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the rosary; as Biber worked for bishops, his main focus was sacred music. The Mysteries are similar to the Stations of the Cross, except there are glorious, joyful, and luminous, as well as sorrowful meditations on the life of Christ. There are 15 Mysteries in all; for instance, some of the Luminous Mysteries are the Baptism, the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes at the Wedding Feast in Cana, and the Eucharist (the immanence of God’s body present in the Host, and his blood in the wine). The Passacaglia is the final, separate cul- mination of this litany, the way the cross anchors the rosary.
Each sonata has an accompanying “picture text,” tradition- ally used by the Catholic Church as aids in meditating; in the case of the Passacaglia, the sketch is of the Guardian Angel with a child. Only the Passacaglia (which ends the cycle) and the first sonata use normal tuning. (The 15th Sonata contains the famous theme later used by Paganini, Rachmaninoff, Brahms, and Liszt.)
Biber was one of the early innovators of violin technique, while being simultaneously one of the violin’s great melodic geniuses. Violin technique is anchored in its early innova- tors, such as Biber of the Dresden school and Corelli of the Italian school. Biber introduced multiple “stops,” where the fingers play broken chords with as many as three strings bowed simultaneously. He used scordatura, or alternative tunings, number symbolism, and Affektenlehre, a theory of the Baroque era where the passions (affections) could
be represented by the correspondences of certain colors or notes. For instance, sorrow was considered a contraction
of vapors in the body, and thus should be symbolized by smaller spaces between notes. Biber was the primary Austrian practitioner of stylus fantasticus, the root of aleatoric music, structures without structure, freeform notes being used to show off the technique of the musician, as in Bach toccatas and Mozart fantasias.
Along with Bach’s D-minor Chaconne, this is one of the great and passionate towers of the Baroque violin repertoire.
GEORG PHILIPP TELEMANN (1681–1767)
Fantasie for Solo Violin No. 5 in A Major, TWV 40:18
Telemann wrote more compositions than Bach and Handel combined. He knew both of them; he was the godfather
of Bach’s witty son C.P.E. Bach, and Handel studied his works. Considered their equal for centuries, he was aban- doned in the 19th century for writing too many works (the way painters were ostracized in mid 20th-century New York for working in color). Bach’s biographers Philipp Spitta and Albert Schweitzer praised many Bach pieces which turned out to have been written by Telemann, whom they belittled.
Telemann wrote an opera when he was 12. He lived and worked indefatigably in Leipzig, Sorau, Eisenach, and Frankfurt, and finally landed in Hamburg, where he taught and composed endlessly. He may have been motivated by the almost immediate death of his first wife and then by the life of his second wife (with whom he had nine children and was initially blissfully happy), who cheated on him, accu- mulated greater gambling debts than his salary, and then left him.
He turned down the job of director at Leipzig’s Thomaskirche because of the salary; the job then famously went to Bach, whose greatest compositions were written there. In addition to writing more than 3,000 compositions, he was a fanatic gardener (as was Handel, as is Julien Brocal).
There was a tendency in his age to write music with one voice only, imitating plainsong or Gregorian chant. But Telemann added the voices of the Italians, the French,
and the Polish to German forms, and the Fantasie for Solo Violin No. 5 is polyphonic. As T.S. Eliot said, quoting Dickens, “He do the police in different voices.” Telemann himself said he “clothed the savage Polish manner in Italian garb.”
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