Luogo e data di registrazione		Plenarsaal der Akademie der Wissenschaften, Mũnich (Germania) - agosto 1980 (1,2), settembre 1980 (3,4,5), novembre 1980 (6)
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producer / Engineer		Andreas Holschneider - Gerd Ploebsch / Wolfgang Mitlehner
	Prima Edizione LP		Archiv - 2723 078 - (3 lp's) - durata 50' 46" | 63' 02" | 51' 28" - (p) 1981 - Analogico - (parziale)
	Edizione "Collectio" CD		Archiv - 437 089-2 - (1 cd) - durata 66' 38" - (c) 1986 - ADD
	Note		-

GERMAN CHAMBER MUSIC BEFORE BACH The German musical scene during the early 17th century was as diverse and fragmented as the political map of the crumbling Reich of the Holy Roman Empire. English viol players such as Brade and Simpson gained a footing at the princely courts of central Germany and in the northern Hanseatic cities; pupils of the great Dutch organist Sweelinck, among them Scheidt, Scheidemann and Praetorius, occupied positions as organists at the principal centres of the Protestant faith, while from the south such virtuoso violinists as Marini, Farina, Turini and Buonamente “imported” the seconda prattica of their mentor Claudio Monteverdi. But: inter armae silent musae - when weapons clash the muses are silent. The Thirty Years’ War which broke out in 1618 destroyed the cultural structure; court musical establishments were dissolved, and town pipers and civic bands, whose members had kept music alive among the middle class, also fell victim to the terrible conflict. In the words of Heinrich Schütz: “Among the other free arts the noble art of music has not only suffered great decline in our beloved fatherland as a result of the everpresent dangers of war; in many places it has been wholly destroyed, lying amid the ruins and chaos for all to behold.” By the time peace was concluded in 1648 after 30 years of war, Thuringia and Saxony had lost more than half of their population, but even in those stricken lands “the arts, which had been trampled in the mud” very soon rose up “by God’s grace to their former dignity and value”. The tirelessly active Heinrich Schütz - pater musicae modernae nostrae - and his widespread circle of pupils brought about a swift renewal of Protestant church music. In the instrumental field, as regards both the forms of composition and the purely technical mastery of performance, especially on the then “modern” violin, Italian musicians had formerly been pre-eminent. Distant Vienna, although threatened by the Turks, did not suffer directly from the ravages of the Thirty Years’ War; musicians there remained in close contact with Monteverdi and his pupils in Venice, thus remaining à la mode. In northern and central Germany, however, the cultivation of music became dependent on local resources, and it was not until about 1680 that there appeared a generation of German instrumental virtuosi and composers of both high standing and pronounced individuality. The emancipation from the predominance of Italian instrumental music brought about by the economic hardships of the post-war period was assisted by the fact that the enthusiasm of Italian musicians for the violin and for monody, which had led to the supremacy of technique for its own sake, had cooled down noticeably; the sonatas of Marco Uccellini, published in 1649, which mark the climax of the development of violin technique since the instrument’s introduction into art music, reveal the rift which had opened up between form and content, and mark the point in time at which compositions by Italian violinists turned in the direction of formal experiments, which were to lead to the late Baroque church sonata and to the concerto. In other European musical centres, too, Italian supremacy was challenged during the last third of the 17th century. In France Lully and his pupils, at the command of the young Roi Soleil Louis XIV sought a characteristically French tonal language, England experienced a last blossoming of music for viols at the hands of Henry Purcell, in Vienna the Emperor Leopold I appointed Johann Heinrich Schmelzer as primo violinista of the Imperial Chapel, and later as court Kapellmeister, while in northern Germany there sprang up everywhere “violin-gardens, spring-fruits, flower-clusters, and keyboard-fruits”. The formal layout of central and north German chamber music produced between 1680 and 1700 was marked by sonata-form elements derived from the Sonata concertata of Dario Castello with its solo episodes framed by sonorous ensemble sections, by suites consisting of the customary sequence of dance movements, and by suite fragments including pieces unrelated to dances and generally entitled “Aria” with free introductory pieces of various kinds described by the word “Sonata”. The two-section type of “sonata” akin to the prelude and fugue is more closely related to the suite movements which follow it than the three- or four-section opening movement for a suite, which is more emancipated and - as we know from contemporary accounts - was often played independently, without the suite to which it had originally belonged. Stylistically important are the inner parts, “which do not sit still” (Mattheson), and which do not yet possess the ad libitum character of “filling-in” parts such as are to be found in French and Italian ensemble music of the period. The unique dual role of the viola da gamba as a solo instrument in the alto-tenor register and as an embellishing basso-concertante part also arose out of the desire for richness of sound and polyphonic penetration of the vertical harmonic texture. The summum opus of German composition instruction between Schütz and Bach - evidently widely distributed in manuscript copies and well known - was probably the Musicalisches Kunstbuch by Johann Theile, “the father of counterpoint, as some call him”, in which are set out all the virtuosic fugal and canonic devices to be found throughout German music of that time. Collections of sonatas published during the last quarter of the 17th century are founded on various different principles of Construction. The custom, common in Italy until almost the beginning