In his Introduction Robert Rawson states that this book will correct three myths concerning music in Bohemia during the Baroque: ‘first, that the period after 1618 until the early phases of the national revival at the end of the eighteenth century is a “dark period” for Czech-language literature and arts. Second, that the use of the Czech language practically died during this period and was replaced with German. Third, that the notion of a specifically Czech identity was invented in the nineteenth century’ (1). As the author makes clear, while this is not a general history of music in Bohemia and Moravia during this time, ‘the central focus … is the Czech-language milieu’ (2). In contrast, however, to studies of the nationalist traditions of the nineteenth century, Rawson's examination of musical ‘Czechness’ combines a clear sensitivity to the earlier musical sources and a broad understanding of the complex multicultural environment in which the composers worked. He establishes as a foundation the formative importance of the rural cultural institutions, the village church and schools, and the significant role of the Catholic Counter-Reformation in promoting Czech-language publications, especially the cantionals of spiritual songs that were of clear importance to the native composers.
Important to his discussion are musical characteristics of the stylus rusticanus, which include ‘short and repeated melodic cells; the prevalence of triadic motifs; instrumental character in vocal music; the use or evocation of alternatim praxis; melodic writing in parallel thirds, sixths, tenths, unisons and octaves; paucity of counterpoint; extreme contrasts of style (usually from mixture of high and low styles within a single work); emphasis of the first beat; and parallel minor–major keys’ (48). Rawson rightly points out that the presence of these markers in a composition does not create true ‘folk music’ since such works were often composed for courtly celebrations, especially during Carnival, when the intent is more likely to have been to promote humour than to offer respectful imitation. These stylistic elements are most evident in the tradition of Christmas pastorellas prominent throughout Central Europe. Rawson examines closely the examples by native composers, such as Pavel Josef Vejvanovský, which are often marked by quotation of the Central European carol Resonet in laudibus / Josef lieber, Josef mein / Hajej, můj andílku. He also clarifies the transition from the predominantly instrumental pastorella of the seventeenth century to the vocal examples in the early eighteenth century. A separate chapter examines in detail how the patron saints of Bohemia, especially Wenceslas and Jan of Nepomuk, were used to promote a reconnection through music to a pre-Reformation Catholic past for the Czech kingdom.
The final two chapters analyse the increasing influence of the new Italian styles in Bohemia and Moravia in the early eighteenth century. An examination of Vivaldi is focused especially on the place of Count Morzin as a patron of Vivaldi and dedicatee of the Opus 8 concertos, but Rawson also investigates the ‘Vivaldian’ influence on Antonín Reichenauer, Josef Gurecký and Jan Dismas Zelenka, and the presence of manuscripts by Bohemian composers in the collections of Franz Rudolf Erwein, Count of Schönborn-Wiesentheid. The final chapter begins with an examination of the many Italian opera librettos with prominent ‘Bohemian’ characters, such as Libuša and Vlasta, the latter of whom becomes a model of the Amazon female. The theatrical venture of Count Franz Anton von Sporck is briefly mentioned, but probably most significant is Rawson's discussion of provincial theatrical productions, especially those given at the court of Johann Adam von Questenberg, and he examines in greater detail L'origine di Jaromeriz in Moravia and a serenata, Der glorreiche Nahmen Adami, both by František Antonín Miča. The serenata is an especially fitting conclusion to this work as it is partly in German and partly in Czech.
This book is particularly timely and useful because of Rawson's citation and integration of much recent Czech scholarship that has not always been easily accessible to non-Czech scholars, and it provides a fuller context to his earlier articles on the pastorale tradition and the rustic Hanák musical style of central Moravia (see Rawson, ‘Gottfried Finger's Christmas Pastorellas’, Early Music 33/4 (2005), 591–606, and Rawson, ‘Courtly Contexts for Moravian Hanák Music in the 17th and 18th Centuries’, Early Music 40/4 (2012), 577–591). I was, however, particularly frustrated by the many incomplete or inaccurate citations in the footnotes, making it very difficult to find the specific information he was citing. For example, he seems to have transposed a catalogue inventory number (942) for the original manuscript siglum (A 952/XVI:6) of the Gegriest seist du attributed to Schmeltzer (74). In other notes, he simply cites the title of an entire book, when only a specific section is pertinent to his discussion at that point. In another case, he misreads a reference in an earlier Czech book (117); the song he cites as being found ‘in the Vratislavský I manuscript of 1417 (466)’ is actually found in Wrocław, Biblioteka uniwersytecka, rkp. I.Q.466, f.143v. One particularly vexing moment is when he provides a reference (159, note 52) about Alessandro Poglietti's real name being ‘Alexander Hendel’ with no source or citation to support this significant finding.
