ALTHOUGH YOU MIGHT NOT EXPECT IT, the 2005 Boston Early Music Festival was full of first performances. The centerpiece of the festival was the world premiere of an almost 300-year-old opera: Johann Mattheson’s Boris Goudenow, which proved to be a musical gem. The Festival Orchestra concert was to provide two more first performances, thanks in part to an ill-disposed soloist. A planned work for the concert was a terrific keyboard concerto by the long-neglected German composer Johann Wilhelm Hertel (1727-1789), performed by South African keyboard whiz Kristian Bezuidenhout.

At an early rehearsal, principal cellist Phoebe Carrai mentioned that coincidentally, she had recently given the Canadian premiere of a Hertel cello concerto. Her friend Markus Möellenbeck had unearthed and edited the concerto, publishing it in 2005. Imagine Carrai’s surprise when, a week later, the BEMF directors asked her if she could give the concerto’s US premiere two days later.

The result was a winning performance of a truly delightful piece. The audience gave it a warm reception, and Boston Globe reviewer Richard Dyer proclaimed: “With eloquence and finesse, cellist Phoebe Carrai played a terrific concerto by Johann Wilhelm Hertel that deserves a place in the repertory alongside the concertos of Haydn.”

Strong praise, indeed!

If Hertel’s music is so terrific, why has history forgotten him? Probably because he lived and worked in small towns in Northern Germany, where his compositions circulated in manuscript form only. When his works were published, it was almost always for local consumption. Simply put, he didn’t travel far and neither did his music.

FAMILY TIES
Hertel harkened from a musical family; both his grandfather and father made their living as performers and composers. Although his father Johann Christian traveled, for he was an accomplished viola da gamba player, he concertized mostly in his native Germany and occasionally in Holland. Johann Wilhelm was born in the German town of Eisenach, where his father performed in the court orchestra of the local duke. Early on, Johann Wilhelm studied violin with his father, and harpsichord with J.H. Heil, a student of Bach.

Talented and adept, by 12 he played the harpsichord for his father on concert tours. As he followed his father from one court position to another, the youngest Hertel gained musical experience as well. By the age of 17 he had joined his father in the court orchestra of Strelitz, which is a city north of Berlin. When that orchestra was dissolved in 1753, Johann Wilhelm relocated to the town of Schwerin, slightly north and east of Strelitz, where he would spend much of the rest of his life in the employ of a princess and a count.

Over his lifetime, Hertel composed an impressive quantity of music, and was particularly lauded for his vocal works, including lieder, oratorios, cantatas, passions and masses. He also wrote over 40 symphonies (one with eight obbligato timpani!), and numerous chamber and keyboard sonatas as well as many concertos for diverse instruments. Hertel penned a treatise on thorough-bass as well as two autobiographies, which include a list of his works. Sadly, much of his musical output has been lost over time. Of the six cello concerti that Hertel composed, only two survive: the autographs of both are located at the library of the Royal Conservatory in Brussels.

The Hertel autographs were part of the extraordinary collection of Johann Jakob Westphal (1774-1835) who amassed many manuscripts by J.S. Bach, including one of the four extant manuscripts of the cello suites, and C.P.E. Bach and his contemporaries.

We are fortunate that Markus Möellenbeck has made Hertel’s A minor Cello Concerto available in a modern edition, and can only hope that he will do the same for the A major Cello Concerto that is also housed at the Royal Conservatory.

While Hertel may not have been well known outside of northern Germany, he certainly was a sophisticated and erudite composer. He did travel to Berlin, and came in contact with several well-known musicians there, including violinist Franz Benda (with whom he studied), C.H. Graun, and Carl Phillip Emanuel Bach. An influence on both C.P.E. Bach and Hertel was the then-popular “Empfindsamkeit” (“sensibility” or “sentimental style”), a North-German aesthetic found in both music and literature that focused on subjective expression. The music tended to be not too ornate and rhetorical: instrumental compositions imitated the speaking style of vocal recitatives. It also really tried to evoke emotions, sometimes changing moods quite quickly and surprisingly.