The larger context of this conference was the annual festival of early music in Thuringia known as Güldener Herbst (Golden Autumn). The series of concerts, church services, guided tours and similar events in late September and early October took note of the three hundredth anniversaries of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach's birth on 8 March 1714 and Philipp Heinrich Erlebach's death a few weeks later, on 17 April. Since Bach was born in Weimar (central Germany) but worked primarily in the northern cities of Berlin and Hamburg, and Erlebach, conversely, hailed from a small town in the far northwest but spent his career in Rudolstadt (about twenty miles south of Weimar), the 2014 festival focused on cultural interrelationships between the two regions, summed up in the subtitle ‘Norddeutsche Impulse’ (north German impulses).
Its scholarly denouement was fairly compact, comprising ten papers by scholars from Poland, Germany, the United States and Japan, plus a tour and concert in the opulent Heidecksburg Palace, where Erlebach served as Kapellmeister for several decades. The symposium took place under the aegis of the Institut für Musikwissenschaft Weimar-Jena, directed by Helen Geyer, in partnership with the umbrella organization Academia Musicalis Thuringiae, led by Christian Storch.
Erlebach, born in 1657, was touted in the promotional literature as one of the most important musicians between Heinrich Schütz (1585–1672) and Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750). Though he was, indeed, ‘one of the leading composers of his time in central Germany’ (Bernd Baselt and Dorothea Schröder, ‘Erlebach, Philipp Heinrich’, Grove Music Online <www.oxfordmusiconline.com> (18 March 2015)), his music is still not widely known. This is partly because the vast majority of Erlebach's compositions, which encompassed virtually all the main instrumental and vocal genres, were destroyed in a fire about two decades after his death. A number of works that were spared this fate, and several others for which only the text has been preserved, were examined in varying degrees of detail at the symposium. In most cases, however, the presentations drew comparisons with other composers and courts, both near and far.
The first set of papers was delivered at the Hochschule für Musik Franz Liszt in Weimar. Maria Stolarzewicz (Warsaw) led off with a wide-ranging summary of the aesthetic background of musical culture at central German courts around 1700. She spoke about the relationship between music and language, the concepts of mimesis, nature and truth, music as a language of feelings, and other broad topics. Included were quotations from the works of usual suspects such as Barthold Feind, Johann Mattheson and Christian Friedrich Hunold. But there were also cameo appearances by figures as diverse as Charles de Saint-Évremond, Christian Thomasius and Ludovico Antonio Muratori. Claus Oefner (Eisenach) then considered the sometimes fraught relationship between musical leaders at court (Kapellmeister) and church (Kantor), and the division of labour between them. He described in detail the specific duties of composers such as Erlebach (Rudolstadt), Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel (Gotha/Sondershausen), Johann Ludwig Bach (Meiningen), Georg Philipp Telemann (Eisenach) and Johann Philipp Krieger (Weißenfels), and noted that the institutional modus operandi differed from place to place.
Christian Ahrens (Ruhr-Universität Bochum, retired) presented a wealth of information about musical ensembles at Thuringian courts in the early eighteenth century, based on his examination of archival materials in Weimar, Gotha and Sondershausen. He has been able to determine the size of these groups, the instruments and voices that were employed, the identities of the musicians and many other details. To his substantial book on the Hofkapelle in Gotha (‘Zu Gotha ist eine gute Kapelle . . .’: Aus dem Innenleben einer thüringischen Hofkapelle des 18. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2009)) can now be added an even more extensive study of ‘Die Weimarer Hofkapelle 1683–1851’, which will soon appear as the first volume in a new series of Schriften der Academia Musicalis Thuringiae (Sinzig: Studio). In addition to alerting us to the pitfalls of interpreting this evidence (on account of the dual functions of courtly musicians, for instance), Ahrens stressed that smaller court ensembles were the norm, rather than the relative behemoths in Dresden and Mannheim.
