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Back to Bassists: The Restoration of a Symphony

Categories: Bach | Haydn | Mozart | Posted: December 30, 2016 — John Feeney

“…about the violone or the great bass of the violins, it is the most stimulating and best musical instrument and to the music a most singular ornament…”

Heinrich Schütz
(1615-1672)

I am grateful to Tom Crawford for giving me the opportunity to play Haydn’s Symphony No.31, the Hornsignal. This is a piece that I have been anxious to perform – not only because it’s a great symphony, but also because it includes my favorite bass solo of the six Haydn symphonies (6, 7, 8, 31, 45 and 72) that feature the double bass. Symphony No.31 also provides the opportunity to present to the public the king of 18^th century bass instruments, the Viennese violone. This huge 5-string double bass, with a thirds tuning, was championed by many composers – most notably Mozart, Franz Joseph and Michael Haydn, Schubert, Vanhal, Dittersdorf and Sperger – who created a great wealth of virtuosic solo and chamber music for it.

The flexibility and variety of double-bass instruments inevitably led to their inclusion in musical genres that welcomed not only their great resonance, but accessed their melodic capabilities as well. By the mid-18th century, the double bass – equipped with three, four or five strings  – had become a routine fixture in the serenade and divertimento traditions that were blossoming in the musical capitals of Salzburg, Vienna and various other European regions. In Mozart’s orchestras, for each cello there were two, three or four double basses. These were typical forces throughout the continent.

Watch John Feeney, Bass

Joseph Haydn was among the composers of this age to recognize the versatility of the double bass, which he featured in the aforementioned Esterházy symphonies. In 1761, Haydn entered the service of this court. And it was during this early period that he, as Vice-Kapellmeister, composed several concertos to showcase the virtuosity of his court musicians.

This is the theme to the concerto for violone by Haydn – so sadly lost- but perhaps yet to be discovered! Haydn’s C Major cello concerto wasn’t discovered until 1961….

Among these is the lost Concerto per il Violone (1763), which is listed in the Entwurf-Katalog. At  that time, Haydn’s double bassist at Esterházy was Johann Georg Schwenda. (He later employed other virtuoso bassists: Josef Kampfer, Friedrich Pischelberger and Johannes Mathias Sperger.) All of these virtuoso bassists were renowned as both soloists and composers. Sperger composed over forty-five symphonies, eighteen bass concerti, and numerous virtuosic chamber works for bass and other instruments. The Viennese violone creates a uniquely resonant tone and was widely cherished by these 18

^th

century composers and instrumentalists.

It should be noted that 20^th century scholarship often underestimated the abilities, versatility, and history of the double bass. Sadly, many of our colleagues and presenters continue to exclude the double bass from certain works – especially in the serenade and divertimento genres (historically performed without cello) on faulty assumptions concerning the range and general capabilities of the double bassists employed by Haydn and his contemporaries.

In 2001, I was thrilled to learn that the St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble was planning to record Haydn’s Symphonies 6, 7 and 8 as well as the premiere of the unpublished Divertimento, 5 Variations on a Minuet in E Flat Major, H. 2/24. (This, too, has a wonderful bass solo, previously unrecorded.) I cherished the opportunity to play these wonderful works and their bass solos, and particularly with the same forces used in Haydn’s Esterhazy orchestra, i.e., one each: viola, cello, bass.

When the orchestra management sent me the symphonic scores, however, my enthusiasm gave way to something close to horror. In these 1954 Eulenburg Editions, editor H.C. Robbins Landon had taken it upon himself to change Haydn’s composition – giving the bass solos in all three symphonies over to the cello.

Here is the 1965 H.R. Landon edition of Symphony No.8 where he tacitly restores the Violone solo to the bass, and the previous 1954 edition in which he supplants the bass with cello. As you can see, with one on a part, the role reversal makes the voice leading absurd.

These “Urtext” editions have pages of errata mentioning relatively trivial matters, such as a dot here or a missing dynamic in the 2nd violin. This gives the air of devotion to the letter of the score. But these editions mention nothing of the quantum liberty the editor has taken by changing the bass solos to cello solos!

I prepared to do battle with management and my colleagues. I was determined to prove to them that these were in fact bass solos. The voice leading with the cello bass roles reversed is absurd: the double bass playing low Cs while the cello is in the stratosphere. Remember, there was only one player on each part.

