An unexpected encounter
by Isaline Leloup
This album is the story of an encounter between an instrument forgotten by modern music and a musician in love with history and what it awakens in our daily imagination. Let’s explore the Viennese violone !
This instrument also called Viennese bass, is a peculiar type of double bass which saw its moment of glory around 1760, at the height of Classicism. This new instrument has been fretted and has a particular tuning with thirds (from low to high : F-A-D-F#-A), which allows it to both perform chord and harmonic work, and easily execute virtuoso passages in all registers. Several composers, such as Hoffmeister, Dittersdorf, Sperger, and even Mozart, wrote music for this elephant with the voice of a birdsong. Such pieces range from the utmost virtuoso solos to refined chamber music compositions for various ensembles. Two long years have allowed a project to mature and created a desire to enable others to meet this instrument and the infinite possibilities it offers. This journey gave me the opportunity to find the correctness of interpretation of this music, by appropriating its language, by dancing it, by moving away from it and finding it again to make it resonate in you. This recording takes you to one of these Viennese salons to introduce you to this rarely performed literature. Let’s sit down and enjoy a hot chocolate around a quartet, a concerto arrangement for quintet and an unusual duet giving the solo part to the viola. This Viennese bass music is, for me, filled with lightness, inventiveness and virtuosity, awakening, with each new passage, the imagination. It is sometimes dancing with flexibility and passion, sometimes filled with humor, gluttony and tenderness. It takes us to a multitude of feelings that even bring us closer to opera. Enjoy this refreshing concert full of colours and contrasts !!
Many music lovers would be at loss if they were to explain what a violone is. And, as concerns the “Viennese violone”, it is common fare only for very few specialists. This Da Vinci Classics album is therefore a much-needed opportunity for music lovers to familiarize themselves with the history, features and unique sound of this fascinating instrument.
As could be easily imagined, the violone is a large and low-pitched string instrument, belonging in the family of violins, violas, cellos and double-basses. Indeed, under certain viewpoints it might be considered as the double-bass’ ancestor. This attitude, however, reveals an evolutionary concept of music history, seen as a “progress” from less to more perfected instruments. Though undeniably the history of most instruments is punctuated with technological innovations, these, in many cases, represented ameliorations only from the standpoint of a later musical aesthetics. In other words, a louder grand piano is doubtlessly better suited for playing a Brahms concerto than a forte-piano would be; however, it is debatable whether that same instrument is the best option for performing a Mozart Sonata.
Unavoidably, therefore, the history of musical instruments is intertwined with the history of musical taste; new instruments corresponded to new aesthetics and styles, and older instruments might fall into oblivion if the repertory they represented was in vogue no more. Since the interest in performing the musical repertoires of the past is a relatively recent phenomenon, this attitude de facto consigned many fascinating timbres and aural suggestions to the silence of museums of musical instruments. This is sadly true of the Viennese violone, and the work of musicians who carefully reconstruct its repertoire and playing techniques is therefore particularly praiseworthy. In his Violin School, published the same year when his son Wolfgang Amadeus was born, Leopold Mozart wrote about the violone, describing its physical and musical features. However, in the second edition (1769), his significant additions bear witness to a typically Viennese phenomenon which was emerging at the time. In 1769, in fact, he discussed the five-stringed violone, in which “frets of rather thick string are attached to the neck at all the intervals, in order to prevent the strings from rattling on the fingerboard and so improved the tone. One can also perform difficult passages more easily on such a Bass, and I have heard concertos, trios, solos and so forth played on one of these with great beauty”.
From being just a supporting instrument for the orchestral texture, and one substantially confined to the bass part, the violone was claiming the status of a solo instrument. This was made possible through some innovative solutions, typical for the Viennese version of the instrument and for the playing technique and tuning system associated to it. The tuning system proved to be a major advantage of the Viennese violone, but also – competing, as it did, with rival schools of thought – a problem eventually undermining its success. Whereas most German violones were four-stringed, and France, Spain, Italy and England favoured three-stringed instruments (though with different tuning systems), the five-stringed Viennese violone allowed for more agility and freedom of playing. A higher number of strings, in fact, fostered the possibility of quickly spanning large intervals, and consequently of mastering virtuoso passages more easily. Agility was also fostered by the presence of frets and by the shape of the instrument. Frets allowed for a more precise intonation, but also for a technique similar to the guitar’s barré, i.e. the possibility of creating chords by positioning the finger transversely in correspondence of the fret. Moreover, the Viennese violone’s silhouette, characterized by a very sloping upper part, permitted to the player to easily reach the high-pitched notes (obtained by pressing the strings in the instrument’s lower part).
