(Sorry for the awful pun; I couldn’t resist.)

If you didn’t read it, you might want to take a glance at the previous post on Stamitz’s life to get some context. There are two other contexts that are quite important for how I end up ‘coming in’ to his music though: one is contemporary performance of Classical music (in the restrictive sense); the other is the history of the viola, both played and composed for.

Even now, with the early music movement a permanent fixture of the concert and recording scene, a lot of programming of Classical (late 18th-century, if you like) music tends to be very canonical. There’s an underlying assumption, much more overtly stated if you move back a few decades but still active, that there are ‘essential’ composers and why would you bother playing, recording or listening to anything else? I’m much more familiar with this as a very derided critical approach in literary studies, but its practical outworking is still fairly secure in music management. For most purposes, the essential composers of the Classical were until very recently exactly three: Josef Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Anyone else got played for very specific purposes (Clementi for student pianists, for example) or in single works only (Boccherini’s Minuet). In the last few years this has eased a bit; J C Bach has made occasional appearances on performance schedules and Michael Haydn rather more. But it is still very unusual to encounter what you might consider a second-rank Classical composer performed, compared to an only semi-major Baroque or Romantic one (where the group of possibly ‘essential’ composers is in any case much larger and more blurred around the edges). Stamitz would certainly count as such a composer.

There have been an apparently disproportionate number of very good composers who played the viola. Bach (a multi-instrumentalist in a very modern sense of the word) is said to have liked playing viola in his own orchestral pieces. Mozart is known to have written some of the viola parts in his chamber works to play himself – this lies behind the unusual instrumentation of works like the Kegelstadt trio (Mozart, viola; one of his pupils, piano; Stadler, clarinet). The list can be continued at length. However, focusing in a little towards Stamitz, there was a major shift taking place in the early- to mid-eighteenth century away from polyphonic writing, with lines that tended to be equally complex and important more or less wherever they sat in the pitch range, towards homophonic (chordal) writing, with usually one melody line at a given time, supported by various kinds of relatively straightforward harmonic figuration. One result was that second violin, viola and to some extent cello parts became considerably easier and more boring to play. Mozart, it is worth noting, chose to direct his compositions from the keyboard (probably always an early piano; filling in chords and textures more or less ad lib). Not many people would choose to direct Mozart from the violas. The emergent string quartet form (spearheaded chiefly by Haydn) gave the cello part considerably more freedom, but still tended to leave the middle parts (second violin and viola) with less to do.

One result of this was that the musicianship of viola players seems to have started to decline. This process would continue into the nineteenth century to the point where the viola section was usually where aged violinists retired to (!), playing violins strung to viola pitch (not unusual among small-handed learners today, but certainly never ideal from the point of view of tone) and notoriously weak links in a chain. It became a sort of third violin instrument. Whatever stage this had reached by Stamitz’s time, it is certainly true that there were very few active solo viola performers in the late eighteenth century. This was why none commissioned solo works from Beethoven or to my knowledge Haydn and only the Sinfonia Concertante from Mozart, in contrast to the large amounts of piano, violin, flute, and cello music (much of it now not very well-known) written as display pieces for career virtuosi. If a lot of violists were converted or (dare I suggest?) burnt-out violinists even at this point, it would logically lead to them playing violin showpieces as long as they were able to hold down solo careers at all.

In this context, it is unsurprising to find that there is very little music featuring the viola from the Classical period. (There isn’t much from the times immediately before and after, but that is a separate question.) Stamitz is a significant exception and probably so largely because he played it himself as an itinerant virtuoso, and finding very little existing suitable repertoire must have filled the gap with his own compositions. Not a vastly prolific composer in general, he nonetheless wrote (that I am aware of) at least six full-scale viola concerti, two duo sonatas with piano, and various shorter pieces for viola and orchestra, with or without another solo instrument (notoriously, a sinfonia concertante for viola, double bass and orchestra). He seems to have done something similar with the even more obscure viola d’amore, which he also played and wrote for.

Sticking largely to the viola, the question emerges: Why? We know Stamitz at least got paid work first as a violinist, and the least complex assumption is that he did actually take up viola as a young adult. What led him to use the somewhat neglected instrument as a virtuoso soloist, rather than sticking solely with violin? Playing some of his music, I am inclined to believe he must have had quite large hands for the size of instrument in use (the left has to do some fairly substantial stretches by the standards of a generation before Paganini), which may have made it more conducive; and by the time he wrote most of the surviving compositions for it, he clearly had an insight into the tone and characteristics of the instrument in itself, though that might have come simply from playing with ability and attention. However, it is tempting to speculate that mere chance (perhaps covering a vacancy at Mannheim) led him to pick up viola to start with, and that he partly stuck with it and gave it more attention on realising that here was a vacant niche, whereas violinists were everywhere to be found. (I may of course be biased here, having more or less that experience looking for freelance work in southern England at present!)