My own contribution (Stephen Crist, Emory University) focused on a group of arias in Johann Sebastian Bach's church cantatas. I discussed ways in which Bach grappled with the conventions of aria composition during the crucial thirty-three months between March 1714, when he was promoted to Konzertmeister at the ducal court in Weimar, and December 1716, when he apparently stopped writing cantatas there. Since this was the first extended period during which Bach composed arias on a routine basis, it can be viewed as a kind of testing-ground, a ‘laboratory’ offering opportunities for practice and experimentation.
The final paper in the first session, by Rashid-S. Pegah (Würzburg), examined a brief period in the career of Johann Georg Conradi (or ‘Counradj’), who is best known as having been director of the Hamburg opera in the 1690s. A manuscript score of his first success there was uncovered at the Library of Congress more than forty years ago (George J. Buelow, ‘Die schöne und getreue Adriane (Hamburg 1691): A Lost Opera by J. G. Conradi Rediscovered’, Acta Musicologica 44 (1972), 108–121). It was recorded in connection with the Boston Early Music Festival in 2004 but reached the stage only in 2014, at the Landestheater Niederbayern. Before settling in Hamburg, Conradi worked as Kapellmeister at the courts in Oettingen, Ansbach and Römhild. Buelow noted that Conradi served Duke Heinrich of Saxe-Gotha at Römhild (in the southwest corner of Thuringia) for about three years in the late 1680s, immediately before he left for Hamburg: ‘Here he built up a notable orchestra, although further details of his career during this period are unclear’ (George J. Buelow, ‘Conradi, Johann Georg’, Grove Music Online <www.oxfordmusiconline.com> (18 March 2015)). Pegah's archival research on the Hofkapelle at Römhild filled in many of these blanks, and he also offered brief comments about two of Conradi's successors there, Johann Thomas Schaumburg and Johann Philipp Käfer.
After a brief set change, to travel from Weimar to Rudolstadt, the conference continued the next day in the beautiful surroundings of the Porcelain Gallery in the Heidecksburg Palace. Bernd Koska (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg) presented a fascinating paper on music at the court of Schleiz in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Despite straitened financial circumstances, Count Heinrich XI pursued a grandiose cultural agenda. Immediately after coming to power in 1692, he began building his musical ensemble by hiring leading musicians and purchasing modern performing materials. He eventually made contact with Telemann and J. S. Bach. But during the 1690s and the first decade of the 1700s Agostino Steffani (1654–1728) and Erlebach supported the court's efforts. Steffani's involvement is somewhat surprising, given that Hanover, where he served as Kapellmeister, is rather distant – more than one hundred and fifty miles northwest. The factor enabling his participation was that packets of music were sent from Hanover to Schleiz on a regular basis. Rudolstadt, on the other hand, is relatively close (approximately twenty miles), so it was not difficult for Erlebach to exert a decisive and personal influence on the development of court music in Schleiz. For two decades, there was indeed an intensive musical exchange between the two courts, and Erlebach's music became a permanent feature in Schleiz, just as it was in Rudolstadt. Koska drew particular attention to a previously unknown booklet containing the libretto for a 1693 Musicalischer Glückwunsch that Erlebach composed to honour the occasion of Heinrich's accession. He also presented evidence indicating that Erlebach's compositions were performed in Schleiz between 1698 and 1712.
Another especially stimulating presentation was an account by Andreas Waczkat (Universität Göttingen) of music at Friedrichswerth, the summer residence of Duke Friedrich I, known as ‘the little Versailles of Thuringia’. The chief musician there was the chamber organist and later Kapellmeister Christian Friedrich Witt (c1660–1717), Stölzel's predecessor in Gotha, whose Passacaglia in D minor was formerly attributed to J. S. Bach (bwv Anh. 182). To the extent that Witt's music is known at all, it is his keyboard works that have usually been examined. Waczkat turned his attention instead to the instrumental ensemble music, mainly concertos and overture-suites, and their relationship to aspects of French style. He drew comparisons to some of J. S. Bach's Weimar works, and to festive court music in Herrenhausen (near Hanover), where Francesco Venturini (c1675–1745) was also producing overture-suites for performance at a summer residence. After Witt died in 1717, Venturini was entrusted with the task of reorganizing the Gotha court Kapelle.
