Dear Friends,

CHAOS surrounded music study in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Chaos on the streets of Paris battered at the windows of the new conservatory, formed to add musical fanfare to public celebrations of a young Republic. Student flautists had to play etudes and sonatas amidst the cacophony of Mme Defarge’s town meetings, the shouting of revolutionary slogans and blood-chilling cries for revenge or justice. South of Paris and a century earlier in the conservatories of Naples, castrati sang the lyrical melodies penned for them by the city’s composers, all sharing the very same room with musicians practicing horn, oboe, trumpet and harpsichord - creating an eruption of sound.

In Germany, the Bach home offered the greatest schoolroom of all. But here, infants had to be tended to, scores had to be copied for Sunday’s cantata, Latin had to be taught alongside the teenage student-composers who clamored to hear Johann Sebastian play all the preludes and fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier. Two centuries ago, these three centers of music learning exploded with unmeasured sound and energy.

Four Nations invites you to spend this spring semester exploring the music that emanated from these three creativity mills.

Our first performance in January audits the Paris Conservatory’s first instrumental classes, taught by violinist Kreutzer and cellist Duport, both admired and immortalized by Beethoven. In fact, nineteenth century Romanticism seems to have found its Academy in the Conservatoire.

In February we go south to noisy Naples, a city inhabited by brigands, shaded by Vesuvius, speckled with palaces, opera houses and orphanage-conservatories of music. The city was home to Alessandro Scarlatti and his followers. They taught all of Europe how to write melody, how to make a voice bloom, how to move the heart with graceful simplicity.

Finally, in March we visit Leipzig, where Johann Sebastian imparted an “old testament” of compositional techniques to students who emerged as the proponents of new styles, styles that rejected Old Bach’s strictures and values. Your enrolment form is enclosed with this letter. Krista, Charlie, Loretta and our guests Jennifer Lane and Christine Brandes promise musical treasures, unexpected delights but no surprise quiz! See you in class! 

Click here for information about the entire series.

Best regards,

Andrew Appel