Collegium Musicum concerts

One name dominated musical life between about 1720 and 1750. Everywhere you went this immensely prolific German composer’s name was on people’s lips. He moved often, composing piles of instrumental works and sacred cantatas, and was sought out by nearly every major city or court. So whatever happened to Telemann? (Did I fool you?) Somewhere along the way, in the annals of historiography, focus centered more on Johann Sebastian Bach, Telemann’s less famous contemporary. And no, I will not argue their relative merits here. From an 18th-century perspective the judgment was clear: one music encyclopedia from the day accorded Telemann four times as much space as Bach. Even more tellingly, Bach was third in line for the post at Leipzig and got the job only after the top choice (guess who?) declined.
As a university student in Leipzig years earlier, Telemann had already made an impact on the city’s musical scene. In 1802 he founded the Collegium Musicum, a mostly amateur music society that met regularly to give concerts. Typical fare included such gems as Telemann’s Concerto for Four Violins in C without basso continuo, which allows the instruments to suggest a virtuosic kind of string quartet. Leading and supporting functions pass freely among the players, and there is a beautiful richness when strings—without the assistance of the keyboard—play close harmony.
A few years after his arrival in Leipzig in 1723, Bach took over the reins of the Collegium. This ensemble became an important forum for his interest in secular, primarily instrumental music—and not just his own music. This evening we hear a variety of works by a small coterie of musicians, all of whom had close contact with Bach and with each other.
Bach’s contemporaries included Johann Friedrich Fasch and Johann Georg Pisendel. Fasch was a student at St. Thomas’s School in pre-Bach Leipzig, though he was largely self-taught as an instrumentalist. He eventually produced his own suites, which were played by Telemann’s Collegium. In 1708, while studying law at Leipzig University, Fasch actually formed the “second ordinary Collegium musicum.” The fortunes of instrumental music in Leipzig were clearly on the rise, and music like Fasch’s Oboe Quartet would become increasingly coveted for a variety of settings. One of the members in Fasch’s Collegium was J. G. Pisendel, an extremely talented violinist who had earlier played with Telemann’s group. Pisendel’s extant works are few, but each is striking in its quality and inventiveness. He had trained first-hand with the Italian masters (including Torelli), and had become friends early in life with both Telemann and Bach. The Italian influence shows strongly in his impassioned and lyric Violin Sonata in E Minor, which follows the Corellian model of slow-fast-slow-fast “church sonata” structure. After declining a position in Leipzig, Pisendel took charge of the finest instrumental group in Europe at the court in Dresden.
Younger by a generation, Johann Ludwig Krebs was born into a musical family. His father had studied organ with Bach, and young Ludwig entered St. Thomas’s School in Leipzig during Bach’s tenure. His talent and industry were duly noted, and he performed under Bach’s guidance in both sacred settings and, on the harpsichord, at Collegium events. Krebs’s works show the exciting transition between Baroque and Classical sensibilities in regard to harmonic freedom and treatment of solo versus orchestra. He was classmates with his teacher’s second son, Carl Philip Emanuel Bach, whose wonderful G-minor oboe sonata would have been perfectly suited for the Collegium concerts. This sonata likely dates from Emanuel’s own days at Leipzig University and features the striking chromaticism that has become his trademark.
Bach’s own offerings at the Collegium concerts could range from overtures and concertos all the way to solo keyboard music, as in the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue heard this evening. Such works show how size of ensemble mattered little to Bach, who could incorporate numerous independent lines to suggest a massive, almost orchestral texture. The Chromatic Fantasy’s opening portion is precisely the kind of brilliant, chromatic elaboration that Bach could improvise, in the moment, off a particular harmonic foundation.
One of the Collegium’s venues was Zimmermann’s coffee shop (see image below), located just off Leipzig’s main market square. Every week Bach’s band would perform to the delight of friends and customers (let’s hope the cappuccino machines were quieter then!). Bach would compose or arrange chamber sonatas, overtures, and numerous concertos for that setting, as well as several secular cantatas. On this last point, the so-called “Coffee” Cantata from 1734 surely merits comment. BWV 211 Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht, represents Bach’s closest approach to opera, a genre he seemed otherwise intent on avoiding. The scenario depicts a cantankerous, protective father named Schlendrian (which trans-lates roughly as “stick-in-the-mud”) and his capricious, caffeine-addicted daughter Liesgen, who will not sacrifice a cup of Joe to marrying a real Joe. All the operatic features are in place: alternations between recitative and da capo arias, memorable tunes, and a central conflict that needs reconciliation. The first soprano aria (no. 4) celebrates the charms of coffee, and one wonders whether Bach received a kickback from Zimmermann for plugging his wares.
In general, given rather tired clichés of Bach as the staid, overly-pious technician, it is refreshing to see him and his music thriving in realms outside the sanctuary, to have images of the actual venues, and to meet the friends and colleagues that he would have seen on a daily basis.

(c) Jason Stell