was by Fanny. In turn Fanny helped Felix by constructive criticism of pieces and projects, which he always considered very carefully.

Fanny Hensel died in Berlin in 1847 of complications from a stroke suffered while rehearsing one of her brother’s oratorios, The First Walpurgis Night. Felix himself died less than six months later from the same cause, but not before completing his String Quartet No. 6 in F Minor, written in memory of his sister.

In recent years, her music has become better known thanks to concert performances and a number of CDs. Her reputation has also been advanced by those researching female musical creativity, of which she is one of the relatively few well-documented exemplars in the early 19th century.

Hensel composed over 460 pieces of music. Her compositions include a piano trio and several books of solo piano pieces and songs. A number of her songs were originally published under Felix’s name in his opus 8 and 9 collections. Her piano works are often in the manner of songs, and many carry the name Lied ohne Worte (Song without Words). This style (and title) of piano music was most successfully developed by Felix Mendelssohn, though some modern scholars assert that Fanny may have preceded him in the genre.