Because one thing Stamitz is not hugely characterised by as a composer is originality. Especially looking at the music not written presumably for his own performances, it is usually very well-crafted, but of its type to what might be held a fault. His formal repertoire is the stuff of introductory musicology: sonata form opening movements, with both halves repeated verbatim; slow movements, usually in ternary or ‘song’ form and often in the subdominant; finales very often rondos. Four-bar phrases, limited modulations but substantial use of chromatic leading to colour melody lines. Lots of melodies in parallel thirds and loud-soft echo repetitions of key phrases.

None of this is bad. Indeed, one of the results is that played with the right notes in the right places, even if not hugely well, the music is almost guaranteed to be pleasant to listen to, and if performed with care and a certain amount of (era-appropriate) flair, the emphasis on balance, cohesion and construction makes it highly satisfying to play. It will tend to stand or fall in someone’s estimation depending on how well they like the style of the period, and how far they consider completeness, balance and neatness equally valid musical goals to emotional impact and self-expression. (Personally, I prefer the former most of the time, in my art music anyway; but as we still live in a sort of post-Romantic era of the arts, I’m swimming against a bit of a tide in that.)

So equally with Stamitz’s viola music. The most interesting thing about it is by no means that it is original or striking unusual in the context of Classical music regardless of instrumentation. What makes it worth coming back to is that there seem to have been no other composers of similar ability writing for solo viola. There is perhaps not that much point playing Stamitz string quartets with Haydn, Mozart and the first half-dozen Beethoven ones available; a main reason for playing his clarinet concerto with the Mozart in existence might simply be variety (though there is certainly no reason not to play it); but the viola works are uncontested by anything in similar style. If you like the music of the late eighteenth century, and you play the viola, the only way you will satisfactorily combine the two without resorting to transcriptions is Carl Stamitz.

And taken in that context, it is notable that his pieces are not second-rate either. The Bb major sonata (the only one I have played, and one of only two that I am aware of) is a well-constructed and charming duo sonata, with a very even-handed first movement (a lot of it in three parts, the viola and the two hands of the piano), a slow movement largely led by the piano and a rondo finale in which the viola largely gets to show off in the episodes. Making the most of the instrument’s stronger and more distinctive lower register (where violin music heads upwards for more projection, good viola music heads downwards), the viola is often a third or even a tenth below the piano where they play in close harmony. All of this would not be that remarkable, were it not that most duo sonatas of the early Classical (and this includes earlier Haydn and Mozart) are very patently for keyboard with accompaniment (of violin, cello, or whatever it may be), and are often effectively performable with the piano part alone. Being a genuine duo sonata at all puts the Stamitz ahead of its time; that the keyboard’s partner is viola could be seen as a bonus to us violists. Alternatively, it could be suggested that accompanying a pianist would be a poor outlet for a virtuoso, though there are plenty of works for virtuoso string players where the piano hogs the limelight – Beethoven’s early sets of variations for cello and piano, for instance.

The tail end of Stamitz’s life betrays a woeful lack of financial judgment in the round. However, his seizing of a distinctive performance niche and moulding of creative activity into personally useful forms suggests someone who managed to be a businesslike musician without sacrificing the quality of his music to business conditions. Whether it is the usefully flexible trios for violin (or flute), second violin and cello (or viola), which evidently sold well (they were published as far away as England) and probably because so many combinations of instruments can play them; or the concerti which make perfectly conventional demands upon the orchestra, reserving occasional flights of musical fancy to the solo part which Stamitz would have been able to perfect before booking the pieces into concert advertising if necessary, his music is generally content to fit very well with its situation. Ironically, it then proves often similarly well-adapted as a resource for modern musicians under constrained circumstances (ie without millions of arts funding behind them – so that would be everyone since 2008 in fact). The first viola concerto is known as the orchestral (viola) audition piece par excellence – being pitched at the right standard for the purpose where almost nothing else is. Flexible chamber music is always useful. And while the high Classical style may not be all the artistic rage any more, it remains accessible, pleasing and inoffensive, which is always a good start for keeping the audience on side if you don’t know what to plug a programme gap with.

So here’s to Carl Stamitz: the pragmatic composer par excellence, and happily a writer of rather charming music to boot.