Haydn: Part-Songs - J.C.F Bach: Motet

Album review

Haydn's 13 part songs, for three or four voices with piano, were completed around 1801 and thus number among his last compositions. Haydn in his later years was a very public figure; as the most famous living composer, he had all the commissions he could handle, and he complained, according to the uncredited booklet notes here, that "my duties increase as my years increase." That makes these little songs all the more interesting, for he told his biographer Griesinger that they were written "con amore," with no external stimulus. Indeed, some of them seem to have a very personal quality that is especially remarkable in view of the essentially entertaining nature of the part song as a genre. In his final years, after he stopped composing, Haydn signed his letters with a little musical autograph drawn from Der Greis (The Old Man, track 7): "Hin ist alle meine Kraft/Alt und schwach bin ich" (Gone is all my strength/Old and weak am I). And his setting of Gellert's Abendlied zu Gott (Evening Song to God, track 12) has a quality of personal religiosity that Haydn rarely had the chance to express in an age in which religious belief did not go very deep. The majority of these songs are comic, and a drinking song like Die Beredsamkeit (Talkativeness, track 9) has little-known but entirely characteristic examples of Haydn's sense of humor as the singers finally mouth the word "stumm" (mute) after Haydn has masterfully drawn the contrast between water, which makes us mute, and good wine, that turns us into arguing orators. In this song and in several others, Haydn turns his mastery of counterpoint to humorous ends, with utterly delightful results. Every one of these songs is an absolute gem. They were probably written with one voice to a part in mind, but they lose little when sung by a small choir, as they are here. The Netherlands Chamber Choir seems to miss a few of Haydn's jokes -- the old man of Der Greis is too perky at the start -- but the choir sings humorous songs well, neither stepping on the jokes nor plowing through them lifelessly. In Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach's motet Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme (Shepherds awake, a voice is calling), which closes the disc, the group is less successful. In this odd work, one of J.S. Bach's least-known sons tries to transplant the dense textures of his father's motets forward into the language of the Classical era. There's quite a bit of interest in hearing the attempt, and in hearing the famous Lutheran chorale emerge from a Classical harmonic texture. The choir has intonation problems in the sections of this unaccompanied work that sound like the elder Bach, but they do justice to a set of Haydn's least-known and most fascinating short pieces.
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