Ignace Bossuyt has already written extensively about music and certainly about Baroque music. But what he has now accomplished clearly surpasses what he previously did on Bach and others. Bach is represented in this work, but rather as a reference point. Everything else is about predecessors and contemporaries and the complete German Baroque music, because there is still much to be found there that we barely know. It is The Unexpected Treasure of German Baroque Music, as the title tells us, and as the book teaches us.
The professor emeritus at KU Leuven wanders through the entire German landscape from 1650 to 1700 and finds numerous noteworthy composers in dozens of cities. He starts in 1650 in Dresden, finds Schütz there and arrives fifty years later in Bach's Leipzig. A hundred years lie between their birth years. What a remarkable musical journey. And Bossuyt remains Bossuyt: whichever composer he encounters, he penetrates him deeply, albeit with only one representative work. Usually it involves an unknown work and often by a host of lesser-known composers. Don't expect an encyclopedia or a course. The commentary is thorough, though. You need more than average musical interest to follow everything in detail. With each of the discussed works there are scores and texts (with translation!), as there are both instrumental and vocal works.
Other Masterworks
Perhaps the most important thing about the book is that it will expand your standard Baroque repertoire with many discoveries. Not more "masterworks", nor even "small" masterworks, but others, that fall outside the canon. And that other Leuven musicologist, Pieter Bergé, writes in his foreword to the book that this is ultimately what Bossuyt is after: "the enrichment of the listener." That listener can do this immediately, because a QR code at the beginning of almost every work leads him directly to the selected music fragments. An example? Ever heard of Andreas Christopher Clamer (1633-1701)? Hardly known, a Salzburger, he led the choir boys of the Dom there and published in 1682 his only collection of instrumental music. Bossuyt picks his first Suite as a particularly striking example, and — how else can I put it — gives a music history lesson.
Text and explanation in abundance: about cadences, about suites, about their dance movements and their names, about tempi and tonality, in short thorough, as you might expect from a professor emeritus. But don't be mistaken, he is your best guide in the exploration of a virtually unknown Baroque world. And besides Clamer there are 49 others of whom he, after a well-documented biography, discusses one composition. You will have heard of Scheidt, Froberger, von Biber, Pachelbel, but he then chooses compositions by them that will be discoveries for you. As with Johann Georg Conradi, once director of the Hamburg opera house. One opera of his has survived, Die schöne und getreue Ariadne, with "a grandiose solo scene of nine minutes", a favorite of the author who devotes twenty pages to him. Rightly so, because if you use the QR code and listen to the voice of Canadian soprano Karina Gauvin, you're hooked. It is a 2004 recording with the Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Paul O'Dette.
Grand Master Johann Sebastiani
Bach himself is not entirely absent from the book. No, he refers very often to the grand master when he encounters a work in which he finds kinship or even similarities in treatment or text interpretation. Incidentally, there is also a short chapter about a cousin of Bach, Johan Christoph, and about another family member, Johann Michael Bach, and he 'reviews' his chorale Herr, wenn ich nur dich habe. The book even includes a composer named Johann Sebastiani (sic). And he too wrote a St. Matthew Passion which Bossuyt extensively analyzes. The chronology and geographical journey through German Baroque ends with Johann Kuhnau, Bach's predecessor as cantor of the Thomaskirche in Leipzig.
It has become a substantial book with additional information at the back. You can not only glean more instruction from the notes, bibliography and index of names and places. There is also a long list of listening examples on YouTube included in the book. For those who have more interest in Bach himself, there is an index of his cited works. Then follows a discography and a reference to the website IMSLP.org, for consulting scores: "a true goldmine with both original prints and manuscripts and modern editions. An extensive explanation of the terminology used cannot be missing from an author who previously wrote the instructive book Van noten en tonen. Wegwijs in muzikale begrippen. So let yourself be willingly guided along these untrodden Baroque paths by this eminent expert, and expand your own musical knowledge with at least a few works from this "unexpected treasure".
- WHAT: The Unexpected Treasure of German Baroque Music. From Schütz to Bach (1650-1700)
- WHO: Ignace Bossuyt
- PUBLISHER: Sterck & De Vreese, Gorredijk, 2021, 432 p.
- BOOK PRESENTATION: online streaming by Concertgebouw Brugge on June 6, 2021 at 11 a.m. by Ignace Bossuyt (speaker) and Korneel Bernolet (harpsichord). Read the program here and how you can participate.
