“The music theoretician often lacks practice, and the practitioner, theory.”
– Andreas Werckmeister, Hypomnemata Musica (Quedlinburg, 1697)
John Koster recently sent me a reference in the above book (p. 37) to a lost canzona by J. J. Froberger. I had never seen it, even though it has been cited in the literature since the 19th century. Werckmeister is talking about keyboard temperaments, and says this to illustrate the advantages of a temperament suitable for all keys:
“Some 30 years ago, the world-famous Froberger composed a canzona wherein he gradually transposes the theme through the whole keyboard into all 12 keys, varies and develops it nicely, and thus passes through the circle of fifths and fourths until he arrives again at the key where he began.”
The words “some 30 years ago” gave me a faint hope that the work might not be quite lost after all. Just before his death in 1667 – exactly 30 years before Werckmeister’s publication – Froberger compiled a new collection of works for the Emperor Leopold I which contains six otherwise unknown capriccios (entitled “caprice” for the Frenchified sovereign) – a form which in late Froberger is nearly indistinguishable from the canzona. This incalculable treasure has not been made available to scholars since it appeared out of the blue at auction in 2006, so there is as yet no way to determine whether the piece in question is one of them. It might even be one of the six unknown fantaisies in the same autograph. Or it might be a chimera, the result of a confused report regarding, say, Bull’s chromatic hexachord fantasy.
“Some 30 years ago” is, of course, very vague, and there is no way of knowing how Werckmeister, tucked away deep in Saxony, could have seen the alleged piece. Could “some 30 years” be stretched another 15, to around the time when Hanß passed through Dresden? Froberger was notoriously cagey with his manuscripts, since people tended, then as now, to “massacre” his pieces, as his patroness Duchess Sibylla of Württemberg put it. But perhaps the Elector persuaded the composer to leave a token of his art in exchange for the gold chain the traveling virtuoso received? From the Saxon capital a copy or word of such an outlier might later have reached Quedlinburg or Halberstadt, where Werckmeister was working.
The canzona/caprice might also have been so special that Froberger never included it in any collection. In his lifetime very few were tuning their harpsichords in a way that would have allowed performance of such a work, although as Werckmeister states, there were other similar examples. He is against instruments with many added keys: “Many talk and discuss a great deal about sub-semitones but yet don’t know how to use them”; “I have long since been to sub-semitone school; it is better to lay a good temperament.”
His attitude toward temperament is laudably flexible at this point:
“As a practical matter, I can, if I so wish, have all the fifths and fourths beat a very little between each other; and on the other hand, leave the upper notes of all the major thirds higher than the lower. Since I have learned the ropes, I can quickly adjust one thing and another.”
This is a recipe for evil, un-historical equal temperament...from the year 1697. But he goes on:
“Sometimes I tune some of the fifths pure, and some of them beating, which is also perfectly acceptable.”
This is a manifesto for promiscuous flexibility. Imagine tuning willy-nilly to the mere needs of the moment, according to the scores on the music stand! That would never do.
Actually, in his last publication (Musicalische Paradoxal-Discourse, 1707), Werckmeister went over to the doctrinaire side – in favor of equal temperament, “Which is an example of how devout, well-tempered people can live, and will rejoice, in constant equal harmony with God.” He even apologized for any past propaganda for unequal temperaments. Werckmeister was tired of the endless, violent polemics, insisted that composers should be free to use all possible keys, and could no longer bear thirds as wide as a whole comma, which in 1697 he was yet willing to accept in passages through difficult keys. If this isn’t proof of how Bach understood the term wohltemperiert, I don’t know what is.
On p. 11 of the Hypomnemata, the portentous words wol-temperirten Clavier appear,* as part of a discussion of relationes non-harmonicae. What exactly Werckmeister considers wol-temperiert he doesn’t specify, but he was definitely moving in the direction of 12th-comma meantone – which is what you can call equal temperament in order to either persuade skeptics, or confuse fools.
Our author closes Chapter V (p. 14) with a passage that now rings out like a prophesy fulfilled:
“Whoever in their youth does not occupy themselves with the correct rules of composition will remain a bungler as long as they live, however great they think themselves. It is regrettable that so much evil nonsense has crept into the composition of music, which is often excused by incompetent authorities. Should one wish to abandon the natural foundations of music, and cast away the basis and causes of music found in nature, so that one composed and performed only according to their own delusions and whims, there would soon be no difference to be found between a rock band [Bierfiedlerei] and a symphony orchestra [rechschaffenen Musicalischen Collegio]. Whereby it must be said that a rock band is often preferred to an orchestra [Capell- und Kirchen Music].”
(Apologies for the updated translation, but “beer hall music” seemed to lack punch, and what church music has become, we all know.)
***
A couple of years ago in the dead of winter I was traveling the wonderful narrow-gauge steam-train system in the Harz mountains up to the Brocken, their highest point. I didn’t know I had to to change trains to get to the top. When I realized the error, I got out at the tiny town of Benneckenstein to take a train back. Having two hours to wait, I went to the local tourist office, which was just closing. On the map I received from the irritated official, I was astonished to find the birthplace of Andreas Werckmeister listed as a local sight. I trudged down a long hill past the miserable remains of East German administration to the river, crossed the bridge, and stood for a minute at the address listed, in front of a shabby facade of plywood covering rotted half-timbering. There was a nice memorial to the once-famous native son in a nearby miniature park, facing what little is left of the church where young Andreas had his first organ lessons from his uncles.
I missed a bus back up the hill and had to wait awhile in the cold for the black beast to come around the bend and take me back to where I could catch the very last train up to the Brocken, which is one of the candidates for Bald Mountain. That was the place all the devils used to assemble for their revels on St. Walpurgis Night. Thoughts, not of Moussorgsky, but of Andreas Werckmeister put me to sleep in the snow-blasted hotel, rebuilt on the core of a radio- and observation-tower used successively by Nazis, Communists and NATO.
December 16, 2023
* But not for the first time in Werckmeister. That was on the title page of his first publication, the Orgel-Probe of 1681, which refers to wohl temperieren. The term comes up in three more of his books. See Rudolf Rasch, “Does ‘Well-Tempered’ mean ‘Equal-Tempered’?” in “Bach, Handel, Scarlatti - Tercentenary Essays”, Cambridge, 1985.
|