Gustavus III (1746-1792), King of Sweden from 1771, is perhaps best known to most amateurs of music as Riccardo, Governor of Boston. This is because when Verdi wrote his opera "A Masked Ball," which played around rather loosely with the historical fact of the King's assassination, the Austrian censorship, a mite touchy about things like regicide, made him demote his characters. (The notion of a masked ball in Boston goes down hard with us, but the Italians apparently neither winced nor snickered.) Gustavus, although unhappily married and a nephew of Fred the Gross into the bargain, was really quite a monarch, as monarchs go. When he came to the throne, Sweden was being run and ruined by two opposing factions of landowners quaintly designated as the "Hats" and the "Caps." More gentlemanly approaches having failed, Gus got things in control by fostering a revolution--a rather novel idea when one considers what happened in France a few years later or in America almost concurrently. Ten years afterward, when Catherine the Great started throwing her not inconsiderable weight around, Gus's navy whupped the Rooshians to a faretheewell, forcing the Empress to pay the Swedes an annual tribute. Like his Uncle Fred, Gustavus was a firm believer in culture on the French model. Himself regarded as one of Sweden's most important writers and playwrights, he actively encouraged and supported arts and letters--his enemies said he bankrupted the country thereby--and the Gustavian Era is still regarded as Sweden's Cultural Golden Age. (The assassination was the result of Gustavus' intention actively to intervene in the French Revolution on behalf of the Royalists.)
In music, Gustavus had perhaps more luck in wooing outside talent than in creating a native school. (The best-known Swedish musical name of the period is that of the song-writer Carl Michael Bellman; but Bellman, like Robert Burns and Thomas Moore, was really a lyricist who adapted well-known tunes to his texts.) .One importee was the peripatetic Dresdener Johann Gottlieb Naumann, who had once spurned a handsome offer from Uncle Fred. Among other things he wrote an opera, "Gustav Vasa," about the King's heroic predecessor Gustavus I, the plot outline furnished by none other than the King himself. Naumann's chosen instrument was the glass harmonica, that contraption of revolving wet glass bowls, invented by Benjamin Franklin, believed to drive performers on it mad. Naumann remained sane until he died of a stroke at sixty, and wrote a good deal of music for the harmonica, including a dozen sonatas. The three offered here come from a set of six published in 1786 with the proviso that a piano would do if the harmonica was in the repair shop. In the LP era Bruno Hoffmann has several times recorded samples of Naumann's glass harmonica music.
Another musical import was Mainzborn Joseph Martin Kraus who outlived his exact contemporary Mozart by just a year. In his brief lifespan he rose to be kapellmeister at the Swedish court, and accompanied his royal master on a tour of western Europe and England. His last composition was a remarkable funeral cantata for Gustavus.
Johan Wikmanson, however, was a native product. Sometime mathematician, organist, violist, 'cellist, educator, and manager of the state lottery, he admired and imitated Kraus, and wrote, among other things three sonatinas for zither and a piano sonata called ''The Henhouse.'' The ''Divertimento" heard here is really a threemovement sonata.
Stig Ribbing fetchingly presents the entire program on contemporary pianos from the Stockholm Museum of Musical History. The one used in the Kraus had a "bassoon register" consisting of a sheet of parchment interposed between hammers and bass strings--shades of John Cage!