Lo and behold – management (having forgotten that they’d given me the three scores) sent three new ones: 1965 Doblinger, also edited by the great Haydn scholar H.C. Robbins Landon.  Apparently, over eleven years he’d come to his senses and given the solos back to the bass!  Again, not a word in the pages of errata about this change from the previous version – although it was surely the all-time biggest amendment to his previous “customized Haydn” symphonies.

As it turned out, we recorded and performed these marvels the way Haydn intended them. And as Haydn so often writes at the end of his scores, “Laus Deo!” Praise be to God!

Since then, I’ve had the good fortune of performing No. 6 many times – most recently with period orchestras. Unfortunately, however, yet another hybrid edition (again courtesy Robbins Landon) has reared its bogus head.

Here is the Doblinger 1965 H.R. Landon edition of Symphony No. 6 where he strangely allows the bass to play only the “A” section theme. The “B” section now looking very odd indeed! Curiously, Doblinger -also in 1965- printed this edition by Bernhard Herzmansky which leaves the violone solo entirely intact.

This one allows the bass to play the “A” section of the solo, but then assigns the “B” section to the cello — carelessly reversing the voice leading. In this one, he also takes the bass out of the music entirely in the middle of a running eighth note passage that covers the last four eighth notes of bar 116 in the first movement. (There is no other instrument that has suffered this kind of meddlesome tampering and even eradication at the hands of scholarly editors.) Perhaps Robbins Landon thought the high A would be beyond the capability of the bass.

So once again, even though these were period instrument orchestras, I had to jump through hoops simply to play the music the way the composer had written it. (Of one performance, the critic from The New York Times wrote, “Memorable among those voices (in Haydn 6) were the limpid sweetness of David Ross’s flute, the clear-voiced and expressive violin of the concertmaster Cynthia Freivogel, and the agile and charismatic double bass of John Feeney.”)

Apparently, Robbins Landon was unaware of the tuning of the Viennese violone (or perhaps of its existence altogether!)  because the notes he removed were among the most resonant on the instrument (A-F#-D). Not only that – they form the basis of most of the many concertos written for the bass during this period, including Haydn’s Concerto for Bass (composed some 20 years before he wrote a cello concerto) and Mozart’s Per Questa Bella Mano. (In fact, Mozart never composed a similar solo role for cello).

In the 1964 version of Haydn Symphony No. 31, H.C. Robbins Landon has restored the solo to the bass. In this 1907 edition of Symphony No. 31, Eusebius Mandyczewski decided to give the cello the bass solo. in both cases, not a word of explanation is given.

Understandably, all of this got my already raised dander up even more! I started to examine editions of Haydn’s other symphonies with bass solos: 31, 45 and 72. I found of all of Haydn’s symphonies with bass solos (6,7,8,31,45 and 72) that the single solo that was left alone and not handed over to the cello was No. 45. Of course, I also knew the reason. This is the famous “Farewell Symphony”, and the editors knew that the cellist could not leave the stage twice!

So why would a Haydn scholar of world renown take such liberties in supposed urtext editions? And why did editors start to remove the bass completely from all of these works? Generations of musicians and classical music audiences have grown accustomed to a virtually bass-free chamber music world. How sad and how wrong! Can you imagine the effect of removing the bass from other music? Jazz? Ixnay! Rock? No Reply! Latin? No way Jose! Pop? Not! Folk? No sir. Not in a million years!

A bit more background on the troubled fate of the double bass and its artificially diminished role in chamber and orchestral music: as a young man, well before the internet made everything accessible, I spent a lot of time scouring music libraries in different cities in search of original folios of chamber music. I learned not to trust the card catalogs that so often referenced music – particularly 18^th century music – as written specifically for cello when, in fact, the score had no “cello” designation. Rather, what was written was “basso”, “bass” or “violone”.

I would make a beeline for racks and shelves, hungry to go through each score to look at the composer’s original designation. Very quickly, I began to see a disturbing trend.

In manuscripts and first editions, I saw the score had “basso” printed, only to be changed by the editor of a later publication to read “basso (violoncello)”. A still later edition changes “basso (violoncello)” to read “violoncello (basso)” – with designations reversed. And the final change: “basso” disappears altogether and “violoncello (basso)” becomes simply “violoncello”.

Over the years, the editors had successfully and entirely eradicated the composers’ designation of basso in this music.

But there’s some light (and welcome sounds) ahead. Thanks to the work of historians including Cliff Eisen, Carl Bar, Neal Zaslaw, and the pioneering bassists who are resurrecting the Viennese violone (with great vigor, especially in Europe) the truth is catching up to musical scholarship and performance. As Martin Luther King once said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

An Excerpt from :

“The Compleat Mozart: A Guide to the Musical Works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
By Neal Zaslaw, William Cowdery”

Neal Zazlaw on Mozart’s Salzburg Divertimenti- K.136, K.137 and K.138.

