Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment
Julia Bullock, soprano

The Enigma of Greatness
in the Golden Age of the Baroque

There is a scene in the seminal 1990s television series The Wonder Years where Kevin inadvertently starts a student walkout due to a call of nature. Borrowing from Shakespeare, he observes, “It seems some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them while they’re in the bathroom.” It is a good analogy for the enduring fame and/or misfortunes of Baroque composers.

You might wonder why a band on its first prestigious US tour after the coronavirus pandemic chooses to turn up with what might, on the surface, seem to be a playlist for an easy listening radio station. Better surely to present a high-concept new version of a previously obscure masterpiece. Or a “box set’ epic of one composer’s entire orchestral output in one evening.

But as the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (OAE) has travelled around the UK in recent years, we’ve discovered there is another story that needs telling. It’s about that very enigma of greatness. The music you’ll hear this afternoon is all considered extremely famous. Great, if you will. But it is so for reasons we often overlook and its path to seeming immortality is more perilous than one might assume.

What makes one piece or composer a “hit” while others languish in obscurity? Is it luck—remember Kevin in the bathroom—or a genuine extra quality that raises it above mediocrity (as Peter Schaffer refers to in Amadeus)?

We can be embarrassed to say we love Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons for fear of seeming to lack discernment. But why? This is music of an exceptional quality and virtuosity that has lost none of its thrill in 300 years. The Four Seasons, composed around 1723, owes its place in history to a number of factors. It was composed at a time when music publishing in Europe was just becoming a viable business, meaning that more music was preserved and disseminated, and, frankly, helping it to avoid the fate of dying with its composer. Even then, while many people on the street will likely recognize its main themes, there are very few of us who can recall much, if anything, about the other eight concertos that were published in the same set. Was the difference simply that Vivaldi chose to assign these four concertos a “program” courtesy of the poems inscribed with each.

You might think Vivaldi must have lived like a rock star, but even in his lifetime his reputation fluctuated. In his 60s, after a portfolio career as a somewhat negligent priest, teacher at a girls’ school, and opera impresario, he decided to seek fortune one last time by heading to Vienna in search of a job at the imperial court. Once there he encountered disaster and died barely a year later, a pauper.

Henry Purcell is a composer very much in the bones of the OAE. He lived, worked, drank, and died in London for just 36 short years between 1659 and 1695. Yet no English-born composer came close to matching his fame until Elgar, some 200 years after his death. Purcell came into the world at the end of England’s brief period as a republic—a time when music had been effectively banned—as the arts had started to flourish again with King Charles II and the restoration of the monarchy. By rights, Purcell should occupy a place in English cultural life equal to Shakespeare, but he was not afforded the same status as time went by, and very little of his music was heard again until the 20th century ushered in a revival. The Fairy Queen is Purcell’s colorful adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a piece immersed in his trademark adventurous harmonies and beguiling melodies.

George Frideric Handel really was a mega-star in his day. Born in 1685 in Halle in the state of Prussia (now modern Germany), and after extended travels around Italy, he arrived in London in 1711. There the music scene was flourishing but still creatively feeling the loss of Purcell. In 1714, Handel’s past could have caught up with him. When he left Germany, the composer had been in the employ of the Elector of Hanover but had stayed away without his patron’s permission. When an unfortunate series of events led to the Elector becoming King George I of the recently united kingdoms of England and Scotland—the new king was the great-grandfather of Hamilton cameo star George III—Handel had a potentially career-ending reputational problem on his hands. The extent of this may be overstated in the telling of the story, but ever the gifted negotiator, Handel was finally able to smooth over all rifts and the renewed relationship with the Hanovers was to produce many of his best-known works, including the Water Music, the Coronation Anthems, and the Fireworks Music. Through his skills, business acumen, and a remarkable instinct for portraying human drama, he first became a highly successful opera composer with works such as Alcina (1735) and Giulio Cesare (1724) before public appetite for such music dwindled in the late 1730s. He then found a new dramatic outlet in writing oratorios, including Samson (1743) and Solomon (1749). While the oratorios have been omnipresent in concert halls ever since—most notably Messiah (1742)—the operas fell so far out of fashion that they were not revived for more than 200 years. (Both Alcina and Giulio Cesare only had their modern revivals in the 1920s.)

Johann Sebastian Bach, an exact contemporary of Handel, had an unusually enhanced sense of higher purpose even by 18th-century standards. Despite his Lutheran devoutness, though, there is good evidence that he gave consideration to what today would be called his “legacy.” Throughout his career, Bach barraged his employers with complaints about the resources made available to him and spent much of his later life preparing and compiling authoritative editions of his work. Yet as large as Bach looms today as a historical figure, during his lifetime he was not so feted. He only got the job as director of music for the city of Leipzig in 1723—it was there that he produced the great masterpieces such as the Passions and the cantatas—when the town council finally accepted that their first choice, Georg Philipp Telemann, was deaf to their offers.

