Christian Gottlob Neefe’s Career
The organist of the Court Chapel was Christian Gottlob Neefe, son of a poor tailor of Chemnitz in Saxony, where he was born February 5, 1748. He is one of the many instances in musical history in which the career of the man is determined by the beauty of his voice in childhood. At a very early age he became a chorister in the principal church, which position gave him the best school and musical instruction that the small city afforded—advantages so wisely improved as to enable him in early youth to gain a living by teaching. At the age of 21, with 20 thalers in his pocket and a stipend of 30 thalers per annum from the magistrates of Chemnitz, he removed to Leipsic to attend the lectures of the university, and at that institution in the course of time he passed his examination in jurisprudence. Upon this occasion he argued the negative of the question: “Has a father the right to disinherit a son for devoting himself to the theatre?” In Chemnitz Neefe’s teachers in music had been men of small talents and very limited acquirements, and even in Leipsic he owed more to his persevering study of the theoretical works of Marpurg and C. P. E. Bach than to any regular instructor. But there he had the very great advantage of forming an intimate acquaintance with, and becoming an object of special interest to, Johann Adam Hiller, the celebrated director of the Gewandhaus Concerts, the then popular and famous composer, the introducer of Handel’s “Messiah” to the German public, the industrious writer upon music, and finally a successor of Johann Sebastian Bach as Cantor of the Thomas School. Hiller gave him every encouragement in his power in his musical career; opened the columns of his musical “Wöchentliche Nachrichten” to his compositions and writings; called him to his assistance in operatic composition; gave him the results of his long experience in friendly advice; criticized his compositions, and at length, in 1777, gave him his own position as music director of Seyler’s theatrical company, then playing at the Linkische Bad in Dresden. Upon the departure of that troupe for Frankfort-on-the-Main, Neefe was persuaded to remain with it in the same capacity. He thus became acquainted with Fräulein Zinck, previously court singer at Gotha but now engaged for Seyler’s opera. The acquaintance ripened into a mutual affection and ended in marriage not long afterward. It is no slight testimony to the high reputation which he enjoyed that at the moment of Seyler’s flight from Frankfort (1779) Bondini, whose success had driven that rival from Dresden, was in correspondence with Neefe and making him proposals to resign his position under Seyler for a similar but better one in his service. Pending the result of these negotiations Neefe, taking his wife with him, temporarily joined Grossmann and Helmuth at Bonn in the same capacity. Those managers, who knew the value of his services from their previous experience as members of the Seyler troupe, paid a very strong, though involuntary, tribute to his talents and personal character by adopting such unfair measures as to compel the musician to remain in Bonn until Bondini was forced to fill his vacancy by another candidate. Having once got him, Grossmann was determined to keep him—and succeeded.
As long as the Grossmann company remained undivided Neefe accompanied it in its annual visits to Münster and other places;—thus the sketch of his life printed sixteen years later in the first volume of the “Allgemeine Musikzeitung” of Leipsic bears date “Frankfort-on-the-Main, September 30, 1782”; but from that period save, perhaps, for a short time in 1783, he seems not to have left Bonn at all.
There were others besides Grossmann and Helmuth who thought Neefe too valuable an acquisition to the musical circles of Bonn not to be secured. Less than a year and a half after his arrival there the minister Belderbusch and the countess Hatzfeld, niece of the Elector, secured to him, though a Protestant, an appointment to the place of court organist. The salary of 400 florins, together with the 700 florins from Grossmann, made his income equal to that of the court chapelmaster. It is difficult now to conceive of the forgotten name of C. G. Neefe as having once stood high in the list of the first North German composers; yet such was the case. Of Neefe’s published compositions, besides the short vocal and clavier pieces in Hiller’s periodical, there had already appeared operettas in vocal score, “Die Apotheke” (1772), “Amor’s Guckkasten” (1772), “Die Einsprüche” (1773) and “Heinrich und Lyda” (1777); also airs composed for Hiller’s “Dorf-Barbier” and one from his own republished opera “Zemire und Azor”; twelve odes of Klopstock—sharply criticized by Forkel in his “Musikalisch-Kritische Bibliothek,” much to the benefit of the second edition of them; and a pretty long series of songs. Of instrumental music he had printed twenty-four sonatas for pianoforte solo or with violin; and from Breitkopf and Härtel’s catalogues, 1772 and 1774, may be added the following works included neither in his own list nor that of Gerber: a partita for string quartet, 2 horns, 2 oboes, 2 flutes and 2 bassoons; another for the same instruments minus the flutes and bassoons; a third for the string quartet and 2 oboes only, and two symphonies for string quartet, 2 horns, 2 oboes and 2 flutes. The “Sophonisbe” music was also finished and twenty years later, after Mozart had given a new standard of criticism, it was warmly eulogized in the “Allgemeine Musikzeitung” of Leipsic. At the date of his letter to Cramer (March 2, 1783) he had added to his published works “Sechs Sonaten am Clavier zu singen,” “Vademecum für Liebhaber des Gesangs und Clavier,” the clavier score of “Sophonisbe,” and a concerto for clavier and orchestra. His manuscripts, he adds (Cramer’s “Magazine,” I; p. 382), consist of (a) the scores of the operettas which had appeared in pianoforte arrangements; (b) the score of his opera “Zemire und Azor”; (c) the score of his opera “Adelheit von Veltheim”; (d) the score of a bardic song for the tragedy “The Romans in Germany”; (e) the scores of theatrical between-acts music; (f) the score of a Latin “Pater noster”; (g) various other smaller works. He had in hand the composition of the operetta “Der neue Gutsherr,” the pianoforte score of which, as also that of “Adelheit von Veltheim,” was about to be published by Dyck in Leipsic. A year before at a concert for amateurs at the house of Mr. von Mastiaux he had produced an ode by Klopstock, “Dem Unendlichen,” for four chorus voices and a large orchestra, which was afterwards performed in Holy Week in the Fräuleinstiftskirche. In short, Neefe brought to Bonn a high-sounding reputation, talent, skill and culture both musical and literary, which made him invaluable to the managers when new French and Italian operas were to be prepared for the German stage; great facility in throwing off a new air, song, entr’acte or what not to meet the exigencies of the moment; very great industry, a cacoethes scribendi of the very highest value to the student of Bonn’s musical history in his time and a new element into the musical life there. This element may have seemed somewhat formal and pedantic, but it was solid, for it was drawn from the school of Handel and Bach.
Music in Private Houses of Bonn
Let us return to Neefe’s letter to Cramer again for some notices of music outside the electoral palace:
Belderbusch, the minister, retained a quintet of wind-instruments, 2 clarinets, 2 horns and a bassoon.
The Countess von Belderbusch, wife of a nephew of the minister, whose name will come up again, “plays skilfully upon the clavier.”
The Countess von Hatzfeld, niece of the Elector, was “trained in singing and clavier playing by the best masters of Vienna to whom, indeed, she does very much honor. She declaims recitatives admirably and it is a pleasure to listen to her sing arias di parlante. She plays the fortepiano brilliantly and in playing yields herself up completely to her emotions, wherefore one never hears any restlessness or uneveness of time in her tempo rubato. She is enthusiastically devoted to music and musicians.”[4]
Chancellor and Captain von Schall “plays clavier and violin. Though not adept on either instrument he has very correct musical feeling. He knows how to appreciate the true beauties of a composition, and how to judge them, and has large historical and literary knowledge of music.”