Interview, Johannes Pramsohler and Philippe Grisvard on Berlin Harpsichord Concertos

A third member of Ensemble Diderot gets a moment in the spotlight - after director and violinist Johannes Pramsohler's early French violin concertos and cellist Gulrim Choï's North German cello concertos, harpsichordist Philippe Grisvard takes centre stage for a quadruple bill of harpsichord concertos from the flourishing artistic environment fostered by Friedrich II of Prussia (known to posterity as Frederick the Great). 

Culturally speaking, things were at a pretty low ebb in Prussia before Friedrich took the throne - but within a short space of time he had turned Berlin into a major focus of artistic and in particular musical activity, and composers began to explore new avenues. The latest album from Ensemble Diderot presents four world premiere recordings, with concertos by Christoph Nichelmann, Carl Heinrich Graun, Christoph Schaffrath and Ernst Wilhelm Wolf - the ensemble note that although CPE Bach is in many ways the elephant in the room, they felt it better to focus on previously unrecorded works. 

Johannes and Philippe explain more about musical life in and around Friedrich's court, and the contributions these composers made to the emerging genre of the solo harpsichord concerto. 

The arrival of Friedrich II of Prussia seems to have been a real musical sunrise, with commentators including CPE Bach hailing a sudden blossoming of art and culture in Prussia. How bad had the situation become under his father, and how did Friedrich II achieve such a rapid revival?

Philippe Grisvard: The musical situation was pretty bad during the reign of Friedrich’s father, Friedrich Wilhelm I. He cared little for music, except maybe now and then some church music. Besides that, everything was about the army. But already as a Prince, Friedrich was setting the ground for the artistic future of his court. Some travels to Dresden made him acquainted with the crème de la crème of the musical world, and once King, he only had to make a few calls.

Johannes Pramsohler: Our fascination for Friedrich’s musical universe actually started over ten years ago when we were ensemble in residence at the Rheinsberg castle where Friedrich started his musical journey, far from his controlling father and surrounded by incredible musicians. He clearly had a talent to gather excellent artists around him because some of them stayed with him almost his whole life. Probably he also just released some extra funds to lure them to Prussia.

As well as a patron of the arts, Friedrich II was a talented musician and composer in his own right - how close a relationship would he have had with composers such as those featured here?

PG: I’m not aware of precise details regarding their personal relationships. Schaffrath and Nichelmann were his court harpsichordists (when he was Prince for the first, and the latter alongside Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, later. I’m pretty sure Friedrich knew the value of these two musicians, but their role was limited mainly to accompanying his daily concerts, and the quality of their compositions was of little importance to the king, who only liked Quantz's music and his own as far as flute music was concerned, and Hasse's for opera. The situation was different for C.H. Graun because, as Kapellmeister, he had to compose and conduct operas (in the style of Hasse, of course) for the royal opera. Wolf should be left out of these considerations because he was only in Berlin as a visitor.

The keyboard concerto was still quite a new innovation in 1740s Germany - how did its role evolve from forming the backbone of the continuo to taking centre stage as a solo instrument?

JP: I have the theory that this evolution of the harpsichord actually started with Johann Sebastian Bach and his sonatas for obligato harpsichord and violin and then of course with his concertos who were mostly arrangements of concertos for other instruments. Of course Bach did it in the most brilliant way and later composers had to juggle also with the new “gallant” style which was very much focussed on melodies that are easy on the ear rather than complicated counterpoint. And I guess Bach set the bar so incredibly high – if we think of the fifth Brandeburg concerto as the first ever harpsichord concerto – so that later composers had a hard time living up to that.

PG: It is my impression that many harpsichord concertos from that period are in fact treated in the same way as a concerto for flute or violin: the right hand takes on the melody, while the left hand tackles the bass, often in a very unelaborate way. By adding a few more idiomatic formulas for the keyboard, most composers managed quite well, but didn’t produce anything outstanding. It took a Schaffrath or a Nichelmann, true goldsmiths and virtuosos of their instrument, to achieve something unique and specific to the harpsichord.

For two of these concertos (the Nichelmann and Schaffrath), written-out copies of the original cadenzas survive. Was that unusual for the time, compared to improvising them on the spur of the moment?

PG: This is not unusual, although it is not the norm. In fact, many cadenzas from this period survive, but to a lesser extent than for the classical and pre-Romantic concertos. It is not known for whom these written cadenzas were intended - perhaps amateurs -, but it is certain that the improvisation of cadenzas was favoured by an audience of connoisseurs.

JP: And Philippe is the best improviser of all! We had so much fun listening to his endlessly flowing ideas during the preparation of this recording.

Berlin was of course the main centre of gravity for Prussia (then as now) - how much can we speak of a stylistically coherent ‘Berlin school’ of composition at this time?

PG: The "Berlin School" style is perhaps an expression that should be put into perspective. Or should it be extended, to a certain extent, to the whole of northern Europe, at a time when scores, ideas and modes were circulating ever more efficiently. There really is something common to the styles of a Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach in Berlin, a Georg Benda in Gotha, a Müthel in Riga, and so on...

JP: For me, the “Berlin” style is characterised by the “Empfindsamkeit”, this highly sensitive way of expressing deep inner thoughts through the use of chromatism and an incredible attention to detail in ornaments and specific rhetorical figures. Also those extreme changes of mood as we know them from CPE Bach’s famous trio sonata “Sanguineus & Melancholicus” can only be found in the works of composers from Berlin.

This question actually brought us to record so many albums with music from Berlin – we wanted to find out: is there a Berlin style or not? And I think we found it… at least our own way of playing it I think.

These four concertos are all world premiere recordings - how did you find these hidden gems? Did they require reconstruction before you could perform them, or were they intact?

JP: As Philippe did all the digging for this project I let him answer this question.

PG: It was quite simple really: one or two sojourns in Berlin, dedicated to research at the Staatsbibliothek, where I scanned maybe around fifty concertos, all in pretty good shape, complete, scores or separate parts. I only had to choose among them (by far the most difficult task!) and then edit them. The next step was reading them with Ensemble Diderot. Only this ensemble can endure endless hours of sight reading unknown music in the Empfindsamkeit style!

JP: And we did have a lot of fun!