On Josef Mertin's recordings of the Brandenburg Concertos

When, in 1950, post-war Europe, whose political and cultural scene had been mercilessly divided by the Iron Curtain, was commemorating the 200th anniversary of the death of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), the festivities were borne in the spirit of numerous symbolic connotations. They were aimed at re-embracing the most valuable assets of conflict-debased German art, as well as celebrating Bach’s universally comprehensible musical language. The festivities were particularly vigorous in war-ravaged, divided Germany and neighbouring Austria, whose music centres of Salzburg and Vienna saw the Bach anniversary as am opportunity to hold numerous commemorative events and concerts. The Bach jubilee was not overlooked by the Czechoslovak music publisher Supraphon, which duly implemented a project that would have no parallel in the country in the years to follow. Making the best of the composer’s anniversary, the company utilised the repertoire in the record catalogue, the post-war availability of fledgling Viennese artists and its contacts with the musical circles in the Austrian capital. In the 1950s. Supraphon produced a host of remarkable recordings, primarily featuring core Czech 19th- and 20th-century music, with many of them catching the attention of critics and discerning listeners abroad. From the late 1950s, Supraphon’s success was increased in part owing to the engagement of renowned foreign conductors and instrumentalists, including those hailing from beyond the Eastern bloc (John Barbirolli, Jean Fournet, Antonio Pedrotti, and others). Nevertheless, at the time, none of the state publisher’s projects came into being outside the country, and without the participation of Czechoslovak artists, as had been the case of the recording of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, BWV 1046-1051 (1718-1721), made in Vienna in 1950.

The history of the album started in the heart of the Broumov Promontory in the northeast of Bohemia by the Czech-Polish (until 1945, Czech-German) border. In March 1904, Josef Mertin (b. 21.3.1904 Broumov, d. 16.2.1998 Vienna) was born into a German family living next to the Benedictine Monastery. Following his graduation from the local grammar school, where he had received thorough training in singing, the violin, piano and organ, and a brief spell as a music teacher in his remote native town (1922-1925), in 1925 he received a scholarship from the company Benedikt Schroll’s Sohn and moved to Vienna in order to study voice and sacred music at the Wiener Musikakademie. While in the Austrian capital, in 1927 and 1928 he formed a chamber orchestra and passed exams in church music and pedagogy, and in 1928 he graduated as Kapellmeister from the Neues Wiener Konservatorium. Mertin concurrently attended musicology seminars at the Universität Wien. In 1928, at the age of 24, he made his debut with the Wiener Kammerorchestervereinigung; from 1932 he conducted Hans Gál’s Madrigalchor (1890-1987); and in 1933 he founded his own instrumental ensemble, Collegium musicum Wiener Musikakademie.
At the end ofthe 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s, in addition to new contemporary music and Bach pieces (the Saint Matthew Passion, on period instruments), Mertin also performed compositions by Guillaume de Machaut (c. 1300-1377), whose moderntiine premieres in Vienna caused quite a stir, as well as by his beloved Heinrich Schütz. He taught at the Kapellmeisterschule and the Neues Wiener Konservatorium (1928-1938), the Wiener Volskhochschule (1932-1938), and at the Musikakademie (1937-1938). In 1950 he left the Konservatorium der Stadt Wien so as to continue teaching at the Musikakademie (1946-1978) and organ restoring (from 1931 he worked at the Federal Monuments Office), to carry out research into the building of historical musical instruments and put together a collection of early instruments at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Evidently the most intriguing of his activities were Mertin’s experimental early music performances at the Hofburgkapelle and the Albertina gallery (from 1934, he held his own concert series at the Festsaal der Graphischen Sammlung der Albertina). His achievements in the domains of music, education, organisation. restoration and collecting earned him the title of Professor, the Cross of Honour for Science and Art (1960), the Gold Medal of Merit for the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna (1989), and the Silver Medal of Merit of the Republic of Austria (1994).
