MÚSICA A TRES

CARL PHILIPP EMANUEL BACH

• LA TEMPESTAD | GUILLERMO PEÑALVER, traverso - ANTONIO CLARES, viola da braccio - SILVIA MÁRQUEZ CHULILLA, harpsichord

• ARSIS 4202 2009 | DL HU 184/2009

Three jewels that look galant but are libertarian in structure: the quartets Wq.93, 94 and 95. Written in 1788, the last year of Carl Philipp Emanuel's life, they form a kind of testament from a composer who, now far from the demands of the court, enjoyed complete freedom to write chamber music close to the fantasia, the genre he considered best suited to expressing human passions.

The autograph manuscript, preserved in the Singakademie in Berlin, bears Bach's own title “Quartett fürs Klavier, Flöte und Bratsche”, which, as a wink, is like saying “quartets for three”. La Tempestad has indeed chosen three, understanding that three performers bring four lines to life: the two of viola and flute, and the two of the harpsichord when it moves from its role as basso continuo (accompanist) to “obbligato harpsichord”, with its part written for both hands.

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714-1788) Cuarteto en La menor, Wq. 93 (1788) o1. Andantino o2. Largo e sostenuto o3. Allegro assai Cuarteto en Re mayor Wq.94 (1788) 04. Allegretto 05. Adagio 06. Allegro molto Cuarteto en Sol mayor Wq.95 (1788) 07. Allegretto 08. Adagio 09. Presto Sonata en trío en Fa mayor Wq. 163 10. Un poco andante 11. Allegretto 12. Allegro

"The version is absolutely exemplary, with a perfectly structured and coherently presented musical discourse, full of brilliance, virtuosity, energy and forcefulness. If there is anyone who still feels wary of the music of C. P. E. Bach, let them get hold of this album and they will very probably change their mind."

Salustio Alvarado | RITMO

"Be that as it may, the ensemble La Tempestad, which has recorded these singular ‘quartets for three’ along with a trio sonata, has preferred to do so with harpsichord, thus showcasing the fine work of Silvia Márquez, alongside the limpid phrasing of Guillermo Peñalver's flute and the powerful sonic cohesion of the viola, played by Antonio Clares. The result is a delight to listen to."

Antonio Díaz Bautista | LA VERDAD

"The performance is of overwhelming delicacy and exquisite taste. An album to listen to again and again without ever tiring of it."

Eduardo Torrico | CD COMPACT

"This time we are witnessing a most remarkable contribution from the frankly fabulous ensemble La Tempestad: three incredible scores that Emanuel composed in 1788, that is, in the last year of his life."

Pablo Del Pozo | DIVERDI

"The three-legged texture that turns ‘quartet’ into a hindrance, the half-mirrors and reflections, the never strict imitations, the unexpected silences... everything in these pieces is overflowing imagination, feigned disorder and loving attention to detail."

Pablo Del Pozo | DIVERDI

"Splendid instrumentalists make up the ensemble for the occasion: the flautist Guillermo Peñalver, the viola player Antonio Clares and the harpsichordist Silvia Márquez, the latter especially praiseworthy in handling an instrument that, given the dynamic demands of the score, seems to call for the presence of a pianoforte."

José Luis Fernández | SCHERZO

"Its Cuarteto en Sol mayor stands out for the lightness and taste in phrasing displayed by Guillermo Peñalver and Silvia Márquez. By contrast, the deep expressiveness of the Adagio, in which the harpsichord becomes the undisputed protagonist, leaves us breathless."

Olalla Martín | AUDIO CLÁSICA

Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach, or Killing the Father

In 1925 Viaje por el Norte de África was published, a brief and splendid account of the wanderings through Morocco of an already mature Hugo von Hofmannsthal, remembered above all for the no small merit of having been the librettist of several of Richard Strauss's finest operas. In one of its chapters, La conversación en Salé, set in the twin city of Rabat, one of the characters voices his doubts about German complication, which would make it impossible to like Schumann once Wagner had existed, or make a taste for Schumann unimaginable after the existence of Bach [1].

