A Grand Tour: American Bach Soloists
British gentlemen in Rome by Katherine Read, c. 1750. Image source: Yale Center for British Art
The Grand Tour was a rite of passage for young aristocratic British men in the 18th century: a months- or years-long trip to the Continent to increase their knowledge of the classical past; educate them in current European mores, fashions, politics, art, and music; and enable them to sample some of Europe's decadent pleasures before returning home, more worldly-wise, to settle down and produce an heir.
A typical route would begin in London, where before setting out the Grand Tourists (in the 18th century they were mostly men) would be outfitted for the rigors of 18th-century travel. Embarking from Dover they would cross the Channel (a sometimes rough voyage), and then travel by stagecoach to Paris. After acquiring a personal carriage in Paris, the travelers would often continue on southeast to Geneva, and then make the hazardous crossing of the Alps to their ultimate destination: Italy. As the Earl of Darmouth wrote to his son Lord Lewisham on a Grand Tour: "Having passed the Alps like Hannibal. . .you have nothing to do, but, like him, to enjoy the Luxurious sweets of Italy." [1]
Perhaps stopping first in Turin or Milan, they would travel east through Verona (location of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet) to the fabled city of Venice. After a sojourn in Venice that might include the festive Carnival season (which ran from the day after Christmas until the dawn of Ash Wednesday), they would head south through Bologna and Florence to Rome. After some time in Rome examining ancient ruins and artifacts, they would travel further south to Naples to view the ruins of Herculaneum and, after its mid-century discovery, Pompeii, and climb Mount Vesuvius. Returning, they might head north into Austria (Vienna), Bohemia (Prague), and Germany before heading west to the Low Countries (Amsterdam). Then the Grand Tourist would sail back to Britain, laden with art, books, manuscripts, antiquities, and other luxuries or curiosities acquired on the journey.
Piazza San Marco, Venice, by Giovanni Antonio Canal (Canaletto), c. 1730–1734. Image source: Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum
For the inaugural concert of American Bach's 37th season, "A Grand Tour" (seen October 26 at St. Mark's Lutheran Church, San Francisco), artistic director Jeffrey Thomas used the Grand Tour as the selection principal for four Baroque masterworks: Handel's Ode for the Birthday of Queen Anne, "Eternal Source of Light Divine" (1713), representing London; Bach's Orchestral Suite No. 1 in C major (c. 1725), representing Leipzig; Vivaldi's Gloria in D major (c. 1715), representing Venice; and Handel's Dixit Dominus (1707), representing Rome.
While there is no question about the quality of these four works, they don't all fit comfortably into a Grand Tour framework. And it's curious that there was no work included by a French composer to represent Paris. But any doubts about how closely the works reflected the concert's title were swept away by the superb performances of the vocalists and the American Bach Soloists orchestra and Cantorei chorus. To take the works in the order of performance (and geographically from north to south):
Handel's Ode for the Birthday of Queen Anne: The concert's gorgeous opening work was probably never performed publicly in Handel's lifetime, and so would not have been heard by Grand Tourists on the eve of their journey. Queen Anne was severely ill on her birthday on 6 February 1713 and 1714, and so it's unlikely that a concert including this work was ever held. However, the first stanza of this Ode has become one of Handel's most-performed works.
Queen Anne by Michael Dahl, c. 1702. Image source: National Portrait Gallery NPG 6187
I only had a single hesitation about the ABS performance. The music for the opening stanza was originally intended to be performed by Queen Anne's favorite singer from her Chapel Royal, the high tenor Richard Elford. Thomas followed a common practice in having the opening stanza sung by a countertenor, the pleasant-timbred Kyle Sanchez Tingzon. Although he acquitted himself honorably, unlike Queen Anne I prefer to hear a female soprano or alto sing this exquisite, ethereal music.
