MLK 250

Mozart - Linley - Kraus
250th Anniversary Festival
April-July 2006

Honorary Patrons - Dr.Bertil Van Boer, Dr.William Davies

Press release

It used to be assumed that if something has been forgotten by posterity, then it fully deserved its fate: it must have been of low quality, and, besides, modern audiences should not be expected to know anything beyond tiny proportions of the outputs of a handful of acknowledged “great composers”. If we do not listen to anything beyond the accepted canon (largely compiled in the nineteenth century), then our preconceptions can remain safely unchallenged, and therefore “correct”. Unfortunately, that attitude has resulted in these favoured composers being treated as though they worked in a vacuum. It is also completely artistically untenable, and luckily we realise today that such an attitude is both smug and liable to breed or reinforce prejudice. In the last fifty years, an explosion of interest in hitherto-neglected masterpieces from the past has occurred, for example the works of Purcell (beyond Dido), Monteverdi, Handel’s operas, and lesser-known Mozart (e.g. Idomeneo and Zaïde). It should therefore not surprise us that there are more masterpieces that await performance. Alongside indisputable Mozartean masterpieces (some famous, others less so), we aim to raise the profile of the works of Linley and Kraus – all of the highest calibre – and reintroduce them to the concert hall and opera house, where they belong. No allowance need be made for the quality of this music.

Given that Mozart’s fame rests largely on a remarkably small number of masterworks (many from the 1780s), it is interesting to ask whether we would consider him as we do today had he died, say, in 1778. It is difficult to know which pieces, given that scenario, would be valued and played today. While the surviving outputs of his exact contemporaries are much smaller (exacerbated in Linley’s case by the virtual disappearance of his orchestral output and his exceptionally early death), nothing can be said against them in terms of their quality or originality. Mozart did not exist in a hermetically-sealed world, taking musical dictation from God, but in the rough-and-tumble world of late eighteenth century European music, where influences paid scant regard to national borders. All three were to encounter dizzying musical change, leavened by experience of the music of great Baroque masters such as Handel and Bach, but all responded differently. It is these influences, differences and similarities in the works of three great, contemporary composers that this Festival will explore.

Many biographies exist of Mozart, but the lives and works of his two contemporaries are less well-known…

Thomas (Tom) Linley, the younger (1756-1778).

“The Tommasino, as he is called, and the little Mozart, are talked of all over Italy, as the most promising geniusses of this age.” (Burney: An Eighteenth-century Musical Tour in France and Italy, p.184; ed. By P.A. Scholes; Oxford University Press, 1959).

It was during this time, when he had followed his teacher from Livorno to Florence, that he met and befriended his exact contemporary, Mozart. Although their meeting – and collaboration, for they played duets together – was brief, their shared background and prodigious talents ensured that they never forgot each other. Linley kept a letter he received from Mozart for the rest of his short life, while according to the singer Michael Kelly:

“[Mozart] conversed with me a good deal about Thomas Linley… with whom he was intimate at Florence, and spoke of him with great affection. He said that Linley was a true genius, and he felt that, had he lived, he would have been one of the greatest ornaments of the musical world.” (Kelly Reminiscences, 1826; p.112 in R. Fiske edn.)

Linley set about composing in earnest in the 1770s, writing cantatas, songs, more than twenty violin concerti (only one appears to survive), two operas, glees, madrigals and three large-scale choral works. /i>The Duenna, an opera for which he was responsible for most of the music (libretto by Sheridan), received more performances between 1775 (its year of composition) and 1800 than any other mainpiece opera, even including The Beggar’s Opera; it was last performed at Covent Garden in the 1840s. The Cady of Bagdad, his last major work, was a comparative failure by comparison, owing to the poor quality of its libretto rather than its music, which frustratingly shows Linley becoming more experimental, particularly in his writing for brass and winds. It is tempting to speculate about the directions he would have taken his musical imagination had he lived even to the age of his two peers.