Before Josef Mertin died at the age of 93, he could not only look back fondly at his long life filled with music and pioneering work focused on its early stylistic periods, he was also able to observe with pride the progress of his numerous pupils (Claudio Abbado, Mariss Jansons, Zubin Mehta, and others), many of whom had been enticed by his unconventional teaching methods and imbued with a passionate ardour for early music. The New Testament’s "For many are called, but few are chosen" (Matthew 22:14) also applied to Mertin’s students, the majority of whom could only put up with his not overly systematic educational methods for a few lessons. Yet those who did remain faithful to Mertin’s apostolic verve and rccondite pedagogic techniques embraced performance of early music on period instruments and copies in the post-war decades so fiercely that they almost condemned their teacher's name to becoming a mere encyclopaedia entry. The most gifted of Mertin’s pupils in the late 1940s included the Austrian violinist Eduard Melkus (b. 1.9.1928 in Baden an Wien), who in 1946 assumed the post of concert master of Mertin’s Collegium musicum and served his teacher as a faithful and practical guide through the vieissitudes of the music scene in Vienna (from 1951 to 1953, he studied in Switzerland with the Vienna-born violinist of Czech origin Petr Rybář, a friend of Bohuslav Martinů). Melkus also followed in Mertin’s footsteps by founding early-music ensembles, Schola antiqua Wien (1952) and Capella academica Wien (1965), and finally, as a professor of the violin, viola, Baroque violin and historically informed early-music performance at the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien (1958-1996).
When in the autumn of 1950, following years spent at the Schola cantoruin basiliensis in Basel (1947-1950), the gifted Dutch organist and harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt (1928-2012) arrived in Vienna to study musicology, he immediately joined Mertin’s early-music seminar attended by a number of antagonistic talents. Mertin’s students also included the gifted recorder player Elisabeth-Liesel Schaeftlein (1927-1993), a Graz native and sister of Jürg Schaeftlein (1929-1986), the legendary oboist of Concentus musicus Wien (1953). Probably in 1948, she introduced to Mertin and his disciple Melkus her gangly compatriot Nikolaus Harnoncourt (1929-2016), who from 1948 studied the cello with Emanuel Brabec at the Musikakademie. Had Elisabeth-Liesel Schaeftlein not done so, the young Harnoncourt would most likely have pursued the path of a solo instrumentalist, or “just” a player of the Wiener Philharmoniker, performing Dvořák’s and Strauss’s music, instead of becoming one of the major figures of historically informed early music performance of the second half of the 20th century. Had it not been for Elisabeth-Liesel Schaeftlein, in 1950 Mertin’s student team, extended for the sake of the imminent recording of the Brandenburg Concertos with a group of players of the Kammerorchester of the Wiener Konzerthausgesellschaft, who for its time and in comparison with other Viennese orchestras had an unusually high proportion of female members, would have had to do without the cellist Harnoncourt.
The talented recorder student Elisabeth-Liesel Schaeftlein, the rising violin star Eduard Melkus, the hitherto unknown cellist Nikolaus Harnoncourt and the subtle Gustav Leonhardt, in the company of members of the Wiener Kammerorchester (l 946), got together in the studio to make under the guidance of Melkus a groundbreaking album of the Brandenburg Concertos. The project had been preceded by the complete recordings made by Alfred Cortot (1932, Orchestre de l’Ecole Normale de Musique) and Adolf Busch (1936, Adolf Busch Chamber Players), as well as accounts of individual pieces, including, for instance, Wilhelm Furtwängler’s live recordings of Brandenburg Concertos Nos. 3 and 5 with the Wiener Philharrnoniker at the Salzburger Festspiele in 1950. Yet, some two centuries after Bach’s death, Josef Mertin decided to take a revolutionary step and perform the flagship work - a "showcase of the composer's instrumental mastery" (N. Harnoncourt) - in a chamber formation, making use of the instruments and applying the performance canon of Bach’s own time. "within the Baroque concerto genre, the concertos represent an ultimate apex; with regard to the instrumentation, they are true chamber music, unveiling their value in the more intimate milieu in which they were formerly performed too. Your gramophone recording (with its most natural use being for personal listening in a private circle) thus complies with the essential trait of this music," Mertin wrote to Supraphon after listening to the recordings that were being completed.