Thanks to these features, the Viennese violone quickly reached the status of solo and chamber music instrument; a scholar researching on these topics went as far as defining the years 1760-1800 as “the Golden Age of Virtuosity” for the Viennese violone. During these four decades, the violone became the protagonist of more than thirty solo concertos and many chamber music works. Even Haydn and Mozart tried their hand in the creation of works for this instrument, and enriched its already large repertoire. After this “Golden Age”, however, the violone’s success began to wane. This was largely due to the new harmonic perspectives of the Romantic era: here, the Viennese violone’s many strings were a hindrance rather than an advantage, since they prevented smooth transitions among distant keys, such as were in demand in Romantic music. The violone quickly became obsolete, and the double-bass was widely adopted in its stead. Actually, the curtain of forgetfulness which now surrounded the instrument was broken only by a rather sensational discovery, in 1955. At that time, a collection of violone pieces resurfaced in the Landesbibliothek in the German city of Schwerin. The collector was Johann Matthias Sperger, a violone virtuoso performer and composer, represented in this album by one of his works. The collection included works by Borghi, Dittersdorf, Zimmerman, Pichl, Stamitz, Vanhal, Capuzzi, Cimador, Hoffmeister, and by Sperger himself. This discovery prompted the pieces’ publication in the Sixties, and the appearance of a treatise on the concertante (i.e. solo) works in the Viennese Classicism, by Adolf Meier. Thanks to the efforts of Meier and of his fellow scholar Klaus Trumpf, interest in this instrument increased, its playing techniques were rediscovered and its golden age was somewhat rekindled.
The first piece recorded here is the last of the eighteen Concertos written for the violone by Johannes Matthias Sperger, presented here in an original and effectful transcription realized by the soloist, Isaline Leloup. As previously mentioned, Sperger was one of the greatest virtuosi of the violone, but he did not limit himself either to the performance activity, or to the composition of violone works. In fact, he was a very prolific composer, who left numerous works such as concertos for horn, trumpet, bassoon and viola, as well as at least forty-five Symphonies, many works of chamber music and of sacred music. He had born in Feldsberg in 1750, and had received his first musical education in the local Franciscan monastery. After moving to Vienna, in 1767, he studied composition with Albrechtsberger (later to become Beethoven’s teacher) and violone with the great virtuoso Pichelberger, for whom Mozart would compose a concertante aria. He was later employed in the musical chapels of several important noblemen of the time, in Pressburg (now Bratislava), in Kohfidish, and in Ludwigslust, where he was appointed a Court Musician by Prince Friedrich Franz I of Mecklenburg. The concerto recorded here dates to Sperger’s time in Ludwigslust (1807). In between these appointments, Sperger toured extensively (and particularly in Italy), gaining international fame as an astonishing virtuoso. During his life, he was also highly appreciated as a composer; the esteem surrounding him is testified by the fact that Mozart’s Requiem was performed at his burial. In spite of his fifty-three works for solo violone, he would be criticized by later scholars of the double-bass, who found his works exceedingly difficult to perform. This was due to the fact that indeed they are nearly unplayable on the modern double-bass, but are considerably easier and more effective when played on the violone. The performance recorded here allows the listener to appreciate the violone both in its virtuoso features, thanks to the brilliant passageworks and dazzling sequences, and in its lyrical nature, where its expressive and warm timbre is highlighted by the surrounding string instruments in the version recorded here.
If Sperger was highly appreciated at his time, Carl Ditters was such a successful musician that he earned a noble title (“von Dittersdorf”) as well as the highest Papal honours. Also in Ditters’ life, his first musical education was due to a religious context, in this case to the Jesuits. He was a child prodigy as a violin player, who was engaged by numerous courts of the era; however, he also studied composition and counterpoint under the guidance of an Italian musician. As the Chapel Master of the bishop of Großwardein he composed plentifully, including numerous operas and oratorios; later he was appointed by the Bishop of Breslau, in Johannesberg, while, between 1784 and 1787, he resided in Vienna where he played in a string quartet with Haydn and Mozart. This Duet for viola and violone is one of his works which have achieved immortal fame, due to its breadth of vision, to the knowledgeable interplay of the two instruments, to the mellow overall sound they achieve, as well as to its intensity of expression and, at the same time, levity and grace.
Vienna was also the background of Franz Anton Hoffmeister’s life; however, his core activity became that of music publishing, through which he befriended Mozart. His utter ability in the field of music publishing did not diminish his skill as a composer; rather, his first-hand knowledge of the best works of the contemporaneous composers encouraged his own creativity. He wrote more than fifty Symphonies, about sixty concertos as well as chamber music and German comic operas (Singspiel). His four Quartets with Double Bass employ the Violone as the true protagonist of the quartet’s fabric. Indeed, the lowest-pitched instrument takes here the place of the highest, the first violin. In the Quartet recorded here, the first movement’s main themes are always introduced by the violone, as happens with the principal theme of the concluding Rondo. This work illustrates the violone’s capability to enter into a fascinating dialogue with the other members of the string family, and its attitude to both soloism and interplay.
Together, these three works display the full palette of this long-forgotten instrument, and will doubtlessly foster renewed interest in its fascinating potential.