Tempesta di Mare revives Janitsch

The surprising return of Johann Gottlieb Janitsch

TOM PURDOM

When artists contemplate the possibility of immortality— as they occasionally do— they tend to think they can achieve it only by swinging for the fences every time they create something. If you want to produce lasting work, many artists feel, you must compete with titans like Beethoven or Tolstoy.

But consider Johann Gottlieb Janitsch, a court composer for one of the most musical and warlike monarchs in European history, Frederick the Great of Prussia. In the middle of the 18th Century, Janitsch wrote some pleasing, skillfully varied, musically interesting pieces for a small private gathering. And 250 years later, thousands of miles from the site of his patron’s salon, an audience spent a very satisfying evening listening to his work.

The Soviet Union did something right

The Tempesta di Mare program was labeled “Rescued by the Red Army” because the five manuscripts had been removed from a German institution at the end of World War II, preserved in the Soviet Union, and returned to Germany in 2001. Tempesta di Mare’s co-director, lutenist Richard Stone, argued in his program notes that the Soviets should get credit for preserving it. In the USSR, the manuscripts were stored in acid-free boxes in a climate-controlled facility; in Germany, before their removal, they’d been stacked in open piles. Stone had journeyed to their new (and properly set up) home in Germany and copied the music by hand.

So what did we hear? Was it worth all that effort?

As a matter of fact, it was. As Stone said in his notes, Janitsch is a transitional figure. His work combines the melodies and light pleasures of the late 18th Century rococo period with the counterpoint of the true Baroque.

Picture this setting

The opening notes of the program’s first sonata— a piece for flute, violin, viola, cello and harpsichord— were a perfect example of the warm graciousness that is, for me, one of the chief attractions of Baroque music. You couldn’t hear these pieces without visualizing the private, cultivated setting they were written for.

The second sonata was a little feast of melody, with a roster that included jaunty melodies, rustic melodies, and marching melodies.

Janitsch made especially good use of that irresistibly attractive instrument, the Baroque oboe— an instrument that’s mellower and less penetrating than the modern oboe, but capable of rising above its partners like a trumpet.

A flair for the viola

When Frederick’s military enterprises diverted money from his artistic interests, Janitsch supplemented his income by composing for a salon run by Sara Levi, the daughter of one of Frederick’s bankers. She was fond of the viola and Janitsch took her taste into account. For many composers, the viola is primarily an instrument that fills in the middle harmonies. Janitsch wrote viola parts that placed it on an equal footing with its colleagues. Violist Karina Fox played in four of the five pieces and filled a major role in all four.

The audience wasn’t remarkably large, of course. Tempesta di Mare probably attracted two or three hundred people, at most, to each of its performances. The audience for 18th-Century music played on period instruments is small and specialized. But wouldn’t you love to think something you created could warm a few hundred hearts a couple of centuries from now?