Musical Mysteries and Blessings

Works by Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber and Mark Andre

Harry Haskell

“Of all the violin players of the last century,” the English music historian Charles Burney wrote in 1789, “Biber seems to have been the best, and his solos are the most difficult and most fanciful of any music I have seen of the same period.” Although Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber composed numerous operas, masses, cantatas, and other large-scale works, his posthumous reputation rests largely on his technically demanding and stylistically innovative music for solo violin, as well as a diverse body of instrumental chamber music. Bohemian by birth, Biber spent his entire life within the sprawling, polyglot empire of the Austrian Habsburgs, which offered abundant opportunities for both musical growth and professional advancement. An entry-level job as a rank-and-file musician in the minor principality of Graz paved the way to a more prestigious appointment in the musical household of the Bishop of Olmütz, Karl Liechtenstein, in the central Moravian town of Kroměříž. There Biber gained access to a large and well-funded cadre of performers, including 38 highly trained instrumentalists who displayed their talents in the lavishly scored and often brilliantly virtuosic music that the bishop commissioned for his court and chapel.

Although Biber’s prowess on the violin made him a local celebrity in Kroměříž, the young virtuoso had loftier ambitions, and in 1670 he departed for the comparative metropolis of Salzburg, where he would remain until his death in 1704. The ecclesiastical court of Prince-Archbishop Max Gandolph von Kuenburg was an outpost of Italian culture, expressed in architecture as well as music. It was in Salzburg that Biber embraced the florid, extroverted, richly melodic Italian style exemplified by his famous contemporary and fellow composer-violinist Arcangelo Corelli. Availing himself of the court’s extensive musical resources, he experimented with novel instrumental techniques and composed large-scale polychoral works modeled on those associated with St. Mark’s Cathedral in Venice. By this time Biber’s fame was solidly established. A portrait engraving that adorned the 1681 edition of his influential solo violin sonatas— the works that prompted Burney’s encomium—shows a dandyish, bewigged figure sporting a modish linen collar and a heavy gold chain recently bestowed on him by Emperor Leopold I. Biber became kapellmeister in Salzburg in 1684 and was ennobled six years later, assuming the aristocratic title “Biber von Bibern.”

Biber’s cutting-edge violin techniques, timbral effects, and tunings are characteristic of the “fantastic style” (stylus phantasticus), which the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher described in 1650 as “the most free and unfettered method of composition, bound to nothing, neither to words, nor to a harmonic subject.” No works better illustrate these unfettered flights of fancy than Biber’s 15 “Mystery” (or “Rosary”) Sonatas for violin and basso continuo, so called because they illustrate the Mysteries of the Rosary in the Catholic Church. These highly virtuosic works were probably meant to be performed during special services in Salzburg Cathedral celebrating the joyful, sorrowful, and glorious mysteries of the lives of Mary and Jesus. (In a more secular vein, Biber also wrote programmatic sonatas depicting everything from armies in battle to peasants making their way to church.) As such, the “Mystery” Sonatas hark back to another boundary-crossing instrumental collection, the Sacro-profanus concentus musicus (Sacred-Secular Musical Harmony) by Viennese court composer Johann Heinrich Schmelzer, with whom Biber may have studied in Kroměříž. The difficulty of characterizing such musical hybrids as intrinsically secular or sacred may be judged from the fact that one contemporary manuscript source explicitly links Biber’s Tenth “Mystery” Sonata to the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683… Apart from the opening “Annunciation” Sonata, each of these tonal “mysteries” features a different unorthodox string-tuning scheme, the better to capture their atmosphere of supernatural spirituality. In the first sonata on tonight’s program, for example, the violin’s so-called scordatura is G–G–D–D instead of the conventional G–D–A–E tuning. Biber’s resplendent evocation of the Resurrection—the first of the five “glorious” mysteries—is followed by sonatas depicting Christ’s Ascension, Pentecost, and the Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin Mary. At the end of the collection Biber appended a stand-alone movement subtitled “Der Schutzengel als Begleiter des Menschen” (The Guardian Angel as Humankind’s Companion), in which he dispensed with the continuo accompaniment to create a monumental Passacaglia for solo violin on the scale of Bach’s mighty D-minor Chaconne: it consists of 65 brief but dazzlingly imaginative variations on a repeating four-note pattern known as a ground bass, which descends stepwise from G to D. Biber’s Passacaglia in G minor not only prefigured Bach’s Chaconne but laid the foundation for the entire solo-violin genre.

