Josef Mysliveček

All première recordings

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Josef Mysliveček was born on 9 March 1737 in Prague. He and his twin brother attended the Dominican Normalschule at the Church of St Giles and, probably, the Jesuit Gymnasium in the Clementinum. They also attended the Charles-Ferdinand University, but in March 1753 Josef withdrew owing to his lack of academic success. In May that year he and his brother entered the family millers’ business, becoming apprentices; in 1758 both became journeymen and in 1761 master millers. Soon after this Josef decided to devote himself to music. He studied organ and composition with František Václav Habermann and Josef František Norbert Seger and published his first set of symphonies about the year 1763.

On 5 November 1763 he left Prague for Venice, where he studied operatic composition with Giovanni Battista Pescetti. His first opera, Semiramide, was staged in Bergamo in 1766 and contemporary librettos confirm that even at this early stage in his career he was known as ‘Il Boemo’ (The Bohemian) because the Italians found his family name impossible to pronounce. By the time Mysliveček died, in abject poverty, in Rome on 4 February 1781, he had composed nearly thirty operas. He had spent the remainder of his life in Italy but had also travelled to Prague,Vienna and Munich. For several years he was on friendly terms with Leopold and Wolfgang Mozart (his name is to be found some forty times in the Mozarts’ correspondence from 1770 to 1778) but the relationship soured in 1778, when Mysliveček failed to fulfil a promise to secure for Wolfgang an operatic commission at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples for the Carnival in 1779.

Apart from operas and oratorios Mysliveček composed concertos, a large quantity of chamber music (solos, duos, trios, quartets,quintets and octets) and some forty-five symphonies. These include the ‘Six Overtures for Two Violins, Two Hoboys, Two French Horns, Two Tenors, with a Thorough Bass for the Harpsichord or Violoncello’, originally published in London in 1772 by William Napier, and edited for this recording by Daniel E. Freeman.

All six symphonies, or Overtures if you prefer Napier’s title, are in three movements,the opening movements well-developed sonata-allegros, the finales in very condensed (and virtually monothematic) sonata form, the central movements lyrical and in a related but contrasting key. None of the symphonies lasts more than about ten minutes, but they show the hand of a master-craftsman, and within their deliberately restricted compass a remarkably varied range of mood and character.

from notes by Daniel E. Freeman