The Electorate of Saxony attracted musical talent from far and wide in the second quarter of the eighteenth century. The electoral and royal seat of Dresden (the Electors were also Kings of Poland) drew the best composers and musicians in Europe, including Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, and Telemann. Its Hofkapelle under Friedrich August I (Augustus II of Poland) and II (III) was widely known as the finest instrumental ensemble in Europe, endowed with a magnificent new opera house, the most famous Italian singers, and a vast repertory by old and new composers in antique and fashionable styles. The court provided excellent performing spaces and instruments, and musicians could obtain permission to travel to study their art. Here woodwind players first began to specialize in a single instrument and the flute took its place as a virtuoso’s vehicle in mixed ensembles.
In 1714 the Hofkapelle engaged a flute specialist (as opposed to an oboe doubler) in the person of the Frenchman Pierre Gabriel Buffardin (c1690-1768). Buffardin was eventually joined in 1727 by Johann Joachim Quantz (1697-1773), who had entered the court’s service a decade earlier as an oboist, made an extended musical tour of Europe, and returned to Dresden to displace Johann Martin Blockwitz (fl.1717-33) as Buffardin’s second flutist. During that earlier period, Quantz reported, “there were few compositions written especially for the flute. One had to make do for the most part with compositions for the oboe and violin, which one had to arrange as well as possible for one’s purpose.”
A few leagues away in 1723 Saxony’s mercantile center of Leipzig appointed Johann Sebastian Bach to compose and direct the music in the city’s principal churches and to teach their choristers. Chamber music featured at home, where Bach’s third son Johann Gottfried Bernhard played the flute, as well as in the Collegium Musicum Bach directed. Bach composed the six organ trios, recycling ealier keyboard or chamber pieces, sometime between 1727 and 1729 for the instruction of his eldest son Wilhelm Friedemann. The slow movement of BWV 527 appears again in Bach’s triple concerto, with an added pizzicato part that turns it into the quartet form that Quantz considered the real test of a composer.
Quantz’s dedication to the flute led him to build instruments to his own special design (featured in this concert) and eventually to leave Dresden to serve as flute teacher to Frederick the Great of Prussia in Berlin, where he wrote the century’s most comprehensive manual on performance, his Essay of a Method for Playing the Flute Traversiere (1752). In response to an attack on certain aspects of his Essay a few years later, Quantz challenged his critic to a musical duel, to consist of a public performance of Telemann’s twelve Fantasies for unaccompanied flute—but his assailant avoided the encounter by making an unannounced departure from the city.
Quantz’s own reputation as a composer has suffered from the negative opinions of critics who wrote in the early classical period, when Europe was in the grip of social and political ferment and when his music, though still being played, seemed like a relic of a bygone and more conventional era. In the past few years however much of his enormous unpublished output has been rediscovered and earned new attention, opening a window, as in this sonata from a manuscript collection, on the dramatic mood Italian opera cast on musical life at the time, not only in Saxony but in much of northern Europe.
Another Italian musical form that took the north by storm at the time was the concerto. Bach composed his e minor flute sonata in about 1724, employing a concerto-like form that, combined with its brilliance and that of prominent flute parts featured in his cantata output from the same period, has led to some speculation that it was produced to mark a visit to Leipzig by Buffardin.
Program note © 2004 by Ardal Powell