A number of the period instmments employed in Mertin`s recording of the Brandenburg Concertos were from his own collection, which was also made use of by the members of the Wiener Gamben-Quartett (1949): Melkus, Harnoncourt, Alfred Altenburger (1927-2015) and Alice Hoffelner (b. 26.9.1930), who would marry Harnoncourt in 1953. Instruments from the collection were also used by Gustav Leonhardt, who in Mertin’s recording of the Brandenburg Concertos played the viola da gamba (Brandenburg Concerto No. 6 in B flat major). By the way, the collection and an organ built by Mertin himself (organo di legno) were indispensable in the making of the generally better-known 1954 radio recording by Paul Hindemith of Claudio Monteverdi’s opera L'Orfeo, performed by Melkus and the oldest generation of the then not yet named historical instruments ensemble Concentus musicus Wien, helmed by Harnoncourt.
In addition to the minimalist configuration, made up of students of Mertin’s early music performance class and the members of die Wiener Kammerorchester, headed by the concert master Edith Steinbauer (1901-1996) and the cellist Frieda Litschauer-Krause (1903-1992), the wife of the orchestra’s founder, another natural facet of the pioneering 1950 recording was the adherence to the original instrumental structure of Bach`s Kothen orchestra, including two recorders in the fourth concerto, which up until the 1970s were commonly replaced with traverse flutes. Specific information about the instruments played in the individual Brandenburg Concertos has not been preserved, nor has the date on which the album was made. Yet Mertin’s studio recording is more than a mere sonic document of a revolutionary moment in the history of performing early music on modern and period instruments. Compared to the later projects of Viennese provenience - Jascha Horenstein’s, implemented in September 1954, using historical instruments (performed by Nikolaus Harnoncourt and members of Concentus musicus Wien), and the 1957 recording of Felix Prohaska conducting the members of the Kammerorehester der Wiener Staatsoper - Mertin’s account stands out owing to his endeavour for the utmost sonic transparency and precise leading of the instrument parts. Mertin also gave great thought to the tempos. Even though Horenstein opted for markedly faster tempos. Mertin’s account is strikingly akin to the first of the series of Harnoncourt’s recordings of the Brandenburg Concertos (1964, 1981/1983, 1982). Mertin’s dismissive attitude to the romanticising conception of Bach’s orchestral concertos is boldly audible in comparison with Furtwängler’s 1950 album: Whereas Furtwängler himself played the piano on Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 in D major (29:23), Mertin invited to perform on the harpsichord the technically superlative Bruno Seidlhofer (1905-1982) (22:38). Furtwängler turned Bach’s work into a Classicist-Romantic piano concerto, while Mertin returned to the dialogical character of the Baroque concerto.
"]osef Mertin was the father of all the endeavours to purge Romantic and Baroque music of romantic deposits and comfortable tradition," the conductor Milan Turković, bassoonist of Concentus musicus Wien, wrote years later. And bearing cogent witness to this is even the oldest of Mertin’s (precious few preserved) studio recordings, surprisingly made by the Czechoslovak label Supraphon. For the first time since its lirst release, on 12 shellac discs, in 1953, Mertin’s complete account (to whose final recording the (self-) critical Mertin took exception and, following the recording’s completion, he even offered to make for Supraphon new recordings, this time only with Collegium musicum) is now being presented to listeners on CD (in 2004, the year marking the centenary of Josef Mertin’s birth and the 75th birthday of Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Austria’s ORF radio station
released a selection of the Brandenburg Concertos Nos. 3, 4 and 6). Thus, after an interval of 66 years, music lovers are offered Mertin’s historically first recording of the Brandenburg Concertos in their entirety, as performed by his ensemble on modern and period instruments. The project serves to pay tribute to Mertin's visionary approach and express admiration for his followers, headed by Nikolaus Harnoncourt. The present unique album is also a proud reminder of their Czech connections.

Martin Jemelka
Translation: Hilda Hearne