Andrew McIntosh plays Biber’s Rosary Sonatas

Program

• Biber The Rosary Sonatas

• Program:

  1. The Annunciation

  2. The Visitation

  3. The Nativity

  4. The Presentation of Jesus in the Temple

  5. The Finding of Jesus in the Temple

  -intermission-

  6. The Agony in the Garden

  7. The Scourging at the Pillar

  8. The Crowning with Thorns

  9. The Carrying of the Cross

  10. The Crucifixion

  -intermission-

  1. The Resurrection

  2. The Ascension

  3. The Descent of the Holy Spirit

  4. The Assumption of Mary

  5. The Coronation of the Mary

  Program Note by Andrew McIntosh

  Monumentally virtuosic, radically experimental, and exquisitely beautiful, the Rosary Sonatas of Heinrich Biber were published in Salzburg around 1675 and represent one of the most unique collections of violin repertoire in existence, still shocking today in their breadth and their use of scordatura (retunings of the open strings). Each sonata has an ornate copper plate engraving at the beginning of the score, depicting one of the Catholic Mysteries of the Rosary, and a tuning that creates unique resonances matched in some way to the subject matter of the images. The exact function of the pieces and the circumstances of their performance during Biber’s lifetime are unknown, but Biber was likely a Jesuit and the pieces align with the Jesuit tradition of Spiritual Exercises, in which one meditates on the Mysteries of the Rosary, often with the assistance of images, and contemplates every aspect of a Mystery, imagining the point of view and the experience of the people and events depicted in order to have an experiential understanding of the Mystery, not just an intellectual one. Biber himself was an exceptional violinist as well as composer, with a reputation for advancing the technical limits of violin playing at the time, and for his virtuosic solo violin performances where he would occasionally accompany himself by playing the bass line on the foot pedals of an organ.

  In these works, Biber has gone to great lengths to physically embody the Mysteries on the violin and in the music. The pieces with the strangest tunings and the most tension are reserved for the Mysteries which deal with pain and suffering, while those depicting reverence or joy have more open and bell-like tunings. There is frequent symbolism of the cross, with a physical crossing of the middle two strings in The Resurrection, as well as gestures that look like crosses on the printed page, and even instances where the violinist must leap across the instrument, tracing a cross physically with their bow arm. In The Scourging of Jesus there are a variety of gestures that make the violinist feel like they are using the bow as a whip. In the Crucifixion sonata one can hear the hammering of nails, and the sonata ends with the earthquake that is a part of that story. In one of my personal favorites, The Agony in the Garden, not only is the instrument tuned in dissonant Major 7ths, but you can hear an insistent little collection of phrases at the end of the sonata that are repeated three times. In Jesus’s prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, when he is agonizing over his fate, he asks three times to “please take this cup away from me”, always finishing with “but your will be done”. If you listen carefully you can hear the exact question/resignation structure of the prayer repeated three times, with echoes.

  Another delightful rhetorical device that was pointed out to me by musicologist/performer Malachai Bandy is the repeated presence of a rhetorical figure called “circulatio”, in which the notes circulate in a specific melodic pattern which was sometimes used to depict a crown and circular perfection. One can especially hear this gesture at the very end of The Coronation of Mary. Importantly, there are no circulatio gestures at all in The Crowning with Thorns, perhaps implying that it is in fact a false crown. There are, however, many thorns to be heard, as it is one of the pieces with the most tension on the instrument, and the piece in which the notes one hears least resemble the ones written on the page (and are very difficult to produce), due to the extremity of the tuning.

  Many of these examples are from the Sorrowful Mysteries, but there are wonderful rhetorical devices in the “Joyful” and “Glorious” mysteries as well. For instance, in The Ascension the violin is tuned exactly to the overtones of a baroque trumpet and plays a fanfare to announce Jesus’s entrance into heaven. Perhaps most poetically of all, there are many parallels between The Nativity (which is quite solemn in mood and contains foreshadowings of the suffering Jesus will go through on earth), and The Resurrection (which is extremely joyful and includes a literal quotation of the hymn “Surrexit Christus Hodie”, or “Christ is Risen Today”), perhaps suggesting a meditation on birth and re-birth.

  While not personally religious, I find the experience of performing these works to be deeply moving, especially if I put myself in the shoes of someone treating them like a Spritual Exercise.

  The listener

  The suffering of the instruments being put through all of these different tunings may have also been intended as an embodiment of the suffering depicted in the Mysteries. There will be a fair amount of retuning between pieces, as the violins are taken from one Mystery to another. It is a bit utopian to have all of these different resonances and harmonic palettes available through retuning, as it also takes a very real physical toll on the strings. Gut strings are already very sensitive to temperature, humidity, etc., even when tuned normally. It is likely that at some point in the performance a tuning may not hold very well, and your patience as a listener is very much appreciated if we occasionally stop to tune mid-piece, or if there is the occasional sour note on an open string. These particular sufferings are avoidable in a recording studio, but they are an inevitable and perhaps even intended aspect of going through this journey in a live performance (unless I were to use 15 different violins, which would create a different set of sufferings for the performer).

  The violins

  Five years ago I commissioned a new baroque violin from German luthier Michael Fischer, who has been living in Los Angeles since the 1980’s, based on an original instrument by 17th-century German luthier Jacob Stainer. Stainer violins today are not all that well-known, but at the time Stainer was considered one of the premiere violin makers in Europe. In fact, in the 18th century a Stainer violin cost four times the price of a Stradivarius, and Biber, Bach, and Mozart all played on Stainer instruments. Michael ended up making several Stainer copy baroque violins, and I’m extremely grateful to him for lending them for this performance.