There is no doubt that the Bach to whom the story refers is Bach, Johann Sebastian. There is no record that father and son were compared in that conversation, but would that same German complication not have made an appreciation of Carl Philipp's music impossible after the existence of Johann Sebastian? “We have only one Bach, whose extremely original technique belongs to him alone”, wrote the chronicler Johann Friedrich Reichardt, another German. Did he mean Sebastian? No: the praise was addressed to his son, since by then the father had been almost forgotten.

It is hard to imagine that Reichardt had any comparative intention, both because the father had been forgotten and because of the sheer difficulty of the comparison, for the musical distance between father and son is undoubtedly greater than that between the medina of Fez [2] that Hofmannsthal visited almost a century ago and the one we can see today, still a genuine inhabited medieval city.

Not without mischief, Octavi Rofes recently recalled Arnold Schönberg's suspicion about the authorship of the Thema Regium that the young Frederick II of Prussia offered Johann Sebastian in Potsdam for an improvised fugue in six voices. The extreme contrapuntal difficulty of its writing, which would have far exceeded the king's abilities, led Schönberg to cast an accusing glance towards Carl Philipp, who would thus have avenged himself for the excesses of rigour and severity of his father.

Killing the father: here, then, is a musical settling of scores. But also a hinge on which two quite different eras turn. Sebastian himself was aware that his music closed an age, that his style had gone out of fashion. What came to be admired was the galant style, the Empfindsamkeit, the rococo. The generation of his sons, certainly the most innovative among them and first of all Carl Philipp, responding fittingly to the climate of the time, led music towards different worlds, making the emergence of Classicism possible.

The tireless traveller Charles Burney saw it lucidly: “Of all the composers who for more than thirty years have been in the service of the King of Prussia, only two, C. P. E. Bach and Franz Benda, have had the courage to be original; the others are nothing but imitators.” Nor is the well-known Arabic proverb far from the deeper truth, which proclaims that sons resemble their time more than their fathers.

In contrast to the father's constructive vigour, with its scholastic fugues and severe counterpoint, there appears a simpler, kinder, more natural and spontaneous expression, steeped in the pre-Romantic sentimentalism of the Sturm und Drang, though without lapsing into mawkishness. The sensitive gaze of Laurence Sterne in Viaje sentimental por Francia e Italia would be a kind of literary equivalent. And humour appears too. In an interview I conducted with him years ago [3], Bob van Asperen pointed out that it is clear Carl Philipp did not take from his father the idea of emotions in music, and that what he added was something important: ‘I am the first to have expressed l’humour in music’.

Carl Philipp's music is unstable, fragile, brittle, subject to abrupt changes of mood, always on the verge of rupture, volatile and full of contrasts. Variety, virtuosity and experimental exploration are frequent features of his compositions, and such openness to innovation did not desert him even in the very last stretch of his long life, as the exuberance of the trios Wq. 93 and 95 proves. Its feverish, agitated character demands an equally vehement spirit from its performers. Yet without losing rigour of construction, it achieves the feat of being at once delightful and coquettish music.

Thus the world advances: the son of the greatest master of counterpoint renounces him and gives himself over to galant music, becoming in this way one of the greatest innovators in music.

Far from regarding him as a diluted Bach, we should value him for what he really is: a modern composer in the best sense, a forerunner of the artist's expressive freedom. And, alongside that, precisely because of it, a point of reference for uncertain times and for a world in disorder. To be enjoyed in homeopathic doses.

Ambrosio Lacosta

[1] I quote from the Alba edition (2001).

[2] Whose description occupies one of the best stories in the book.

[3] It was published in the first issue of the magazine Goldberg, together with the powerful images captured by the Leicas of Koldo Chamorro.

Quartets for Three

In December 1788 Carl Philip Emanuel Bach died, having become a true spiritual guide to the great masters of Classicism. “He was the father; we are the children”, wrote Mozart, who that very summer had composed his spectacular final symphonic trilogy, with which he seemed to open up to a world of new sensations and emotions. But 1788 was also the year of Haydn's Cuartetos Op. 54/55, crucial works in the development of chamber music, which thus took the path of brilliance and drama, at the same time expanding its palette of colours by embracing a wider variety of keys. A crucial moment, then, in the development of European musical creation, heralding the advent of a new style, the Romantic (whose starting point many present-day authors place in 1789, the decisive year of the Revolution), that Romanticism which already throbbed in the expressiveness of the empfindsamer style or in the turbulence of the Sturm und Drang, with which Emanuel Bach had been so familiar.