As in this performance by Kathrin Hottiger, soprano; Dominic Wunderli, baroque trumpet; Jonathan Pesek, violoncello; and Frédéric Champion, organ:
|
Eternal source of light divine With double warmth thy beams display, And with distinguished glory shine, To add a lustre to this day. |
After Tingzon, the other excellent soloists for the ABS concert were the bright-toned soprano Julie Bosworth; Morgan Balfour, whose warm soprano revealed both a lovely high extension and a mezzo-like lower register; the rich-voiced contralto Agnes Vojtkó; and the solid baritone Jesse Blumberg. Bosworth, Votjkó and Blumberg were soloists in last season's performance of Bach's St. John Passion by ABS, one of my favorite live performances of 2024; Blumberg has regularly performed and recorded with early music groups in the Bay Area and Boston. Balfour, an alumna of San Francisco Conservatory of Music, also appeared in ABS's 2023 concert performance of Rameau's Pygmalion, a favorite from our year of French Baroque opera.
The libretto by Ambrose Philips in praise of Queen Anne's virtues is exceedingly fulsome, but Handel's music is ravishing, and was ravishingly performed. This is the first time I'd heard the full Ode, with different soloists or combinations of soloists singing each stanza, all of which were concluded by the choral refrain "The day that gave great Anna birth/Who fix'd a lasting peace on earth." The peace, alas, was fleeting—Britain would go to war again in Europe just four years after the Treaty of Utrecht ended the War of the Spanish Succession—but Handel's music has proved to be far more lasting.
Bach's Orchestral Suite No. 1 in C major: Joseph Sargent writes in his informative program notes that "we imagine that Leipzig—home of the great Johann Sebastian Bach—and Venice—a focal point of Italian music—were high on the list of hotspots" for the Grand Tour. He is certainly right about the latter, with its opera, gambling, art, churches, canals, Carnival, and courtesans—but probably not the former.
Thomaskirche, Leipzig, 18th century. Image source: JS Bach Biografie Online
J.S. Bach was not well-known outside of Germany; significantly more famous were George Philip Telemann and Christoph Graupner, both of whom were offered the position of Thomaskantor in Leipzig before Bach, and both of whom turned it down. On hiring Bach the Leipzig town council grumbled, "Since the best could not be obtained, a mediocre candidate would have to be accepted." [2]
Fewer than two dozen of Bach's hundreds of compositions were published during his lifetime, primarily keyboard works, and he was mainly known as an organ virtuoso. In addition, the severe Lutheran town of Leipzig did not possess many attractions for a Grand Tourist. Dresden, capital of Saxony and a center of porcelain manufacture; Berlin, capital of Prussia; and Hamburg, with its Gänsemarkt (Goose-market) opera house, were more likely Grand Tour destinations. [3]
Despite the improbability of a Grand Tourist actually hearing a Bach orchestral suite, the concert performance highlighted the virtuosity of the ABS instrumentalists, particularly oboists Stephen Bard and Curtis Foster and bassoonist Georgeanne Banker. Their fingers were kept flying through Bach's series of dance movements, fluently conducted by Thomas.
The overture to Orchestral Suite No. 1, performed by the English Concert conducted by Trevor Pinnock:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BURErcLxHi4
Vivaldi's Gloria in D major: In the early decades of the 1700s Vivaldi was employed by Venice's renowned Ospedale della Pietà, an orphanage just to the east of the Piazza San Marco where young women were trained as musicians and singers. Travelers from Britain and across Europe attended performances by the all-female orchestra and choir of the Pietà, where the women performed behind latticed screens erected to shield them from the lustful gaze of men. So there's no question that a Grand Tourist might have heard this work, or one of the many others Vivaldi wrote to be performed by these highly skilled musicians and singers. [4]
The church of Santa Maria della Pietà (tallest building on the left) and the Ospedale della Pietà (immediately to the right of the church and to the left of the bridge), Venice, c. 1760. Image source: Venecísima
The ABS Cantorei is a mixed-gender choir, and they truly sounded glorious in this work, justly one of Vivaldi's most well-known. "Et in terra pax homínibus bonæ voluntatis" (And on earth, peace to men of good will), performed by the English Concert conducted by Trevor Pinnock; listen for the amazingly modern-sounding dissonance on the word "voluntatis" between about 3:20 and 3:48:
Handel's Dixit Dominus: It may seem odd that a work by Handel (rather than, say, a work by Corelli or Scarlatti) was chosen in this program to represent Rome; after all, he was born in Germany and spent most of his working life in Britain. But the 21-year-old Handel traveled to Italy in 1706 and composed there in Florence, Venice, Naples and Rome until 1710. In his program notes Thomas calls Handel's Italian years "the most important journey of his life." It was there that he absorbed Italian musical style and gained experience composing vocal works on both intimate and large scales, including Italian opera.
