Real women, and mythic ones, are at the heart of the Witches? music festival, being performed by the Jerusalem Baroque Orchestra this month with pianist Gili Loftus and violinist Susanne Scholz.
The Baroque period spans roughly two centuries. They bridge the Renaissance, with the melancholy works of John Dowland – like In darkness let me dwell – to the Classical Era with Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. The name is likely derived from Unusual Pearl and came to mean how nature’s gifts can be transformed by soul and craft into works of complicated beauty.
This beauty was highly individualistic. Bach had his own system of tuning, now lost to us, and composed his Well-Tempered Clavier to teach. Paganini used to go to Rome to personally examine the sheep killed so that their guts could be reworked as strings for his violin. Baroque violins were larger, used gut-strings, and were not normally played by the nobility.
“They played the Viola da Gamba,” Scholz told The Jerusalem Post, “the violin was a money-making instrument.”
She arrived in Vienna from Graz to study music in the late 1980s and discovered the fierce intellectual joy of early music.
“I’m very interested in going to different times with music,” she said, noting that when one is lucky enough to hold violins from that era, “it’s totally different than what you imagine.”
Loftus had a similar experience when she played the Andre Stein fortepiano used by Clara Schumann.
“I was in Zwickau going over her favorite compositions at the Schumann House,” she told the Post, “and I could see the notes musicians put there.”
Schumann instructed the performers to use a specific fingering technique, which Loftus felt was a bit unnatural, yet when she tried it, the music gained a new meaning.
“I imagined my own hands as if they were, in a manner of speaking, Clara Schumann’s hands,” she suggested, “it required a certain legato [a manner of smoothly playing the notes in unison] in service of the musical expression, and that made me feel, in a very humble way, that I can allow myself to feel a little bit like her, which is a precious experience.”
IN THIS festival, Loftus will perform music related to Mozart’s older, and no less gifted sister, Maria Anna Mozart.
“She was very present in his life,” she explained, “they were a brother and sister act as children, and they constantly wrote to one another as adults.”
She pointed out that, despite Mozart’s sister exchanging ideas with him, even offering him help with composition, the culture of the time simply did not permit a woman of good standing to perform.
For the sake of a good marriage
Women were taught to sing and play music with the goal that these skills would help them have a good marriage. Having achieved that, they were expected to be quiet. There is a reason why a common harpsichord at the time, often used by young women in music classes, was called a virginal.
Musical education aimed at facilitating young women’s social mobility was the reason Vivaldi taught music at the Venice Ospedale della Pietà, an orphanage for girls.
His star pupil was Anna Maria dal Violin, a name her talents won her, as she was left there as a baby without a name. Vivaldi wrote 28 concertos for her, and crowds flocked to hear her play, but she was a rare exception.
Another unique exception was Maddalena Laura, who was also taught in an orphanage and supported by composer Giuseppe Tartini.
It was by virtue of her marrying the violinist Ludovico Sirmen, who performed alongside her, that she was a rarity – a woman composer and musician, encouraged by her husband to publicly perform at the tail-end of the Baroque period.
“Male composers wrote thousands of works for money,” Scholz told the Post, noting that Bach’s wife might have worked with him on compositions “but she never signed her name.”
For her, this is an example of how women were kept invisible during that time and even later.
“When I finished the music academy, none of the top orchestras in Vienna invited women to work with them,” Scholz said. This attitude changed relatively recently.
Scholz’s concert includes Telemann’s Overture Suite for Omphale, a mythical queen to whom Hercules was a slave, a selection from Purcell’s The Fairy-Queen, and music composed by Laura Sirmen.
The festival also includes a Hebrew musical adaptation by the Nari Baroque Ensemble to the works of Madame d’Aulnoy, who shaped modern fairy tales with works like The Blue Bird (1697) and who created the character of Prince Charming.
Witches? Baroque Music Festival will take place in Jerusalem from Monday, September 16, to Thursday, September 19. Mythologies will be performed in Tel Aviv on Saturday, September 14 at 7 p.m. and in Jerusalem on Monday, September 16, 8 p.m. Mozart: Girl Wonder will be given in Jerusalem on Tuesday, September 17, 5 p.m. Blue Bird will be offered on Tuesday, September 18, 8 p.m. The Jerusalem Fair will include live, free music, Tuesday, September 17, 6 p.m. Tickets range from NIS 50 to NIS 110. Call (02) 671-5888 to book.