And with which he remained familiar until his last breath, as the three Cuartetos on this album show; they were also written in 1788 as a masterly culmination of their composer's dedication to chamber music. The autograph manuscript is preserved in the Singakademie in Berlin, and in it Bach himself writes: “Quartett fürs Klavier, Flöte und Bratsche”. Later, on the title page, Carl Friedrich Zelter, that intimate friend of Goethe and one of the few men who had the privilege of addressing the brilliant author of Fausto with the familiar “du”, noted: “Drey Quartette für Fortepiano, Flute und Bratsche”. This is very interesting, for it reveals the aesthetic and social circumstances of the turn of the century (there is no record of the date of Zelter's annotation), which, like a historical hinge, would bring about the progressive sidelining of the aristocratic harpsichord in favour of the bourgeois piano (hence the change from the generic klavier, which at the time referred to any keyboard instrument, to the specific fortepiano).

It is strikingly noteworthy that, despite its title, the score calls for only three instruments (in the autograph parts they are named in Italian: flauto, viola, clavicembalo), and this although Bach had added “und bass” (“with bass”) in his personal catalogue. One of the first to be surprised must have been Johann Heinrich Westphal, a pupil and great admirer of the composer, who had requested the works with the intention of copying them (and indeed, his copy is the second source in which these pieces have survived). When he wrote to the family asking about the bass part, the reply from one of Bach's daughters was clear: “There is no other bass part than that of the keyboard; otherwise your Excellency would have received it along with the rest”. It is clear that at the time genres were classified not by the number of performers but by the number of musical voices, but does the writing for harpsichord here justify the four parts of the quartet? Certainly, subtle traces of what might be a basso continuo appear from time to time in the left hand of the keyboard, but overall the brilliance and modernity of the writing, with no discontinuity between the two hands, points for most of the time to a texture in three parts. Does that mean that Bach assumed a fourth instrumentalist (a cellist, perhaps) would have sufficient ability to improvise the bass line, or perhaps the composer did not think it fitting to shed entirely the conventions of that venerable support of the continuo, even though his aesthetic imagination was already anchored in the present, not only in spirit but also formally, and even pointed resolutely towards the future of his art?

The interpretative option chosen here is therefore perfectly consistent with the nature of the works and offers the added interest of showing the possibilities of the harpsichord in such late music, including its capacity for contrasts of dynamics, a challenge that Bach constantly sets it. The idiomatic writing for the instruments stands out equally in every kind of texture (and the Cuartetos present every possible combination), pitting their sonorities against one another and blending them with the same artistic poise. If in the outer movements the formal principles of sonata and rondo dominate (which places the music in purest Classicism), the rhapsodic and expressive character of the slow movements verges on the most dreamy Romantic tone in moments such as the Adagio of the Cuarteto en sol mayor, with a very special prominence given to the keyboard. Traces of a strongly expressive intent are also found, for example, in Bach's use of silences in the first movement of the Cuarteto en re mayor, which on numerous occasions leaves the listener's spirit suspended, or in the final three bars of that same movement, an unexpected slow transition to the Adagio, as well as in a bold planning of modulations, which are especially surprising in the sweetly nostalgic first movement of the Cuarteto en la menor. The ability to weave extensive developments from small melodic cells that Bach demonstrates in the outer movements of the Cuarteto en sol mayor also undoubtedly earns him a place of honour among the great architects of sound.

The Sonata en fa mayor Wq. 163, dated around 1755, belongs instead to the thoroughly baroque genre of the trio sonata, although it presents a somewhat singular structure, since it does not follow Corelli's scheme of four or more movements, nor the typical Vivaldian three-part form (fast/slow/fast), for the piece progressively gathers speed (Un poco andante – Allegretto – Allegro). The work was originally written for bass recorder, viola and basso continuo, although here the flute voice is taken by a traverso, which gives its part greater presence and lends its dialogue with the viola more agility and brilliance. The double cadenza (viola and flute) included at the end of the first movement is an excerpt from those that Emanuel Bach himself published as an example for his piano concertos.

Pablo J. Vayón