Luogo e data di registrazione		Oude-Katholieke Gem. v. Sinte Maria, Utrecht (Olanda) - 24-27 novembre 1982
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producer / Engineer		Gerd Berg / Hartwig Paulsen
	Prima Edizione LP		EMI Electrola "Reflexe" - 1C 069-1466971 - (1 lp) - durata 41' 50" - (p) 1983 - DMM (Digitale)
	Prima Edizione CD		EMI "Classics" - CDM 7 63419 2 - (1 cd) - durata 41' 50" - (c) 1990 - DDD
	Edizione CD		EMI "Classics" - 8 26535 2 - (1 cd) - durata 41' 47" - (c) 2000 - DDD
	Note		-

In the resplendent chronicle of the orchestra (Hofmusikkapelle) at the Hapsburg court in Vienna, the Baroque period represents one of the high points. Of the Emperors of this epoch - Ferdinand II, Ferdinand III, Leopold I, Joseph I and Karl VI - all but the firstnamed were themselves active as composers and musicians. The name of Leopold I is associated in particular with the expansion of operatic activity at the Imperial court; but the two other categories of Baroque music - church music and chamber (i.e. secular non-dramatic) music - also flourished under his rule. "...if there was one thing in the world that could not fail to afford the Emperor gratification, it was good music. It increased his pleasure, reduced his cares, and one may say of him that among all diversions he was never better entertained than at a well-arranged concert... His orchestra can be called the most perfect in the world, and that is no wonder, since the Emperor always set the examination himself when a new musician was to be engaged..." This quotation from a lengthy excursus on Leopold’s passion for music from the pen of his biographer Gottlieb Eucharius Rinck, together with many similar reports, shows that Leopold’s musical court and his own musical talents were admired by contemporaries. No wonder, then, that the Viennese court became a centre of attraction for competent musicians, just as the court for its part was always on the look-out for outstanding musical talents and was willing to pay well for them. A musician in the Emperor’s employ could achieve a considerable income - such cases are documented; not, however, by means of the regular salary, which in any case was often months or even years in arrears owing to the constant financial straits at court. On the other hand there were  opportunities to secure additional revenues for extraordinary services over and above one’s normal duties. This official variety of supplementary emolument was not infrequently written into the conditions of employment from the outset (as was still the case with Anton Bruckner). Thus in 1667 Johann Heinrich Schmelzer was able to apply for special financial consideration on account of “the especial trouble taken over the arias for festivities and operas, since he could otherwise put the time beyond the fulfilment of his duties to other gainful use". Similar petitions from musicians - particularly from such as were unable to come by any source of extra income - have survived in great number: on occasion sad evidence of real privation, but important for our knowledge of the social status and way of life of the musical profession. These conditions of existence were also of central importance to the four composers represented on this recording, and are documented accordingly. Marco Antonio Ferro was lutenist to the Imperial court from 1642. Dismissed in 1651, apparently for some aberration, he addressed a request to the Emperor in 1656 to “be so gracious as to forgive him his errors an receive him back into the Hoff Capeln" (sic). The Emperor only cancelled hisinstructions “to reject the supplicant" two years later, and Ferro returned to the court on 1st October 1658. He died in this post in 1662. The two four-part sonatas recorded here come from Ferro‘s only known publication, a collection of sonatas dedicated to Emperor Ferdinand III that appeared in Venice in 1649. The favour and disfavour of the court were likewise decisive factors in the life of Johann Jacob Froberger. He may have come to Vienna circa 1634, and was admitted to the Hofkapelle as organist on 1st December 1636. In the following year, in accordance with the usual practice, he was able to travel to Rome with the Emperor’s support to study under the famous Girolamo Frescobaldi. He seems to have smoothed the way to Rome for himself by requesting the Emperor’s confessor “to endeavour how he might convert him to the Catholic religion, with which he had already made a start". After his return he was back in the service of the court from 1st April 1641 to October 1645. He then appears to have set out on travels again, which we know took him to Rome, Brussels, France and England. Re-employed once again as court organist on 1st April 1653, he was dismissed after Leopold ascended the throne. He spent the last years of his life in Héricourt at the residence of Princess Sibylla von Württemberg-Montbéliard, who like him originally came from Stuttgart. The Capriccio and Toccata on this recording survive in the National Library in Vienna in an autograph manuscript dedicated to Ferdinand III “for so many clement favours bestowed on me without my meriting them". Johann Heinrich Schmelzer, one of the most famous violin virtuosi of the time, came from the little town of Scheibbs in Lower Austria, where he was born circa 1623 as the son of an apparently highly active father - he appears as atanner, baker and soldier! Schmelzer junior is recorded as a musician in St Stephan’s Church, Vienna, in 1643; on 1st October 1649 he was engaged as a musician to the court, where he was appointed assistant Kapellmeister in 1671 and Hofkapellmeister (director of music at the court) in 1679. He died a year later, however of the plague. He had been given noble status in 1673. As his above-mentioned petition (not the only one of its kind) proves - likewise his legacy shows him to have been by no means badly off - he knew how to keep his head above water, unlike many of his colleagues. Since circa 1667 he had been in contact with the music-loving Bishop of Olmütz, Karl von Liechtenstein-Castelcorn; as surviving letters prove, he made himself available to the Bishop as music advisor, and repeatedly sent him compositions on request - certainly not without remuneration. It is to this situation that we owe the survival of the three sonatas recorded here, which are preserved in the Bishop’s music archive, now located in Kremsier. After Schmelzer, who was both preand succeeded in the position of Hofkapellmeister by a long series of Italians, the next native Austrian to occupy the post was Johann Joseph Fux. As Ferro and Froberger had stood at the beginning of the Leopold era, and Schmelzer in the middle, so Fux was active at its end. He was engaged at the Hapsburg court by an authoritarian decision of Leopold’s that by-passed the usual bureaucratic procedures, and he was even able - a rare phenomenon - to hold his own in both artistic and human terms under the utterly different personalities of Leopold’s two sons, Joseph and Karl. With Fux, as composer, theoretician, teacher and organiser of the music at court an undisputed authority, the Baroque breed of Hofkapellmeister died out, and with his and Karl VI’s deaths the truly great era of the Hofmusikkapelle also came to an end. The manner in which the sonata a quattro K 347 was preserved bears witness to his fame: a pupil of Fux’s, the Bohemian Jan Dismas Zelenka, who worked in Dresden and was sent from the Dresden court to Vienna and Italy to study, put together a manuscript collection of well-known pieces in Vienna in 1717/18, in which this sonata appears alongside other works by Fux. One would like to believe that Emperor Leopold I, whom music accompanied all his life as an innate need, also died to the sound of music. Although this is admittedly something that is attributed to many rulers, it would fit into the picture of Leopold, and indeed of the period as a whole, if in his last hour, aware of his tradition, he had ‘fallen into line’, not least with the thought that death represents the entry into eternal harmony. Translation: Clive R. Williams
EMI Electrola "Reflexe"