In 1773, Linley had become the leader of the Drury Lane Theatre orchestra, a post he was to hold until his death. When his father became a patentee of that theatre in 1775 with Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Tom composed an impressive Ode on the Witches, Fairies and Aerial Beings of Shakespeare (1776) and a one-act oratorio, The Song of Moses (1777), which was revived in a slightly revised form the following year. Both are hugely imaginative, with strong choral writing, and attractive arias and duets for the (mostly soprano) soloists. The opening chorus of his incidental music to Shakespeare’s The Tempest (Arise, ye spirits of the storm), written in 1776, looks forward to the next century, and indeed was performed in London representations of that play for about forty years after Linley’s death, before it was ignominiously supplanted by Henry Bishop’s cosy, “operatised” Tempest.

Tom also wrote a large-scale orchestral anthem, Let God Arise, for the Worcester Three Choirs Festival in 1773; this was revised and augmented by two arias for the Gloucester Festival of 1775. At least one of these extra arias, with one of Tom’s trademarks – an oboe obbligato – was probably written for the castrato Rauzzini, for whom Mozart had earlier written Exsultate Jubilate.

The texts of the cantatas demonstrate the high literary influences that Tom was being exposed to by his circle of friends and family: one (Darthula) is a setting of “Ossian” (aka James McPherson), a writer who was to have a major influence on the Romantic movement, while another is a setting of a text based on Goethe’s Werther. As well as looking forward, Tom reached back into the seventeenth century to set Abraham Cowley’s poem, Awake my Lyre.

He died in a boating accident at Grimsthorpe Castle in August 1778, causing deep shock to his hosts and probable patrons, the Duke and Duchess of Ancaster, his faithful public and the Royal Family. George III commissioned four copied volumes of Tom’s major (vocal) works. The late Roger Fiske (1986: 413) thought Tom “our most promising composer between Purcell and Elgar, [whose] accidental death when only twenty-two changed for the worse the whole history of [British] music.” Listening to many of his surviving works, it is a shock to realise that he not just “showed promise”, but was actually a major composer. We are only today beginning to ascertain the scale of his achievements, and it will be salutary to set these in the context of his great contemporaries during the festival.

Joseph Martin Kraus (1756-1792).

After two years of study at the University of Göttingen, Kraus accepted a proposition to travel to Sweden in order to focus his career on music at the court of Gustav III. He spent two years of relative hardship attempting to break into the Stockholm musical establishment. A commission for an opera, Proserpin, whose text was drafted by the King himself, won him the post as Deputy Musical Director in 1781.

The following year he was sent on a grand tour by Gustav in order to observe the latest trends in music theatre in continental Europe. This lasted four years and brought him into contact with major figures such as Haydn, Gluck, Antonio Salieri, Padre Martini, and others. Kraus’ travels also took him throughout Germany, Italy, France, and England, where he witnessed the Handel Centenary celebrations in 1785.

While in Paris, he experienced difficulty with cabals back in Stockholm that sought to prevent his return, but their resolution in 1786 made it possible for him to become the leading figure in Gustavian musical life. In 1787 he was appointed as director of curriculum at the Royal Academy of Music, and the next year he succeeded Francesco Antonio Uttini as Kapellmästare, eventually attaining a reputation as an innovative conductor, progressive pedagogue, and multi-talented composer.

Although he was a much sought after composer for stage music, his principal opera, Æneas i Cartago, remained unperformed during his lifetime. In January of 1792 he was present at the masked ball wherein his patron, Gustav III, was assassinated, causing considerable turmoil in the cultural establishment that the monarch had nurtured. His own health deteriorated shortly thereafter, and he died only a few months later in December of 1792 from tuberculosis. He was buried in the Stockholm suburb of Tivoli following a ceremony where his coffin was carried across the ice of the Brunsviken by torchlight.

(Notes reproduced by kind courtesy of leading Kraus scholar Dr. Bertil Van Boer.)

For further information, please contact:
either Dr. William Davies ( davies.william@gmail.com; tel.: 023 80 487927),
or Dr. Peter Leech ( pgleech@hotmail.com).

