Jan Ladislav Dussek (1760-1812): A Bohemian Composer "en voyage" through Europe.

Proksch, Bryan

Jan Ladislav Dussek (1760-1812): A Bohemian Composer "en voyage" through Europe. Edited by Roberto Illiano and Rohan H. Stewart-MacDonald. (Quaderni Clementiani, no. 4.) Bologna, Italy: Ut Orpheus, 2012. [xvi, 546 p. ISBN 9788881094783. [euro]92.95.1 Music examples, illustrations, bibliographical references, name index.

Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in the so-called Kleinmeister of the classical era. Neglected for the better part of 150 years among scholars and performers alike, we have substantial books on Myslivecek, Clementi, Pleyel, and now Jan Ladislav Dussek. Dussek was probably the most highly regarded of these during his lifetime, but our knowledge of him prior to this book was limited to a few dissertations (the one dealing with sources is nearly fifty years old) and a variety of master's-level theses. His music has been the beneficiary of numerology: with a 250th birth anniversary in 2010 and a 200th death anniversary in 2012, a burst of new scholarship on him was undertaken in a very short span of time. As will be seen, the present compilation of essays will do much to further our understanding of Dussek's life and music as well as the larger world of late classical and "proto-romantic-era" music outside of the Haydn-Mozart-Beethoven triumvirate. The first half of the book greatly expands our primary-source evidence for the composer's life, works, and reception, while its second half deals with the music directly through analysis and interpretation.

The first essay in the collection, Michaela Freemanova's examination of primary source material in Dussek's native Bohemia, makes it painfully apparent why so few scholars have attempted to venture into this area of music history; her essay quotes sources at length in five different languages: German, English, French, Latin, and Czech. With no parallel translations to English provided (the exception being one brief translation from Czech, oddly without the original language printed) the book opens with a high intimidation factor. This is unfortunate because Freemanova presents remarkable archival and printed material that has major implications for Dussek's biography. Haydn and Mozart scholars take for granted easy access to basic sources such as those she presents on Dussek, but only now has someone been able to surmount the formidable linguistic barriers. Her essay concludes with numerous avenues for further investigation, all part of a just-beginning effort to clean up two centuries of misinformation and assumption regarding the details of Dussek's life.

The collection's second essay, by Massi-miliano Sala, examines newly-discovered letters and concert advertisements relating to Dussek's time in Germany and France, later in life after he left England. Less daunting since it only relies on German and French sources, the author provides a convenient appendix with side-by-side translations of ten previously-unknown letters. Seven of these are to publisher Gottfried Christoph Hanel. Sala examines their implications for the chronology and circumstances of a number of Dussek's later works, including his op. 60 string quartets. The letters demonstrate the extent to which Dussek lived life in a precarious financial state, never able to break away completely from the old courtly patronage system that was fast failing. In a larger context, Sala's study provides an informative example beyond the usual discussions of Mozart and Beethoven on the gradual evolution of the freelance composer.

David Rowland provides us with the first detailed insights into the business side of Dussek's time in London, beginning in 1789. He describes Corti, Dussek, & Co. at length, noting that John Corti was the firm's workhorse on the business side while Dussek was seemingly the musical brains. There is a hint that Dussek's involvement was based solely upon his willingness to publish exclusively with the company. The composer proved incapable of leading the business when Corti died in 1798. The firm failed in 1800, shortly after Dussek turned to Longman, Clementi & Co. for his publishing needs. By then Dussek had also abandoned his wife (Corri's daughter) and child, fleeing in debt to Hamburg, never to see them again. Rowland closes with an informative discussion of Dussek's effort to extend the lower register of the piano in collaboration with London manufacturer Broadwood.

Rudolf Rasch's essay fills in a substantial gap in the young Dussek's biography: his trip to Holland at age 18. Rasch has uncovered enough primary-source material to warrant two appendices, but his examination makes it clear that the factual accuracy Of many of these sources ranges from suspect to completely wrong. While we now have much more primary-source information., assessing what we can actually know about the composer's time in Holland from these sometimes-contradictory reports remains problematic.

The common wisdom on Dussek is that he was basically an early incarnation of a type of "London Chopin" who was forgotten to history after he fled England. In separate essays, Therese Ellsworth and Laure Schnapper work to emend the part of the story where Dussek and his compositions were forgotten by examining the reception of his music throughout the nineteenth century. Ellsworth, focusing on England, notes that by 1836 his works were on the verge of oblivion before a spike in interest From 1837 to 1876. She attributes this brief renaissance to the work of pianists Alexandre Billet and Arabella Goddard and of the critic J. W. Davidson. Interest in his compositions fell off dramatically when these figures faded from the London music scene. Focusing on France. Schnapper addresses the "Chopin precursor," cliche: in an effort to better understand how ii came to be attached to him. She credits the Paris Conservatoire professor Antoine Marmontel's pedagogical editions of Dussek's music with maintaining interest in the repertoire for some time. Marmontel touted the ways in Which playing Dussek's works would improve aspiring pianists' touch and expression. Outside of the academy, the perception that Dussek wrote "serious" music combined with a renewal of French interest in historical music led to the reissue of a number of his works later in the century.

