This is a story about official Opus Ones and what came before, about
the mysteries of composers’ early attempts at writing music,
focusing on Gioachino Rossini, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Ludwig van
Beethoven and my own Trio Opus 1, of which in truth I can say
‘It’s not my First Work!’
Rossini was fourteen when he was admitted to the Bologna Conservatory
in 1806. He was forced to submit to exercises in strict
composition—I always wish that I had had more strict training
in my youth—and he studied the chamber works of Haydn and
Mozart with avidity, even orchestrating some of them. So keen was he on
the music of these composers that his fellow students nicknamed him
‘Il Tedeschino’—the Little German. Two
years later, in 1808, Rossini composed the opera Demetrio e Polibio,
‘my first work,’ he said later.
Not true! Before there was a Mass
in 1804, and even three years earlier, in 1804, aged twelve, he had
written 6 sonatas for
four players (two violins, cello and double bass). You
should never believe composers nor trust program notes, particularly
for wood-wind trios and quartets, for Rossini’s well known
wind quartets are hardly more than an arrangement of these string
sonatas, and I quote the program notes: demonstrating
Rossini’s mastery of instrument writing whereby each player
is provided with music which is thoroughly idiomatic to this particular
instrument.
Johann Sebastian’s most famous and prolific son was Carl
Philipp Emanuel Bach. In 1731 he engraved, with his own hands, though
under his father’s supervision, a little one page Minuet in C,
‘with hands crossing.’ ‘My first
work,’ he said later, a truly official Opus 1.
Stories of Beethoven’s childhood in Bonn abound.
‘At the age of eleven, this youthful genius will surely
become a second Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart,’ wrote his teacher
Christian Gottlob Neefe in the Magazin
der Musik.
‘Beethoven soon began to compose,’ says Alexander
Thayer. ‘He worked extremely hard at his composition,
sketching and polishing his works over and over again until he
considered them finished, including a set of Variations on a March by Ernst
Christoph Dressler for the piano, composed in 1782 when he
was twelve years old.’ ‘My first work,’
he said later. But the official Opus 1 came only in 1794, by which time
Beethoven was twenty-four; he had taken his time. In Vienna he had the
musical wherewithal to make that city sit up and listen, the Three
Piano Trios Opus 1 were intended to be an event, they were in the genre
directed at the aristocratic devotees of chamber music who were at the
very centre of the Vienna scene. Like all of his early music right up
to the Septet
Opus 16 the music is scaled very broadly, both weighty and discursive,
even overblown, with ponderous slow movements and including his famous
innovation, the Scherzo.
Now a little interlude or digression on Russian composers, whose
official Opus Ones were even further removed from their first attempts
at composition.
Sergei Rachmaninov’s official Opus 1 is the fabulous and
famous Piano Concerto
in F# of 1890—he was seventeen at the time. A
remarkably mature work, even for an official Opus 1, an unbelievable
start, but hardly ‘my first work.’
In 1946 I played the second bassoon part as a student in the Melbourne
Conservatorium orchestra, but understandably, as a struggling
bassoonist, Rachmaninov’s spectacular piano music had no
influence on me whatsoever. The Concerto was preceded by an opera, Esmeralda, only
fragments of which exist, an even earlier Piano Concerto,
only sketches of which exist, and the Symphonic Poem Manfred, of which
nothing exists, it is now lost forever.
Sergei Prokofiev, as a child musically precocious, left a huge amount
of juvenilia. He wrote his first piece at the age of five, and by 1902,
aged eleven, he was already the composer of two operas. In this case
the official Opus 1, his Piano
Sonata Number 1, was a remodelling of an earlier sonata,
so he could hardly say ‘my first work’ later.
But, unlike his predecessor Rachmaninov, Prokofiev may just have had
some influence on me. Just listen to this: Pace Dr Jimmy Steele, I was
expelled from the Melbourne University Conservatorium, no, not for
‘improving’ on the great masters, just for sheer
incompetence. I couldn’t play the bassoon, I
couldn’t do the harmony and counterpoint. What a happy,
positive note on which to start examining my very own official Opus 1,
the Trio for flute, clarinet and bassoon of 1956. I was twenty-eight at
the time, ‘you left your run a bit late George, little
Gioachino was twelve when he wrote his six string sonatas, little
Emanuel was twelve when he engraved his Minuet in C and
little Ludwig was twelve when he finished his Variations on the March by Ernst
Christoph Dressler; but you George, you were twenty-eight
by the time you wrote your Trio,
what held you up?’
‘But it’s not my first work!’ I said,
later....