Were I a businessman (which, Gott sei dank! l am not, having put that incarnation behind me), I would sink all my dough in a chocolate powder to be advertised as Rococo Cocoa. But I must reluctantly relinquish that sure-fire name to the first taker, and content myself with the life of the mind, such as it is. Today our subject is simply Rococo, though Rococo is not exactly simple, except perhaps in mind. The term itself derives from the French rocaille (from roe = a rock), which designates decorative rockwork or shellwork; the most pertinent application was probably to rather fantastic artificial grottoes in the gardens of Versilles. Rococo represents a reaction to the overpowering heaviness, not to say lumpiness, of Baroque; significantly it is sometimes called "Louis XV Style" in contradistinction to the more formal, pompous, and preposterous Louis XIV Style. Rococo is more inward than Baroque--an art of interiors rather than one of buildings. It is amusing rather than demanding, pretty rather than magnificent, intimate rather than public. One source terms it "gay and freakish," which would be a splendid description if we were still permitted those words. Rococo throve only a short time in its pure form (if it had one). Among French painters it is characterized by Watteau, Fragonard, and Boucher (he of those dreadful pink pneumatic girls). Among French composers, Couperin was surely the distillation of Rococo, especially in the keyboard suites with their tiny, much-ornamented component movements. In architecture, strangely, the best representation is in the pilgrimage churches of Bavaria.
In Germany the music of the Rococo tended toward miniaturization and Intimacy. But where the French Rococo had emphasized a kind of detached sensibilite (feeling, sensitivity), "the incorrigible sentimentality of the German soul,'' to quote Paul Henry Lang, "broke into tears at the slightest provocation." (I suppose the culmination of this tendency was Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, which Thackeray sums up thus: "So he sigh'd and pined and ogled,/ and his passion boil'd and bubbled,/ Till he blew his silly brains out,/ And by it no more was troubled.") The watchwords, to nutshell it, were feeling and melody, the two being inseparable.
Feeling and melody are the true links of this adventurous little recital, for, birthplaces aside, "International Rococo" might better apply than '' South German.'' Hullmandel and Edelmann, for example, made their careers in Paris, Kraus in Stockholm, Cramer in London; Beecke traveled all over, and only Lang and Gugel stayed put. We are only just now beginning to appreciate the short-lived Kraus (an exact contemporary of Mozart), a minor genius who, though he wrote within the framework of the taste of his times, imitated no one. Hullmandel (an Alsatian like Edelmann) may have studied with Christian Bach; he spent some time in Italy, and ended his days in London, having fled there to escape the Revolution. A consummate craftsman, he was sometimes taxed with being rather cautious and with failing to "let it all hang out." Edelmann did not flee the Revolution and ended up on the guillotine. Like Hullmandel, he preferred the piano to the harpsichord, but unlike him, he virtually wallowed in a sort of melodramatic emotionalism, and is regarded as a "pre-Romantic." Cramer was the father of the better-known and once popular J.B. Cramer, piano manufacturer and compiler of operatic fantasies. Ignaz von Beecke was a military chap by profession but also a highly talented musical amateur, selftaught both in piano and composition, who knew everyone who was anyone, and who was generally admired by his fellow musicians, with the exception of Mozart. W.S. Newman compares the Bohemian Lang's sonatas favorably with those of the last-named, and calls his music '' A promising, virgin field of study." Gugel, born in Mainz and resident near Dinkelsbuhl, is ignored by the standard dictionaries.
(Note: these works, like most of their era, are for piano with violin accompaniment.)
