Marsh, J. C. Bach, Mozart, Berwald, Hesse, Rossini: 18th- and 19th-Century Sonatas & Fantasias, for Organ 4-Hands

Description

In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the practice of playing pieces for four-hand duet on the piano became increasingly widespread, due to a number of reasons. The ascent of the bourgeoisie implied a growing literacy and musical education; indeed, the bourgeoisie started to appropriate practices and habits which had previously been aristocratical privileges, including the concept of music as a fundamental aspect of Bildung, the spiritual “building” of a person’s and a society’s culture. With bourgeois men increasingly working in offices distinct from their houses, the female members of the family spent most of their times in their homes and in those of their friends, and, since they could normally afford domestic help, they had more time for leisurely activities: music-making was one of the favourite pastimes and social activities. Moreover, the bourgeoisie also crowded theatres and concert halls, and they liked to reproduce at home the famous motifs and themes they had heard on the operatic stage. The preferred system for this reproduction was, of course, playing the pieces personally; for amateurs and music-lovers, the piano transcription of an orchestral/vocal score would have been far too complex to play, and the possibility of dividing the “notes” between two keyboard players was a particularly welcome one.
While this practice created a positive habit and the specific compositional and technical traits of four-hand keyboard playing, it remains strictly bound to the instrument of the piano and to the domestic context of Hausmusizieren, the music-making of the educated bourgeoisie. The leisurely and almost “cozy” style of this kind of chamber music appears to be dramatically distant from the features of a seemingly similar instrument, the organ.
Different from the piano, the organ’s setting is typically the church; in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, it was an instrument played mostly by male musicians (whereas most piano dilettantes were female); the organ’s repertoire was seemingly more serious and severe than the frequently frivolous adaptations for piano duet; and the physical intimacy between the two players on the same piano keyboard would have seemed rather out of place in the soberer setting of a church.
These elements undoubtedly account for the objective discrepancy between the enormous amount of works and transcriptions for piano duet on the one hand, and the relatively scanty works for four-hand organ duet on the other. However, scantiness does not imply inexistence, and these rare gems are really worth rediscovering. Indeed, if the organ’s manuals are similar in appearance to the piano keyboard, it is common knowledge that the principles ruling the two instruments’ mechanics are utterly different from each other; moreover, the organ possesses a pedalboard which is missing on most pianos. It would seem, then, that there are many more differences than similarities between the two instruments. However, the stimulus behind several transcriptions for organ duet came precisely from some instrumental limitations, particularly as concerns the pedalboard. Many organs, especially in southern Europe, were structurally insufficient for the performance of complex works involving the organ’s pedals. In consequence, these were adapted for four-hand organ duet, with the “Primo” playing the part originally prescribed for performance on the manual, and the “Secondo” playing the pedal part on another manual. This limitation became, as is often the case, a valuable opportunity, and, along with countless transcriptions (most of which were impromptu and therefore left no written trace), several composers decided to create original compositions for this ensemble.
This Da Vinci Classics album includes examples of the various genres hitherto cited. The Sonata by Johann Christian Bach is unlikely to have been conceived for performance on the organ, even though Johann Christian’s father, the celebrated Johann Sebastian, had been one of the greatest organists of all times. However, Johann Christian, Bach’s youngest son, was under many aspects a very different character from his father, and this Sonata’s aesthetic principles have virtually nothing of the Baroque style practised by Johann Sebastian. Here, the Classical style is at its best and at its most refreshing, and it is easy to understand why a warm and great friendship blossomed between Johann Christian and the much younger Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. In spite of the lightness and brilliancy of this piece, which would seem ill-suited to the majestic sound of the organ, in fact this Sonata is particularly appropriate for performance on the organ, due to its “symphonic” style. The rich counterpoint and dense texture are valuably enriched by the varied timbre of the organ stops.