Alan Davidson's essay examines the depiction of Dussek in his surviving portraits, including images from both London and Paris. Davidson argues that the most well-known of the London portraits encourages the viewer to see Dussek as an attractive "doe-like" musician who was highly successful with the public (p. 234). His French portrait, conveniently used as the book's cover image in full color, portrays Dussek as a "fashionable foreigner" (p. 236) who was highly "sensitive" (p. 239) and politically aligned with the royalists. Davidson admits that the biographical evidence is less than ideal in helping to assess some of these trans, and it seems doubtful that a portrait would stand as strong enough evidence to overturn anything we might know about Dussek from other sources anyway. That he reads very little into the late portraits of Dussek is somewhat surprising, especially considering that the ca. 1812 physionotrace engraving of him is surely the most true-to-life.

As might be expected, the "works" half of this collection faces far fewer problems than the "life" portion simply by virtue of the existence of the music itself. In general these essays provide a much-needed overview of the composer's style and compositional tendencies. The editor's own contribution is the highlight of the section. Rohan H. Stewart-MacDonald's essay on the remote key areas employed in the piano sonatas demonstrates the ways that Dussek's practice is rooted in but different from Haydn's. He argues that the composer's "English restraint" should lead us to question the extent to which the composer was truly "proto-romantic" (p. 377). Intriguingly, if we project MacDonald's argument backwards to its logical conclusion, musical taste in London probably played a much larger role in the development of Haydn's growing preference for remote keys in the later works (and especially the piano sonatas) than is generally acknowledged.

Jean-Pierre Bartoli's contribution deals with issues of improvisation and "fantasy" in Dussek's solo piano works. Working his way through the improvisational cliches present in the fantasies and preludes, he goes on to demonstrate their deployment in Dussek's non-improvisatory works, especially the piano sonatas. Along the way Bartoli shows how the various themes within the Fantasie op. 76 all include the same basic underlying melodic motion, arguing that the work is a fusion of genres, namely a fantasy and a grand sonata. Dussek's developmental technique, the author concludes, is equal to that of Beethoven but differentiated through his ability to slip spontaneously into quasi-improvisational sections.

The avoidance of Haydn proves to be one of the oddities of a number of the other essays in this section. This oversight is problematic when one considers that both Dussek and Haydn were prominent figures in the London music scene of the 1790s. For instance, both Stephan D. Lindeman's overview of piano concertos and Marie Sumner Lou's examination of the chamber music avoid direct comparisons between Dussek's practice and that of Haydn. This is most notable in many of their music examples. The Dussek piano trios addressed by Lott appear to be closer in style to Haydn's "accompanied piano sonata" practice than to anything like the more equal treatment of the instruments seen in the early nineteenth century. Given the relative obscurity of Dussek's works today, even the occasional reference to Haydn's practice, as seen in (for instance) Renalto Ricco's essay on the op. 60 string quartets, seems warranted.

The final two essays both deal with performance issues in Dussek's piano sonatas. Jeremy Eskenazi investigates the "legatissimo" style of fingerings implied by the articulation and slur markings of the first movement of the Sonata in F-sharp Minor, Op. 61, "Elegie harmonique." This style of playing enhances the implied polyphonic textures often seen at important formal junctures within the sonata. His essay also acids significance to the "legatissimo" performance indication seen at the opening of the work's second movement. Although other keyboardists and treatises discuss this approach, Eskenazi argues that Dussek's use of the style on a consistent basis as a part of his normal performance idiom was new and unique. Jeanne Roudet begins with Dussek's uniqueness, in particular the difficulty of classifying a compositional and performance style that is at once partly classical and partly romantic depending upon the feature under consideration. She demonstrates musical connections with piano works ranging from C. P. E. Bach and Haydn to Chopin (of course) and Liszt.

Taken as a whole, the book is sure to be the most important scholarly resource on Dussek for some time to come. Since his coincidental birth and death dates inspired the production of so much scholarship, we Can only hope that further high-quality research on this composer will be forthcoming in the coming non-commemorative years.

BRYAN PROKSCH

McNeese State University