Masses and motets by a great, yet little known, German master who was a direct influence on Mozart

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Product Details

Artist: The Rodolfus Choir
Conductor: Ralph Allwood
Organ: Christopher Whitton
Label: Gaudeamus

Critic Reviews

Delivered with energy and a sense of colour by Christopher Whitton on the organ of Eton College, whose resonant, spacious acoustic gives life to the singing of the 16-voice Rodolfus Choir. Their polished tone and well-schooled approach more than compensates for an occasional suggestion – no more – of running away with themselves. Ralph Allwood’s direction is fluent.
BBC Music Magazine

More Information

The music of Johann Ernst Eberlin was central to the early development of a much greater composer. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (who was, for the first three years of his and the last three of the older man's life, a fellow resident of Salzburg) was brought up on Eberlin's liturgical music, at the hand of his father Leopold. The Mozarts père et fils, both of whom succeeded Eberlin as Kapellmeister to the Archbishop-Prince of Salzburg, were impressed by his mastery of contrapuntal writing, a skill well documented in this selection from his 70 masses and well over 200 other liturgical pieces; indeed, the young Amadeus's Salzburg masses and motets owe a distinct debt to his predecessor.

Leopold Mozart and Ebedin were both Swabian, born in the region of Augsburg: indeed, it has even been suggested that Eberfin (who was Leopold's senior by 17 years) may have taught the younger musician. They certainly shared a training that was typical of their time. Both attended the Augsburg Gymnasium and both later enrolled at the Benedictine University in Salzburg. At both these institutions the student would expect to receive a broad theoretical education that dated back to the Medieval tradition of the seven liberal arts, divided into the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music) and the more practical trivium (grammar, rhetoric and logic). For the musician, this training in Classically-based disciplines, including rhetoric and the musical properties of the natural world (theories derived from Pythagoras) could be combined with a study of the various practical treatises by authors such as Zarlino, Fux and Mattheson. Eberlin's training was not in composition as such. Rather, he applied his more general education to the music that he wrote. This attitude seems strange today, but it made perfect sense in the mid-eighteenth century, when musicians (composers in particular) were servants: just as it was the court doorman's job to open and close doors, it was the ordained station of the court composer to compose. Had it not been for the exceptional gifts of his youngest son, Leopold Mozart would most likely have remained as obscure a figure as his fellow Swabian.

Thus, while Leopold gained fame (rightly or wrongly) as the pushy father of a young genius, in the history of what Stravinsky called the 'German stem' of composers, it is Eberlin's fate to feature as a worthy, but brief, footnote. It would be foolish, however, to dismiss his music simply because of its relative unimportance in our gallery of preferred composers, the canon of 'greats', pre-greats, postgreats and sub-greats. Quite apart from its undeniable quality and charm, its very unprogressiveness is significant.

Eberlin wrote his liturgical music for the Roman Catholic Church, an organisation well known (more in eighteenth-century Salzburg even than now) for its resistance to innovation. As a result, Eberlin's masses and motets eschewed as inappropriate the popular, easy expressivities of the style galant for an altogether more serious manner, highly imitative and often tortuously chromatic- witness the Hosanna of the Mass in A minor. In the monumental organ pieces featured here, the pleasant, short-breathed phrases of much contemporary South German music is entirely absent: instead, a series of craggy fantasia episodes and terse fugues recalls the Northern stilus phantasticus of a century earlier. Unwittingly, Eberlin was writing music that fitted the aesthetics of the sublime (according to Burke, that which in Nature causes 'astonishment... admiration, reverence and respect') like a glove; moreover, he was composing at a time when these aesthetics were growing in influence. The ascendancy of the 'sublime' was, among other things, partly responsible for the re-acceptance of the music of that other supposed conservative, J. S. Bach, into German cultural life in the late-eighteenth century. Thus, while Ebedin most likely wrote in the contrapuntal style because he (and, more importantly, his masters) considered it appropriate for the setting of sacred texts, his music carries the seed of later 'rediscoveries' of strict counterpoint: seed which bore fruit in the music of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.

As Arnold Schoenberg, a late blossom from the 'German stem', might have remarked, the German genius manifested itself in the integration of old and new. With this in mind, when we hear Eberlin's motet Christus factus est – with our ears inevitably tuned to the later setting by another devoted Austrian Roman Catholic, Anton Bruckner – we might even hear something like the start of a great tradition.

© 2000 Robert Quinney

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