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Modus Phantasticus
Susanne Heinrich - Viols with Reiko Ichise - Bass Viol
Germany was never blessed with the sort of solo viol traditions that flourished in England and France. The imagination of the typical German instrumental composer was excited mainly by the keyboard and the violin. These were, after all, instruments vital to the musical profession, and were the conventional vehicles for technical display, fuelled by a rhapsodic style of writing from north Germany called the ‘stylus phantasticus’. The viol took a back seat. The common association with consort playing by the leisured classes did not particularly advance the notion of the viol as an instrument of virtuosity. But the viol consort soon gained a reputation for providing special effects alluding to mortality and the supernatural. Viols were slotted into the middle string parts of vocal concertos and sacred cantatas of the lamento tradition. The solemnity that viols brought to sepulchral music in enhancing the sonority and enriching the texture meant that they dominated the scoring, sometimes to the exclusion of other instruments. The profile of the viol in Germany was raised considerably with the arrival during the late 16th century and the first half of the 17th century of elite violists from England. They came from a tradition of consort playing so prevalent that newfangled madrigals by Claudio Monteverdi became grist to their mill, and were duly transcribed for a consort of viols with some avidity, judging from the many extant manuscript arrangements in England. Madrigals had been around in England and Germany even before the mid-sixteenth century. By the time Heinrich Schütz tried his hand at writing them, the basso continuo had been incorporated into the genre. Schütz’s five-part setting of the Italian text ‘Feritevi’ about violent love is a prime candidate for a transcription based on historical practice. The lowest voice functions as a thoroughbass, underlining the frenzied exchanges of ‘arrows’ (‘saette’), ‘death’ (‘morti’), and ‘vipers’ (‘viperette’) in the upper four voices. Schütz himself arranged for a consort of four viols. In a technique he termed falso bordone, four viols were employed in preference to the organ (and other instruments) in accompanying the Evangelist in the Historia … der Auferstehung … Jesu Christi (1623). The consort was manifestly not to be considered an extravagant substitute for mere chordal accompaniment. Schütz suggested that the viols improvised passaggi, but only after diligent rehearsing with the singer. Madrigals were by no means the only source for consort transcription. An arrangement for three parts was fashioned—for James Sherard (1666-1738), amateur musician, composer, successful London apothecary and honorary MD of Oxford University—out of Johannes Schenck’s solo viol sonata op. 2/4. Schenck’s writing belonged to the German-Dutch virtuoso viol school, which combined the English division style with the Italian-inspired Austro-German violin school. His luxurious but technically demanding chordal and polyphonic writing made it apt for transcription, although the arranger pointedly omitted the episodes of dramatic flourishes, perhaps as a concession to the intended scholarly gentlemen performers. In the same collection (MS Mus. Sch. D. 249 in Oxford University’s Bodleian Library) is a solo viol sonata in the ‘phantasticus’ vein by Davidt Adam Baudringer, who might well have been the lutenist employed at the Marienkirche in Lübeck in 1676 known as David Arnold Baudringer. The work is as much a testimony to Sherard’s collecting zeal as to his predilection for the viol: although he played the violin, he included no fewer than five viol pieces by Lübeck composers. The ‘sweetly murmuring’ attribute of the ‘beautifully delicate’ viol—according to the polymath Johann Mattheson in his very first treatise, Das neu-eröffnete Orchestre (1713)—was probably the reason why the instrument was often incorporated into string ensembles. These were either mixed (with violins) or homogenous, i.e. a viol consort; both configurations are supported not only by musical but also iconographical evidence. The consort was particularly suited to the string ‘tremolo’, a device of tender throbs of chordal accompaniment above which soars a poignant cantilena. This was a technique so ingrained in the compositional idiom of the period that Johann Sebastian Bach transferred it wholesale to his keyboard music. The repeated chords in the harpsichord part of the 3rd movement of the E major violin sonata BWV 