A European walk through Bordeaux 21
Beck's Overture.
35, Rue Huguerie.
The exact contemporary
of Joseph Haydn (1732-1809), but younger than Christoph Willibald Gluck
(1714-1787) born twenty years earlier, composer and conductor Franz Ignaz Beck
(1734-1809) lived until
1801 in these twin houses, built by the architect Lhôte. He was born in
1734 in Mannheim, where his
father, a musician of the
Electoral Palatinate, instilled
in him the rudiments of music, notably
the bass. The title page of
the Symphonies Op. 1 published in
1758 indicates that Franz
Beck was also the
“disciple” – as he liked to
be called – of Johann
Stamitz, the founder of the Mannheim school.
We can
be sure about very little of Franz Beck’s life before Bordeaux. If we are to believe his student
and first biographer Henry Blanchard, writing for the Revue et gazette musicale de Paris, his adventurous youth echoed that
of Barry Lyndon’s Memoirs
and Casanova. In about 1750, Beck is thought to have hurriedly left the Palatinate (he was 16) to travel
to Italy. Having become the favourite of the Elector, he had
been the subject of jealousy
and malice. He was the victim
of a conspiracy designed to
make him leave Mannheim, and which took the form of a duel. From the first blow delivered by Beck, his partner used
theatrical blood to feign his death.
Convinced he had killed his
opponent, a practice strictly
prohibited by the Prince, Beck hastened
to leave the Palatinate and
take refuge in Italy, where he probably
studied with Baldassare Galuppi. In Venice,
Franz Beck was hired as a private music teacher for a secretary to the doge. He took
off with his daughter to flee with her to France, through Italy to Naples where they boarded
a ship to Marseilles.
For several years,
Beck worked as a conductor
in Marseille. At least this is
what it says
in the frontispiece of his
Symphonies Op. 3 published in Paris in 1762. It is believed that he
stayed in Paris and Brussels. We
know that he ended his journey
as a wandering musician in
Bordeaux, but we do not know the exact date at which he arrived.
In 1762, when he published his
symphonies, it was under the title of First Violin of the Concert of Marseille. In
1798, an administrative report indicated that he had
been faithful to the city for “thirty-two
years.” Which meant he must have arrived between 1762 and 1765.
Shortly after
his arrival, he was appointed
music master at the opera. In
1774, he became an organist at the church of
Saint-Seurin, where his ability to improvise fugues stunned
the inhabitants of Bordeaux. He assumed
a sufficiently prominent
place to become, in 1780,
the first conductor of the newly
built Grand Théâtre, which he inaugurated with incidental music and choruses of his own composition for Racine’s
Athalie.
Twenty-eight of his symphonies were published in Paris between 1758
and 1766. We do not know either
where or when most of them (Op. 1 to 4) were composed, but they kept being
rediscovered. Today they are still performed, with an almost brutal energy in Germany,
or sentimentally in New Zealand.
In Bordeaux, he played his symphonies rarely, preferring to take a backseat, especially in the
latter part of his career,
to humbly reveal to the inhabitants of Bordeaux the full wealth
of those of his exact contemporary, Joseph Haydn.
But it was
in Bordeaux that he wrote his two
masterpieces. First, his
Stabat Mater with its large
chorus and symphony, created
in 1782 in Bordeaux then played successfully in 1783 in Paris, at the spiritual concert and at the court
of Versailles. The work was
not a success at the Opéra de Paris. There, he experienced the saddest moment of his life, and
for two reasons. First, the
first horn of the Opéra gave a
disastrous performance, which
affected the interpretation
and aroused the public anger
of Franz Beck. Second, it was
at this concert that he saw his
duellist opponent reappear, the same man who had feigned
death in Mannheim and whose
spectre, now very much alive, chose this moment to reveal the conspiracy that had decided
his fate. Yet Beck was convinced. In Bordeaux, he had composed
a masterpiece. And in 1806,
three years before his death,
already retired, he sent another autographed copy of his Stabat
Mater to Napoleon.
In 1784, for the first
performance in Bordeaux of Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice, he composed his own
Death of Orpheus overture, which became very successful
among spectators in Beck’s lifetime. At their request, his prelude accompanied
Gluck’s work until at least the year 1797.
With the Revolution, having first become François Beck, then merely a citizen Beck, he changed his
style and became the ineluctable
composer for all the events held
in Bordeaux in 1789, for the Thermidor and the Consulate. Probably lacking conviction, but not without
interest, Beck, originally
a foreigner, arrested in
the early winter of 1793 before being acquitted
on 5 January 1794, composed
for over ten years for the
Temple of Reason and for all the events
of the Champ-de-Mars, from Anthems and the Te Deum of
the National Guard through
to the celebrations of calm
and gratitude. The music and its composer, who wished to demonstrate
a flawless patriotic zeal, put music to all the most tragic events and the most unexpected reversals of fortune. In 1790, he composed a hymn
to celebrate the sovereignty
of peoples. In 1796, a hymn in honour of the victorious Bonaparte. And in January
1799, a cantata for the anniversary
of the death of Louis XVI. Then,
after being pushed aside from
the rostrum of the Grand Théâtre, he
stopped all public activity.
In 1801, sick and ruined, he retired
to live with his son in Rue
des Religieuses (Rue Thiac) and stopped
composing.
When he
died on 31 December 1809,
at the age of 75, his wife, the pious daughter of the secretary to the
doge, destroyed the countless
occasional musical scores thanks
to which citizen Beck had ensured her
survival. Nothing remains, except a Hymn to Reason.
A final solemn tribute was paid to him
in his church at
Saint-Seurin. There was a fermata
for the deceased organist,
but the musicians of the Société philomathique and those of the Grand Théâtre grouped
together to interpret not only Gluck’s De Profundis, but also one of his Bordeaux masterpieces as a final tribute to the artist.
The inhabitants of Bordeaux gathered
in the basilica and, chilled
to the bone in the cold January
weather, listened one last
time not to the final bars of the Stabat Mater largo, Quando
corpus morietur, but to the Death
of Orpheus overture, through which the deceased musician had wanted to hold
his own against
the illustrious Gluck. The chronicler
Bernadau writes: “Never before had this
overture been performed, even when conducted
by the author, with as much precision and as much passion as on that day.” The date was 23 January 1810.
Since then,
time has passed. In both
Mannheim and Bordeaux, Beck was forgotten.
Moreover, Franz Beck was punished for wanting to replace
the music of the famous Gluck with
his own overture
at the insistence of the Bordeaux spectators.
Gluck’s mannas were to take their
revenge two hundred years later.
In 1980, to celebrate the two hundredth anniversary
of the inauguration of the Grand Théâtre, Racine’s
Athalie was performed again. But without … …
… …
… …
© Bertrand Favreau
and Tyché Editions 2014
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