In the wake of the French Revolution, the passage of Classical style into the Romantic around 1800 was one of the most pivotal and cataclysmic events in the history of Western music, and dozens of composers were deep in the thick of its development. By putting the weight of this entire historic period on the broad shoulders of Ludwig van Beethoven, music history has had only a weak grasp of what really happened at the time and who else was involved. This has been due partly to the attitudes of those scholars and experts whose opinions mattered most, such as Charles Rosen, who commented in his respected 1971 study, The Classical Style, that any composer from the Classical Era outside of the big three — Franz Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Beethoven — was “not worth discussion.” Since that time, significant progress has been made in advancing some other figures. Key pre-Romantic Classicists such as Jan Ladislav Dussek, Hyacinthe Jadin, Anton Reicha, and Etienne-Nicolas Méhul have stepped forward from the shadows, and certain composers of the era previously branded as conservatives, such as Muzio Clementi and Luigi Cherubini, have had their status upgraded to pioneers of Romantic style.

However, there are composers who are so obscured in the shadows of Beethoven and Mozart that their contributions are barely recognized. Just recently, major recording projects have emerged that reveal the merits — and some limitations, though not as many as one might think, given the received wisdom about the era — of two significant individuals from around 1800 who played key roles in the rise of Romanticism: Joseph Wölfl (1773-1812) and Anton Eberl (1765-1807). Their names are as difficult to remember as they are to pronounce, but in terms of the development of Romantic style, both men had something to say.

Joseph Wölfl is known, after a fashion, as the pianist who played against Ludwig van Beethoven to a draw in a famous cutting contest in Vienna in 1795. (He did not lose to Beethoven, as is sometimes stated.) To some experts, Wölfl is a composer of negligible merit who left behind compositions too slight in substance to enter the pantheon of classical music’s greats or even near-greats. This view is reflected in the verdict of Wölfl’s biography in Grove’s as well. From Russia comes a disc that puts this easy summation to a rigorous test, Caro Mitis’ Joseph Wölfl: The Symphonies, performed by the Pratum Integrum Orchestra. This band is the most accomplished original instruments ensemble in Russia, and they seem to get better with each disc they release. The Caro Mitis discs are Super Audio CDs and pack a good deal of punch from an audiophile perspective. Judging just from his credentials, Wölfl can’t be all bad, one might think. He studied with both Leopold Mozart and Michael Haydn, possibly had some lessons with Wolfgang Mozart as well, and despite their reputed enmity, was a fast friend with Beethoven. Listeners who have had contact with Wölfl through his piano concertos or string quartets often aren’t aware that he wrote three symphonies. Unfortunately, the third exists in a piano reduction only, and his Grove’s worklist doesn’t even mention its existence.

Wölfl’s symphonies are, in a word, mind-blowing. The Symphony No. 1 in G minor, dedicated to Cherubini, takes the typical Haydnesque classical symphony — specifically, the extended ones written for Johann Peter Salomon, numbered 93-104 — and turns that format right on its head, partly through combining Haydn’s late symphonic idiom with his earlier Sturm und Drang style. The first movement is an especially stormy and eccentric Largo-Allegro pair that threatens to blow the roof off; even within the context of classical Sturm und Drang, this is a wild ride. That is followed by a minuet, a minuet as the second movement, mind you. The third movement, Andante con moto, is a study in extreme dynamic contrasts, with dramatic hammer blows on the timpani in a symphony written just one year after Beethoven’s “Eroica.” Move over “Surprise” Symphony! The Presto finale is more conventional than the rest, but by this time one’s jaw is already unhooked from one’s face. The C major Symphony takes much the same tack with the typical notion of a late Mozart symphony and has a second movement Andante that is absolute lunacy. However, Wölfl isn’t imitating Haydn or Mozart. He simply understands their style and succeeds in creating something original out of those templates.

Pratum Integrum Orchestra – Wölfl: Symphony No. 1 in G minor, Op. 40 – Minuetto

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Pratum Integrum Orchestra – Wölfl: Symphony No. 1 in G minor, Op. 40 – Finale. Presto

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Pratum Integrum Orchestra – Wölfl: Symphony No. 2 in C major, Op. 41 – Andante

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The sound is great, and the slightly loose intonation and playing of Pratum Integrum only adds to the effect of this music. Joseph Wölfl: The Symphonies is Pratum Integrum’s best disc yet and effectively prosecutes the matter that Joseph Wölfl is a composer who deserves a second chance in terms of his reputation and merit.

