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Thomasschule

Thomasschule, Leipzig

The Thomasschule was a boarding school attached to Leipzig’s principal church, St. Thomas’s (the Thomaskirche).

 Bach, as Kantor, was its director. The pupils at the school were selected on
musical aptitude, and it was the Kantor’s responsibility to select them and train them as singers. Instrumental training was provided for the most able of them, and all had to learn Latin. Bach refused to teach Latin, so he had to pay for a Latin tutor out of his own salary.

The Kantor, had to provide all the music for the four principal churches in Leipzig, and any other music the City Council required. To aid in this, the council employed some professional musicians: four wind-players, three fiddlers and ‘an apprentice’.

Most of Bach’s instrumentalists were drawn from amongst the Collegium Musicum, students at the University or pupils at the school. The age-range of the school’s pupils was from 12 to 23. At that time boys’ voices ‘broke’ at about 17 or 18, so in fact Bach had a pool of very able, experienced singers at the school; and his band was of high standing, despite the stinginess of the ‘official’ provision.

The Thomasschule placed severe restrictions on Bach’s choice of musicians to perform his music. However, the Collegium Musicum was a pool of highly competent musicians, some of them virtuosos of their instrument. It was from the Collegium Musicum that Bach drew his musicians for the secular cantatas.

A piece of ‘trivia’ not trivial at the time: on the day after the performance of no.215 Bach’s virtuoso trumpeter and the leader of the Leipzig Stadtpfeifer (town wind-band), Gottfried Reiche, died as a result of his musical exertions. Such are the demands of the first trumpet part of the Christmas Oratorio.

 

Leipzig Collegium Musicum

A Collegium Musicum was a music society.

With the burgeoning of bourgeois culture, particularly in prosperous and vibrant centres such as Leipzig, there began a slow shift away from music being made exclusively for The Court or The Church. Art music was becoming accessible to a much wider public. An example of this is the Music Hall in Dublin where Messiah received its first performance. Collegia musica were a vital part of this development.

Collegia musica brought musicians together to make music, and were often purely amateur in status. In Hamburg, Georg Philipp Telemann set up a collegium musicum in his own home.  It was Telemann who founded the Collegium Musicum in Leipzig, in 1702 (when he was also associated with St. Thomas’s for a time). This became the focal point for professional musicians, and it was an organisation of real standing within the city, informal and voluntary institution though it was. Bach’s becoming director of the Collegium does not seem to have brought him any financial rewards, but it did greatly widen his scope, compared to the restrictions placed on him by his ‘day-job’ at the Thomasschule.

 

Royal recognition

By 1842 Mendelssohn was a major celebrity in Britain, and became a favourite of the royal family. In June and July, he visited the queen and Prince Albert at Buckingham Palace, where he improvised (on Rule, Britannia!), and accompanied the queen singing Lieder both by him and his sister. He arranged seven of his Songs without words as piano duets for them and The Scottish Symphony would later be rededicated to Queen Victoria.

 

Fanny Hensel

 

Fanny Hensel nee Mendelssohn

Fanny Mendelssohn was four years older than her brother Felix. As children they were very close, challenging and stimulating one-another intellectually and musically. They stayed in close contact for their entire lives.

The convention at the time was that Felix, though the younger, being male, would play the dominant rôle as a musician. They conformed to this, much to the detriment of Fanny. She could well have been Felix’s equal in ability, but she was discouraged from publishing her work, even by her brother (perhaps for complex reasons). As was ‘suitable for a lady’, her output was limited in the main to Lieder and piano pieces: salon music in effect. She has just 11 opus numbers to her credit, though her compositions number 500 (including one cantata, one oratorio, one overture and some chamber works). She started to publish just a year before her death, a venture in which her brother did not participate.

Fanny married the painter William Hensel – they had one child. She was a central figure in Berlin salon life (for which most of her music was written). Visiting Rome, she became friends with the young Gounod, who acknowledged her as an important influence on his developing style.

On 14th May 1847 she died suddenly of a stroke aged 41.

 

Handel’s maggots – obsessions

On 19th September 1738, Jennens wrote to a friend

“Mr.Handel’s head is more full of maggots than ever”

Maggot 1: His newly discovered carillon – “with this Cyclopean instrument he designs to made poor Saul stark mad.”

Maggot 2: A bespoke organ, costing £500, designed so that he could direct the orchestra from it, ‘all the time with his back to the audience!’ (Not considered a bad idea now; but the cost in current money would be about £77,000). Jennens suggested he was ‘overstocked with money’ – a bit rich considering the cost of his own Leicestershire home.

Maggot 3: ‘A Hallelujah he has trumped up at the end of his oratorio since I went into the country’. Handel had refused to set the Hallelujah Jennens had put at the end of the opening scene, and thought Jennens’ ending not sufficiently grand. Fortunately for us Handel carried out precisely Jennens intentions regarding Hallelujahs.

Jennens concludes: “but it grows late and I must defer the rest till I write next, by which time, I doubt not, more new ones will breed in his brain.”

 

Gopsall Hall, Leicestershire

Charles Jennens converted the hall into a magnificent Georgian mansion, which cost him more than £100,000 (about £15,000,000 in today’s money).

Gopsall Hall

The house still stood in the 20th century, indeed the estate had a motor-racing circuit in the 1920s and ’30s. But by 1952 it was mostly demolished, and the current Gopsall Hall Farm stands on its site – not far from Twycross Zoo.

 

Charles Jennens

was born in Gopsall Hall in Leicestershire.

His great-grandfather was one of the great Birmingham ironmasters and lived at Aston Hall. So the family were immensely wealthy and Charles lived accordingly, with a second home in Bloomsbury.

Charles Jennens

He was a man of literary pretensions, bringing out his own edition of some of Shakespeare’s tragedies, which brought him scorn and ridicule from some quarters. But he was a very able amateur librettist, providing the libretti for Messiah and Belshazzar, as well as Saul.

Both Jennens and Handel were difficult men, apt to be high-handed. Handel could fairly massacre a libretto to suit his music; but Jennens would not countenance such treatment of his work (see maggot number 3 )