The psalm setting Dixit Dominus may have been commissioned by the wealthy Cardinal Carlo Colonna for the second Vespers service of the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel celebrated on 16 July 1707 in the Church of Santa Maria di Monte Santo in Rome.
Piazza del Popolo, Rome, by Gaspar (or Caspar) van Wittel, 1718. The church of Santa Maria di Monte Santo is the domed building to the left; the one to the right is its sister church, Santa Maria dei Miracoli. Image source: ArtsLife
The words of Dixit Dominus are taken from the Latin Vulgate Bible, and depict a wrathful Old Testament God. One verse reads, "Judicabit in nationibus implebit ruinas: conquissabit capita in terra multorum" (in the words of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, "He shall judge among the heathen; he shall fill the places with the dead bodies: and smite in sunder the heads over divers countries"). On the word "conquissabit" the choir percussively illustrates the blows smiting heads asunder (at around 5:35 in the following clip, which begins at 5:02):
https://youtu.be/H2i8dk8kMXY?t=302
The performers are Les Musiciens & Choeur du Louvre conducted by Marc Minkowski.
Dixit Dominus is a startlingly dramatic composition with a lot of antiphonal interplay. It is a supreme test of a chorus, and Cantorei (as in the other choral works, supplemented by the soloists) met every challenge of this demanding work. It was both a thrilling conclusion to the concert, and a sobering one: in recent years we have seen far too many places filled with dead bodies.
After the violence of "Judicabit," the final section before the "Gloria Patri" and Amen is a depiction of serenity and peace: "De torrente in via bibet" (He shall drink of of the brook in the way: therefore shall he lift up his head), beautifully sung in concert by Julie Bosworth and Morgan Balfour, here sung by Annick Massis and Magdalena Kožená:
"A Grand Tour" will undoubtedly be among my favorite live performances of 2025. Information about the remaining concerts in American Bach's 37th season can be found on the American Bach website.
- Quoted in Mark Bridge, "Eighteenth century Grand Tours fueled by art—and adrenaline," The Times, 22 December 2020, a review of Sarah Goldsmith, Masculinity and Danger on the Eighteenth-Century Grand Tour, University of London Press, 2020. Instead of hazarding the dangerous Alps, some Grand Tourists would instead hazard the dangerous seas by boarding a ship and sailing through the Straits of Gibraltar to Genoa, south of Milan, or Livorno (Leghorn), west of Florence, on Italy's northwest coast.
- Jörg Jacobi, "Rediscovery of a youthful masterpiece," booklet essay, Antiochus and Stratonica, Boston Early Music Festival recording, CPO 555369-2, 2020.
- Although the extant manuscript of the Orchestral Suite No. 1 in a copyist's hand dates from Bach's early Leipzig years, there has been speculation that it and at least one of the other Orchestral Suites was actually written while he was Kapellmeister at the court of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen from 1717–1723. Köthen lies 60 km northwest of Leipzig.
- You can watch a full performance of Gloria by all-female forces in the highly recommended BBC Four film Antonio Vivaldi: Gloria.
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