Last Friday, May 31, there was a new commented recital of the Muzio Clementi Association of Barcelona (AMCB). The pianist Marina Rodríguez Brià offered us a program that links Muzio Clementi with the Viennese composer Marianna de Auenbrugger.
Clementi's relationship with this pianist and composer goes back to the first stay of the Italian composer in Vienna, from December 1781 to May 1782. On this trip, Clementi met many musicians and celebrities from the Viennese society. The most well-known anecdote is the famous musical duel that confronted him with Mozart on Christmas Eve, recently arrived to the Imperial city, in presence of the Emperor Joseph II. His stay in the Austrian capital served him to become known as a pianist and as a teacher, to establish relationships with musicians, to discover musical repertoire, to deal with publishers and to mix with members of the Viennese society.
Among these, it seems that he frequented the house of the Auenbrugger family, where musical meetings were often held with the best musicians in the country. Among them were Haydn, Salieri and Mozart. The father, Leopod Auenbrugger, was a doctor who was later recognized as the discoverer of exploration through percussive auscultation. The daughters, Catalina Franziska and Marianna, were pianists and students of Haydn and Salieri.
Marianna Auenbrugger died prematurely at the age of 23. She studied Counterpoint with Antonio Salieri and probably she took herself the initiative to compose. The Sonata in E flat major is her only work that has reached us and, according to the frontispiece of the edition, the first and the last composition. The quality and maturity of this work makes it difficult to believe that it was the first, but there is no evidence to the contrary. It is written in a gallant style, very close to Mozart, but with a very singular audacities, like the harmonies produced by the apoggiaturas, ostensibly dissonant. The second movement is full of a great expressive lyricism and the third movement has a section that prefigures the Ländler or Waltzes by Schubert, with a refined aroma of Viennese romanticism. To pay homage to her, Salieri edited her Sonata with the addition of a funerary Ode for voice and piano composed by himself and dedicated to her as a posthumous award to the late composer.
Clementi dedicates to Marianna (Nancy) his sonata opus 8 no. 1 in G minor. This offering shows an artistic proximity between them. It is possible that Clementi, famous professor, had given her some interpretative lessons or advices during his stay in Vienna. The sonata is full of emotional tension, with themes of great beauty and dramatic contrasts and silences. According to Marina Rodríguez, the technical and virtuosic difficulty is completely at the service of musical expression. Nothing is gratuitous. Was it written after the death of Marianna? The young pianist died in August 1782 and the sonata was published by Castaud in Lyon in December of the same year. The unbridled passion and the abrupt end, suddenly cut, suggest the vitality of youth and the representation of sudden death. At the moment it is a question that remains unanswered. What we can say is that the G minor tonality is used by Clementi in some of his most passionate and expressive sonatas, such as opus 34 no. 2 or opus 50 no. 3, "Didone abbandonata".
The performance of Marina Rodríguez was intense and emotional, just as works with such a personal hallmark demand. Added to her usual expressive power is an element of control of the ancient piano that few pianists could solve with such effectiveness, especially with a camera moving and recording a few inches away. It is very difficult to control the sound on a two hundred-year-old piano that, despite its excellent restoration, presents irregularities and surprises in the action of the mechanism. A mechanism, by the way, that has a great sensitivity and an enviable repetition capacity for an instrument so old that shows the excellence of the constructor. As Marina himself says, "it's an adventure that takes us back two centuries and allows us to enjoy the loudness of the past".
MARIANNA AUENBRUGGER (1759-1782)
SONATA in E flat major
.Moderato
.Largo
.Rondo. Allegro
MUZIO CLEMENTI (1752-1832)
SONATA op.8 num. 1 in G minor (1782)
To Marianna Auenbrugger
.Allegro
.Andante cantabile
.Presto
The session was attended by a television crew to cover a story for the news about the Clementi and Collard pianos recovery project promoted by the AMCB.
Joan Josep Gutiérrez
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