In my 40 years plus of professional orchestral playing I have played a huge swathe of the core orchestral repertoire, making around 200 CD’s in the process. However during ‘lockdown’ I started digging deep into music that I have never touched and also that audiences never get to hear. I discovered a whole world of vibrancy and beauty generally untouched on the concert platform.
It was so exciting to meet with the music and composers that the likes of Mozart and Haydn had been thrilled by. Though not all of the same quality of composition of those geniuses for sure, much is yet still wonderful. In our day we seem to have narrowed our focus in so many areas of music deeming the core repertoire worthy and ignoring the rest. One marvellous benefit of the digital recording revolution which began back in the 1980’s was that so much of this forgotten repertoire was recorded by niche companies and is now available to us to enjoy on digital platforms. But it does take some digging to unearth the best and this is what I’ve enjoyed doing during since the 17th March 2020 when all performance came to a sudden halt.
As a starting point
for the programmes I took this first hand account of the life of a very successful Classical era musician Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf, detailing many fascinating and intimate aspects of a successful composer and performers life in the classical era
We have a delightful picture of one evening in 1785 when four friends get together and sit down to play some ‘new’ string quartet music. On second violin was Joseph Haydn, on viola Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. But on first violin in this august company was Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf. Held in high regard by Mozart, he was himself a very successful composer in the classical era. But with the passing of time his music has largely been forgotten, eclipsed by the giants such as his friends here, Haydn and Mozart.
Someone who was listening mentioned,
“although they played well their performance as a whole was not outstanding!”
Joining the court orchestra of the Prince Joseph Friedrich who lived in a castle in Vienna at the age of just 11, Dittersdorf went on to have a career playing with the greatest composers of the era and travelling around the Classical world’s great music centres such as Prague, Paris and Venice. The great repertoire from this era has come down to us as works of other-worldly perfection, but in this autobiography we get to see the blood sweat and tears that went in to the genesis of these great compositions, and the sometimes grim reality of the insecurity of the life of musicians, no matter how proficient.
Starting at the very beginning of the Classical era these series of radio programmes introduce us to the world of wonderful music into which Mozart, Haydn and their friend here Dittersdorf were born into. It goes without saying that the great Classical works did not arise in a vacuum but were the fruit and product of a world of music largely forgotten to us now. Dittersdorf’s autobiography brings us back to that world in all its vivid colour.
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