Johann Adolf Hasse
(1699-1783)
Have you ever heard baroque music? I think you might know the names of some composers. Bach ,Haendel or Vivaldi are familiar names.But did you ever hear about Johann Adolf Hasse ?
Read this essay about is time in Dresden :
The D major Sinfonia, marked the beginning of the "Age of Hasse" in Dresden. It is the sinfonia, or overture, to the opera which, in 1731, attracted the attention of the Saxon court to Johann Adolf Hasse after he had spent nearly ten years in Italy. (The attention, be it said, not only of courtiers but of true connoisseurs as well: it is thought that Johann Sebastian Bach and his son Wilhelm Friedemann were among those present at the performance.) Hasse was on good terms with the court poet at Dresden, Johann Ulrich von König , from a time when they had known each other in Brunswick, and moreover he had excellent references from Naples, Vienna and Venice, so the highest postition for a musician at the court, vacant since Heinichen's death in 1729, was as good as his. The reason he was not given the appointment immediately was that Augustus the Strong's life was seen to be drawing to a close, after which all court officials would be dismissed as a matter of form, but dismissing so greatly sought-after a master as Hasse - even if only as a formality -would have been far more risky than keeping him waiting, and not issuing a decree confirming his appointment in the meantime. Eventually Hasse entered the service of the Saxon court officially on 1 December 1733 on quite exceptional terms, by which he was exempted from attending the Elector visits to Warsaw (he followed his father as elected King of Poland, too). Consequently Hasse and his wife, the singer Faustina Bordoni, were able to continue their careers in Italy, sometimes staying there for years on end, which gave Pistori, Zelenka and Pisendel a chance to shine in Dresden. It must also be said that the sumptuous festivals Augustus the Strong loved to celebrate were abolished at a stroke by his successor. The only legitimate son of the "Saxon Hercules' inherited little of his father's enormous charm and matching charisma. The children of the older Augustus's mistresses were a notoriously turbulent bunch, but their prim half-brother had inherited not only the looks but also the phlegmatism and reserve of his mother, a woman known as "Saxony's votive pillar". He may have been exemplarily faithful to his wife, the Austrian Archduchess Maria Josepha, but in no sense was he a "father of his people" In fact the stand-off between the Protestant population of Saxony and the Catholic government grew substantially greater under Augustus III. Shutting its double doors, the court shut out the people. Schloss Moritzburg, Augustus II's hunting-lodge some ten miles from Dresden, was given over to royal lyings-in, and the new Hubertusburg, much further away, became the royal family's favourite residence. The completion of the Catholic court church, which almost dominated the Dresden skyline (the tower was secretly built several metres higher than appeared in the plans), turned the religious alignment - hitherto regarded as a private matter for the dynasty into a huge, tactless demonstration of power. The court church was consecrated in 1751, to music by Hasse, and his late, grand masses were also composed for it. Though it looks a dainty rococo structure from a distance (as in Bernardo Bellotto's views of the city, for example) it is a monster, and its unspeakable acoustics struck fear into the hearts even of 19th-century composers. Altogether, it is Hasse's sacred music that testifies to his true greatness and genius; his seria operas struggle to keep audiences interested in either their subject-matter or their performance, for it is virtually impossible nowadays to muster on one stage stars of the kind for which they were written, and whose vocal prowess the conditio sine qua non plain gave them life When the English musical historian Charles Burney, on a visit to Vienna in 1772, asked Hasse for a complete list of his works, the composer answered that he himself did not recall everything he had written. He promised Burney to draw up a list of all he could remember (Faustina offered to help) but failed to deliver. Even today, we are confronted with an immense body of work among which only the sacred solo compositions have been put into systematic order. As with so many of J. S. Bach's contemporaries, there is an urgent need for Hasse's oeuvre as a whole to be thoroughly sorted out. (Like so many others, Hasse has been a victim of the Bach-centred, Prussian-orientated and Protestant-dominated musical scholarship which, during the 19th century, put all its efforts into compensating for the lack of "earlier" art to which the evolving new German empire had a claim by developing a perfidious, pseudo-historical cloak of legitimation woven from the Brandenburg Concertos and the Musical Offering, in order to turn the (Saxon) composer of those works into a Prussian. Any of Bach's contemporaries who resisted the efforts to force them into this mould were simply damned, as prolific scribblers, minor masters, even "morally defective" Yet if ever a composer deserved to be elevated into the Parnassus of Prussian Cultural Property (the designation to this day of the artworks and libraries left behind by the departing Hohen zollerns) it was Hasse. On each of Frederick II's visits to Dresden - apart from the first he always came as an enemy, and now and then rode through its ruins - he invariably commanded a performance of Hasse's latest opera. One was chosen to inaugurate the theatre in the Neues Schloss in Potsdam, too, and the astonishing number of flute concertos Hasse wrote - 80!-is scarcely explicable without at least an allusion to the philosopher of Sanssouci, whose cannonballs and torches destroyed Hasse's house in Dresden in 1765, along with all the autograph manuscripts that did not happen to have been left in Paris, Vienna, Venice or Naples. Numerous chronological issues in Hasse's career will never be clarified, thanks to his greatest fan's dedication to the science of war. Hasse's works were to have been published in the very first "complete edition" of any composer: the enterprise was planned by Breitkopf of Leipzig, but it perished in the flames when Hasse's ardent admirer torched his royal cousin's frontdoor.The elegance and eloquence, beauty and clarity of Hasse's personal "handwriting" are rooted in its harmonic stillness. Upper parts richly decorated in a rocaille-like style move above a foundation of agile Trommelbässe (bass lines with a steady drumming rhythm), only very rarely falling away into "foreign mannerisms", almost never "deceiving" the car. Hasse's "invention" - unlike that of Bach or Zelenka - has a melodic quality which is not short-breathed yet needs no harmonic commentary. Hasse was no stranger to polyphony, but he had no wish to write it for its own sake everywhere and all the time. "Nothing succeeds like success" - scarcely another composer enjoyed as unanimously high a reputation in ancien regime Europe as Hasse did. Bourgeois opera audiences worshipped him as fervently as did crowned heads in Vienna, Dresden, Naples, Paris, London and Berlin. His music dissolved national frontiers and spanned two generations: the ink was still wet on Bach's Brandenburg Concertos when Hasse celebrated his first triumphs in Italy, and by the time he put down his pen Mozart had taken up residence in Vienna. Undoubtedly many of his contemporaries did not deserve to be as overshadowed by him as they were; Frederick II, growing ever more peculiar as he aged, could not endure operas in any other style but his; Gluck's career did not really take off in Vienna, and the North Italian courts with their Habsburg connections were dominated by Hasse (involuntarily). Was it a desire to "see fair play' that allowed us to forget such a master ?
So I hope you do know more right now About this composer.
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