Syms 6/7

He is not even listed in my Oxford Companion to Music (10th edition), this Johann Wilhelm Wilms. He was a contemporary of Beethoven, born two years later and outliving the great man by 20 years. He was born a German, but moved to Amsterdam at an early age believing that to be the land of promise. What he found was that the kudos and the money went to performers not to composers, and perforce he had to earn his own living largely from performing and teaching. His music, if these two symphonies (his final two) are anything to go by, is agreeable but straitlaced. Even after Beethoven was dead Wilms was still writing symphonies very much to Haydn's general formula, with slow introductions to the first movements and very fast finales. The idiom is slightly updated from Haydn, but if I were to try to characterise it I would be reduced to calling it not-Haydn and not-Beethoven, and very very definitely not Mozart. The nearest parallel might be the early symphonies of Schubert, and it is only fair to Wilms to note that he had a genuine melodic gift, something that shows through particularly in the slow movements. These two works seem to me to be absolute models in a Toveyan sense, and very nicely scored too. They are not `great' symphonies, but then neither are Weber's. However Weber's music is bursting with originality even in his lightweight mode, whereas a Wilms symphony is more an experience in which `the second subject, a graceful and flowing melody in contrast with the rugged vigour of its predecessor, enters in the key of the dominant' and does similar things beloved of commonplace all-purpose programme-note writers. I do not know whether Wilms gave the option of repeating the exposition in his first movements, but if he did the performers decline it, and rightly so in my opinion.

The Concerto Koeln is directed from the leader's desk by Werner Erhardt. The group photographs show 14 players, but the sound suggests something nearer 40, and the full list of participants in the Concerto Koeln is somewhere around that figure. The recorded sound is to the very high standard that has become routine these days, and I experienced a satisfying feeling of fairness to the composer as I listened to this thoroughly agreeable and undemanding music, whose manuscripts had long been lost. The liner note by Ernst A. Klusen is notably sympathetic, and Erhardt himself also contributes a short note. It brings back the lines of the poet to me `Dead clay that did me kindness,/I can do none to you'. What I can do, what anyone can do for the shade of Wilms is to take an interest in this pleasant record, and I would like to thank Archiv as well as the performers while I am about it.

German-born Johann Wilhelm Wilms was mainly active in Amsterdam, where he established at the age of 19 and lived until his death. He is remembered principally for being the composer of what was used as the Dutch National Anthem from 1815 to 1932. His dates, 1772-1847, make him a near contemporary of Beethoven by birth (1775-1827) and a (less but still) near contemporary of Spohr by death (1784-1859). Those two "brackets" are significant. Wilms may have started his compositional activities under the influence of Haydn and Mozart, but these two late symphonies (and they are Wilm's last two), from 1819 and 1830, fully embrace the new aesthetics of the romantic sensibilities.

Comparing them with Beethoven's symphonies would be unfair to Wilms - such comparison would be unfair to any other contemporary composer, for that matter - but also stylistically inappropriate: there is much more full-blown romanticism in Wilms' style than in Beethoven's; those two symphonies are milestones on the path leading from Spohr to Schumann, really.

Defining precisely what it is that makes you immediately recognize that you are listening to romantic music rather than music from the classical era (that convoluted formulation, because it is not the same as "classical music"!) is way beyond my layman's capacities, although one recognizes it for sure and without the shadow of a doubt when one hears it. Tentatively, listening to Wilms and reminiscing on Haydn, Mozart and all those "minor" composers from the classical era that Concerto Köln served so well (Vanhal, Kraus, Kozeluch, Myslivecek and the likes), I'd say (other than all the harmonic reasons a musicologist would give): the powerful brass and timpani underpinning (I think the timps were rarely present in the orchestrations of the Classical era, and that it is Beethoven who really introduced them as one of the constitutive elements of the orchestra), the weight and impact of the basses, a vehemence in the violins that the "Sturm und Drang" style of the 1780s adumbrated but never approached, and, last but not least, the solo role ofen attributed to horn. There is no mistaking the melody first intoned by horn at 4:12 in the first movement of the 6th Symphony, then picked up by clarinet then flute, for anything a composer from the classical era could have written. There is an interesting stylistic ambiguity in the first minute of the slow and solemn introduction to that same 6th Symphony, but - as if Wilms was passing on to himself the relay baton from the style of his youth to the style of his future - at 1:11 it erupts strikingly: a rising interval of fourth intoned in full force by the brass, followed by a mighty brass choral underpinned by timpani, and you are meditating before the infinite vistas of untamed nature (the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich can't fail to come to mind; significantly, his dates are 1774 - 1840, REALLY contemporary with Wilms). The "Andante quasi allegretto e grazioso" of the same may start in a deceptively galant style and mild atmosphere, but soon powerful, rhythmically robust and Schumanesque utterances enter.

Don't expect Brahms either - we are not there yet. But these are magnificent works in their own style, representative perhaps of a time of stylistic transition (of which Spohr, Raff and maybe even Schumann in his symphonies would be other champions) but no less appealing because of that. There is great sweep, melodic invention, orchestral splendor. Endless gratitude to Concerto Köln for offering this new and invaluable discovery.

The works date from about 1820 to 1830 (Beethoven time !).

Wilms achieved international fame in his time and was a competitor of Beethoven. (Don't forget, that he was under his shadow).

The performances are very good.

The brass tend to blast at climaxes which I find exciting.

It is always interesting to compare composers of that time especially with Concerto Koln.

Of course Beethoven is the leading one.