Anton Reicha (1770 – 1836) was a Bohemian-born, later
naturalized French composer of music very much in the
German style. A contemporary and lifelong friend of
Beethoven, he is now best remembered for his
substantial early contributions to the wind quintet
literature and his role as teacher of pupils including
Franz Liszt and Hector Berlioz. He was also an
accomplished theorist, and wrote several treatises on
various aspects of composition. Some of his theoretical
work dealt with experimental ...(+)
Anton Reicha (1770 – 1836) was a Bohemian-born, later
naturalized French composer of music very much in the
German style. A contemporary and lifelong friend of
Beethoven, he is now best remembered for his
substantial early contributions to the wind quintet
literature and his role as teacher of pupils including
Franz Liszt and Hector Berlioz. He was also an
accomplished theorist, and wrote several treatises on
various aspects of composition. Some of his theoretical
work dealt with experimental methods of composition,
which he applied in a variety of works such as fugues
and études for piano and string quartet.
Reicha was born in Prague. His town piper father died
when the boy was just 10 months old, leaving him in
custody of a mother who had no interest in educating
him. The young composer ran away from home when only
ten years old, and was subsequently raised and educated
in music by his paternal uncle Josef Reicha. When they
moved to Bonn, Josef secured for his nephew a place
playing violin in the Hofkapelle electoral orchestra
alongside the young Beethoven on viola, but for Reicha
this was not enough. He studied composition secretly,
against his uncle's wishes, and entered the University
of Bonn in 1789. When Bonn was captured by the French
in 1794 Reicha fled to Hamburg, where he made a living
teaching harmony and composition and studied
mathematics and philosophy. Between 1799 and 1801 he
lived in Paris, trying to gain recognition as an opera
composer, without success. In 1801 he moved on to
Vienna, where he studied with Salieri and
Albrechtsberger and produced his first important works.
His life was once again affected by war in 1808, when
he left Vienna when it was occupied by the French under
Napoleon and returned to Paris, where he spent the rest
of his life teaching composition and in 1818 was
appointed professor at the Conservatoire.
Reicha's output during his Vienna years included large
semi-didactic cycles of works such as 36 Fugues for
piano (in a "new method of fugal writing"), L'art de
varier (a set of 57 variations on an original theme),
and exercises for the treatise Practische Beispiele
(Practical Examples). During the later Paris period,
however, he focused his attention mostly on theory and
produced a number of treatises on composition. Works of
this period include 25 crucially important wind
quintets which are considered the locus classicus of
that genre and are his best known compositions. None of
the advanced ideas he advocated in the most radical his
music and writings (not used in the 25 great wind
quintets), including polyrhythm, polytonality and
microtonal music, were accepted or employed by
nineteenth-century composers. Due to Reicha's
unwillingness to have his music published (like Michael
Haydn before him), he fell into obscurity soon after
his death and his life and work have yet to be
intensively studied.
Musically, the wind quintets represent a more
conservative trend in Reicha's oeuvre when compared to
his earlier work, namely the compositions of the
Viennese period. Instead, Reicha was inspired by the
supreme artistry of his players from the Opéra Comique
to explore the technical limits of the five instruments
comprising the wind quintet, with writing that combines
elements from comic opera, folk tradition, military
marches and fanfares with his lifelong interests in
variation form and counterpoint. Technical wizardry
also prevails in compositions that illustrate Reicha's
theoretical treatise Practische Beispiele (Practical
Examples) of 1803, where techniques such as bitonality
and polyrhythm are explored in extremely difficult
sight-reading exercises. 36 fugues for piano, published
in 1803, was conceived as an illustration of Reicha's
neue Fugensystem, a new system for composing fugues.
Reicha proposed that second entries of fugue subjects
in major keys could occur in keys other than the
standard dominant), to widen the possibilities for
modulations and undermine the conservative tonal
stability of the fugue. The fugues of the collection
not only illustrate this point, but also employ a
variety of extremely convoluted technical tricks such
as polyrhythm (no. 30), combined (nos. 24, 28),
asymmetrical (no. 20) and simply uncommon (no. 10 is in
12/4, no. 12 in 2/8) meters and time signatures, some
of which are derived from folk music, an approach that
directly anticipates that of later composers such as
Béla Bartók. No. 13 is a modal fugue played on white
keys only, in which cadences are possible on all but
the 7th degree of the scale without further alteration.
Six fugues employ two subjects, one has three, and No.
15 six. In several of the fugues, Reicha established a
link with the old tradition by using subjects by Haydn
(no. 3), Bach (no. 5), Mozart (no. 7), Scarlatti (no.
9), Frescobaldi (no. 14) and Handel (no. 15). Many of
the technical accomplishments are unique to fugue
literature.
Although originally written for Flute, Oboe, Clarinet
in C, Horn in E & Bassoon I created this arrangement
forWoodwind Quintet (Flute, Oboe, Bb Clarinet, French
Horn & Bassoon).
SHEET MUSIC