London is about to recognise the significance of one of its greatest composers. But rather than being a British genius, he is a long dead German whose surname is already very famous. The work of Johann Christian Bach, once lauded as “the London Bach”, has been largely overlooked by the city he made his home from 1762.
This is despite the string of popular operas he created and his early influence on an eight-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whom he met and performed with in London.
His illustrious lineage – he was the youngest son of Johann Sebastian Bach – was initially Johann Christian’s passport to the musical hotspots of Europe, but it has since come to overshadow his own work. Never mind that he once taught music to the children of King George III and went on to run some of the first public concerts in Britain, at Carlisle House in Soho Square and then at Hanover Square – today his works are rarely staged.
That may now change with the publication this summer of the score of his operatic work, Lucio Silla – acclaimed at the time but later forgotten – as part of the first modern comprehensive edition of Johann Christian Bach’s music.
The opera manuscript is to be made available to musicians in the hope that Britain might properly recognise his legacy.
Musicologist Paul Corneilson of the Packard Humanities Institute in California said he is optimistic about restoring the reputation of the London Bach. “The work we are doing really will reclaim his name, I think, and hopefully let people hear one of the best of his operas,” he said this weekend.
“He was the only one of JS Bach’s sons to write operas, and Mozart definitely respected his talent. In fact, his works sound a lot like Mozart’s early Italian operas.”
Johann Christian’s path to becoming master of Queen Charlotte’s music in London followed a period of apprenticeship in Europe, where he learned first from his father and then from his older half-brother, Carl Philipp Emanuel, in Berlin.
Born to JS Bach’s second wife, the singer Anna Magdalena, in Leipzig in 1735, he later became the first Bach family member to travel to Italy. He studied with some of that country’s most eminent teachers and music historians in Bologna, Milan, Turin and Naples before moving to London in 1762 to become musical director of the King’s Theatre.
Here, he developed the career of soprano Anna de Amicis, and had such a successful first season that he gained the top job of music master to the German-born queen. Most of his operas and other music, including an oratorio, were then written for his adopted city.
The young Mozart came to London with his parents and older sister in April 1764 as part of a grand tour of European capitals. The Mozart children, known for their musical prowess, were presented to the king and queen at the then Buckingham House, where the young Mozart played the harpsichord for the monarch. Johann Christian, who was known as John Bach in England, is then reported to have settled the child on his lap at the instrument and begun to play, before stopping suddenly so that Mozart could continue. The English composer William Jackson wrote of their duet: “Each led the other into very abstruse harmonies and extraneous modulations in which the child beat the man.”
Later in the evening, as Bach looked over the score of an aria from his London opera Zanaida, Mozart – who was looking at it upside down while rolling on the floor – pointed out a wrong note in “an instance of extraordinary discernment and readiness in a mere infant”.
In 1772, at the age of 16, Mozart wrote an operatic treatment of Lucio Silla – based on the love life of a second-century BC Roman statesman and general. A few years later, Johann Christian turned to the same subject, using the same libretto by Giovanni de Gamerra.
In 2013, both operas were staged in succession as part of the annual Mozart Week festival in Salzburg, Austria. “In fact, a passage of Bach’s opera was inserted into Mozart’s, so similar are they in style, and I don’t think anyone in the audience noticed,” said Corneilson.