“These three works for strings have enjoyed equal popularity as string quartets and as works for string orchestra. In both settings they sound good in modern concert halls and on recordings. The historical evidence suggests, however, that Mozart probably thought of them as composed for one player per part, and quite possibly to be played not by the normal string quartet (two violins, viola, and cello) but by the so-called ‘divertimento quartet’ (two violins, viola, double bass.)”

An excerpt from:

The Cambridge Companion to Mozart
By Simon P. Keefe

“The intended scoring of Mozart’s bass line in serenades, divertimenti and concertos- and even in certain chamber works- has been controversial. While most sources give only the generic ‘Basso”, meaning bass part in general (and consistent with a scoring of cello or double bass or both), Cliff Eisen has noted that in all concertos in which a bass instrument is explicitly prescribed it is the double bass. Accordingly, in cases such as K. 271, where the part is labeled ‘Basso’, Eisen has suggested that a scoring of double basses alone cannot be excluded. Prior to the 1760’s, independent concertos did not circulate widely in Salzburg; instead, they derived from the orchestral serenade, which usually included two or more concerto movements, a practice observed by Mozart. Eisen suggests that serenade orchestras frequently did without cellos, thus making it possible that the same was occasionally true of concertos.”

I am grateful to these and other scholars. But an aspect of “scholarly” research that troubles me is the idea of basing whether or not the intended basso instrument is cello or bass on the lowest note. These assumptions, often made on the discovery of some few specific Courts receipts for strings, are not conclusive and do not embrace the whole of the 18^th century continental bass world with it’s myriad 3, 4 and 5-string basses.

The great bassist/composer Jan Dismas Zelenka (1679-1745) wrote bass parts in chamber music down to a low C.  Leopold Mozart (1719-1787), who was 26 when Zelenka died, frequently wrote low C for the bass. One example: his Sinfonia da Camera D17 for 2 violas, 2 cellos and bass. Wolfgang Mozart, both Haydns, Dittersdorf and Wanhal all wrote bass parts that went down to Ds and Cs.

Each of these composers also traveled, encountering different bass instruments with different numbers of strings and different tunings. Yet 20^th century “scholarship” excludes the bass from music based on false notions of range and register. Except in the instance of solo and virtuosic chamber vehicles for specific tunings (most often Viennese violone), 18^th century composers wrote their bass lines without limiting them to a low A, F natural or a low E. They composed what they were inspired to write, knowing that if some players could not reach down to the ideal the composer set forth, they would take certain passages up the octave.

Personal encounters with low Cs, so frequently in orchestral music of Mozart, Haydn, and indeed all the classical composers, dispel the notion that chamber music works with low notes could not have been intended for the bass. In chamber music that bears this designation, I have heard the profound effect of using the bass as the sole basso instrument. The 8-foot register (cello range), when open (vacant), creates a spacious clarity that elevates these works. The option of using both cello and bass is misguided. Filling that 8-foot register adds a heaviness to these divertimenti and serenades that diminishes their beauty.

I leave those works specifically and legitimately bearing the term violoncello to the cellists, while asserting that all 18^th century music designated basso was most certainly written with the bass in mind and heart.

Case in point: Mozart K.138. This, along with the other two Salzburg Divertimenti, is a perfect example of how the bass offers the most profound and desirable realization of the score, which calls for “basso” and has some very low notes that in no way detract or seem unnatural. Rather, the bass helps to place the whole work in a spacious and profoundly resonant tone world. A recent performance:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PS0jIFlRfUM

Along with the Salzburg Divertimenti, we have Mozart’s Horn Quintet, (benefiting greatly from the use of the bass rather than cello, which is too close in register to the horn and 2 violas), the B flat Viola quintet (the other 5 viola quintets are for violoncello), the D major and C major flute quartets (the G and A major flute quartets are for cello) and the Oboe Quartet. Here is a link to a performance of the Mozart Oboe Quartet: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=m4JXdUaFEVA

…and another to my first outing on the Viennese violone, the D major Flute Quartet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V12GclOzopc

For any skeptics still out there, another nudge –  this from program notes I wrote with help from bassist/historian David Chapman for a recording of the Mozart Flute Quartets, which dared for the first time to use the bass for the C & D major quartets (scored for basso) and cello for the A & G major (scored for violoncello):

“Upon scrutiny of all available resources, the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe has determined that while Mozart scored the Quartet in G- KV 285a and the Quartet in A- KV 298 for a Violoncello, both the Quartet in D KV 285 and the Quartet in C KV Anh.171 were scored for Basso.