Junko Sonoda (University of the Arts, Kyoto) called attention to the central role in Rudolstadt of church music by Johann Rosenmüller (c1619–1684), based upon the large number of his works listed in a catalogue of the court's musical holdings during the first two decades of the eighteenth century. She noted that the repertoire differed from that of the Weißenfels court, and she interpreted the inclusion of distinctly Catholic movements such as the Dies irae as evidence of religious tolerance. Andreas Münzmay (Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main) discussed Erlebach's Harmonische Freude Musicalischer Freunde, seventy-five arias published in two volumes (Nuremberg, 1697 and 1710). A significant proportion of these pieces originated in Erlebach's operas Die Plejades (Brunswick, 1693) and Die siegende Unschuld (Rudolstadt, 1702), which have not been preserved. Münzmay noted that the original operatic texts were changed in these prints, and he compared them with similar publications by Johann Sigismund Kusser (1660–1722). The president of the Gesellschaft für Musikgeschichte in Baden-Württemberg, Joachim Kremer (Staatliche Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst Stuttgart), concluded the scholarly proceedings with a largely spontaneous lecture concerning the role of Erlebach's music in southwest Germany, within the context of a larger project focusing on the cantata repertoire in that region. On the one hand, traces of Erlebach occasionally appear in Württemberg's musical history; on the other, several works by the court Kapellmeister in Stuttgart, Johann Georg Christian Störl (1675–1719), show up in the inventory of the music collection at Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt (1714–1720). The musical profile of both courts was similar, and the linchpin of the exchange between them may well have been the widow of the Duke of Württemberg, Magdalena Sibylla (1652–1712), a prominent composer of hymns.
The symposium was followed by an all-Erlebach concert performed in the Festsaal of the Heidecksburg Palace by Les Amis de Philippe. The group's founder, Ludger Rémy, was unfortunately absent, but his talented student and deputy, Sebastian Knebel, led with aplomb. The programme included two instrumental works: an ouverture in C major (Nuremberg, 1693) and a sonata in E minor for two violins and basso continuo (Nuremberg, 1694). But vocal compositions predominated. Each half of the concert included an aria from Gott-geheilgte Sing-Stunde (Rudolstadt, 1704): ‘Ach! Mehr als zentnerschwere Last’ for soprano and alto, and ‘Ihr Augen, laßt euch nicht erschrecken’ for tenor and bass. In addition, there was the cantata Gott will vor [für] alle seine Gaben for the fourteenth Sunday after Trinity (text by Erdmann Neumeister, 1708), and the psalm cantata Der Gerechte wird grünen for the Feast of St John the Baptist. The highlight of the evening came at the end, with music Erlebach composed for a celebration honouring the new Emperor Joseph I in Mühlhausen. Two of the three sections had not been performed since the work's premiere on 28 October 1705. The concert was clearly a labour of love for Manfred Fechner (Jena), who prepared the performance materials from original sources. It was recorded for later broadcast on Deutschlandradio Kultur.
In 2013 the Academia Musicalis Thuringiae and Institut für Musikwissenschaft Weimar-Jena mounted a similar international symposium to mark the tercentenary of Johann Ludwig Krebs (1713–1780), the famous organist, composer and student of J. S. Bach. After two symposia in a row, it will be understandable if the organizers decide to wait an additional year or two before launching their next project. But once they catch their breath, it is to be hoped that they continue these gatherings, which are stimulating valuable new research on the rich musical history and culture of this fascinating corner of Germany. The proceedings of both symposia are scheduled for publication in the Schriften der Academia Musicalis Thuringiae series.
