When Emperor Leopold II was crowned King of Bohemia in Prague in 1791, two pieces of music were commissioned for the occasion. One was an opera from Mozart. The other was a choral work from the Czech composer Leopold Koželuch. Even though Leopoldʼs wife Maria Luisa reportedly dismissed La clemenza di Tito as “a German mess”, it has been staged innumerable times since. As far as anyone knows, Koželuchʼs Coronation Cantata was not performed again until January 2017, in a church not far from the Estates Theatre where it premiered.
“It really is an exceptional piece,” says conductor Marek Štilec, who led the Prague Symphony Orchestra and Martinů Voices chamber choir in last yearʼs performance. Štilec is the artistic director of Czech Masters in Vienna, a project devoted to resurrecting the music of Koželuch and a handful of other Czech composers who were working in Vienna in the second half of the 18th and early part of the 19th century. “Itʼs a shame that their music has been forgotten,” Štilec says.
“When you look at the scores, the level is pretty high. In fact, some of Koželuchʼs symphonies were for a long time attributed to Haydn. This is definitely music that should be heard and recorded.” Štilec came upon it by accident. He grew up in classical music, picking up the violin at the age of four under the tutelage of his father, a musicologist, and his mother, a composer. By the age of 17 he had founded his own ensemble, the Chamber Orchestra Quattro, and switched to conducting, a passion that grew after he had a chance to study with luminaries like Jorma Panula and Michael Tilson Thomas. He now works mainly as a guest conductor, in particular with the Czech Chamber Philharmonic Pardubice, Sinfonietta Cracovia and Wiener Concert-Verein.
In the course of researching 18th and 19th-century repertoire from Central Europe, Štilec made a compelling discovery. “I began to come across names of Czech musicians and composers active in Vienna at that time,” he says. “As I dug deeper, I found more and more of them in important positions.” Indeed, Koželuch was both Kammer Kapellmeister and Hofmusik Compositor in the court of Emperor Franz II, succeeding Mozart in those positions after his death, reportedly at double Mozartʼs salary. Earlier, he turned down an invitation to succeed Mozart as court organist in Salzburg, fearing the same abuse that drove Mozart to resign. In Vienna, Koželuch taught well-connected aristocrats, became involved in court intrigues with the likes of Antonio Salieri, and wrote music that prompted Ernst Ludwig Gerber, a German composer who compiled a dictionary of prominent musicians, to say of him, “Leopold Koželuch is without question the generally most loved among our living composers, and this with justification.”
When Koželuch died in 1818, Czech violinist, organist and composer František Krommer-Kramář (aka Franz Krommer) succeeded him. Earlier, Bohemian composer Florian Leopold Gassmann served as chamber composer and court conductor for Emperor Joseph II, and founded the Tonkünstler-Societät, the first group in Vienna to give concerts for the general public. Pavel Vranický (aka Paul Wranitzky), a violinist and prolific composer who ran two theatre orchestras in Vienna, was a favourite of Empress Maria Theresia and friends with Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven. Haydn asked him to conduct the Vienna première of his oratorio The Creation, and Beethoven had him conduct the premiere of his First Symphony.
This list could easily include another half-dozen names. Why were they in Vienna? On a macro level, they were part of a larger diaspora that saw Bohemian musicians of the Baroque and Classical eras working in major music centres throughout Europe – places like Venice, Paris and Dresden, where Jan Dismas Zelenka wrote such inventive music during the 1720s and 30s that J.S. Bach became an admirer and friend. To Czechs this emigration seemed perfectly natural, as Bohemia was considered the conservatory of Europe (at least by the Czechs), a training ground for talent too good to remain local.
To the extent that there were only a limited number of court and church positions in Bohemia to support a surfeit of well-trained musicians and composers, this was certainly true. In the case of Vienna itʼs also worth noting that it was part of the same political entity, the Habsburg Empire, and thus not considered going abroad. As the capital, Vienna had an allure that Štilec states succinctly: “The money was there, and the power was there. It was the perfect place to make a good career.”