The Brandenburg Concertos, now among Bach’s most highly regarded orchestral pieces, were gifted to the Margrave of Brandenburg-Schwedt in 1721 as a presentational manuscript (now a prized asset of the Berlin State Library). The Margrave, however, just put them on a shelf in his library and they then disappeared for more than a century. That could well have been that, but fortunately, they fell into the hands of a Bach devotee and were finally published in 1850.

Composers in 18th-century Europe generally had three places of employment: the court, the church, and the opera house. The most glamorous of those establishments were in Paris. These were pre-Revolutionary times and great celebrity was still to be found delighting the aristocracy and upwardly mobile. Renowned among these were Jean-Baptiste Lully and Jean-Philippe Rameau. Purcell, Vivaldi, and Bach have all enjoyed revivals in interest, but Lully and Rameau, while maintaining a hardcore of enthusiasts, have never regained the stellar appeal they once held. Today they are chiefly represented on orchestral programs by interludes such as Lully’s “Marche pour la cérémonie des Turcs” from his music to Molière’s play Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme and by Rameau’s “Les Sauvages” from the “opéra-héroïque” Les Indes Galantes.

The quite phenomenal accomplishments of the women composers of the Baroque faded from public view faster even than the more unfortunate of their male counterparts. Barbara Strozzi was reputed to have had more secular music in print than any other composer of her time. Today even among musicians, her name is only gradually (re)gaining recognition. If we can’t right the injustices of the intervening centuries, we can at least play our role in the restoration.

We view narrative from our own point in history. That is inevitably colored by the inventions of the last century or so, most significantly the means of the wide distribution of audio recordings, public broadcasting, and commercial advertising. This coincided with a greater interest in, and awareness of, standardized cataloguing.

It is almost impossible to underestimate the impact of the recording industry during the 20th century on the popularization of all the works on today’s program. One day, we may look back and consider it to be a machine of enlightenment matching the importance of the invention of the printing press. Recordings have affected everything from how we refer to pieces of music to what we consider to be canonical works. The story goes that Handel’s “Arrival of the Queen of Sheba” only came to be widely known by that name because the conductor Thomas Beecham decided it needed a better name than the Sinfonia from Act III of Solomon when he recorded it in 1933. For decades in the UK, Bach’s Air on the G String was far better known in Jacques Loussier’s jazz trio arrangement that underscored the punchline in a cigar advertisement. Johann Pachelbel owes his “one-hit wonder” status to another Frenchmen, the conductor Jean-François Paillard. A composer from the generation before Bach, Pachelbel and his work had languished in obscurity until 1968 when Paillard recorded an arrangement of his Canon in D for three violins and bass. It literally and figuratively struck a chord with listeners who understood music much more readily through the repeating structures of rock and pop songs and could grasp the unfolding of Pachelbel’s music. The Four Seasons always fitted neatly on a vinyl LP but came to wider attention when British violinist Nigel Kennedy adopted the techniques of MTV music videos as part of the promotion of his 1989 recording.

The recording industry turbo-charged the perception of the Brandenburg Concertos as a singular entity and a pillar of the western musical canon. The first recording of this music as a set appeared in the mid-1930s, just 80 years after their first publication. Thus, someone’s first contact was as likely to be with the collected set on LP as it was with an individual concerto in performance. Another 50 years on, in the 1980s, the gathering movement of period-instrument ensembles coincided with the advent of the compact disc. There suddenly was a vibrant market for new recordings of Baroque music, both familiar and less so, injected with the vitality that historically informed performance brought to the repertoire. Showcasing as they do a variety of instrumental timbres, and appealingly packaged as double-disc sets, the Brandenburgs became calling cards as each group (including the OAE) laid down its own take on these standards.

The music of the 17th and 18th centuries has continued to be “unearthed” and re-evaluated throughout modern times. Bach’s Cello Suites were not considered a core part of every cellist’s library until Pablo Casals fished a copy off the shelves of a music shop in Barcelona. The modern music lover would assume that Haydn’s Cello Concerto in C had always been there, but in fact, if you had whistled its theme on the steps of this concert hall in the 1950s, nobody would have noticed. The manuscript was only discovered in 1961. By accident.

The really extraordinary reflection, which we should all pause to consider, is that when we look back at the 150 years we call the Baroque, a time of some of humanity’s greatest musical creativity, most people still know more tunes by a rock band like the Eagles.

In a way we are all the Wonder Years’ Kevin. Today you came to a concert. Maybe you brought someone with you. Maybe you’ll tell someone about it later. As a result, perhaps in 50 years’ time, someone else will listen to these pieces for the first time with the same sense of excitement we all once experienced. You have become part of the never-ending story of music history in all its enigmatic greatness

—Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment