First of all, Happy October! October is the best month, and on this topic I will hear no debate.
Now, onto some music. This one I came upon by happenstance: I’m on vacation today and tomorrow (I’ve been on vacation since last Friday, actually), but The Wife had to work today, so I’m up but I’m staying home while she’s off to the office. But my car was parking her in! So out I went to move my car so she could get out…and this piece was on WNED at that moment. I only heard about ninety seconds of it, but I was intrigued, so I made note of the title and looked it up on YouTube. Now I’m sitting here finishing up my first cup of coffee while I listen to Ouverture bardique by Ferdinand Ries.
Who is that, you ask? Well, Ries is yet another of those common figures I like to feature here: composers of talent whose work may not be good enough to earn a spot in whatever “Musical Pantheon of Greatness” we’re celebrating, but whose work is too good to merit the obscurity into which it has fallen. Ries was a contemporary of Beethoven’s, living 1784 to 1838, but he wasn’t just a contemporary of Beethoven’s: he was an associate of the great master’s, actually serving for a time first as a pupil of Beethoven’s and later as his secretary and copyist. I assume that as a copyist it fell to Ries, at least in part, to decipher Beethoven’s manuscripts and put things in order as to create actually playable sheet music. In the annals of art preservation, not enough credit is given to Beethoven’s copyists. I mean, look at this–we’re talking seriously heroic work here.
Ries turns out to have been one of those composers who didn’t have to really wait for obscurity. He worked hard and had a modestly successful musical life, but he never heard a number of his later works performed, and his own passing at the age of 53 wasn’t even noted by the music publications of his day. But again, I listen to this and think, “Does he really deserve to be forgotten?” This overture, a concert work not written to introduce a dramatic piece, starts off with a typically “muscular” intro, common to the classical overtures of the time, but then it goes to very interesting places. No Rossini-style overture, this–Ries’s piece is thoughtful and exciting, and it’s also orchestrally interesting when you notice the degree to which Ries has given some of his most fascinating material to the harps. So here’s a work that is deeply classical in its conception, but you can feel the Romanticism whispering around the edges.
I liked this piece a great deal, and I hope you will, too. Here is Ouverture bardique by Ferdinant Ries.
