Peter von Winter (1754-1825)
- Concertino per il Fagotto (c.1800)
Performers: Patrick de Ritis (bassoon); Bratislava chamber soloists; Michael Dittrich (conductor)
---
German composer. He was a pupil of several of the Mannheim court musicians, including the elder Thomas Hampel, and as a boy showed outstanding gifts as a violinist; at the age of ten he was playing in the court orchestra, and subsequently his services were employed on the double bass as well as the violin. In 1776 he had a permanent post as a violinist. Although he had no lessons in composition, he seems at this early stage of his career to have been active as a composer of instrumental music. He was briefly a pupil of the vice-Kapellmeister at Mannheim, G.J. Vogler (who later founded the Mannheim Tonschule), but later dissociated himself from him. Winter’s work in the orchestra also brought him into contact with contemporary opera, particularly opere serie by J.C. Bach and also Anton Schweitzer’s Alceste and Ignaz Holzbauer’s Günther von Schwarzburg, and with the melodramas of Georg Benda, which were exciting much attention. In 1778 the electoral court, with all its musical personnel, moved to Munich, where Winter became director of the orchestra. In this capacity he was responsible, in particular, for conducting the opéras comiques that the Marchand troupe performed in German translation at the ‘deutsche Schaubühne’. The lively cultural atmosphere of Munich was a stimulus to his general outlook as well as to his musical development; and at this time he first met Mozart, whose Idomeneo was given in Munich in 1781. He began to compose for the stage, writing ballets, and melodramas modelled on Benda. A concert tour with the clarinettist Franz Tausch took him to Vienna (1780-81), where he learned from Salieri the Italian bel canto manner, a style whose flowing cantabile he mastered to perfection. In Vienna he also made contact again with Mozart – though evidently in somewhat strained circumstances (see Mozart’s letter to his father, 22 December 1781).
Soon after his return to Munich, in 1782, he made his début as an opera composer with Helena und Paris, but this work was unsuccessful, as was Bellerophon (1785). He was appointed vice-Kapellmeister in 1787, and in 1798 became court Kapellmeister, a post he held until his death. Despite his initial lack of success he continued to compose operas, and several times took extended leave from Munich in an attempt to make a name for himself in various centres as an opera composer. He visited Naples and Venice between 1791 and 1794 and Prague and Vienna from 1795 to 1798, and it was in Vienna that he achieved his first decisive success with Das unterbrochene Opferfest (1796). From then on he enjoyed a high reputation well beyond Munich, though the next operas he wrote for Munich were received with little enthusiasm. He was particularly pained by the failure of the heroic opera Colmal (1809), which he regarded as his most successful work. In 1804 and 1805 three new operas (all settings of texts by Da Ponte) were well received in London, but Tamerlan (1802) and Castor et Pollux (1806; a translation of Il trionfo dell'amor fraterno) met with cool receptions in Paris. In his later years Winter devoted himself increasingly to composing church music and to teaching singing, and in 1825 he recorded his teaching method in the Vollständige Singschule. To mark his completion of 50 years in court service in 1814 he was decorated and granted a personal title of nobility. In 1816 he embarked on a concert tour of northern Germany and Italy with his pupil Clara Metzger-Vespermann, later a celebrated singer, during the course of which he directed three of his operas in Milan in 1817 and 1818. His last opera for Munich was the Singspiel Der Sänger und der Schneider (1820), but he remained active until his last years as a composer of church music.
hermoso concierto, muchas gracias ...
ResponEliminaUn placer!!
Elimina