When the 14 year-old Mozart perpetrated a daring theft from the most powerful institution in the world, there was no need to circumvent a laser grid by descending on cables from on high.
Mozart and his father attended a Holy Week service at the Vatican in 1770. There, they encountered for the first time Gregorio Allegri’s haunting “Miserere.”
Allegri composed his setting of Psalm 51 (50) in the 1630s. The piece was intended for exclusive performance in the Sistine Chapel, as part of the Tenebrae service of Holy Wednesday and Good Friday.
Its conception is a striking one, with two choirs: one intoning a simple chant, and the other, spatially separated, providing ornamentation. The effect of a stratospheric top C makes the “Miserere” one of the most enthralling works in the choral literature of the late Renaissance.
The Vatican, realizing it had a good thing, forbade performance of the piece or copies of the score to be circulated outside its walls, under pain of excommunication.
It was Mozart who blithely liberated the piece, copying it down from memory and handing it off to author and music historian Charles Burney, who published it without delay.
Mozart was summoned before the Pope, and rather than being excommunicated, he was showered with praise for his feat of musical genius. The ban on the “Miserere” was lifted.
Mission accomplished!
These portraits, of Allegri (left) and the teenage Mozart, will self-destruct in five seconds
In the words of Wilde’s Lord Henry, there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
While it might be true there’s no such thing as bad publicity, it would be nice if Antonio Salieri could transcend his notoriety – as the alleged murderer of Mozart and a second-rate hack – to be recognized for some of his actual achievements. Especially since none of the charges leveled against him happen to be true!
I like “Amadeus” as much as the next guy, and while I am very happy it has served to keep Salieri’s name alive, and perhaps lent a greater degree of commercial viability to subsequent recordings of his music, it is worthwhile to examine the historical facts.
In reality, Salieri was a generous teacher, who fostered Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt, and even Franz Xaver Mozart, his rival’s son, who was born a little more than four months before his father’s death.
Salieri himself was a prolific and successful composer. He wrote 37 operas, in addition to orchestral works, concertos, chamber music, and sacred pieces. While he was no Mozart – who was? – his music is finely crafted and often quite enjoyable, certainly no worse than that of a majority of his contemporaries.
Yes, Mozart believed Salieri and the Italian faction ensconced at the Viennese court (including future Mozart librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte) were against him. And there may have been something to it at first. However, beyond a rivalry pertaining to certain specific jobs, Mozart and Salieri appear often to have been better than cordial acquaintances.
The two even collaborated on a cantata, “Per la ricuperata salute di Ofelia” (“For the recovered health of Ophelia”), rediscovered in 2016, a joint venture apparently entered into voluntarily (in contrast to an earlier contest, in which two one-act operas were juxtaposed, purely for the edification of the emperor). The cantata was written in 1785, to celebrate the recently-convalesced soprano Nancy Storace, who would soon create the role of Mozart’s Susanna in “The Marriage of Figaro.”
When Salieri was appointed Kapellmeister in 1788, his first act was to revive “Figaro.” He was also responsible for arranging first performances of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 22 (K. 482), the Clarinet Quintet, and the Symphony No. 40. He was full of praise for “The Magic Flute.” And as I said, he took it upon himself to educate Mozart’s son.
Sadly, Salieri’s enormous compositional output gradually faded from memory already during the latter years of his life. Ironically, it is the scandalmongers who kept his name alive.
Rumors of Salieri’s involvement in Mozart’s death were codified by Alexander Pushkin in 1831, a few years after Salieri himself had passed, in the poetic drama “Mozart and Salieri.” This was later set as an opera, in 1898, by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.
Peter Schaffer picked up the thread in 1979, when he wrote the play “Amadeus,” which of course was adapted into the Academy Award-winning film in 1984.
As the compact disc era progressed, more and more of Salieri’s output became available for first-hand assessment – and guess what? A lot of it is quite good!
Happy birthday, Patron Saint of Mediocrity!
Russian film version of Rimsky’s “Mozart and Salieri” (without subtitles):
In English, if a bit fuzzy:
Salieri’s Concerto for Flute, Oboe and Orchestra:
Overture to “Les Horaces”
“Das Lob der Musik” (“The Praise of Music”)
A Mozart and Salieri collaborative effort, the cantata “Per la ricuperata salute di Ofelia”
Happy Canada Day! Let us honor the classical music heritage of the Canadian national anthem.
The music was composed by Calixa Lavallée, a French-Canadian, who had been a Union band musician with the Fourth Rhode Island Regiment during the American Civil War. Lavallée was commissioned to write the piece in 1880 by Théodore Robitaille, then Lieutenant Governor of Québec, in anticipation of that year’s Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day celebrations.
The words (in French) were added later, by Sir Adolphe-Basile Routhier. The first English translation was published in 1906. Two years later, an official translation, by Robert Stanley Weir, appeared. “O Canada” served as the country’s de facto national anthem beginning in 1939. It was officially adopted only in 1980!
Last year, musicologist Ross Duffin put forth that “O Canada” was not an original composition at all, but rather a patchwork of preexisting melodies from the classical repertoire. To which I say, what took him so long? Anyone with a passing knowledge of “The Magic Flute” knows that. Also, as far back as 2008, a listener wrote to inquire of me what was the name of the Franz Liszt composition I played that sounded so much like “O Canada?” All is revealed here, with musical examples below:
One of its sources, from Mozart’s “The Magic Flute”:
Variations on the theme from a Piano Sonata in F major by Anton Reicha:
Listen for a familiar, repeated interlude in Liszt’s symphonic poem “Festklänge” (“Festive Sounds”), in this performance from across Lake Michigan:
“Wach’ auf” from Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger”
Finally, Matthias Keller’s “The American Hymn.” I confess, this one is new to me. For its discovery, I must tip my hat to Professor Duffin.
It’s not inconceivable that Lavallée would have fulfilled his commission with a pastiche, a common enough practice among band musicians of the day. This is not to take anything away from the Canadian national anthem. As you may know, the melody for “The Star Spangled Banner” was appropriated from a British drinking song!
I’ve told this story so many times, I thought surely I had shared it here before. Maybe I have. But it’s not turning up in a search of my old posts, so please forgive me if I’m repeating myself.
Today is the 350th anniversary of the birth of Tomaso Albinoni.
Albinoni is one of those Italian Baroque composers (Venetian, to be exact) who wrote so much agreeable, fairly interchangeable music. Perfect for morning or afternoon drivetime. For the most part, his works are short – ten minutes at average, as an educated guess. Those in a major key are bright, those in a minor key don’t dig too deeply. Oboe concertos. Concertos for strings. Thanks to Albinoni, the term “concerto a cinque” is heard fairly commonly on classical music radio stations.
In his lifetime, his works were viewed as being on a par with those of Arcangelo Corelli and Vivaldi. Bach also found his music of interest, basing at least two of his fugues on Albinoni themes and using the composer’s basslines for instructional purposes. It is this matter of the bassline that has secured Albinoni’s immortality in the hearts of music-lovers everywhere.
During World War II, a significant portion of Albinoni’s output was lost in the bombing of Dresden. (Which makes me wonder, how much did this guy actually write, anyway?) Then in 1958, seemingly out of nowhere, a musicologist by the name of Remo Giazotto (1910-1998) published a previously-unknown “Adagio in G minor.” This he claimed to have reconstructed from surviving fragments – a bassline and the wisp of a violin melody – from an Albinoni manuscript that had been housed in the Dresden State Library.
Sad and soulful, perhaps even desolate – wholly of a piece, in fact, with the tale of its recovery from the ruins of a city that had been leveled in a three-day Allied attack – it has become Albinoni’s most-frequently performed work. It’s been used in countless movies and television shows – “Gallipoli” comes to mind – and it is included in just about any collection of greatest hits of the Baroque.
The thing is, did Albinoni really write it?
Curiously, for whatever reason, Giazotto never produced the actual manuscript from which he claimed to have reassembled the work. This has led to a widespread belief that the piece is not by Albinoni at all, but Giazotto’s own creation. But if that’s indeed the case, why not own it? It’s beautiful music, man!
Perhaps he was afraid of being laughed out of academia. “Respectable” music at this point in time was teetering into the avant-garde. At the very least, it wasn’t tonal.
Interestingly, following Giazotto’s death, one of his assistants, Muska Mangano, did find the “Albinoni” fragments among his papers. In the upper right-hand corner of the page, there was a stamp corroborating that the source material had indeed once been stored in Dresden. However, the fragments had been transcribed in a modern hand. It’s assumed that this was the source from which Giazotto worked.
The original Albinoni manuscript has yet to be recovered. Clearly, there is still a fair amount of mystery surrounding the true provenance of this timeless, haunting classic.
So once more, an assessment of Albinoni manages to focus very little on the merits of his own achievements! Nothing about the cantatas. Nothing about the operas, which nobody knows.
Still, if people are still talking about him 270 years after his death, he must have done something right.
Happy birthday, Tomaso Albinoni!
The Albinoni Adagio
A whole mess of Albinoni “concerti a cinque” performed by I Musici
It may be Haydn’s birthday, but one of my favorite stories about the composer actually involves his remains. Marvel at the weird tale of Haydn’s skull and how it was kept separate from his body for 145 years – and about how the Father of the Symphony currently rests with two heads.
