Un portal on escoltar i gaudir de l'art musical dels segles XVI, XVII, XVIII i XIX. Compartir la bellesa de la música és l'objectiu d'aquest espai i fer-ho donant a conèixer obres de compositors molt o poc coneguts és el mètode.
Slovenian composer. In 1749 he was mentioned in the register of the
Jesuit University in Graz. In 1757 he went to Kamnik near Ljubljana as a
music teacher and by 1773 he was referred to as Civis chori regens. He
is likely to have taken part in the activities of the Accademische
Confoederation Sanctae Caeciliae, a church music society which existed
at Kamnik between 1731 and 1784. Some time during the 1780s he wrote the
opera Belin, which would make it the first opera of its kind in
Slovene, and among the first to be written in any Slavonic language.
Zupan’s surviving works show that he was close to the style of the
mid-18th-century South German School of church music.
Bohemian composer. He studied the oboe with Besozzi in Dresden, then
became a grenadier in the 50th Infantry regiment, apparently joining it
at Eger in 1762; the regiment was later at Vienna (from 1763), Enns
(1764), Linz (c.1771) and Braunau (1775). From 1768 to 1775 Druschetzky
was a regimental musician and towards the end of his service a
Kapellmeister. His first known composition is a Symphony in G dated 1770
in Linz, where he also published a Concertino in G for harpsichord by
F.X. Dušek. On 15 April 1777 he became a bestallter Landschaftspauker
(‘certified regional drummer’) in the public service of Upper Austria,
conducting the musical performances on official occasions in Linz. In
about 1783 he may have moved to Vienna, where he was a member of the
Tonkünstler-Societät. In 1786 or 1787 he entered the service of Count
Anton Grassalkovics at Pressburg (Bratislava), where he directed and
provided music for the wind band. Following the count’s death in 1794 he
was employed by Cardinal Battyány in Pest at his country estate at
Rechnitz. By 1802 he was music director and composer for the wind octet
of Archduke Joseph Anton Johann in Budapest, city where he died in 1819.
Much of Druschetzky’s output consists of Harmoniemusik. His musical
language is slightly anachronistic, employing an early Classical style.
His music displays a competent, if undistinguished, response to melody
and harmony and his forms are short and devoid of melodic extension. His
textures, however, often feature unusual sonorities and daring
concertante passages, especially for wind instruments. The second
movement of the fourth of his last six oboe quartets (in H-Bn) contains
an early use of the B–A–C–H motif.
German composer, political writer and writer on music. Son of a
lutenist, Johann Reichardt (c.1720-1780), he received his early musical
education from his father, as well as Franz Veichtner and Carl Gottlieb
Richter. He attended Königsberg university, where he became acquainted
with the philosophy of Emanuel Kant, but in 1771 he embarked on an
extensive tour of Germany to further his own musical education. In 1775
he applied for and won the post of Kapellmeister to Frederick II though
he had little experience in musical composition, and in 1777 he married
Julianne Benda, daughter of Franz Benda and composer in her own right.
Tours to Italy and Vienna in 1783 (where he became friends with Joseph
Martin Kraus) as well as France and England in 1785 both broadened his
education and served to implement a Concert spirituel in Berlin. In 1791
he retired to his country home in Giebichenstein due to illness, and
shortly thereafter he was denounced as a revolutionary. After the
Napoleonic invasion, he was offered the post of musical director in
Kassel, but he spent the last years of his life in poverty. Reichardt
can be seen as one of the most intellectual composers of the period. His
views on musical life, published as a series of letters, evoke Charles
Burney, while his 1774 'Über die deutsche komische Oper' must be seen as
a seminal work on the genre. He was close friends with Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe and Friedrich von Schiller, working with the former in 1789
on the Singspiel Claudine von Villa Bella. His musical style is often
dramatic, with orchestration that foreshadows the Romantic period, and
he can be considered both an adherent of the Sturm und Drang style and
one of the principal composers of Lieder of the Berlin School. His
compositions include 1500 Lieder, 29 operas (mostly Singspiels), 11 sets
of incidental music to plays, two ballets, two oratorios, 13 German
cantatas, a Requiem, two Te Deums, eight Psalms, nine symphonies, 11
concertos (nine for keyboard), three quintets, a quartet, 15 trios, 26
keyboard sonatas, 16 violin sonatas, and over 100 horn duets.
