Josef Mysliveček

(1737–1781)

Symfonier

Symphony in C major, F 26

1. Allegro con spirito
2. Andante
3. Presto

Symphony in A major, F 27

1. Allegro con brio
2. Andante
3. Allegro

Symphony in F major, F 28

1. Allegro
2. Andante
3. Presto

Symphony in D major, F 29

1. Allegro assai
2. Andante grazioso
3. Prestissimo

Symphony in B flat major, F 30

1. Allegro con spirito
2. Andante
3. Presto

Symphony in G major, F 31

1. Allegro con brio
2. Andante
3. Presto assai

Josef Mysliveček was born on 9 March 1737 in Prague. He and his twin brother attended the Dominican Normalschule at the Church of St Giles and, probably, the Jesuit Gymnasium in the Clementinum. They also attended the Charles-Ferdinand University, but in March 1753 Josef withdrew owing to his lack of academic success. In May that year he and his brother entered the family millers’ business, becoming apprentices; in 1758 both became journeymen and in 1761 master millers. Soon after this Josef decided to devote himself to music (perhaps there was no schöne Müllerin for him?). He studied organ and composition with František Václav Habermann and Josef František Norbert Seger and published his first set of symphonies about the year 1763.

On 5 November 1763 he left Prague for Venice, where he studied operatic composition with Giovanni Battista Pescetti. His first opera, Semiramide, was staged in Bergamo in 1766 and contemporary librettos confirm that even at this early stage in his career he was known as ‘Il Boemo’ (The Bohemian) because the Italians found his family name impossible to pronounce. Il Bellerofonte was produced in Naples a year later, for the birthday of Ferdinand IV, King of Naples, and by the time Mysliveček died, in abject poverty, in Rome on 4 February 1781, he had composed nearly thirty operas. He had spent the remainder of his life in Italy but had also travelled to Prague, Vienna and Munich. For several years he was on friendly terms with Leopold and Wolfgang Mozart (his name is to be found some forty times in the Mozarts’ correspondence from 1770 to 1778) but the relationship soured in 1778, when Mysliveček failed to fulfil a promise to secure for Wolfgang an operatic commission at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples for the Carnival in 1779.

Apart from operas and oratorios Mysliveček composed concertos, a large quantity of chamber music (solos, duos, trios, quartets, quintets and octets) and some forty-five symphonies. These include the ‘Six Overtures for Two Violins, Two Hoboys, Two French Horns, Two Tenors, with a Thorough Bass for the Harpsichord or Violoncello’, originally published in London in 1772 by William Napier, and edited for this recording by Daniel E. Freeman, author of the forthcoming Il Boemo: Josef Mysliveček. The Napier print bears a dedication to George Nassau Clavering, the third Earl Cowper, an expatriate English nobleman who lived in Florence. It is likely that the symphonies were first performed by Lord Cowper’s noted private orchestra in advance of publication. The large number of surviving examples of the print attests to their wide dissemination in England.

All six symphonies, or Overtures if you prefer Napier’s title, are in three movements, the opening movements well-developed sonata-allegros, the finales in very condensed (and virtually monothematic) sonata form, the central movements lyrical and in a related but contrasting key. None of the symphonies lasts more than about ten minutes, but they show the hand of a master-craftsman, and within their deliberately restricted compass a remarkably varied range of mood and character.

Here are a few examples: the festive opening Allegro con spirito of F 26; the gentle Andante for strings of F 27; the imposing opening Allegro of F 28; the busy opening Allegro assai and the Prestissimo finale of F 29; the splendid and substantial opening Allegro con spirito of F 30; and the grand Allegro con brio and ravishing Andante of F 31. You are sure to find others.

Robin Golding (2004)

Josef Mysliveček’s output of orchestral music offers some of the finest examples of a gracious eighteenth-century Italian symphonic style that is little heard today except for occasional performances of the symphonies of Sammartini, Boccherini, and J.C. Bach, plus a group of Italianate symphonies by W.A. Mozart (cf. K 74, 81, 95, 97, 81, 112, 114, 162, 181, 182, 184, 297 and 338). Mysliveček was the most talented symphonist resident in Italy at the time of Mozart’s visits in the early 1770s, and he provided Mozart with many important stylistic models.

Italian symphonies in Mysliveček’s day were usually cast in three movements (fast–slow–fast) without a minuet, the last movement typically a rollicking 3 / 8. In Italy, three-movement opera overtures and threemovement symphonies bore the same designation (sinfonie) and were composed in nearly identical style. Brevity was an important legacy of the origins of Italian symphonies in overture style. It made sense to keep the length of opera overtures short (so as not to detract attention from the main musical event), but in symphonic style one can be left feeling a bit cheated. A standard technique of reducing length was to omit the repeats customary in binary or sonata form (another one was to restrict the length of sonata-form development sections). The Napier set has more repeats than would be usual in Mysliveček’s symphonies (they are found in half of the fast movements), perhaps a means of appealing to a northern preference for lengthier symphonies. In general, the Napier symphonies exhibit a dignity and solidity that may well have been designed specially to please the English. One even wonders whether the rondeau that concludes F 27 reflects Mysliveček’s conception of the style of English country dances.

Scoring for strings, horns, and oboes was standard for Italian symphonies written in the early 1770s. In slow movements, the horns were omitted, whereas the oboes were sometimes included, sometimes omitted (as in F 27), and sometimes substituted for flutes (as in F 26 and F 29). It was common in the 1770s to feature solo passages for divided violas (‘tenors’) combined with oboes or flutes in parallel motion. Mysliveček’s symphonies of the 1770s contain so many of these passages that it is difficult to identify another composer of eighteenth-century symphonies who seems to have been as fond of the sonority of violas as Mysliveček was. It does not take long for the listener to recognise Mysliveček’s ability to satisfy the expectation of eighteenth-century audiences for symphonies that had the power to arouse the emotions and delight the senses. Alongside standard techniques of orchestral virtuosity (rushing scales, shimmering tremolos, etc.) guaranteed to surprise and amaze, there is a full range of moods and textures common to symphonies of Mysliveček’s day, including examples of the exquisite slow movements that were a specialty of his. One is hesitant to assert the introduction of a composer’s character traits into music written in the eighteenth century (which was so much bound to genre traditions), but it is tempting to discern in Mysliveček’s music some traces of a dynamic personality whose outstanding qualities were described by Wolfgang Mozart as ‘fire, spirit and life’.

Daniel E. Freeman (2004)