Programme of Events

(A*) Friday, 10 & Saturday, 11 March, 2006: Collegekerk Sint Niklaas (8:30 p.m.) & Kerk klein Begijnhof (8 p.m.), respectively, Gent, Belgium.
Music for the Tempest – Linley
Requiem in do-klein – M. Haydn
Waisenhausmesse – Mozart (K.139)
 

Saturday, 1 April 2006: St. Mary's Church, Aylesbury, at 7:30 p.m.

The Song of Moses – Linley
Mass in C Minor – Mozart (K.427)
Symphony in F (Buffa) – Kraus.

Lynsey Docherty & Michelle Walton (sopranos),
Philip Salmon (tenor) & Roland Davitt (bass)
Aylesbury Choral Society and Frideswide Ensemble (conducted by Peter Leech)
 

Saturday, 13 May 2006: Pershore Abbey, Pershore, from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

A Mozart-Linley Open Singing Workshop (led by Peter Leech):
A chance for interested members of the public to explore Mozart’s Coronation Mass, and Linley’s anthem Let God Arise and oratorio The Song of Moses.
 

(A*) Monday, 22 May 2006: Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, at 7 p.m.

Music for The Tempest – Linley
“Concerto violin ob[b]ligato” in F – Linley
An Ode on the Witches, Fairies and Aerial Beings of Shakespeare – Linley

Juliet Fraser, Elin Manahan Thomas & Charlotte Mobbs (sopranos),
Matthew Brook and Robert Rice (basses);
Adrian Butterfield (solo violin and leader); Anthony Robson (oboe soloist)
The Linley Consort of Voices & Instruments (conducted by Andrew Edwards)
(A Gala concert in aid of the Dulwich Picture Gallery).
 

Saturday, 27 May, 2006: St. Mary’s Church, Dedham, Essex, at 7:30 p.m.

(2nd Jane Davies Memorial Concert.)
Bastien und Bastienne (overture) – Mozart K.50
Innocente donzeletta – Kraus
Symphony no. 29, in A – Mozart
The Cady of Bagdad – Linley

Catherine Griffiths & Rowan Fenner (sopranos),
Philip Salmon & Sean Clayton (tenors)
The Frideswide Ensemble (conducted by Peter Leech)
(Concert is in aid of Médecins sans Frontières, Africa)
 

Saturday, 10 June, 2006: Aylesbury.

Madrigals and Glees – Linley
English & French part-songs (18th & 19th century)

Aylesbury Choral Society (conducted by Peter Leech)
 

Saturday, 1 July, 2006: Worcester Cathedral, at 7:30 p.m.

Let God Arise – Linley (choral anthem for the 1773 Three Choirs Festival, Worcester)
Coronation Mass – Mozart (K.317)
Eine kleine nachtmusik, 1st movement – Mozart
Te Deum in D major – Kraus (world première)
Arise, ye spirits of the Storm (from The Tempest) – Linley

Rebecca Ryan & Catrin Johnsson (sopranos),
Sean Clayton (tenor) & Adrian Powter (bass)
Bristol Bach Choir and Frideswide Ensemble (conducted by Peter Leech).

The orchestra for many of the concerts is the Frideswide Ensemble, based in Oxford and named after the patron saint of that city. It is run by Jane Downer and its performers comprise many distinguished UK-based period-instrument specialists. Further details can be found at: www.earlymusic.org.uk/Performer's%20Directory/Fre-Hol/frideswideensemb.html.

The Linley Consort of Voices and Instruments will make its début at the Dulwich Picture Gallery Gala Concert. The singers and players are (as in the case of the Frideswide Ensemble) all prominent professional specialists in baroque and classical music.

BOOKING INFORMATION.

More details on the Dulwich Picture Gallery Gala Fund-raising Concert can be obtained from Caroline Annesley (0208 693 1165; also on the internet: www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk/whats_on/dinnersandconcerts.aspx). Please contact William Davies (023 80 487927; davies.william@gmail.com) for more information about the Médecins sans Frontières fund-raising concert in Dedham, north Essex, on 27th May.

Press release