This is really a lead-up post to some (probably highly unreliable and speculative) musings on Stamitz’s music, particularly but not only for viola. However, there are some interesting, not to say bizarre, things about his life that are perhaps handy to set up in advance and it would probably be a very long post all in one!

So, Stamitz was born in Mannheim (modern Germany, which wouldn’t become a unified country for another 150 years) just as Classical-style music was finishing the job of replacing Baroque in fashion – by the time he was an adult the process would be complete. His family were resident in Germany but of Bohemian (Czech) extraction, and so he was named Karel. As an adult, he generally used the German form Carl and eventually legally adopted it. We don’t know why – it may have sounded less foreign, or indeed more sophisticated, or just been easier to pronounce and spell. English and French publications of his compositions casually use the local version of his name (Charles), which confuses matters further but was not unusual at the time.

Stamitz senior was a musician and composer in his own right, and it seems to have been little more than a matter of course that Karel would follow his father’s career. Certainly the first we hear of him as an adult is as a violinist in the Mannheim orchestra (presumably part of the local noble’s establishment). Within a few years, however, he appears again in society letters, by this point having taken up the viola (and probably made it his main instrument) and started composing for it. We can’t be sure what the works being referred to are (there is a great deal of Stamitz known to have existed but now lost, so it might not be anything we now have anyway), but Stamitz is described as writing better for the viola than anyone else active at the time (though, as I’ll discuss in the other post, there wasn’t a great deal of competition).

At some point, Stamitz also took up the viola d’amore – a descendant of the Renaissance viol family, with sympathetic (resonating) strings, six or seven strings tuned in fourths and thirds rather than the fifths of the violin family, and a sweeter tone but less projecting power. Unlike its forebears, which were all played in cello position (upright), it was held under the chin, however, which may have made it an easier extra for Stamitz to pick up once already playing violin and viola.

At some point Stamitz’s ambition, or his independence from family, or his ability, or the financial needs of an expanding family, overtook the orchestral job in Mannheim and he took to working as a travelling virtuoso. This was a common enough musical avocation of the time – the very young Mozart’s performing tours around Europe are the best-known instance. It was insecure, of course, relying on being able to organise and book concerts in advance and have them sell well, but probably considerably more lucrative than the upper-servant type roles of musicians (rank and file performers anyway) in aristocratic establishments.

Stamitz seems to have made the most of his multi-instrumental abilities as a touring soloist, and probably traded on the distinctiveness of playing viola and viola d’amore to set him apart from what was probably a crowded market of violinists. There are a large number of known or surviving works for those instruments, accompanied by piano or orchestra, and it seems fair to assume that these were composed in the service of Stamitz’s performing career rather than the other way round, especially given the paucity of other works that would have been modern and showy enough for his purposes with the audiences of his day.

However, there were also at least two operas (lost) and various chamber music (mostly quartets and trios) that cannot be easily connected with a performance career, as well as solo works for other instruments (a clarinet concerto now considered second only to Mozart’s in the Classical period, for example). These were probably either commissioned by players (the most common way at the time for composers to make money without playing themselves), or in the case of the operas written in hopes of lucrative stagings. Some of Stamitz’s works were widely published, but copyright, particularly international copyright, was a murky business in the eighteenth century and it cannot be counted on that he gained much income from this.

Much to his wife’s financial frustration, in his forties Stamitz tried to pull back from touring – though given his schedule must have been more or less relentless, living hand to mouth as we know the family did and with no prospect of any pension, it is easy to understand the temptation. He moved his family to a different city and insisted on being more resident with them, but died virtually penniless at a few years under fifty. Papers found at his death suggest he had been trying to manufacture gold by means of alchemy, which would explain the declining interest in touring performance and the utter failure to produce any replacement income.

Stamitz’s after-history is a curious one, produced by trends of academic and musical fashion. Unsurprisingly, he was fairly rapidly forgotten as a performer. As a composer, he is treated by musicologists and music historians as significant, a leading figure of the ‘Mannheim school’ of composition and at least something of an innovator (he is credited with the first known example of left hand pizzicato, in his first viola concerto). However, at least until quite recently, his music has been extremely seldom played and little more often recorded. I will go into this more in the other post on his music.

There are some strangely modern features of Stamitz’s life. The apparently chance shift of main instrument, and making of a living chiefly from touring performance while composing in support of that, could be paralleled with many popular twentieth-century artists (and now that the money has gone back out of recording to live performance, it will probably become a more common pattern again). The ham-fisted attempt at a career change to avoid relentless touring, with disastrous financial results, is not uncommon either, though with better healthcare it is more likely that a modern Stamitz would recover from illness and be forced back on the road by sheer poverty, and more rock and pop musicians have found themselves financially hamstrung by exploitative management than literally trying to turn dross into gold. Nonetheless he is a fairly understandable figure in our times, I think.