One of the (many) sweet things about the PIP is that it has a history of playing orchestral works that are well worth hearing, but not so very often heard. Our end-of-summer program is full of such things, delightful pieces just off to the side of the standard repertoire, by composers who - some would argue - just aren’t sufficiently appreciated.
So, in the public interest, in the weeks before our fabulous outdoor concert on September 15 (save the date!!), we’re bringing you a series of biographical notes on some of the scheduled composers, with all the information you’ll need to be a well-informed listener to all the fun stuff Jonathan has programmed for that concert.
We’ll start with someone who should sound very familiar indeed:
Born on January 27, the feast day of St. John Chrysostom, in the height of the ‘classical’ era ushered in by Franz Josef Haydn
Was baptized with a whole lot of names, beginning with (who knew?) 'John Chrysostom'
Showed brilliant musical talent at a very young age
Encouraged by his father, who was also musically inclined
Sent off to Paris, where he became a sensation among the musically literate
Composed in the genres of opera, symphony, string quartet and liturgical music, with lots of extras thrown in
Died tragically young
We must be talking about Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus (or, in its Latin version, ‘Amadeus’) Mozart, right?
WRONG!!! We’re talking about Juan Crisostomo Jacobo Antonio de Arriaga y Balzola, who was called ‘the Spanish Mozart’, and for darned good reasons. The boy was born – yes, on what would have been Mozart’s fiftieth birthday – into a fairly well-to-do Basque family in the northern Spanish city of Bilbao in 1806. His father, a merchant who knew a thing or two about music, was eager to foster young Juan’s education and gave him the best teachers available in Bilbao.
In order to further his musical training, he was sent to Paris when he was only 15, where he wowed them at the Conservatoire. Luigi Cherubini, who was one of his teachers, upon hearing his Stabat Mater, asked, ‘Who wrote this?’ When he learned that it was Arriaga, he exclaimed, ‘You are music itself!’ And he called one of young Juan’s fugues a ‘masterpiece’. With very little instruction, the boy nevertheless showed a mastery of harmony and counterpoint, and his pieces were full of original and delightful musical ideas.
These pieces include the opera Los esclavos felices (The Happy Slaves), now lost except for the overture and a few fragments, written when Arriaga was 14; three ‘sparkling’ string quartets when he was 16; a symphony in D; a Stabat Mater, a Salve Regina and other pieces of church music; four cantatas; a nonet; several Romances and character-pieces, a set of variations for string quartet.
Pretty good for less than 20 years – Juan Crisostomo Arriaga died just five days short of his twentieth birthday, a brief candle snuffed out, probably, by the pressure of so much work and so much fame at so young an age. What a loss to European music! What he would have made of so prodigious a talent if he had lived longer, we can only speculate, and grieve for what is lost.
To give you a taste of that, the PIP will offer the overture to The Happy Slaves on our September program, so you can decide for yourself just how well justified is the title for this young genius – ‘The Spanish Mozart’. We know you will love the music!