Italian composer. He began his musical activity in Tuscany and Liguria.
One of his first operas, 'Il semplice riflessivo e gli astuti furiosi',
was performed in 1798 at the Teatro della Pallacorda in Florence. In
1807 he settled in Cagliari where he was active as a 'maestro al
cembalo' at the Regio Teatro and from the following year at the Cappella
Civica and again at the Regio Teatro, but now as a composer. In June
1810 he moved to Sassari, where he held the position of 'maestro di
cappella' of the Sassari's Cathedral, post he preserved until his death
in 1820. During his stay in Sassari he wrote two operas, a festive
cantata and some liturgical works, among them the foremost 'Messa a tre
voci con accompagnamento di piena orchestra' (1805).
English composer, organist, theorist and painter. He was an exceptional
child prodigy and became one of the most distinguished English musicians
of his day. Crotch was the youngest son of Michael Crotch, a master
carpenter, and his wife Isabella. At the age of about 18 months he began
to pick out tunes on a small house organ which his father had built,
and soon after his second birthday he had taught himself to play God
Save the King with the bass. He played to a large company at Norwich in
February 1778, and that summer his mother began taking him on a series
of tours in which his phenomenal gifts were exploited. On 1 January 1779
he played to the king and queen at Buckingham Palace. He could
transpose into any key, and name all four notes in a chord by ear.
Burney described his abilities in a report to the Royal Society on 18
February 1779. He then toured the British Isles appearing several times
in Scotland. He could play the organ, piano and violin, had already
begun to compose, and was also talented in drawing and painting. On a
visit to Leicester he played to William Gardiner, who reported that he
could read Handel’s organ concertos at sight. In 1779 he made the
acquaintance of two other infant prodigies, Charles and Samuel Wesley,
who established that he could distinguish between mean-tone and natural
scales. Samuel Wesley and Crotch remained lifelong friends. From 1786 to
1788 he was at Cambridge, as assistant to Professor Randall. In
September 1790 Crotch was appointed organist of Christ Church, Oxford,
while still only 15 years old. From 1793 he began deputizing for the
professor of music, Philip Hayes, as the conductor of the Music Room
concerts, which he continued to direct until 1806. He took the degree of
BMus on 5 June 1794, and that of DMus on 21 November 1799.
In March 1797 he succeeded Hayes as professor of music and organist of
St John’s College and the university church of St Mary the Virgin. In
1806–7 he withdrew from Oxford, resigning his organistships, and settled
in London. In London he became well known as a teacher, composer and
scholar. His appearances as a soloist were infrequent but remarkable. He
sometimes played one of his organ concertos at a benefit concert. He
conducted the Birmingham Festival in 1808, and frequently directed
concerts of the Philharmonic Society in London, of which he had become
an associate on its foundation in 1813. Between 1812 and 1823 he gave
courses annually at the Surrey Institution and during the 1820s at the
Royal Institution and London Institution. On the establishment of the
Royal Academy of Music in 1822 Crotch was appointed its principal. He
resigned the principalship on 21 June 1832. In retirement he devoted
himself to sketching, composing and writing on all manner of subjects,
especially for the benefit of his young nephews, nieces and
grandchildren. He would sometimes visit his son, the Rev. W.R. Crotch,
who was master of the grammar school, Taunton; it was during one such
visit that he died. The evidence of Crotch’s precocity is incontestable,
being based in part on contemporary printed accounts in many sources,
including those of such qualified observers as Barrington and Burney.
The fact that Crotch’s ultimate achievement as a composer hardly lived
up to this promise may perhaps be put down to the psychological damage
he suffered as a child. Crotch himself later confessed: ‘I look back on
this part of my life with pain and humiliation … I was becoming a spoilt
child and in danger of becoming what too many of my musical brethren
have become under similar circumstances and unfortunately remained
through life’.
