Cello sonatas Variations on themes from "The magic flute"

Abstract

He steers his how as though through a storm and pours down notes. He reels beyond the topmost limit of the fingerboard and finally disappears in tender harmonics." The musicologist and pub¬lisher of the Teutsche Chnmk Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart (1739-91) was not extolling in these terms some eigiteenth-cen-tury violin virtuoso, but the cellist Jean-Pierre Duport (1741-1818). He was one of those artists who in the Classical period, thanks to their advanced fingering and rowing tech¬nique, made of the cello, which had originally only heen regarded as a "little bass', not only an equal partner in ensembleplaying, hut a truly fashionable instrument. After enjoying a great triumph in Paris and touring Europe, Duport arrived in 1773 in Berlin, where he immedi¬ately found employment at the coun of Frederick the Great. He himself played the in¬strument of the preClassical period, the flute, and became known to history as the "Flute King"; his successor took lessons trom Duport on the cello. When the Crown Prince ascended the throne on the death of Frederick the Great in 1786, Duport was promoted to Super¬intendent of the Royal Chamher Music and later even of the Opera.