Western music has seen some momentous occurrences. The gradual development of polyphony. Secular music first acquiring parity with the sacred variety, then going on to outdistance it by a significant margin. Instrumental music’s evolution from the bandstand into a full-fledged force in its own right. Consumerist attitudes towards music flexing their economic muscle beginning in the 18th century. I could go on. Each of those events brought about a sea change in the way music was written, made, and consumed.
One event that doesn’t ever seem to get the space it deserves is the establishment of the modern civic symphony orchestra and the resultant impact. A few facts and figures are in order: the London Philharmonic Society (not to be confused with today’s London Phil) got going in 1813, Leipzig’s Gewandhaus Orchestra took flight in the 1830s under Mendelssohn, and Habeneck established the Conservatoire orchestra in 1828. By mid century the Vienna Philharmonic was in place, with great orchestras following later in Berlin, Amsterdam, and — tra-la — Boston. Those are just some of the big-ticket bands; others were springing up all over Europe and the Americas like so many morning glories. Orchestras were the happening thing in the mid-Romantic.
Music appreciation became ongoing concern right about the same time. After all, any Tom Dick or Harry could go to those new orchestras; tickets were the same for prince or commoner. So people were hearing a lot more music than ever before, resulting in a small group of seal-of-approval composers whose music made up the backbone of orchestra programs. Top of the World: Beethoven. The Beethoven symphonies were enshrined as the foundation of orchestra concerts, held up as the model for everything a symphony ought to be.
That’s just fine and dandy with me. But that attitude played holy hell with a group of hard-working and worthwhile symphonists who were active from the time of Beethoven’s peak years (about 1805 through 1813) to the 1840s, when the deification of Beethoven began to set in for good. Of the era’s many composers, only the ultra-heavyweights Mendelssohn, Schumann, and (posthumously) Schubert made the grade. No matter how popular anyone else’s symphonies might have been, by 1840 they were gone from concert programs. And the composers have gone into historical limbo right along with their vanished and banished symphonies.
Consider Friedrich Ernst Fesca, George Onslow, Ferdinand Ries, and Louise Farrenc. Do any of them ring a bell? Yet each was quite the bigshot in his or—in the case of Farrenc—her day. Fesca, Onslow, and Farrenc specialized mostly in chamber music, but each wrote some symphonies, while Beethoven’s pupil Ries made it to eight symphonies, almost matching the output of his esteemed master. These four can be joined by the Dutch Johann Wilhelm Wilms and the estimable Louis Spohr, in his day the highest-flying of them all. There haven’t been many posthumous crash-and-burns as devastating as Spohr’s. Good thing he wasn’t around to see it.
I have a certain yen for underdogs and thus of late I’ve been acquiring some familiarity with the thirty or so symphonies remaining from Fesca, Onslow, Ries, Farrenc, Wilms, and Spohr. Modern tech has made it possible to create really spiffy recordings at a reasonable cost, so enterprising labels such as CPO, Harmonia Mundi, and Naxos can release albums of works that never would have had a chance at a microphone back in the studio days. I can explore without having to cringe through crummy performances à la The Norton Anthology of Western Music or being obliged to ferret out a secondhand mono LP made in 1951 at the Conservatorio della Ducale Fenwick Grande.
I don’t mind telling you that I’ve been having a fine time. Amidst my other concerns at present—working on podcasts for the SFS Centennial project, writing program notes for the forthcoming Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra season, taking care of a rapidly fading kitty cat—it’s awfully nice to whirl through a hitherto-unknown but delightful symphony. Fesca et Cie. weren’t hacks, quacks, halfwits, or second-raters. They were all solidly trained composers who had the styles of the late Classical/early Romantic down cold. Those styles were pan-European, but due to the filtering of history, they have come to be associated with better-known individual composers. So there is an early Romantic idiom that we might say reminds us of Weber, or a slightly later dialect that belongs to Mendelssohn. Maybe we hear some Schubert as well, or a touch of Schumann. But what we describe as Weberesque, Mendelssohnian, Schubertian, and Schumannesque could also be called Fescian, Onslovian, Riesian, Farrencesque, Wilmsian, or Spohr-like.
That isn’t to say that any of them were any match for Beethoven. Who was? LvanB went barreling into the 1820s and nothing was ever the same again. Then along came Hector Berlioz with radically new ideas and a downright gleeful attitude towards upsetting barely-established applecarts. Nothing stayed secure for long. Berlioz, then Schumann and Mendelssohn, then Liszt, Wagner and the whole adventure of hyper-colorful late Romanticism. Composers who weren’t as inclined to head right into the winds of change were typically blown away like so much chaff. Thus Louise Farrenc, despite being a forcefully imaginative composer, seems in retrospect rather derivative, like an earthier Mendelssohn. George Onslow (French despite his British name) resembled Mendelssohn even more closely, in that he was also independently wealthy and belonged to the highest strata of society. His music also comes off like Mendelssohn, but this time without the intellectual discipline; Onslow had a tendency to ramble, although his ideas are often excellent and his treatment of the orchestra impeccable.
Fesca was a bit older than either Farrenc or Onslow, and he seems closer to both Beethoven and Schubert, even Mozart in some ways. He’s certainly more of a Classicist than any of the others. Think Weber, but a Weber who was a crackerjack symphonist instead of a theater guy. Without question, if people had a chance to get to know Fesca’s three symphonies, he’d wind up having a posthumous second act. Dandy composer, Friedrich Ernst Fesca, a member of the died-young Romantic club, carried away by—guess what?—tuberculosis at age 37.
Alone of the group, Ries probably really does deserve his obscurity. Whatever original musical personality he had was steamrolled by his unconditional Beethoven worship, so he specialized in poor-man’s LvanB, the musical equivalent of blobbily unconvincing Monets churned out by a mediocre forger.
And Spohr? I wonder if his Biedermeier gentility will ever come back into fashion. He was a damn good composer. But it’s hard to make a case for him given the competition; I’ll take a Schumann symphony over a Spohr any day, but there’s nothing wrong with a well-made albeit slightly bland piece once in a while.