Ferdinando PAER (1771-1839)
La Santo Sepolcro (1803) [63:35]
Giovanni Simon MAYR (1763-1845)
Invito [6:30]
Maddalena (Mary Magdalen) — Cornelia Horak (soprano)
Giovanni (St. John) — Vanessa Barkowski (alto)
Nicodemo (Nicodemus) — Thomas Michael Allen (tenor)
Giuseppe d’Arimathea (Joseph of Arimathea) — Jens Hamann (bass)
Simon Mayr Chorus and Ensemble/Franz Hauk
rec. Church of Maria de Victoria, Ingolstadt, 3–7 September 2008
NAXOS 8.572492 [63:35]
Ferdinando PAER (1771-1839)
La Passione di Gesù Cristo (1803) [69:45]
Maddalena (Mary Magdalen) — Valentina Kutzarova (mezzo)
Giovanni (St. John) — Valentina Coladonato (soprano)
Nicodemo (Nicodemus) — Enea Scala (tenor)
Giuseppe d’Arimathea (Joseph of Arimathea) — Alvaro Lozano (baritone)
Coro La Stagione Armonica and Orchestra di Padova e del Veneto/Sergio Balestracci
rec. Auditorium Pollini, Padua, 18-20 April 2011
CPO 777 698-2 [69:45]
This is a rather confusing pair of releases. The CPO disc
is described as a ‘world premiere recording’; however the Naxos
disc, presenting an earlier recording of the same work, makes no such claim.
The use of different titles partly disguises the fact that these are rival
recordings. The musical sources of the oratorio call it La Passione di
Gesù Cristo, whereas the published text of the oratorio, by Pietro Bagnoli
(1767-1847), calls it La Santo Sepolcro. Naxos and CPO have gone
different ways on this, but the notes accompanying both discs recognise the
existence of the alternative titles so it was an extraordinary oversight of
CPO to claim a world premiere.
Nor is this the end of the confusion. Iris Wrinkler’s notes for the
Naxos version are, for no obvious reason, mainly concerned with an 1822 performance
at Dresden, though at the very end she states ‘it (La Santo Sepolcro)
was first performed in Dresden in 1807’. Perhaps that is literally true;
but the implication that this was the first performance anywhere is not. Confusingly,
Franz Hauk’s synopsis, which immediately follows, commences with the
statement that the work ‘was first performed in 1803 in Vienna’.
Whoever put the booklet together for Naxos must have been nodding. Carlo Vitali,
in the CPO booklet, supports the 1803 date and provides documentary evidence
which I take to be definitive. The premiere was on 3 April 1803, Palm Sunday,
and there was a repeat performance the following day. The title page of the
CPO booklet dates the work ‘(Parma, 1810)’, however, a date not
mentioned at all in the notes, so someone seems to have been nodding at CPO,
too.
The correct date and place add considerably to the interest of the work for,
as Vitali says, the two performances ‘then made way for another premiere:
Beethoven’s oratorio Christus am Ölberge (Christ on the
Mount of Olives) [performed 5 April]. This is one of many bits of evidence
repeatedly linking the Parma maestro [i.e. Paer] and the Bonn maestro, rivals
in the highly competitive Viennese performance marketplace but nevertheless
good personal friends willing to exchange opinions and creative ideas.’
The parallels between Paer and Beethoven are indeed considerable. They were
almost exact contemporaries (Paer born 1 June 1771); both moved to Vienna
in the 1790s; and, most strikingly, they both started working on an opera
on the same subject in the early 1800s, Paer’s Leonora being
premiered on 3 October 1804. An LP recording of Leonora released
in 1979 was until recently the only complete recording of a significant Paer
work and was presumably chosen from among his many operas because of its Beethovenian
interest.
Yet that fact by itself is misleading and anyone approaching Paer’s
music for the first time needs to be aware of his immense standing in his
own time. He was one of the best known and best remunerated musicians of the
Napoleonic era, the highlight of his career coming in 1807 when Napoleon appointed
him ‘Composer to the Emperor’ on an immense salary said be worth
nearly 50,000 francs a year. Yet his was the sort of success subsequently
explained away with the argument that he was composing for his contemporaries,
not the ages. It is difficult to know how much it is worth challenging such
complacent assumptions. Paer was primarily an opera composer (he wrote more
than fifty), but only one of his stage works survived the whirlwind that was
Rossini: the late Maître de chapelle of 1821, sometimes encountered
in its Italian incarnation as Il Maestro di Cappella. This enjoyed
an extraordinary afterlife that continued well into the twentieth century
and before the 1979 Leonora appeared, extracts from Le Maître
were the only music of Paer’s to have been recorded. They reveal him
to have had something of a genius for comedy; it is music that would have
delighted Offenbach.
A complete recording of Le Maître de chapelle is a real desideratum
and would represent the best place to commence a reassessment. As things stand,
apart from the 1979 Leonora, now available on CD, there have appeared
in the last decade an Opera Rara disc of highlights from the opera Sofonisba
(2006) (review),
a Carus recording of the Missa Piena in D Minor (2008) (review),
and the discs under review. This means Paer’s comparatively small body
of sacred music is disproportionately represented: one can wonder, with some
amusement, what the composer himself would have made of this, for there is
nothing to suggest that he regarded works like La Passione di Gesù Cristo
(as I shall call it here) as central to his legacy.
La Passione is certainly no lost masterpiece and probably only an
accident of recording history has resulted in there being two interpretations
on disc. Pietro Bagnoli’s text is a lamentation over the dead Christ
which at the same time expresses the hope of resurrection and confidence that
‘impious Zion’ will be properly punished — there is a strain
of almost gleeful anti-Semitism. It has no more to do with the scripture than
a Poussin painting. Only a much more pious, or naïve, composer than Paer could
have drawn any genuine religious feeling from it, and perhaps one can hardly
blame a busy working musician for leaving the oratorio as remote from true
devotion as he found it. The Naxos blurb’s desperate recommendation
of ‘Paër’s incomparable narrative’ stretches credulity to
breaking point: can they really be suggesting that La Passione is
superior to the equivalent parts of Messiah? That way Christianity
and criticism seem destined to die together.
This said, Paer’s oratorio is worth listening to. The higher mysteries
of the Christian atonement may have been beyond his grasp, but from beginning
to end La Passione shows a very resourceful composer playing to his
strengths, which were in the field of opera. La Passione never feels
static and heavy, as many oratorios tend to do. At times it almost seems to
trip along, a wide range of human passions being expressed in the music amidst
plenty of descriptive orchestral colour. It all feels very assured and at
times close to inspired. If Paer understood his brief as making the lamentation
over the dead Christ musically entertaining, he can certainly be
said to have succeeded. Many listeners will probably choose to pay no attention
to the textual pretext for all this sonorous splendour. The case for a continued
investigation of Paer’s vast body of music is strengthened.
The two recordings both do justice to the work. The Naxos is more incisive
and dramatic while the CPO is more serene and grand; I have gone back and
forth more than once on which I prefer, so will leave it at that. The CPO
recording has the advantage of much better notes and a text of the libretto
in the booklet; Naxos requires the listener to download a libretto from the
website. On the other hand, the more sprightly pace of the Naxos recording
allows room for a small filler in the shape of Mayr’s delightful Invito,
originally written as an introduction to Haydn’s Seven Last Words.
It is well worth having.
David Chandler
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