Václav Pichl

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Václav (Wenzel) Pichl was born on 25 September 1741, of humble parentage, at Bechynˇe, some sixty-five miles due south of Prague. He began his musical studies with Jan Pokorn´y, the local choir-master and school-teacher; in 1753 he became a chorister at the Jesuit College in Breznice (between Tábor and Plzeˇn) and attended the Latin School there; and in 1758 he went to Prague, where he entered the St Wenceslaus Seminary as a violinist, while studying philosophy, theology and law at the University. In 1762 he was engaged as a violinist in the Church of Our Lady before T´yn in Prague, and studied with its famous organist Josef Seger.

In 1765 Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf, who had succeeded Michael Haydn as Kapellmeister to the Bishop of Grosswardein in southern Hungary, went to Prague in search of players for his orchestra and engaged Pichl as a violinist and as his assistant director. After the dissolution of the Bishop’s orchestra, in 1769, Pichl returned to Prague and was appointed Kapellmeister to Count Ludwig Hartig, but a year or so later was recommended by Dittersdorf for a position as violinist at the Kärntnerthor-theater in Vienna. In 1775 Empress Maria Theresa appointed Pichl (in preference to Mozart, it is sometimes said, though with no evidence) as Kapellmeister to her son Archduke Ferdinand, the Austrian Governor of Lombardy. He lived in or near Milan for some twenty years, travelling widely in Italy and meeting eminent musicians such as Padre Martini, Pietro Nardini and Luigi Cherubini, and in 1790 he was Director of opera buffa at Monza, north of Milan. He translated the libretto of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte into Czech. The French invasion of Lombardy in 1796 forced him to return to Vienna, where, apart from a brief visit to Prague in 1802, with his daughter, a singer, he spent the rest of his life. He died there on 23 January 1805, as the result of a stroke while playing a violin concerto in the Palais Lobkowitz.

Pichl’s own list of his works includes twenty operas, thirty masses, eighty-nine symphonies, thirty concertos, and a huge body of chamber music. A thematic catalogue was compiled in 1984 by Anita Zakin, in conjunction with The Symphony, which lists thirty-six surviving authentic symphonies composed between about 1764 and 1803 in chronological order, so far as this is possible. The five recorded here all date from 1769–70, and three of them come from a set of five published as Pichl’s Op. 1 in Leipzig by Breitkopf & Härtel in 1779.

from notes by Robin Golding