I would like to provide two further examples to demonstrate that research for this book was apparently a bit hasty. In the section ‘Heaven and Bagpipes’ Rawson discusses ‘the regional understanding of the emblematic image of the bagpipe and chalumeau’ (49–50). The actual term for chalumeau used in Rawson's source, a collection of sermons by Matthias Faber, is ‘Choraulem’, and Faber even provides a German equivalent: ‘Nihil communius in nuptiis. præsertim Rusticorum, quam ad excitandam lætitiam et cohonestandas nuptias, adhibere Choraulem et Lyripipiarium (ein Schalmeyer und Sackspfeifer)’ (Nothing [is] more common in weddings, especially of the rustics, than to employ a shawm player and bagpiper, for exciting joy and honouring the nuptials). I also note that the quotation ‘Risum teneatis amici!’ (Friends, you must hold the laughter!), which Rawson mentions (50, note 57) as referring to a sermon by Abraham a Sancta Clara, actually refers to the sermon by Faber. When the sermon was published in 1657, both the Latin and German would clearly indicate a shawm player and not the later chalumeau; by 1766, when Hiller published his short biography of Franz Benda, also cited by Rawson, the German term for the later instrument was ‘Schalümo’ (Johann Adam Hiller, ‘Lebenslauf des Herrn Franz Benda, königlichen Preussischen Kammermusikus’, Wöchentliche Nachrichten und Anmerkungen, die Musik betreffend (2 December 1766), 176).
Rawson's discussion of Biber's Battalia (149–151) is most appropriate for his examination of ‘Melancholy Ditties about Dirt and Disorder’ (chapter 6), though to state that ‘Even if the piece was composed in Salzburg, much of its musical content is indebted to his earlier career in Bohemia and Moravia’ (149) seemingly overlooks the possibility that Salzburg was also part of a multicultural community. The citation of Slovak and Polish melodies in the second-movement quodlibet points to Biber's rather broad knowledge of traditional musics from Central Europe, though Rawson's comparison of an eighteenth-century Czech tune with a melody from the Battalia and Schmeltzer's Polnische Sackpfeifen is a bit strained since the melodic ductus in my opinion is quite different.
The identification by Rawson of a previously unknown melody found in the third viola part of Biber's quodlibet (150) is important, though this too is not without interpretative issues. The melody was discovered by Rawson in a number of eighteenth-century sources, perhaps most easily found as ‘Air XXII: Cotillon’ from Act 2 of The Beggar's Opera, and he also discusses a number of earlier French sources. The problem is that in his text Rawson says that the ‘earliest printed source of the melody’ is from a French publication of 1707, though he does acknowledge ‘there must be an earlier source, especially considering that Biber's version is over thirty years earlier than the Feuillet print’ (150). In a footnote on the same page, however, he writes that according to Georgy Calmus's 1912 study of The Beggar's Opera and Alain-René Lesage's parody Télémaque from 1715, ‘the melody was printed in Frankfurt in 1664’. Rawson's page citation is only to Calmus's edition of the French parody, but in the more detailed listing of sources for the tune on page 218 of Calmus's study it is proposed that ‘Vielleicht stammt das Lied sogar aus Deutschland’, since it was published in Georg Heinrich Schreiber's Neu außgeschlagener Liebes- und Frühlings-Knospen Nachschößlinge (Frankfurt: Köler, 1664). Calmus notes that it is also found in Christian Clodius's manuscript songbook from 1669 (D-B Germ. Octavo 231). Though I have not yet seen Schreiber's publication, following up Calmus's citation of Wilhelm Niessen's 1891 study of the manuscript songbook (‘Das Liederbuch des Leipziger Studenten Clodius’, Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft 7 (1891), 579–658) reveals that the tune is copied on pages 643–644 with the following text: ‘Lustig lieben Domini, lustig omnes Populi, quicquid allhier? Ecce frisch Bier, bibere, lambere, schadets auch schier wenn sich einer exercirt und andern wohl vexirt’ (Merrily to love, O lords, merrily, all people, is everyone here? Behold, fresh beer, to drink, to slurp, it's also almost a shame when one of these people drills and annoys others). Clearly this is a closer source to Biber's tune quotation, and the reference to military drills makes it even more appropriate to the imitation of drunken soldiers in the Battalia. Rawson's discovery of this melody is an important addition to our knowledge of Biber and his music, but just a little more effort following his sources would have saved the author from a discussion of tunes that postdate Biber's composition and come from very different cultural contexts.
While some of these bibliographic details will circumscribe its research value, Rawson's narrative is especially compelling in contradicting the three myths mentioned above. At many points he acknowledges the difficulty of separating out the influences on the ‘Czechness’ of these composers in such a multicultural society, and it would have been a very different study had he examined the similar issues in Slovakia, Hungary, Poland and the Balkans. As it stands, Bohemian Baroque provides a window onto both the ‘long’ seventeenth century and the beginning of the ‘long’ eighteenth century, and demonstrates the foundations for cultural traditions that were later evident to Charles Burney and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
