diumenge, 8 de gener del 2023

KEISER, Reinhard (1674-1739) - Der hochmütige gestürtzte und wieder erhabene Croesus (1710)

Theodoor van Loon (1581-1649) - Adoration of the Magi


Reinhard Keiser (1674-1739) - Ausschnitte aus 'Der hochmütige gestürtzte und wieder erhabene Croesus' (1710)
Performers: Lisa Otto (1919-2013, soprano); Ursula Schirrmacher (soprano); Manfred Schmidt (tenor); Karl-Ernst Mercker (tenor); Hermann Prey (1929-1998, baritone); Theo Adam (1926-2019, bass); Günther Arndt-Chor; Ein Kinderchor; Die Berliner Philharmoniker; Wilhelm Brückner-Rüggeberg (1906-1985, conductor)

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German composer. He was the son of Gottfried Keiser (? - before 1732), an organist and composer, and Agnesa Dorothea von Etzdorff (1657-1732), who had married only four months before his birth. The elder Keiser seems to have lost or given up his position as organist at Teuchern in 1674 or 1675 and departed, leaving his wife and two sons behind. On 13 July 1685 Keiser enrolled at the Thomasschule, Leipzig, for seven years, and it was there presumably that he received his principal musical education, studying under Johann Schelle and perhaps Johann Kuhnau. Mattheson observed, however, that he owed his composing skill almost entirely to natural ability and the study of the best Italian music. After leaving the Thomasschule, Keiser probably soon made his way to Brunswick, where the court opera was flourishing under the leadership of Johann Kusser; by 1694 he had obtained an appointment as ‘Cammer-Componist’. His opera Procris und Cephalus, on a text by the court poet F.C. Bressand, was performed in Brunswick that year, while another opera, Basilius, was done in Hamburg. Between 1695 and 1698 Keiser produced five more operas for the Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel court, all with Bressand, but in 1696 or 1697 he moved to Hamburg as Kusser’s successor at the Opera. There he found one of his most sympathetic literary collaborators in C.H. Postel, with whom he wrote eight operas, including Adonis (1697), Janus (1698) and the lost Iphigenia (1699). Beginning in 1703 Keiser also tried his hand at managing the opera house, in partnership with a literary man named Drüsicke. According to Mattheson their administration got off to a good start but was soon beset by financial difficulties, at least partly precipitated by riotous living by Keiser and his friends. In spring 1704 the theatre was temporarily closed, and Keiser left briefly for Weissenfels, where he gave the first performance of his Almira, originally intended for Hamburg.

Drüsicke apparently passed on the Almira libretto to the youthful Handel, a member of the opera orchestra, who scored a great success with his own setting in January 1705, leading to strained relations between the two composers that no doubt contributed to Handel’s decision shortly afterwards to leave for Italy. Octavia (1705), Keiser’s first opera after returning from Weissenfels, inaugurated an important series of eight historical dramas with librettos by Barthold Feind. Following the final collapse of his administration in 1707, Keiser appears to have absented himself from the opera house for more than a year, passing much of his time visiting the estates of noble friends. He may not have participated in the highly successful première of Der Carneval von Venedig in summer 1707, and he composed no new work for 1708. Whatever rift may have existed between him and the new director, J.H. Sauerbrey, seems to have been healed by 1709, and his dominance over the Hamburg repertory became more complete than ever. In 1721 he may have conducted a performance of Tomyris in Durlach before returning to Hamburg, where his arrival was celebrated on 9 August with a performance of his oratorio Der siegende David. In 1725 and 1726, while Telemann composed relatively little for that theatre, Keiser turned out five major new works, two revised versions, and parts of two intermezzos. On 2 December 1728 Keiser succeeded Mattheson as Kantor of Hamburg Cathedral, an important post which nonetheless brought him meagre remuneration. He never again composed a wholly new opera, though he did revise Croesus in 1730. His diminished productivity probably had less to do with the demands of his ecclesiastical duties than with the increasingly sorry state of the Hamburg Opera, which finally closed its doors in 1738. After the death of his wife in 1735, he ‘found reason’ (in Mattheson’s words) ‘to remain completely in retirement’ until his own death four years later. 

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