A similar situation is encountered with Mozart’s Sonata in D major KV 381. Mozart had used to play piano duets with his sister Nannerl from their early childhood on, and he developed a compositional technique for four-hand keyboard duet which combined the intimate character of domestic music-making with sonorities and virtuosity more typical for the concert stage. This was, of course, a consequence of their early acquaintance with public performances, in which they had to demonstrate their skill while also maintaining the charming simplicity of their relationship as a brother and sister. This Sonata, similar to that by Johann Christian Bach (whose style it imitates), is a very symphonic piece; Mozart was still a teenager, at that time, but his compositional ability and his ambitions are evident in the self-assured treatment of the large form and in the varied combinations of the instrumental writing. In this case too, therefore, the arrangement for organ reveals new facets of a known work, and it allows us to glimpse yet another aspect of its inexhaustible musical potential.
On the other hand, a piece which is undoubtedly to be numbered among the almost forgotten works is the C-major Prelude and Fugue by Mozart’s contemporary, the British John Marsh. A gifted composer, and perhaps the most prolific musician of the era in England, Marsh was also the author of an impressive collection of journals which still await a thorough study and which will doubtlessly reveal many unknown aspects of the musical life of his time. Unfortunately, most compositions by Marsh are lost, but those which have been preserved bear witness to their composer’s talent and imagination. He was a man of many interests and a polymath, and was an expert organist, as well as a conductor and organizer of concerts. The Prelude and Fugue recorded here demonstrate his ability and mastery of the form and of the polyphonic technique, and his fantasy in the elaboration of the musical material.
Similar to Marsh, also Franz Adolph Berwald was a man of many talents and the greatest representative of the cultivated musical repertoire in his own country. In his case, he pioneered the composition of “classical” symphonies in Sweden, and was appreciated as a violinist, as a violist and as a teacher of composition and orchestration. However, and once more similar to Marsh, Berwald did not limit himself to music only: in his case, the choice to dedicate himself to other disciplines was also partly due to the lack of professional opportunities in the musical field. Nevertheless, Berwald managed to excel also in a seemingly unrelated discipline, i.e. orthopedic studies, to which he substantially and innovatively contributed. His En landtlig bröllopsfest is extraordinary under many viewpoints: it was originally conceived for four-hand organ, it fascinatingly anticipates the upsurge of “national” schools in the late Romantic era, and it brilliantly describes the various religious and festive stages of a rural wedding ceremony. The musical material for this work partially comes from a collection of Ländliche Spiele und Tanz, vividly depicting the rural traditions of his country.
The relatively short Fantasie op. 35 by Adolf Friedrich Hesse is in turn a sequence of contrasting but consistent sections, alternating more lyrical with more brilliant moments. Hesse was one of the most important German organists of his time, and had been educated in the august tradition of Bach’s organ style. In fact, he was a pioneer of the Bach-Renaissance, and used to perform entire recitals with works by the German master. The contrast with the Italian brilliant style of opera buffa practised by Rossini could seem particularly striking, therefore. However, this is partly a misleading impression, since Rossini was in turn a great admirer of the German musical tradition – in fact, he was even criticized for his Germanophilia, and nicknamed “Il Tedeschino”, the Little German. Even though there are only scanty traces of the Baroque polyphonic tradition in such a famous piece as the Sinfonia from L’italiana in Algeri, undoubtedly Rossini had learnt the aesthetic principles of that musical tradition and interpreted them in his own, highly personal style. This impressive transcription demonstrates the full potential of a version for four-hand organ duet of such a brilliant piece: in particular, the celebrated technique of the Rossinian crescendo seems particularly well-suited to the organ’s terraced dynamics and to its expressive potential.
This album, then, by juxtaposing famous and unknown artists and their pieces, as well as original works with transcriptions, is a very welcome demonstration of how the organ, an orchestra which can be played by one musician alone, can become an even richer repository of varied timbres in the (four) hands of two players.

Liner Notes by Chiara Bertoglio