Weiss: Lute Sonatas Nos. 21, 37 And 46

Description

Sonatas for Lute Volume 4No.46 in A major * No.21 in F minor * No.37 in C majorSilvius Leopold Weiss, whose compositions for his instrument are at last beginning to receive the recognition they deserve, was acknowledged by many writers as the outstanding lute player of his era. His powers of improvisation, in particular, were extraordinary; he was said to rival the skill in extempore composition of his exact contemporary, J.S. Bach. Weiss’s biography is the subject of recent musicological detective work, especially in Germany, Poland and Italy, and some details, such as a revised year of birth, are only becoming clear for the first time as this note is being written. Significant results of this study will be reported in the notes to the next CD in this series, but meanwhile the reader is referred to the notes to volumes 1 to 3, which include a summary of his life and achievements. The music recorded here probably all originated in his mature years, while he was employed at the Dresden court (1717-50). It demonstrates the wide emotional range that the master improviser exploited within the self-imposed restrictions of his large-scale suites or partitas, which he himself called sonatas.Sonata No. 46 in A major opens with an imposing overture of the ‘French’ variety. The so-called ‘French overture’ was developed by Lully for the Parisian court ballets and operas of the mid-seventeenth century, and was consistently used by French composers until the middle of the eighteenth. Although it was not adopted in Italy (even though Handel frequently made use of it for his Italian operas), non-French composers, especially in Germany, composed them throughout the period, the most famous German exponents being Weiss’s contemporaries J.S. Bach and G.P. Telemann. While it was principally an orchestral genre, many overtures were composed for solo instruments such as the harpsichord or lute. The overall plan consists of two stately outer sections, often based on the same or closely-related musical ideas, framing a central faster section in fugal style in which the instruments introduce the same theme in turn, alternating with episodes of more freely-composed music. Sometimes, as in this example by Weiss, the final return to the style and mood of the opening is omitted, and the overture ends at the culmination of the fast fugal section. In fact, according to a Breitkopf thematic catalogue of 1769, this section of the overture also existed as a self-standing fugue in a ‘Partita Grande’ that has otherwise unfortunately not survived. Weiss opens several of his sonatas with overtures, and invariably omits the allemande from the ensuing suite of dance-based movements, suggesting that for him the overture was in some sense a formal substitute for the normal prelude, usually improvised, and allemande. Actually, this overture’s opening is more allemande-like than usual; as we will hear, exactly the same melodic idea is used at