Anton Reicha
Anton (Antonín, Antoine) Joseph Reicha (Rejcha) (26 February 1770 – 28 May 1836) was a Czech-born, Bavarian-educated, later naturalized French composer and music theorist.
[1] A contemporary and lifelong friend of Beethoven, he is now best remembered for his substantial early contributions to the wind quintet literature and his role as teacher of pupils including Franz Liszt, Hector Berlioz and César Franck.
Due to Reicha's unwillingness to have his music published (like Michael Haydn before him), he fell into obscurity soon after his death and his life and work have yet to be intensively studied.
[2] Apparently Reicha's mother was not interested in her son's education, and so in 1780 he ran away from home following a sudden impulse – as he recounted in his memoirs, he jumped onto a passing carriage.
[4] In 1785 the family moved to Bonn, where Reicha became a member of the Hofkapelle of Max Franz, Elector of Cologne, playing violin and second flute in the court orchestra under his uncle's direction.
Christian Gottlob Neefe, one of the most important figures in the musical life of the city at the time, may well have instructed both Reicha and his gifted piano pupil Beethoven in composition and introduced them to the works of Johann Sebastian Bach, such as The Well-Tempered Clavier.
He managed to escape to Hamburg,[2] vowed never to perform in public again and began to earn a living teaching harmony, composition and piano.
These hopes were dashed, however: he could neither get his old librettos accepted nor find suitable new ones despite support from friends and influential members of the aristocracy, and moved on to Vienna in 1801.
"[6] In 1801, Reicha's opera L'ouragan, which failed in Paris, was performed at the palace of Prince Joseph Franz von Lobkowitz, a prominent patron of Beethoven.
This time three of his many operas were produced, but they all failed; yet his fame as theorist and teacher increased steadily, and by 1817 most of his pupils became professors at the Conservatoire de Paris.
It was also in Paris that Reicha started composing the 25 wind quintets which proved to be his most enduring works:[2] far more conservative musically than the experimental fugues he had written in Vienna, but exploiting the skill of his virtuosi from the Opéra Comique to extend significantly the technique and musical ambitions of future players of the still evolving wind instruments.
Berlioz in his Memoirs[11] acknowledges that Reicha was 'an admirable teacher of counterpoint' who cared about his pupils and whose 'lessons were models of integrity and thoroughness' – high praise indeed from one so critical of the Conservatoire in general.
"[14] Indeed, Reicha's experiences as a flautist must have helped in the creation of these pieces, in which he systematically explored the possibilities of the wind ensemble and invented an extended sonata form variant that could accommodate as many as five principal themes.
[13] Musically, the wind quintets represent a more conservative trend in Reicha's oeuvre when compared to his earlier work, namely the compositions of the Viennese period.
In the quintets, as he describes in his preface, Reicha wanted to expand the technical limits of the five still evolving wind instruments (hand horn, 'un-rationalised' flute and clarinet, double reeds with fewer keys), and thereby also the ambitions of amateur wind players, by establishing a nucleus for a corpus of substantial work like that available to string players (and consciously more serious than the Harmoniemusik of the last century).
His writing combines virtuoso display (often still very challenging today, yet idiomatic for each instrument), popular elements (from the comic opera his soloists played, from his Bohemian folk heritage, from the military background to his life – many marches, 'walking' themes and fanfares), and his lifelong more academic interests in variation form and counterpoint.
3, which contains clear musical quotations (most obvious in the horn part) from both the scherzo of his Eroica (also in E-flat major) and the first movement of his 5th symphonies.
They are interesting pieces but a little cold", while Louis Spohr, who was visiting Paris in 1820–21 and reserved judgment until he had heard several performed, assessed them in a letter home (which he included in his autobiography) as having too many ideas linked carelessly or not at all ("were he less rich, he would be richer"), "yet the minuets and scherzi, as short pieces, are less open to this objection, and some of them are real masterpieces in form and contents".
Berlioz[11] also comments on two of the players (in other works): "Joseph Guillou [de], the first flute...has to dominate...so he transposes the flute line up an octave, thus destroying the composer's intention" (p. 56); of Gustave Vogt's cor anglais playing he says (p. 23): "However remarkable the singer...I find it hard to believe she can ever have made it sound as natural and touching as it did on Vogt's instrument".
[17] Technical wizardry also prevails in compositions that illustrate Reicha's theoretical treatise Practische Beispiele (Practical Examples) of 1803, where techniques such as bitonality and polyrhythm are explored in extremely difficult sight-reading exercises.
12 in 2/8) meters and time signatures, some of which are derived from folk music, an approach that directly anticipates that of later composers such as Béla Bartók.
This is partly explained by Reicha's own decisions he reflected on in his autobiography: "Many of my works have never been heard because of my aversion to seeking performances [...] I counted the time spent in such efforts as lost, and preferred to remain at my desk.