Music and Arts’ Anton Eberl: The Complete Sonatas for Solo Piano represents a triumph of dedicated scholarship on the part of fortepianist John Khouri. Intrigued in his student days with a piano sonata attributed to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, but not believed to be written by him, Khouri discovered in the 1990s that the sonata was the work of an alleged Mozart pupil, Anton Eberl, about whom little was known, but who did not outlive his master by even two decades. Once armed with this information, Khouri went on the hunt for whatever he could find of Eberl’s major keyboard music, and Anton Eberl: The Complete Sonatas for Solo Piano is the result.

One thing that is striking here is that Khouri has located a composer who is clearly the equal of Jan Ladislav Dussek and more forward thinking than Muzio Clementi. Khouri discovered in short measure that rather like Wölfl, Eberl had developed a posthumous inferiority complex owing to the way his music was handled by experts long after his death and to long-held assessments of its relative quality. Undaunted, Khouri scoured the libraries of Europe to find the six sonatas, sonatina, fantasy and toccata heard here. He plays them on two rare period instruments, a Jacob Pfister instrument from ca. 1820 and a copy made by Kandik and Belt of an 18th century pedal piano, an instrument well known to Mozart but out of use by the mid-19th century. What Khouri reveals is that this music sounds nothing like Beethoven and that Eberl maintained his close contact with the influence of Mozart as long as he continued to compose. However, Eberl gradually shepherded it into a romantic idiom by virtue of expanded development schemes and adopting his playing technique to the newer six-octave pianos available after 1800, the likes of which Mozart never lived to see. The later sonatas give us a hint of what Mozart himself might have done in the realm of the piano sonata had he lived a decade or two longer. Khouri plays with tremendous enthusiasm, and the recording captures these obscure keyboard instruments in a pleasantly reverberant ambience without losing the sound of the instrument or bringing it so close that we can hear the clatter of every moving mechanism on it.

While this is a worthwhile endeavor in every way, special attention should be paid to the extraordinary grand Sonata in G minor Op. 39 written in honor of Grand Duchess Maria Paulowna, aunt to Princess Sophie of the Netherlands and a significant patroness of musicians. In its day, this sonata was recognized as “among the most attractive, most brilliant, most difficult works of this composer” and hardly seems less so now. The level of challenge is indeed very high and it is an important rediscovery. With all due respect to Khouri’s titanic effort on the Pfister Grand, one is nonetheless curious as to how this would sound on a modern grand.

John Khouri, fortepiano – Eberl: Sonata in C minor, Op. 1- Adagio

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John Khouri, fortepiano – Eberl: Sonata in G minor, Op. 39 – Adagio molto espressivo

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John Khouri, fortepiano – Eberl: Toccata in C minor, Op. 46

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Khouri has done more than to merely take out the trash in recording Anton Eberl: The Complete Sonatas for Solo Piano and making this music available. He has filled in a fitful, stubbornly missing piece of the puzzle in Western canon that anyone concerned with its history should be glad to find in place once again.

If Charles Rosen was right — and he was most certainly acute in his analysis of the music of the “big three,” but is clearly wrong in his rejection of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach from the classical era hierarchy — then what can be the value of revisiting such obscure composers as these? One thing it rights is the progression of historic development. The traditional view is that Beethoven introduced Romanticism in works such as the Eroica, stepped back and took the brickbats of critics and society until he finally “sold” the idea of Romantic style with the Ninth Symphony in 1824. Only Franz Schubert had the guts to get on board while Beethoven still lived. This might help to explain the long resistance to Romanticism in places like Italy and Sweden, where Classical style held sway well into the 1830s. Yet it doesn’t explain the great popularity of Romantic music in France in years prior to 1824, nor does it make sense of the mediocrity of much German music in the years following Beethoven’s death. However, if you look at Romantic style as exploding on the scene in the immediate wake of the French Revolution, with Beethoven both as innovator and operating within a stream of shared activity, then it is clear that between 1800-1830 that there was a choice that composers could take between the established and the new. This explains the generation born in the 1790s, with Italian Gioachino Rossini taking a more classically oriented path, Franz Schubert straddling both modes of endeavor and Swedish composer Franz Berwald and Frenchman Daniel-François Auber veering towards a more explicitly Romantic end of the road. Similar developments among composers may be found in the years around 1900 as well. In the wake of 2000, the concert world is interested in seeing what changes are in store; modernism is definitely over and post-modernism fails to accurately typify some of the things we are seeing. The past is always a good indicator of such trends and by understanding history properly, rather than subjectively, we are better prepared to find our way in understanding the future as it unfolds.

[The author would like to express special thanks to artist Ali Spagnola for allowing the inclusion of her painting, a post-modern take on Jacques-Louis David's "The Death of Marat."]