of the 18th century, of issuing works differing in formal layout and scoring as a single collection, was abandoned in favour of publishing half a dozen sonatas - or sometimes seven, corresponding to the number of planets or days in a week - scored for the same instruments and similar in construction, and in a sequence of keys either ascending or descending diatonically, or even grouped in tonalities a fifth apart, or standing in some complex symmetrical key relationship. Paul von Westhoff assembled his sonatas for violin and basso continuo of 1694 in the sequence A minor- A minor- D minor- D minor- G minor-G minor, and the recently discovered six suites for solo violin are in A minor- A major- B flat major- C major- D minor- D major. Buxtehude’s Opus 1 are in B flat major- D minor- G minor- C major- A major- E major- F major, and his Opus 2 are in F major- G major- A minor- B flat major- C major-D minor-E minor, and Reincken’s Hortus Musicus in A minor- B flat major- C major- D minor- E minor- A major. The earliest work in this anthology is probably the sonata of Johann Rosenmüller, born at Oelsnitz in Saxony in 1619, who from about 1660 lived at Venice, from where he supplied sacred vocal music for courts in central Germany. The dedication of his fourth and last collection of sonatas to Duke Anton-Ulrich of Brunswick is dated 31 March 1682. Form-creating repetitions of entire sections of movements, scanning Adagios full of expressive pauses with purely rhetorical harmony as transitions to slow movements rich in soaring melodies and sombre fugues with chromatic lamento themes mark the Sonata in E minor. Dietrich Buxtehude was organist at the Marienkirche in Lübeck from 1664. His Sonata in B flat major, BuxWV 273 - an early version in manuscript of the sonata published as Op.1 No.4 - is notably advanced for its time on account of its three-movement form and the concertante treatment of the two solo instruments in the introductory Chaconne, which features various contrasting ideas, but which is given inner unity by frequent reappearances of its triadic motif; the opening motif of the fuge is a further variant of the triadic figure. In the later printed version Buxtehude altered the Adagio which leads to the Fugato: he removed, for the sake of a smoother flow of the last movement, the adagio marking of the stylized trill figure which retards the progress of the movement, and he sacrificed, too, the appended violin suite, in which the viola da gamba, used elsewhere in a solo capacity, mainly fulfils the function of a continuo instrument. Johann adam Reincken, who had studied under Sweelinck’s pupil Heinrich Scheidemann, was a friend of Buxtehude, and also joint founder with Johann Theile of the Hamburg Opera opened in 1678, published his Hortus Musicus in 1688. This comprises six sonatas, all of which follow the same formal pattern, well proportioned within themselves and organized as a group in such a way as to demonstrate the characteristics of both sonata and suite, also marked by complete mastery of emotional effects, the whole collection forming by far the most important ensemble music of the late 17th century. Janus-faced between the sonata and the suite is a two-section solo for violin which is repeated unaltered by the viola da gamba. In the solo of the Sonata in A minor the “figuration idea” of the preceding permutation fugue (the incessant semiquaver momentum) is taken up, while figuration of the Allemande to follow is foreshadowed. The Allemande and Courante have their subject matter in common, i.e. the Courante is merely a tripla variant of the Allemande; the Gigue - also a permutation fugue without interludes - is in two sections, with the second section essentially a mirror image of the first. It is also related to the introductory Sonata through the similarity of its themes. While German characteristics are most clearly evident in the sonatas of Buxtehude and Reincken, Paul von Westhoff combined the Italian dolce maniera and French grace with the fruits of German violin technique in his sonata played before Louis XIV in 1682. This first work of Westhoff published - together with a suite for solo violin, also written in Paris, in the Mercure Galant during 1682 accompanied by an account of how the Roi Soleil was so enthusiastic about Westhoff's performance that he ordered him to repeat it twice - is constructed from contrasting elements in accordance with the principles of the High Baroque virtuoso sonata. The combination, rich in contrasts, of slow sections as solos and quick ones as ensembles and their opposites gives rise to a four-section layout marked by inner symmetry. Southern euphony is radiated by the chamber music of Johann Pachelbel, who after learning his craft at the Imperial court in Vienna worked at Erfurt, Eisenach, Gotha, Stuttgart, and finally his native city of Nuremberg. Connections with Johann Kaspar Kerrl, with the Bach family and such contemporaries as Daniel Eberlin (later to be Telemann’s father-in-law) and Dietrich Buxtehude (to whom he dedicated his Hexacordum Apollinis) made Pachelbel a link between the Catholic south and the Protestant north, one of the central figures of the High Baroque musical scene in Germany. The appearance of a solo violin above a consort of deep-toned stringed instruments is reminiscent - like the restrained sweetness of the arias - of Heinrich Schmelzer, while scordatura and the melting Chaconne, exchange of parts in the repeats of the arias, and the technique of the canon in unison point to the posthumously published Harmonia Artificiosa of H. I. F. Biber. The generation of musicians who died during the first decade of the 18th century - Pachelbel, Biber, Westhoff, Buxtehude, and Reincken, who remained active until the age of 99 - these and many others created the climate in which Johann Sebastian Bach grew to maturity. We should understand his arrangements and performances, quotations from and copies of works by Pachelbel, Reincken, Rosenmüller, Kuhnau and Kerrl as marks of respect for the creations ofthe older masters! Reinhard Goebel (Translation: John Coombs)