A Bohemian Bach?
In 1973, a new recording of some chamber music composed by the Czech-born composer Jan Dismas Zelenka was released. Music critic Edward Greenfield was typical of reviewers at the time when he wrote in The Guardian that “this is music to set against that of Bach himself with no apology whatever.” Anyone who might have cared about such a claim would have been hard-pressed to disagree, since at the time very few avid music listeners had even heard of Zelenka, let alone heard any of his music.
The comparison with Bach has many merits. The composers were rough contemporaries, Bach living from 1685 to 1750, and Zelenka from 1679 to 1745. Both were composers working in Germany, with careers linked principally to one city (it has been said that Dresden is to Zelenka as Leipzig is to Bach). They also seem to have been friends (Zelenka is known to have shared meals in the Bach household), and in their compositions one can find influences of each other’s work. And they both composed a lot of music for use in liturgical settings. But at this point, their separate paths become more clearly defined, for Bach was a devout and lifelong Lutheran, while Zelenka —living and working in Saxony, long regarded as the motherland of the Reformation —was nevertheless a faithful child of Catholic Bohemia.
Path to Dresden
Besides the fact that he was the first-born son of a schoolmaster/organist and his wife, living in a small market town southeast of Prague, Zelenka’s biographical details are almost entirely unknown. We do know that he received musical training at the Jesuit college in Prague. During his school years, political events in neighboring Saxony created the matrix within which his life and work were to take shape.
In 1696, the death of the king of Poland, who left no obvious heir, created conditions that several European royal houses attempted to exploit. Among the candidates for kingship was the Elector of Saxony, “Augustus the Strong,” who rather casually converted to Catholicism to qualify himself for the throne. (His wife never converted and was thereafter honored by her Protestant subjects as “Saxony’s pillar of prayer.”) Having turned his back on his Lutheran legacy, the Elector earned the endorsement of Pope Innocent XII and the support of Russia and Habsburg Austria to become king of Poland.
In 1708, Augustus converted a theater within his Dresden court into a royal Catholic chapel, which was staffed by Jesuits and came under the jurisdiction of the Jesuit province of Bohemia in 1710. There were few Catholics in Dresden, and no tradition of Catholic church music, so, as David Charlton explains, “a number of young choristers and instrumentalists were recruited from Bohemia to serve the liturgical requirements of the chapel.” Zelenka was one of those recruits —his Jesuit connections no doubt coming in handy —and sometime in 1710 or 1711, he became part of the Dresden Hofkapelle (court orchestra).
Transformative Influences
From his first days as a member of this ensemble, Zelenka seems to have been involved in composing as well, his first work being a Mass in honor of St. Cecilia —the patron saint of music —first performed in 1711 on her feast day, November 22nd. This was the first of 21 Masses that Zelenka eventually composed during his decades serving the Dresden royal chapel. In addition to these Masses, he provided the church with about a hundred other works including requiems, Magnificats, numerous settings of psalms and the Te Deum, and music for the Holy Week liturgies. Only since the late 1980s have performance scores of these works been available, so recordings and concert performances have been rare.
One of Zelenka’s predecessors in producing sacred choral music for the churches of Dresden was Bach’s great forerunner from the early seventeenth century, Heinrich Schütz. Although he composed for Lutheran patrons and congregants, Schütz’s training under Italian masters in Venice resulted in the writing of works that reflected artistic developments perfected by Counter-Reformation composers (see my “Schütz: Baroque Before Bach” in the September/October 2015 Touchstone).
As in Schütz’s works generations before, the Italian influence is again profoundly evident in Zelenka’s —though now shaded by a century of developments in Italian opera. Musicologist Geoffrey Chew has pointed out that an Italian “Catholic” style had achieved remarkable popularity throughout central Europe in the late seventeenth century. “Church music was transformed, rather as the landscape was transformed through the ambitious building programme which placed exuberant Baroque churches in every town and village.”
The result of this transformation in Zelenka’s hands is a body of sacred music that is often vigorous and virtuosic, music with (in the words of Robert Reilly) a “perky vivacity.” Zelenka’s frequent use of chromaticism is one of the devices that make his music sound more like Haydn or Mozart than Bach and Handel.
Ken Myers is the host and producer of the Mars Hill Audio Journal. Formerly an arts editor with National Public Radio, he also serves as music director at All Saints Anglican Church in Ivy, Virginia. He is a contributing editor for Touchstone.
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