1016 spring readily to mind. The manuals-only chorale prelude ‘Erbarm dich’ (BWV 721) is unique amongst Bach’s organ oeuvre in its use of repeated chords sustaining the harmonies beneath a heart-rending cantus firmus—an obvious choice for a modern transcription. The most enduring and ubiquitous member of the viol consort was the bass viol. Its full range of over three octaves enabled it to function both as a bass-line and a melodic instrument. These qualities were exploited to the hilt in the richly sonorous Stricturae viola di gambicae (1677) for four bass viols, the only surviving work by David Funck, a virtuoso on the violin, viol, guitar and keyboard. Amongst the panoply of styles and techniques, including homophonic dances and contrapuntal pieces, the Sarabande is remarkable in its egalitarian distribution of figurative variations to each of the four viols. Funck’s life was beset by problems of his own making. He was denounced in 1686 for serial alcohol abuse (‘so lange gesoffen’). His career petered out in ignominy in 1699 when he left his position under a cloud of accusations; he was suspected of ‘Criminis Sodomiae’, labelled a ‘wicked man’ (‘böser Mensch’), and later froze to death en route to Arnstadt on foot. Like Funck, Georg Philipp Telemann, too, wrote for four equal instruments, although he can be said to have led a more glorious and productive existence. The four concertos for four solo violins without basso continuo may be unusual, but somehow, in the light of Funck’s work, no longer seem so unparalleled in their scoring. It requires no quantum leap of lateral thinking to transcribe one of them for four viols: the A major concerto, beginning with thunderous multiple-stops, once transposed down a tone, becomes completely idiomatic to the viol. Telemann was one of many who incorporated the bass, treble, and pardessus viols in his chamber music. When he visited Paris in 1737—playing his celebrated Paris Quartets for flute, violin, bass viol and b.c. with Jean-Baptiste Forqueray, among others—he was only following in the footsteps of many such German visitors. One of them was August Kühnel, who came to Paris in 1665 to study the viol. He is known to have been in London in 1682, and on 23 November 1685 the London Gazette announced ‘some performance upon the Barritone, by Mr August Keenell’. As the leading viol virtuoso of the day he was highly sought after, firstly as the director of instrumentalists in Darmstadt, then Weimar, and finally as court Kapellmeister at Kassel. Another visitor to Paris was Ernst Christian Hesse, who was ‘discovered’ by the Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt—incidentally, the erstwhile employer of Kühnel—and in 1698 sent to Paris to further develop his viol technique at the Landgrave’s expense. Hesse’s ambitious plan to study with the two royal virtuosos Marin Marais and Antoine Forqueray involved assuming two separate identities. Hesse progressed rapidly in his studies until his ruse was undone when the two rival masters decided to hold a contest to show off their ‘star’ pupil. Not unexpectedly his music shows the influence of the French style. The same can be said of many German composers, including Georg Böhm. Known nowadays primarily for his influence on the young Bach, Böhm is credited with the development of the chorale partite, in which the liturgical chorale melody replaces the secular dance or song as the basis for variations. He was also adept at fusing national styles: his Chaconne combines French grace and charm with north German sobriety and virtuosity. The Ciaconna was also a dance favoured by Johann Pachelbel as the variation form for the organ. The finest of his six ciaconne is the one in the affective key of F minor, and is based on the conventional lamento ground bass of a descending tetrachord. A certain cosmopolitanism redolent of Vienna exudes from the Ciaconna by Johann Joseph Fux, whose gifts as a composer has long been overshadowed by his abiding stature as a theorist, thanks to his monumental Gradus ad Parnassum (1725). The keyboard piece is but one small offering from his vast corpus of excellent vocal and instrumental music, presented to redress the imbalance in his reputation. The work’s largely four-part writing lends itself to a free arrangement for a four-part ensemble, and, together with the pieces we have selected from Bach’s Orgel-Büchlein, are constructed in the spirit and tradition of adaptation which so characterised the pre-Romantic age of the pragmatic composer. Kah-Ming Ng, 2003 |
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