George Frideric Handel and Johann Sebastian Bach—the twin pillars of the German High Baroque—tower above most of their contemporaries in the eyes of posterity. As tonight’s program shows, however, the edifice they built rested on a foundation that extended back to the early 17th century. Born in 1616, Johann Jacob Froberger was a seminal figure in the early German Baroque, especially in the realm of keyboard music. His peripatetic career took him throughout western Europe, and his synthesis of German, Italian, and French styles served as a model for both Handel and Bach. Friedrich Wilhelm Zachow’s main claim to fame is as Handel’s teacher in Halle, but his organ chorale preludes also exerted a strong influence on Bach. Of the three composers who came of age around the turn of the 18th century, Johann Mattheson was better known as a theorist and critic than as a composer; his friendship with Handel dates from 1703, when they were both associated with the Hamburg opera. Gottlieb Muffat’s music is firmly rooted in Baroque soil, but by the time he died in Vienna in 1770, Mozart and Haydn had laid the groundwork for the Classical style.
Of the five composers, Handel best exemplified the Baroque ideal of the composer-virtuoso. He often conducted his own operas from the harpsichord in the 18th-century manner; Mattheson lauded his skill as a vocal accompanist, noting that “it is a performance which requires its own virtuoso, and other men, who tried to imitate it, did not succeed.” Some idea of Handel’s command of the keyboard can be gleaned from a contemporary chronicler’s account of “the grandeur and dignity” of his organ playing. In performing one of his concertos, Sir John Hawkins wrote that Handel would introduce it with a lengthy improvisation that “stole on the ear in a slow and solemn progression; the harmony close wrought, and as full as could possibly be expressed; the passages concatenated with stupendous art, the whole at the same time being perfectly intelligible, and carrying the appearance of great simplicity. This kind of prelude was succeeded by the concerto itself, which he executed with a degree of spirit and firmness that no one ever pretended to equal.”
The pairing of an improvisatory, free-form prelude or fantasia with a strictly contrapuntal fugue has appealed to many composers as a way of maximizing musical contrast while at the same time showcasing their virtuoso compositional and keyboard techniques. Zachow’s compact specimen of this typical Baroque genre begins as an exercise in broken chords—the so-called style brisé commonly associated with lute music of the period—with flowing figurations in the right hand punctuated by chords on the first and third beats of each measure. After alighting briefly on an F-major cadence, Zachow strikes out in a new direction by introducing a vivacious theme in bouncing eighth notes. This concise and easily recognizable fugal subject is formally presented by each of the four voices in turn. Listen for its serial reappearances as the music’s harmonies and contrapuntal textures grow increasingly elaborate.
Richly inventive and often passionately expressive, Froberger’s keyboard music reflects the influence of the so-called fantastic style (stylus phantasticus), which Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher described in 1650 as “the most free and unfettered method of composition, bound to nothing, neither to words, nor to a harmonic subject. It is organized with regard to manifest invention, the hidden reason of harmony, and an ingenious, skilled connection of harmonic phrases and fugues.” The D-Minor Canzona opens in a deceptively straightforward mode, its simple theme climbing stepwise from A to D. But complications soon arise as Froberger’s “free and unfettered” fantasy shifts into high gear: He weaves an increasingly intricate polyphonic web, the note values growing shorter and shorter as the music takes on a more spontaneous, bravura character. At once playful and serious, abstruse and accessible, the Canzona is divided into three clearly defined sections, the last two culminating in brilliant, improvisatory-sounding flourishes.
Froberger was an early adopter, if not the inventor, of the dance-based keyboard suite that became popular throughout Germany, France, and other European countries in the 17th and 18th centuries. In the Baroque musical lexicon, the Italian word partita—which translates as “little part” or “division”—referred to a suite of stylized instrumental dances in a common key, typically built around a stately allemande, a vivacious courante, a broadly lyrical sarabande, and a springy gigue. Froberger often omitted the gigue or placed it in the second position, as he did in his 1656 print that includes the work. In a recently discovered manuscript that may have been copied from earlier autographs, however, the gigue appears last—in keeping with the conventions of the time—and the other movements bear French titles dedicated to family members of his major patron, Emperor Ferdinand III. All four movements are in binary form: Each of the two parts is repeated with ornate embellishments that highlight the performer’s own unfettered invention.
