Matthew Head

C. P. E. Bach "In Tormentis": Gout Pain and Body Language in the Fantasia in A major, H278 (1782)

In his Magazin der Musik , Carl Friedrich Cramer reported that C. P. E. Bachs Fantasia in A major, h 278 (1782), was composed during the agonies of gout. Tapping into a reported epidemic of this patrician malady among men of letters, Cramers anecdote invoked rich associations of sequestered suffering, withdrawal from public life, the pleasures of the table, genius, sexual (im)potency and humour. Reflecting contemporary nerve-based theories of sensation, Cramer aligned different types of physical and mental pain with specific musical gestures. In so doing, he did more than indulge his hermeneutic imagination: he suggested a connection between Bachs solo keyboard music and the experience of embodiment. The seemingly abstract gestures of improvisation were linked dialectically to the corporeal. Behind the specifics of Cramers reading is a conviction that this kind of music ‘knows’ about the body, as well as the mind, and that it moves between gestures suggestive of thinking, speaking, feeling and corporeal sensation. Analysis of the fantasia, and Bachs letters, supports Cramers reading.

Genre, Romanticism and Female Authorship: Fanny Hensel's 'Scottish' Sonata in G Minor (1843)

The year 1846 was a watershed for Fanny Hensel: in that year she published collections of music in her own name. Felix Mendelssohn, withholding personal approval of his sisters decision to go public, nonetheless acknowledged a change of status when he offered his ‘professional blessing upon your decision to enter our guild’. This much is well known, but the decision to publish was one of several signs that in the 1840s Hensel sought to set her life-long cultivation of composition on a more formal and professional footing. With her Piano Sonata in G minor (autumn 1843) she tackled a genre largely off-limits to earlier female composers in northern Germany. The genre involved extended instrumental forms and Hensel was alternately confident and full of doubts about her abilities in this area. In a letter to her brother concerning her String Quartet, she pictured herself trapped in the ‘emotional and wrenching’ (‘ruhrend u. eindringlich’) style of late Beethoven. Countering her brothers criticisms of the quartet she asserted, ambivalently, that she did not lack ‘the compositional skill’ (‘die Schreibart’) to succeed so much as ‘a certain vital force’ (‘ein gewisses Lebensprinzip’) and the ‘strength to sustain my ideas and give them the necessary consistency’.

Haydn's exoticisms: “difference” and the Enlightenment

In Persia, a sofa married an easy chair; the Indians of the Molucca Islands Fashion wigs from wire; in China, a Muscovite man gave birth, while a satrap in the Indies was impaled for making love – so reads aloud Sempronio, the pharmacist in Haydns Lo speziale (1768), from his newspaper. The librettist, Carlo Goldoni, at once indulges and ridicules his periods fascination with the fabulous, unnatural, and irrational incidents in far-flung climes reported in journalism and travel writings. Goldoni parodies Sempronios gullibility, and implies that the pharmacists preoccupation with world news renders him oblivious to events closer to home. As Sempronio reorganizes the war-torn world with the help of a compass and globe, his unqualified assistant mixes and muddles the potions that his master will dispense. Sempronios fanciful internationalism blinds him to Mengones designs on his ward, Grilletta. Indeed, Sempronios fascination with the exotic makes him an easy target when Mengone sues for Grillettas hand in the exalted costume of a Turkish ambassador. Mengone is not the only suitor to don Turkish disguise in the hope of winning over Grillettas reluctant guardian. Masquerading as an ambassador to the “King of Moluccas,” Volpino (a frequent visitor to the pharmacy) offers Sempronio a job in Turkey as the Kings pharmacist. Volpinos related aria “Salamelica, Semprugna cara” (Act III) begins with Italian-derived gibberish, standing in for Turkish, while the last two lines refer ungrammatically to singing and dancing, as if in celebration of the impending wedding.