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Habsburger Verlag Frankfurt (Dr. Fiedler)
www.habsburgerverlag.de
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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On 07.09.2007, at 05:35, John Howell wrote:
... THAT is why I haven't considered it worth the time or trouble to
study Rifkin's or Parrot's writings. ...
John,
But you _really_ should, you know ;-) Many if not most of the
problems people seem to have with Rifkin/Parrot have, right from the
beginning, had to do with their not having read what the two have
actually written. Admittedly, at the beginning, Rifkin's articles
were not all that easy to find. (Probably the most readily available,
at least on this side of the ocean, was in the Basler Jahrbuch für
Historische Musikpraxis ix (1985) ), so it was a great relief to have
Parrotts summary in 2000: The Essential Bach Choir.
But here's the important thing: both men have dealt in great (one
could also say: mind-numbing) detail with all the documents you have
kindly provided the list, and much more, and have come to rather
different, and almost inescapable, conclusions.
And by the way: as far as I know, _nowhere_ in all his pronouncements
does Joshua maintain that a one-to-a-part performance is the _only_
way to do Bach's cantatas. Just that this is the way the composer,
for many reasons, actually did it. So all the choral directors can
relax and go right on doing what they have always done with a good
conscience. But possibly also with a newly-won sense of the chamber-
music nature of such works.
For what it's worth, the information about performing forces in
Frankfurt am Main would seem to support Joshua's ideas. In a paper I
wrote for a symposium in Magdeburg in 2000 (which should be appearing
sometime soon) I presented a list of the singers involved in
Telemann's weekly cantata performances when he was in Frankfurt. The
list is very short! A typical performance was Palm Sunday ,1721, in
which the following singers took part:
Johann Flegler and Johann Eydmann (boy sopranos, one the Canto, the
other the Canto in Ripieno)
Christian Heuson and Georg Dünckel (Alto and Tenor)
Georg Philipp Telemann or possibly Johann Balthasar König (Bariton)
That was it! And pretty much typical for the years 1711 - 1721 when
Telemann was Kapellmeister in Frankfurt. Heuson and Dünckel were by
the way both professional teachers in the Frankfurter private
schools, the "Deutschen Schulen", which were definitely not as high-
class as the Latin Schools, being possibly equivalent to the inner-
city schools of the 1960s in NewYork (?), so their workday was quite
certainly spent screaming at and beating (literally) some bits of
learning into unwilling students (When Joh. Wolfgang Goethe was asked
about the difference between Latin and Greek instruction when he was
a boy, he is said to have answered: "In Greek there was more
beating!", and he went to a good school!) So one has to ask: what
were their (the teachers) voices like??
Telemann was, as we know, a good friend of J.S.B. and Godfather to
his son C.P.E., so what he was doing in Frankfurt cannot have been
all that different in kind, or much worse than Bach's performances in
his churches in Leipzig. I have for some time now suspected that if
we somehow managed to travel back in time to hear a Sunday morning
cantata in the Barfüsserkirche in Frankfurt — or in the Thomaskirche
in Leipzig— that we would be more that a little shocked at what we
would hear. In short: I don't think we have to be in the least
ashamed of our (Koopman's, Rifkin's, Parrott's) cantata performances
today. I'm quite sure that they are, in many ways, better for us —
with our ears that have experienced Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner_—
than those scantily scored, poorly rehearsed sight-readings in the
freezing Barfusser and Thomas churches 250 years ago would be! But
this does not mean that there is nothing to be learned from these
early efforts!
Peace be with you!
EFF
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