The title is for all you Updike fans out there.
I refer not to the ever-bland Henry Bech, but to Franz Ignaz Beck, a notably successful 18th century composer about whom posterity has remained mostly mum. Beck was just two years younger than Joseph Haydn and died the same year (1809), but while Haydn has done rather well for himself posthumously, Beck stands amongst the sizeable group of composers dubbed the kleinmeisters by H. C. Robbins Landon. He’s a Forgotten Man. He’s not as forgotten as some (Josef Mysliveček, anyone?) but is KO’d by relative heavyweights such as Johann Baptist Vanhal or Josef Martin Kraus, composers so good that they would have been full meisters in any other era. But Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven triple-trump everybody else, so otherwise worthy composers have tended to get swept under the rug.
I’ve been exploring Herr Beck due to a forthcoming Philharmonia Baroque concert for which I am fashioning a program note on his Overture to La mort d’Orphée, a hit ballet of the 1780s that wasn’t quite successful enough for the entire score to have survived. Only the Overture made it through the long, dark tunnel of history; it was so popular that impresarios sometimes slipped it into a production of Gluck’s groundbreaking Orphée. All those extra copies floating around acted like a preservative.
For my money, exploring previously unknown music is one of the fringe benefits of working as a program annotator. Given that the Beck Overture takes up all of six minutes of a program that includes two symphonies and a concerto, I won’t be writing more than a paragraph or so. I don’t really need to dig in all that much. But I’m having a fine time listening to all the Beck that’s currently on record, and reading whatever I can find about him. Might as well take the bull by the horns, carpe diem and all that, and grasp the opportunity to absorb the music of a near-forgotten master.
The greater part of Beck’s output is gone, not all that uncommon a fate for even the brighter lights of the era. (We’ve lost a hefty chunk of J.S. Bach’s music, remember.) He seems like an interesting person, at least in his younger years when he comes off as a bonafide Wild Thang. My impression is of an insanely gifted kid who had the run of the Mannheim court, thanks to his being the prize student of ace kapellmeister Johann Stamitz and the Elector’s pet. He was probably a bit spoiled. We have a story, not necessarily true, that he fled Mannheim after killing an envious rival in a duel; years later he bumped into the supposedly dead guy in Paris and found out that it had all been faked with theatrical blood and a bit of acting. Well, that’s one way for an ambitious courtier to get rid of the Elector’s favorite—but the story doesn’t quite jell for me. The rival would be obliged to leave as well, having faked his own death, so what advantage was there to such an elaborate charade? That Beck left Mannheim normally to study in Venice with Baldassare Galuppi sounds a lot more plausible, albeit downright prosaic compared to the Grand Guignol alternative. The juicy story comes to us from Beck’s student Henry Blanchard, so I suspect that Herr Doktor Professor had concocted a whopper to entertain the kiddies. Or that Henry Blanchard made it all up.
Beck’s abduction of a young lady and his flight from Venice to Marseilles is better documented. Apparently the young lady was the daughter of a high-ranking secretary—who just happened to be Beck’s boss. That little escapade got Beck to France, where he was to remain. A few years in Marseilles was followed by his taking up the baton at the Théâtre Grand in Bordeaux, his home for the rest of his life. Beck became to Bordeaux what Telemann was to Hamburg—the town music-master par excellence. Like Telemann he appears to have been volcanically prolific, but unlike his esteemed German colleague, most of Beck’s stuff vanished down the drain of time. That’s too bad. Beck wasn’t a garden-variety hack, but a real composer.
Most of Beck’s surviving works are symphonies, and in that regard he stands as a classy early Classical symphonist, a Mannheim guy whose style was obviously influenced by his teacher Stamitz. He seems to have stopped writing symphonies in the 1760s, preferring to concentrate on theatrical works. That’s a pity since the surviving works point to a composer who might have developed into a Haydn-league symphonist. As it is, though, his work traces the evolution of the symphony from its opera-overture beginnings into the more substantial four-movement layout characteristic of the full Classical. However, he stopped before the great maturation of the 1770s, so there is nothing in Beck’s output on par with Haydn’s stunning achievements beginning around Symphony No. 40. Beck’s symphonies remain galanteries, old-fashioned harmonically but sturdily constructed and entertaining. Many of their faster sections partake of that busy-beaver scrubba scrubba scrubba Mannheim string style. Op. 4, No. 1 in D Major opens with two Mannheim favorites: hammerblows (three loud chords) followed by a picture-perfect Mannheim crescendo, a.k.a. rocket, a.k.a. steamroller. Op. 3, No. 6 in D Major treats us to another Mannheim specialty, a complex unison passage designed to show off the superb ensemble of the "army of generals," as Charles Burney called the Mannheim orchestra. From what I can tell, he never left the Mannheim style behind—the latest symphony I’ve heard, Op. 14 No. 4 in B-flat Major, is still very much a product of the Palatine court. Op. 3 No. 3 in G Minor is a bonafide Sturm und Drang affair, complete with in-your-face sound effects, but it’s sui generis.
An excellent Stabat mater has survived in addition to two ballet overtures and twenty some-odd symphonies. That’s not much given that Beck may have written upwards of 2000 compositions over his lifetime. Only a handful squeezed through the pinhole of posterity. The fine New Zealand publisher Artaria has ensured that no more will go missing. And we have first-rate recordings of most of his surviving stuff; Naxos graces us with three CDs from Kevin Mallon and the Toronto Chamber Orchestra, Donald Armstrong and the New Zealand Chamber Orchestra, and Nicholas Ward and the Northern Chamber Orchestra, all good outfits. But the real champ is Michael Schneider, who with La Stagione Frankfurt has given us not only three well-filled CDs (from CPO) of symphonies and the two surviving ballet overtures, but has also graced posterity with a live recording of the Stabat mater. Obscure though Beck may be, at least his music has received some well-deserved attention.
We’re playing six minutes of him at the Philharmonia Baroque this September, along with Mozart and Haydn. That’s cool. Despite the enthusiasms of some early 20th century scholars, I really doubt that Franz Beck was an important influence on Beethoven. But he was a good, solid writer and well worth hearing, unless you’re one of those listeners for whom enduring the Galant style is tantamount to genteel purgatory.
Franz Ignaz Beck: dressy but forgotten