SOUNDPOST

Letters, emails, online comments

LETT ER of the MONTH

ONE GOOD TURN

The favourable review of Ensemble Diderot’s new recording (Reviews, March) mentions five of the six composers featured on the disc. The sixth, who is not mentioned at all, is Princess Anna Amalia of Prussia (1723–87, above). She was a very interesting figure and talented composer, daughter of King Frederick William I and Sophia Dorothea of Hanover, and sister of Frederick the Great. She studied with Johann Philipp Kirnberger, one of Bach’s most distinguished students, and appointed him her kapellmeister. Kirnberger included one of Anna Amalia’s works in his Kunst des reinen Satzes, a classic 18th-century book on composition technique. Ensemble Diderot’s album includes the world premiere recording of her Fugue in D major, but sadly she is omitted from the review. Anna Amalia also collected music in her Berlin library, preserving works by J.S. and C.P.E.

Bach, as well as Handel, Telemann and others, thereby making a significant contribution to western music. 

CATHERINE WILMERS

Baldock, UK

TURN, TURN, TURN

My experience of bow tension is somewhat different from that described in the recent article about maintenance and repair (‘Avoiding instrument carnage’, January). A good bow is ultimately a unit of wood and hair. Used under well-lit performance conditions, the bow gets warmer and becomes tighter. After half an hour, the bow may be three turns tighter than when one started to play. The performer may have to loosen it to maintain a good sound. In contrast, woodshedding practice in a cold room (or indeed, in a woodshed), one finds the bow becoming significantly looser. In this scenario, it will need to be tightened to keep the hair from beginning to touch the stick.

The article also mentions winding the strings on to the pegs to prevent the winding from coming up against the inner wall of the pegbox. If it does, further tightening of the string will act as a motor to push the peg outwards. Either it will not be possible to tighten the string, or it will become impacted in the wood.

CHARLES CALVERT

San Francisco, CA, US

A FAMILY AFFAIR

Space restrictions, and a need to stay focused on the violinist, prevented me from writing in detail about Anne Nanon, the African mother of Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges (‘The remarkable revolutionary’, February). I write here to clarify some issues raised by Lauren Blyth (Soundpost, March). New archival research by Pierre Bardin (cited in my original article), shows that Anne Nanon would have been 20 or 21 years of age when Joseph was born, rather than 16 as stated by Blyth. She was reunited with Joseph in Paris in 1755 after a two-year separation, and was left an annuity in 1763 by George Bologne, her former slave owner and lover, prior to his final return to Guadeloupe. She then lived independently as a free woman in Paris, but her investments appear to have suffered major financial loss due to the French Revolution.

We now know, thanks to Bardin’s research, that she died alone in a small apartment in Paris on 16 December 1795.

Her son was not known to her neighbours or landlord. Painfully, it appears that the Chevalier largely disassociated himself from her in later life and that she even legally changed her last name (to Dennevau) in order to protect her famous son from any association with her and scandal in the class-ridden and racist circumstances of that time. Learning of her decease, four months after her death, Saint-Georges filed via an intermediary to resolve her estate and pay her remaining debts.

KEVIN MACDONALD

Cambridgeshire, UK

PITCH IMPERFECT

It was interesting to read Francesca Dego’s experience of playing ‘Il Cannone’, particularly her view that ‘it feels a little longer than average’ when in fact the opposite is the case: the back length is only 353mm, making it closer to an Andrea Amati! It’s the violin’s unusually large stop length that causes this sensation: the player has to adjust their intonation from the fourth position onwards. My sympathies go out to Ms Dego having such a short time to adjust her playing to accommodate this strange left-hand feeling!

SUSAN SHERMAN

Orlando, FL, US

ONLINE  COMMENT

Gerald Elias’s tales of orchestral playing in the March issue, particularly his thoughts on the perils of page turning, provoked a little debate online bit.ly/2MHBLcg RON EIN I usually have an agreement with my stand partner during rehearsals about when to turn difficult pages. When Benaroya Hall, in Seattle, was opened, the Seattle Symphony players had to learn quiet page turns, because scraping the page on the stand could be heard all the way to the last upper rows.

VLADIMIR IVANOV We did a video recording during the lockdown. As social distancing requires we could not share stands. Everyone was responsible for their own page turning, and we wished we played from tablets.

C-H JEN Require every university-level instrumental student to turn pages for pianists. The page turners must always grasp and follow the pianists’ intent and hints.

GERRY MENON Yes, at the very least, it will motivate pianists or accompanists to develop a healthy level of paranoia if not memory!