Antoine Reicha and the Making of the Nineteenth-Century Composer Fabio Morabito and Louise Bernard de Raymond, eds Bologna: Ut Orpheus, 2021 pp. xxix + 329, ISBN 978 8 881 09522 3

Abstract

Who was Antoine Reicha, anyway? Born 1770 in Prague, he was educated in Bavaria, served the court of Elector Maximilian Franz in Bonn, escaped Napoleonic aggression by moving to Hamburg, laboured as a composer in Vienna and finally settled in Paris, where he was appointed the Conservatoire’s professor of counterpoint and fugue. An unapologetic careerist, he was a tireless innovator, an unsuccessful opera composer and a brilliant if freewheeling pedagogue. He adored Haydn, had a cordial relationship with Beethoven, sparred with his colleagues Fétis and Cherubini and mentored such luminaries as Liszt, Berlioz and Franck. Though his name is now largely forgotten, in the musical world of the nineteenth century, all roads led to Reicha. No wonder, then, that in our age of networks, Reicha is staging a comeback. With Antoine Reicha and the Making of the Nineteenth-Century Composer, editors Fabio Morabito and Louise Bernard de Raymond have aimed to capture Reicha in his ‘efforts to navigate a variety of contexts, negotiating at the same time personal, financial, geographical, social, musical, professional and other priorities of self-representation’ (xix). Comprising seven essays in English and four in French, the book is a welcome addition to the growing literature on the composer, offering many perspectives that will engage scholars of eighteenthand nineteenth-century music. Morabito (chapter 1) draws attention to Haydn’s outsized role in Reicha’s autobiography. Central to Reicha’s historiographical project, Morabito argues, was his role as a symbolic link between Haydn and later generations of composers. Morabito characterizes Haydn as a modernist, arguing that for Reicha, ‘playing [the role of] Haydn’ amounted to ‘being yourself musically’ (19). Reicha’s Trente-six fugues composées d’après un nouveau systême (1803) were his most systematic and radical attempt to follow ‘the unruly Haydn blueprint’ (19), but the collection was poorly received. These eccentric fugues, Morabito suggests, were off-putting to Reicha’s contemporaries because of their didactic pretension as much as their novelty. Reicha’s fascination with fugue is further explored by Muriel Boulan (chapter 9), who investigates seven French treatises on ‘school fugues’ written between 1805 and 1840. These texts, she argues, reflect competing ideologies. While Francois-Joseph Fétis in his Traité du contrepoint et de la fugue (1824) characterized fugue as the summit of tradition, Reicha in his Traité de haute composition musicale (1826) viewed it as the essence of modern composition. Rather than including fugal examples by the likes of Palestrina, Handel and Bach in his treatise, Reicha quoted from works composed by himself and his former students. In so doing, he sought to demonstrate fugue’s relevance to the nineteenth-century composer, emphasizing, in his own words, ‘the effects produced by the fugal material’ rather than ‘the insignificant fugues with which students in counterpoint classes busy themselves’ (286; my translation).