The Private Canon: Classical Gassmann

This post is part of a series; more about it here.

Among the many phases the development of my musical taste has gone through, the most embarrassing to recall yet possibly most significant in the long run was my period of classical music snobbery, which lasted through much of my 7th and 8th grade years. Though I was taking piano lessons from a teacher who only taught the Western classics—she figured her students could pick up ragtime and jazz on our own—I was no child prodigy, and mine was in no way an earned snobbery. It was almost entirely an affectation, a fashion I put on, much like the Sperry Top-Siders and Izods I adopted a few months before most of my classmates did (because I literally, no joke, read The Official Preppy Handbook as a guide, not satire). Weirdly, this classical idyll even postdated my obligatory introduction to the Fab Four, which happened in 6th grade at the home of my best friend, David Rigberg, and well after an earlier infatuation with the ouevre of Kiss and assorted disco singles, which I quickly repudiated (though I never quit the Beatles, thank Ringo). It also corresponded with a budding cinema buffery, fed by the Scottsdale Center for the Arts' revival screenings of Hitchcock, Welles, and Chaplin, and with a deep Anglophilia, supplied by KAET, Phoenix's PBS affiliate, which gave me a lifelong love of Austen, Python, and Doctor Who, as well as led me not only to rise in the wee hours with my mum to goggle at the televised Charles-and-Di royal wedding but to purchase a Princess Diana poster for my bedroom wall.

Likewise I blame/thank Phoenix, Arizona's classic music station, KHEP, for the classical music indoctrination. My clock radio was the conduit, and a portable tape player my amanuensis. For precious long afternoons and evenings I blocked out the pop and rock my friends loved and immersed myself in Bach, Brahms, Schubert, Holst, Mussorgsky; occasionally I sought out scores at the library and asked for recommendations from my piano teacher, but mostly this was a listening journey.

Still, it's clear that this affectation ended up affecting me deeply. In a shoebox somewhere I still have some of the cassettes I meticulously curated direct from my radio speaker in those years, and I recall fondly the impossible-to-forget name of one deejay, Torey Malatia (whose name I would hear with pleasant surprise again many years later, as he went on to help create such radio essentials as This American Life and Sound Opinions). I remember that one tape began with Stravinsky's Fireworks. I also remember that one contained parts of a suite from something called L'amore artigiano, which I briefly loved in that intense, play-it-over-and-over-again way one sometimes lets a piece of music imprint on you. I lost that tape somewhere along the line, though, and with it the memory of the piece itself. And though I've Googled the title many times in the years since, trying to track it down, I only recently finally found it.

The revisit was definitely worth it. It turns out it's an overture from an opera by Florian Leopold Gassmann, a Czech precursor of Mozart who straddled what we now think of as the baroque and classical eras, and who wrote a series of operas in a genre called dramma giocoso, literally "drama with jokes" (my favorite kind). L'amore artigiano, which disconcertingly translates as "love in the workplace," has a libretto by none other than Carlo Goldoni. I can't find any recordings of the opera itself, but there are a few choice recordings and videos of the overture. It is short and sweet, around 7 or 8 minutes, and much of it is in a very standard classical groove, the sort of mostly-major-key chamber-orchestra musical wallpaper that has powered many a car commercial. (Sorry not sorry.)


It's the middle movement, the "Allegretto" (starts at 4:26 in the video above), that I spent many a dreamy tween afternoon soaking in, and whose delicacy and hesitation I still find freshly moving. Gassmann is hardly the only composer to milk single repeated notes for their qualities of heart-tugging insistence, but the way he develops the movement's simple signature phrase, just four quarter notes in a row, mostly on the same pitch, pulls us through this triple-meter tune like a leaf bobbing down a stream, or like yarn intently knitted through itself. Its quality of slightly yearning, happy-sad, half-smiling both fills me up and leaves room for my own feelings. Oddly enough it sounds to me like compassionate music somehow, as if it is describing something faintly absurd or quietly painful with such melting gentleness. That may be a lot to hear in a piece of music, but it's what I've got.

I would just point out one musical detail that epitomizes this sense of delicacy. The opening statement of the main theme ends with a tiny irresolution that's like a little curtsy, an invitation to more:

The chords may not be exact but they give an idea what I mean: The key is Eb, and this opening theme sounds like a self-contained little circle that's about to complete itself, resolving back to Eb in the fourth measure—but then it adds a little turn to a Bb chord. Is this setting up the next change? No, it's simply taken us, a bit early, to the chord underpinning the next phrase:

If I were to conjure a narrative analogy for how this sounds, it is as if one partner in a courtly dance has tripped slightly (the turn to Bb in measure 4), only to have their understanding partner hold stoically steady while the slightly clumsy one gets back into line (that long Bb).

I can't imagine that 12-year-old Rob was picturing anything like that as he sat pining in his bedroom 40 years ago. I know in fact that he was staring at the Diana poster and pressing rewind and play on his little tape player and imagining God knows what. But at this distance of decades, I warm with gratitude to that blinkered, besotted mini-me for granting me this small epiphany now.