Mozart Opera Lovers Alert: Try Out J.C. Bach

In 1764, the child prodigy Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart arrived in London and found the reigning composer of Italian opera, Johann Christian Bach, to be a great and good friend to him and his sister Nannerl.  J.C. Bach, the youngest son of Johann Sebastian Bach, was born in 1735.  He studied with his father, then after his father died while J.C. was still a teenager, with his half-brother, Carl Phillip Emanuel Bach.  Further study in Italy (with the celebrated Padre Martini, among others) imbued him with the spirit of Italian baroque opera.  When he arrived in London in 1762, he was already the composer of several successful operas produced in Italy, and he played a major role in reviving interest in Italian opera in London.

One has only to listen to the new Virgin Classics release, "La dolce fiamma: Forgotten castrato arias by Johann Christian Bach," to understand why the young Mozart was so entranced by the still relatively young J.C. Bach's music.  Mozart retained his love for J.C. Bach and his music for many years.  The booklet note for the recording quotes from a letter Mozart wrote his father 14 years after his encounter with Bach: "I love him, as you know, with all my heart and I have a great regard for him."

Mozart did not pull his punches.  When he thought little of a fellow composer, he said so in blunt terms.  but he had nothing for J.C. Bach but praise.

As I began to listen to this new recording, in which countertenor Philipppe Jaroussky collaborates with Jeremie Rhorer and Le Cercle de l'Harmonie, I was immediately struck by how much this music reminds me of Mozart.  J.C. Bach was writing operas before Mozart, and continued to write operas for almost two decades after meeting Mozart.  I speculate that there was influence running in both directions. Mozart was so impressed by J.C. Bach's music that he re-arranged several of Bach's keyboard sonatas into piano concerti, and the style of the two men's music is so similar that early Mozart cataloguers were misled into including these arrangements in the Mozart catalogue as if they were by the younger composer.  Many of the arias in this collection sound like they were extracted from a previously-undiscovered Mozart opera.  Perhaps Bach was influenced by Mozart as Mozart was influenced by Bach.  The resemblances of their music are uncanny!

The big difference from Mozart, of course, is that these arias were all written for castrati, the high-voiced Italian male singers whose testicles were sacrificed to the knife during their youth so that their voices would not change with adolescence, resulting in pure high voices with the power of adult bodies.  Castrati were all the rage in 18th century London.  Many of the best arias by Handel were written for castrati, and J.C. Bach followed suit when reviving Italian opera in London in the 1760s, after Handel's passage from the scene.  Perhaps this helps to explain why Bach's operas fell out of the active repertory; the vogue for castrati had ended by the end of the 18th century.  Also, these were opera seria, a form that was supplanted by the works of Mozart and his operative successors.  Despite Bach's eminence in England, his works did not survive in the repertory, being supplanted by those of Mozart and his successors.

Now Jaroussky has revived them and we can all hear that there is another 18th century composer whose operas are worth exploring.  Anybody who regrets that Mozart did not live long enough to write more operas might take solace from knowing that there is a large body of unknown operas by J.C. Bach to discover.... starting with this fabulous recording.  Jaroussky is in terrific voice here, and his accompanying group enters into the spirit of the project with vigor and finesse.  Now it's time for some enterprising opera company to stage a J.C. Bach opera in New York.  Who will be first?