With this, the eighteenth instalment of the Periodical Overtures in 8 Parts, we are almost one third of the way through this extended publishing project. All 61 overtures, actually symphonies, are being published monthly by Musikproduktion Höflich. Listen here before heading over to musikproduktion höflich to obtain your copy of the score and parts.
Bremner’s one issue by [Franz Xaver] Richter … had staying power. Bremner drew from a French source for the symphony in D major that became “Number XVIII” of the Periodical Overtures. Georges Cousineau had published it in Paris circa 1765 as No. 5 of Sei Sinfonie a Otto, billed as Richter’s opus 7. No newspaper advertisement survives to pinpoint the date of Bremner’s subsequent British issue, but it was announced at the bottom of Bremner’s list of “New Music” on 7 February 1767, so it is likely to have been released at the start of the month or perhaps even earlier.[1] Scholar Jenny Burchell has documented at least five subsequent performances of Periodical Overture No. 18 at concerts of the Edinburgh Musical Society, starting in 1769 and persisting for at least seventeen years, until 1786.[2]
In a small way, Bremner modified Richter’s already-conservative symphony to make it even more old-fashioned: he added figured bass to the Basso part, which had not been present in the Parisian print. Still, that was Bremner’s customary practice throughout the series, and Richter’s symphony still retains many features that speak to its “modern” Mannheim origins. The first movement opens with four measures of a bold premier coup d’archet, made even more dramatic by two weighty pauses prolonged by fermatas. This “first strike of the bows” is followed by quiet but vigorous measured tremolos that climb in stepwise fashion, supported by “drum 8ths.” The same pairing recurs in measure 51 to mark the start of the sonata form’s development, while the movement’s second theme—a showcase for the oboes at measure 28—is the first melody to return in the recapitulation (m. 108). The first theme makes only a brief reappearance at measure 124, shortly before the end of the “Allegro spiritoso” movement.
Richter shifts to the dominant key of A major for the strings-only “Andante” movement, and he employs a binary-sonata pattern that James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy call a “Type 2 Sonata”; it can be diagrammed as an ||: a/I b/V :||: a/V b/I :|| structure.[3] The florid first theme, played by the violins, interlocks contrapuntally with the lower strings. The second theme (m. 18) layers the string instruments in four ostinato-like rhythms: the first violin plays off-beat pairs of sixteenth notes; the second violin performs three eighth notes after a downbeat eighth rest; the viola sounds steady sixteenth notes, while the cello and bass play an eighth note on each beat of the duple meter. Bremner’s edition marks this passage “dolce”—an indication that is lacking in the Parisian print.
Richter retains both the Type 2 sonata form and duple meter for the D major “Allegro molto” finale, but his proclivity for the learned style makes a clear appearance here as well. The first oboe and first violin play an ascending melody that opens with half notes, then adds to the rhythmic energy with increasingly shorter note values. Two bars later, the second oboe and second violin echo the melody, creating a fugato passage, while the low strings play drum 8ths. The full ensemble then participates in a brief but effective crescendo (m. 7), reflecting Richter’s Mannheim background as well. The first violin plays the lyrical second theme at measure 34, at which point the supporting oboes are instructed to play “dolce,” an indication again absent in the Cousineau print, and the rest of the strings add quiet drum 8th pulsations. The second half of this binary sonata (m. 92) again opens with a fugato passage and a brief tutti crescendo. This time, however, the transition back to the second theme and the home key (m. 150) is much longer; it is filled with measured tremolos, sequences, and various interlocking patterns. Although Charles Burney sometimes found such sequential passages tedious, feeling they indicated a “want of invention,” he still regarded Richter’s themes as “often new and noble,” and saw “great merit” in Richter’s music—a view clearly shared by many of his fellow British citizens.[4]
Alyson McLamore
[1] The Public Advertiser, 7 February 1767, p. 1.
[2] Jenny Burchell, Polite or Commercial Concerts?: Concert Management and Orchestral Repertoire in Edinburgh, Bath, Oxford, Manchester, and Newcastle, 1730–1799, Outstanding Dissertations in Music from British Universities, ed. by John Caldwell (New York: Garland Publishing, 1996), 313, 316, 330, 344, 347.
[3] James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Sonata (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 353–4.
[4] Charles Burney, The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Provinces, 2nd ed., corrected (London: T. Becket, J. Rosson, and G. Robinson, 1775), II: 329.