Composer: Maximilian Stadler (1748-1833)

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Stadler was an Austrian composer and Benedictine monk.  Per Wikipedia, "He befriended Mozart, Joseph Haydn, Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Schubert and wrote numerous essays on Mozart, as well as completed some of Mozart's unfinished works."  Which is kind of neat.   I wonder if he knew Vanhal?​​

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Date: 1807

 

Original Instrumentation: 2 violins, viola, cello​

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Why this one:

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I was interested in this one because the score has the title "Canon, uber Haydn's abschied von der musikalischen welt" which translates to "Canon about Haydn's farewell to the musical world."   (In 1807 Haydn, who Stadler was apparently friends with, was still alive though he had been retired for a few years due to illness.)

 

That the piece was short and looked superficially easy didn't hurt either.  (Though more on the latter later).  

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Description:  

 

Key:  A

Time: 4/4  BPM=75

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This one is, uh, a canon.  To quote myself from the Steinkauler write-up:

 

A canon is a piece that starts with a melody in one instrument or voice and then starts adding instruments/voices that imitate that melody.

 

The canon theme, stated first in the violin 1 (left), is a really simple 4 bar melody that the violin 1 repeats 4 times with no deviation.  Violin 2 picks up the theme in the second measure, playing it once exactly as  violin 1 did, and then repeating it "alla terza" or "up a third." (The details of this confused me a little; more on this in the errata section.) 

 

The viola and cello almost have a "false canon" thing going on at the beginning, with the viola coming in with the violin 1 but playing a completely different melody and the cello taking up that melody in measure 2.  This doesn't repeat again though and the two instruments go their separate ways after the opening and act mostly independently of the main canon theme in the violins, with the  viola playing it once "alla 5ta" or "up a fifth" and then the cello taking it up next "all 7ma" or "up a seventh."  

 

During the cello's alla 7ma, the viola and violin 2 start playing bursts of sixteenth notes, in unison and in alternation, for five measures before "passing" the sixteenth note runs to first the cello and then the violin 1 just before the piece ends.

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There's a lot of accidentals flying around after about the first 3rd, but all sound to my ear like passing tones, and didn't seem to push the piece into another key center.

 

I was a little surprised that the viola was the most active and varied part in this, as usually that honor goes to the violin 1, which here mostly just repeats the opening theme over and over until getting saucy at the end.

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Performance:​

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This ended up being more difficult than I thought it was going to be, but at least I figured that out during practice rather than in the studio.  All the accidentals I mentioned earlier, particularly in the viola made some of the fingerings tricky, especially in the faster 16th note sections.  I wound't say that they were "hard" exactly, but definitely "harder" than I thought it was going to be after my first glance at the score.

 

Another reason this was tougher that it would seem at first glance is because of how canons work and the way I have to record these.  Canons come together really late in the recording process because a lot of times the individual parts don't sound like much and the way they weave together in complicated and unintuitive ways when you record one instrument at a time can make for a disorienting recording experience.   After laying down, say, the second instrument, Mike might ask "Were those rhythms right?  Was it supposed to sound like that?" and I'd have to say "Um... I don't know yet."

 

Fortunately, I had already dealt with this with the Steinkauler piece so I was expecting it and didn't get thrown off.

 

Errata:

 

I'm confused by the canon theme "alla X" notations in the score, which seem to mean the opposite that they did in the Steinkauler Canons.  In Steinkauler's, its "alla seconda" or "up a second" meant that the second voice indeed came in a step higher than the first, and its "alla sesta" or 'up a sixth" meant that the second voice came in a sixth higher than the first.

 

In Stadler's canon, it seems to go the other direction.   Violin 2's alla terza starts on C#, which is a third down from the canon theme's starting note of E.   Similarly, the viola's alla 5ta  start on A is a fifth down from E, and the cello's alla 7ma starting F# is a seventh down from E.

 

I don't know if that's a quirk of one of the composers or if notation usage changed in the  100 years between the two pieces.  This kind of obscure classical notation question is also basically impossible to find in a Google search and this is not the first time that I've come up empty trying to parse something odd in an old score.  At least this one was more theoretical, as if I hadn't figured it out (assuming my hypothesis is correct), it wouldn't have affected whether I knew what the score wanted me to play.  The notes were still there, regardless.

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Album Art:

 

I took this photo of Saint Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna, near where Haydn lived.