Georg Joseph Vogler (1749-1814)
- Concerto (F-Dur) per il Clavicembalo
previously attributed to
Joseph Haydn as Hob XVIII: F1
Performers: Robert Veyron-Lacroix (1922-1991, cembalo); Orchestre De La
Société Des Concerts Du Conservatoire; Kurt Redel (1918-2013, conductor)
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German composer, keyboardist, and pedagogue. He received his earliest
training from his father, a maker of musical instruments, later
transferring to the Jesuit Gymnasium in Würzburg, where he matriculated
at the university in law in 1763. In 1766 he moved to Bamberg to study
theology, and in 1771 he was offered the position of almoner at the
Electoral court of Mannheim. Two years later he was sent on a grand tour
of Italy to study with Padre Giovanni Battista Martini and Padre
Francesco Vallotti, eventually finding his way to Rome where he built a
reputation as a keyboard player and was named a papal legate with the
title of Abbé. In 1775 he returned to Mannheim, where he opened a school
of music and published two treatises on music theory, Tonwissenschaft
und Tonsetzkunst and Stimmbildungskunst. A monthly journal outlining his
theoretical concepts, the Betrachtungen einer Mannheimer Tonschule,
followed 1778-81. By 1780 he had appeared in Paris and later London,
from which he was recruited to Stockholm as director musices. Following
the successful performance of his opera Gustaf Adolph och Ebba Brahe, he
often went abroad on concert tours, traveling as far afield as
Gibraltar, Greece, and North Africa. In 1793, following the death of his
rival Joseph Martin Kraus, he returned to Stockholm where he founded
another school of composition, eventually being pensioned off in 1799.
Over the next several years he traveled extensively, making his home in
Copenhagen, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, and Munich. In 1807, he was offered a
permanent position as ecclesiastical counselor and Kapellmeister in the
city of Darmstadt, where his pupils included Giacomo Meyerbeer and Carl
Maria von Weber. A colorful figure who excelled at intrigue, he was
often accused of being a charlatan, particularly when publishing music
reputed to have come from exotic locations (such as the “Greenlandic”
song “Døle vise” or the Chinese rondo Cheu-teu) or performing upon
instruments of his own invention that included pyrotechnics. His
mannerisms did not gainsay this reputation, but his contributions,
particularly toward the field of music theory and orchestration, were
seminal in music history. As a composer, his more than 600 works include
14 operas, four ballets, incidental music for a variety of plays
(including Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Skjöldebrand’s Herman von Unna), 14
Masses, 60 Mass movements, a large amount of sacred music, a massive
Requiem, 30 songs and small cantatas, four symphonies (one, in C major
subtitled “Scalan” that was revised to include a chorus as the “Bavarian
National Symphony”), 11 piano concertos, a horn concerto, 30 piano
trios, 10 string quartets, 112 preludes for organ, and a plethora of
smaller sonatas and miscellaneous pieces. His works often foreshadow the
following century in their sense of orchestral color. The music was
cataloged by his biographer Emil von Schafhäutl in 1888.