When Mozart or his contemporaries felt the need to differentiate specifically between the eight-foot and sixteen-foot string basses, they used the terms Violoncello, Violon , Violone, or Contrabasso. Because Mozart writes the term “Basso” in the scores for these works, the great affinity for double bass instruments during this period, particularly in the regions of Salzburg and Vienna as Leopold Mozart attests to in his 1769 edition of Violinschule), confirm the contrabass instrument as the most legitimate option.

Performance practices of the time, clearly evidenced in contemporary documents and the music itself, point to the double bass as the sole and preferred basso instrument in a wide variety of musical configurations.

In his ‘Zum Begriff des Basso in Mozart’s Serenaden’ (Mozart-Jahrbruch 1960/61), Music historian Carl Bär documents the vibrant Salzburg tradition of employing the double bass (without cello) in the vast majority of serenade works by Mozart. In his 1996 article in Journal of Musicological Research XVI/3, Andrew Kearns reveals that other musical forms relative to the Serenade – the Divertimento, Cassation, Nachtmusik, Notturno, Serenata and Partita – also commonly utilized a double bass.”

The Gran Partita K.361 and C Major Flute Quartet are closely connected. In fact, the second movement of the flute quartet is mostly a transcription of the sixth movement of K.361. Mozart scores Contrabasso as the lone string instrument in the Gran Partita. The bass part in the sixth movement of K361 has exactly the same soloistic material as in mvt. II, Variation III of the C Major Flute Quartet only one tone away – in B flat rather than C.

Finally let me say that the presence of the bass solos in Haydn and all chamber music by Haydn, Mozart, and their contemporaries, is a powerful reminder of the highly developed technical capabilities required of 18^th century bassists.  It also lends strong support to the use of double bass in these works. So what the hell happened?

As I mentioned, in the 18^th century there were 3, 4, and 5- string basses all descendent from the 6-string violone of the Baroque era. It was discovered that each time the bass lost a string, it gained in power and projection. Music was changing. Enter Beethoven! Simultaneously Dragonetti, who could do on a three-string bass what no one could on one with five strings, became a phenomenon. Dragonetti was world-renowned for his force, grace and ability to cradle the entire orchestra with his magnificent three-string Gaspar da Salo bass. This was the kind of power, impact and rhythmic drive that the forward-leaning symphonies of Beethoven, Schubert and late Haydn and Mozart NEEDED.

The problem was (and still is) that not everyone is a Dragonetti. The three-string bassists were no longer capable of playing the solo repertoire that had been composed for the 5-string violone. These instruments had power and projection but limited facility and range. Now, enter now the baton conductor!

Earlier orchestras were led by a triumvirate of keyboard, concert master and bass (the latter standing to convey the gesture and rhythm), with cello at orchestra front and center. Now the orchestras swelled in size, requiring a baton leader. And the double bass was relegated to the outskirts of the orchestra. This period also saw the advent of the modern string quartet as opposed to the serenade quartet, which had consisted of two violins, viola, and bass.

With this new sound of two violins viola and cello, the string Quartet took on a more serious nature. No longer a musical group for entertainment and social gatherings, it became the measure of a composer and all the rage. Think of the Beatles.

I know of music stores that opened their doors in the early the 20th century, flourished until the 1950s, then floundered for almost a decade until being saved by the Beatles! By the mid-sixties, every kid had to have a guitar (those that didn’t wanted to play drums, that is.) There was a band practicing in every garage (as there once had been a string quartet in every parlor). This I have from the horse’s mouth — Louis de Leone, a third-generation violinmaker who had a store in Hartford Connecticut that supplied vaudeville and Broadway theaters throughout the 20th century. De Leone was actually about to close the store when the Beatles phenomenon suddenly took off, reviving his business.

So the rise of the quartet was much like the advent of the Beatles: a sudden and hugely popular universal obsession – and rightly so. Only it veered off course when editors felt the need to homogenize all chamber music, and opted to supplant the double bass with cello in almost all chamber music and in solo passages of symphonies.  Perhaps they thought “there’s always room for cello”?

In conclusion, people relate to the deep tones of the bass on a natural, primal level. It is an integral part of and forms the foundation of nearly all types of music. I am dedicated to restoring the bass – as set down by the composers – back into the music of the classical era.

A depiction of the NY Philharmonic back when they had some 29 or 30 bassists!