Part of the attraction of the suite format was its flexibility, since neither the number nor the order of the constituent pieces was rigidly prescribed. For Handel, the keyboard suite served mainly as a convenient way of packaging miscellaneous pieces—often written at different times and for various occasions—for popular consumption. The Second and Fifth suites graced the composer’s best-selling debut volume of harpsichord music, published in London in 1720. The F-Major Suite had also appeared in a pirated Dutch edition, and Handel was intent on driving such “surreptitious and incorrect” versions of his works out of circulation. The first of the suite’s four movements—a florid, richly harmonized Adagio—attests to “the grandeur and dignity” that Hawkins admired in Handel’s organ playing. It is followed by a sprightly Allegro in the guise of a two-part invention; a short, plangent Adagio in the minor mode; and a bracing Allegro in the imitative style of a fugato. The suite originally ended with a second, far simpler Allegro, but Handel wisely decided to save it for another day.
Mattheson’s esteem for Handel—with whom he had a long and sometimes contentious relationship—is reflected in his lone harpsichord sonata, published in Hamburg in 1713. Unlike Handel, Mattheson was a professional singer rather than a virtuoso keyboard player, but he clearly knew his way around the harpsichord and availed himself of the most up-to-date styles and techniques. Structurally, the Sonata reflects Mattheson’s experience in the opera house: Unusual for a purely instrumental work, it is cast in the rounded da capo form (A-B-A) associated with operatic arias in the Baroque era. The single-movement sonata opens with a series of brief, declamatory phrases, which Mattheson proceeds to stretch out with extensions based on conventional keyboard figurations. This germinal theme recurs periodically, like a musical punctuation mark, and the sonata’s first section ends with a swirling cataract of 32nd-note scales. These, in turn, supply grist for the sonata’s freer and more overtly virtuosic middle section.
The chaconne was one of several harmonically based variation forms favored by Handel and his contemporaries. In essence, the term denotes a set of variations on a repeating bass pattern. In Handel’s justly celebrated Chaconne, HWV 435, this “ground bass” extends over eight bars, moving from the tonic (G major) to the dominant (D major) and back again. Handel rings no fewer than 21 variations on this simple harmonic theme, often transferring material from one hand to the other in a kind of mirror image. In Variation 9, the music abruptly modulates to G minor and stays there through Variation 16, when it makes an equally dramatic return to the home key. This brilliant work culminates in a coruscating cascade of 16th-note arpeggios, the two hands separated by the interval of a third. Published in 1733 or 1734, but likely composed much earlier, the G-Major Chaconne is a worthy companion to the bravura set of variations that concludes Handel’s Suite
No. 5 in E Major.
The son of a famous composer, Gottlieb Muffat specialized in keyboard music from an early age. Educated in Vienna, where he spent almost his entire career, he inherited his father Georg’s cosmopolitan musical taste. His affinity for the refined and highly ornate French Baroque style is evident in the first of six harpsichord suites published in the late 1730s in a collection blandly titled Componimenti musicali (Musical Compositions). The first movement of the C-Major Suite is a so-called French Ouverture, with a broad, majestic introduction followed by a fast fugal section. The “optional” movements include a sweetly lyrical Air in C minor, a high-stepping Rigaudon, and a quick Menuet with a contrasting Trio section in A minor. Muffat’s Gallic sensibility is equally apparent in the Allemande, which emphasizes suavity and restraint rather than display. In place of the traditional gigue, the suite ends with a fast, free-form Finale.
The cheerful, outgoing character of Handel’s Fifth Suite is established in the leisurely, ruminative Prélude, whose lacy garlands of passagework circle around the home key of E major, the better to fix it in the listener’s ear. The Allemande, though brisker and more harmonically adventurous, is cut from the same brightly colored cloth. Both here and in the propulsive triple-time Courante, attentive listeners may hear fleeting snatches of the catchy theme on which the suite’s famous finale is based. The Air began life as a freestanding chaconne, and Handel preserved the original theme-and-variations format in his revision, with the five brief variations masquerading under the French name doubles. Long after the composer’s death, the movement acquired the popular nickname the “Harmonious Blacksmith,” its rhythmically pinging eighth notes purportedly resembling hammer strokes on an anvil. Compared to the G-Major Chaconne, the Air is a sprint instead of a long-distance race, but Handel’s variation technique is nonetheless dazzling.
—Harry Haskell
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