— Teatro Nuovo

Pseudo-Baroque

H. Lane Wilson’s arrangements, first paperback edition

This week’s record is in a genre long out of favor that might be called Pseudo-Baroque for School and Parlor. It flourished in the later 19th century, when quite a few composers felt the urge to write gavottes, minuets, and little da capo arias - more or less in 18th-century styles, but always with telltale traces of the present day intermixed. This went hand-in-hand with adaptations of actual Baroque music by people like the still-remembered Alessandro Parisotti (his arrangements make up the venerable Schirmer album “Twenty-Four Italian Songs and Arias”).

Some of this music, produced by forgotten miniaturists like Jean-Baptiste Weckerlin, Stefano Donaudy, and Jean Gabriel-Marie, is beautiful and worth reviving. I usually like it least when the tone sought is Dainty Pastoral, and as soon as a coy British shepherdess sings “fa la la” my instinctive thought is of Pepto-Bismol. Usually. But I can more than bear this example (composed, the sheet music tells us, by Thomas Brown), because the singing and playing are just so good.

Ria Ginster was born in 1898 in Frankfurt am Main, had a long and first-rate international concert career, and almost never appeared in opera. She clearly could have - among her records is a first-rate “Martern aller Arten,” and she did a radio performance of Suor Angelica that I hope will be found one day. But perhaps she felt she would have had a long wait in provincial houses before she could compete with the big names of the day, whereas her success in song recitals and orchestral concerts was so immediate that by the time she was forty she had appeared repeatedly with Furtwängler, Barbirolli, Klemperer, Weingartner, Walter, Jochum, Beecham, Koussevitsky, Sargent, Krauss, Heger, Mengelberg, and a beginner named Karajan.

Ria Ginster - HMV Records publicity photo, 1934

It’s easy to see why they liked her: she had all the disciplined musicianship of a thoroughly modern singer, but still commanded the skill set of an older generation - the effortless trills, the gorgeously shaped slow coloratura, the perfect legato and poise of tone. I could wish she had recorded a dozen Handel arias instead of Thomas Brown, but I’m not complaining; she gives a model here whose adoption could improve our Handel revivals exponentially.

Meanwhile, did Thomas Brown exist? Sometimes, in the world of pseudo-Baroque, the lines between arrangement and authorship are blurred. The star violinist Fritz Kreisler maintained for years a pretense that he was editing old manuscripts when he was in fact composing for his own pleasure and amusement. Many people now think Parisotti wrote “Se tu m’ami” and put Pergolesi’s name on it. The current specimen is billed as an arrangement by H. Lane Wilson (1871-1915). I can find no trace of composer or song prior to its appearance in 1898, and suspect Wilson might have invented both, but I hope someone will correct me if that is wrong.

Wilson, meanwhile is an interesting figure. His arrangements and original songs alike were in demand, and he popularized them by singing them himself. He made a long batch of records starting in the noisy and primitive studios of 1903. If he did make up the “Thomas Brown” song, we can hear that he came by both his coloratura and his “tra la las” honestly.

Teatro Nuovo puts great emphasis on learning from the singers who had never heard, or heard of, microphone singing - primitive recordings from more than a century ago, forming a link to the traditions of opera’s heyday and the infinite potential of the natural, unassisted human voice. Check this space regularly for samples, and click here for some pointers on how to listen.