Whilst sitting back having a root canal – my Dentist, Â who turned me on to Hummel (see Hummel under composers) – was playing one of those ‘compilations’. Something like “For meditation and relaxation.”
A piece came up and we both perked up our ears. “This is different … nice – wonder who this is.?”
A break in the spit vacuum and drilling comes and he reports, “It’s Spohr”
Neither of us had heard of him.
I had guessed Mendelssohn or Schumann and my dentist thought it was much later than that. Well I was closer to right! Louis (born Ludwig) Spohr was there when Beethoven was a baby and Mozart was a teenager! Mendelssohn and Schumann were not quite twinkles in the eye yet. But it wasn’t “Later” stuff. Earlier actually.
Here are some snippets from his biography:
Spohr was a noted violinist, and invented the violin chinrest, about 1820. He was also a significant conductor, being one of the first to use a baton and also inventing rehearsal letters, which are placed periodically throughout a piece of sheet music so that a conductor may save time by asking the orchestra or singers to start playing “from letter C”, for example). Spohr’s best works are his wistful, elegiac minor-mode first movements, hailed by many of his contemporaries as quintessentially Romantic and inherited by Mendelssohn; his deft scherzos whose influence was felt as late as Brahms; his expressive slow movements with their chromatic alterations which, on occasion, become cloyingly sentimental; and his light-hearted finales which are able to avoid the trap of trivial thematic material.[3]
The ‘wistful, elegiac, and cloyingly sentimental’ bits get me … because sometimes cloyingly sentimental, elegiac and wistful …Â can come across as just plain moving! Like in this piece.
Here’s the piece that perked up our ears.
Spohr violin concerto no. 7 / Adagio
violin-concerto-no-7-adagio