Like Biber, the contemporary composer Mark Andre uses extended instrumental techniques and other unconventional tonal effects to plumb the ineffable mystery of religious faith. Blending live and electronic sounds, …selig sind… (“blessed are”) is an extended, wordless meditation on the Sermon on the Mount, as recorded in the Gospel According to St. Matthew. In the so-called Beatitudes, Jesus proclaimed a radical new theology predicated on humility and compassion rather than Old Testament sternness and strength. Of the eight blessings enumerated in the gospel, Andre has chosen seven as an epigraph to his score, beginning with “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven” (in the classic King James version) and ending with “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.” Andre grew up in a devoutly Protestant Franco-German family, and the omission of the more militant eighth Beatitude (“Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness”) may reflect his own sturdily iconoclastic faith. As he once remarked, “Especially as Protestants, we’re confronted with the commandments of Moses on the one hand and the extremely complex teachings of the gospels on the other. So you have to make individual decisions.” Dedicated to Jörg Widmann, …selig sind… casts the clarinetist in the role of a religious pilgrim who passes through 14 “stations” on the metaphorical path to redemption. All but the first of these musical signposts is preceded by an interlude labeled “transition” or “crossing” (Übergang). Just as Andre’s subliminal allusion to the 14 Stations of the Cross suggests a journey that is both physical and spiritual, so the soloist progresses from one position on stage to another in the course of the 35-minute-long piece. (The meticulously notated score gives approximate timings for various sections and calls for dramatic lighting effects, beginning and ending in pitch-darkness.) The clarinet part—an unearthly repertoire of whisperings and shudderings, spectral multiphonics, microtonal roulades, unpitched clickings, and percussive finger “slaps”—is embedded in electronically processed sounds derived from wind and human voices. Exceptionally in a work of such transcendent quietude, the music rises to a kind of climax in the final station: the clarinet’s sustained high notes, marked “in Verbundenheit” (in solidarity), seemingly herald the divinely inspired peacemakers of the seventh Beatitude.

Long resident in Germany, Andre grew up in Alsace and imbibed the region’s split cultural personality. “Our last name was originally Andress,” he explains, “but it was changed in 1924, when my grandparents were living in France.” As Marc André, his birth name, he studied at the Paris Conservatoire with the renowned “spectralist” composer Gérard Grisey, whose pioneering investigations of the physical properties of sound helped shape the younger musician’s abiding interest in timbre, texture, and sonic metamorphosis. After coming to Germany on a French government scholarship in 1995, he polished his compositional technique in Stuttgart as a pupil of Helmut Lachenmann, delved into electronic media under the tutelage of André Richard, and eventually formalized his cultural “homecoming” by changing his name to Mark Andre. His dual heritage is manifest in many of his chamber and orchestral works, as well as in his opera wunderzaichen. Perhaps not coincidentally, its fictional protagonist is both a cultural transplant (his scholarly quest takes him from Germany to Israel) and the recipient of a transplanted heart.

What Andre describes as his family’s “fluctuating, shifting identity” is part and parcel of his music. The wind paradigm also figures prominently in an earlier piece he wrote for Jörg Widmann, über for clarinet and orchestra, which incorporates actual recordings of wind gusting across the Israeli desert. For Andre, the absence of sound is as expressive as its presence; but what interests him most is “music in the process of disappearing.” He observes that “in the gospels there are episodes where Jesus of Nazareth disappears as soon as he is recognized. And in my compositions things disappear in a similar way: structures, sounds, and different kinds of time.” This penchant for tonal evanescence in part grew out of Andre’s collaboration with Widmann. “Together we developed these different multiphonics with double trills, which were very pianissimo.

That meant that the sounding result was always fluctuating; the sounds were always introduced on the verge of their disappearance.” In sum, Andre says, “I believe that fragility can create a space for intensity.”

A former music editor for Yale University Press, Harry Haskell is a program annotator for Carnegie Hall in New York, the Edinburgh Festival, and other venues, and the author of several books, including The Early Music Revival: A History, winner of the 2014 Prix des Muses awarded by the Fondation Singer-Polignac.