New Light on Dittersdorf's Ovid Symphonies

Abstract

In late 1785 or early 1786 Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf travelled to Vienna, his native city, from his home in the Silesian town of Johannisberg. The main purpose of his visit was to present a new Italian oratorio, Giobbe, commissioned by the Tonkünstler-Sozietät for the concerts that it regularly organized near the end of Advent and Lent. Like other musicians who contributed their talents to the society's charitable concerts, Dittersdorf was not paid for his oratorio. But he brought with him to Vienna music with which he hoped to recoup his travel expenses: twelve symphonies based on stories in Ovid's Metamorphoses, which he presented in the course of two concerts. Three of the symphonies (Nos. 1–3) were later published by the Viennese firm of Christoph Toricella; three (4–6) survive in manuscript parts and three (7, 9, and 12) in manuscript arrangements for piano-four hands. Three symphonies (8, 10, and 11) are apparently lost.

    Several documents related to the Ovid symphonies allow us a clearer understanding of their origins, contents, performance, and dissemination than has previously been possible. In 1781 Dittersdorf proposed to Artaria, another Viennese publisher, a project involving the publication of not twelve but fifteen Ovid symphonies, one for each book of the Metamorphoses.  The surviving proposal is little known; it is published here for the first time in its entirety (Appendix 1). Envisioning an ambitious multi-media project, Dittersdorf proposed to offer the symphonies by subscription in a luxurious edition in which each movement was to be preceded by a large and elaborate engraving of a scene from the story told in music.

    A hitherto unknown analysis of the first six symphonies was published in Vienna in 1786, probably for distribution at the concert in which these symphonies were performed (Les Métamorphoses d'Ovide mises en musique, par Mr. Charles Ditters Noble de Dittersdorf, Vienna: Kurzbeck, 1786; edition in Appendix 2). This thirty-page pamphlet begins with a preface in which Dittersdorf tells how he came to compose the symphonies. The rest of the pamphlet, although it refers to Dittersdorf in the third person, was probably written by him as well, and presents a movement-by-movement explanation of each symphony's program. The French titles that appear in this pamphlet are probably those that most closely represent Dittersdorf's intentions: 1) Les Quatre Ages du monde, 2) La Chute de Phaéton, 3) Actéon (originally Actée) changé en cerf, 4) La Délivrance d'Andromède, 5) Les Paysans changés en grenouilles, and 6) Phinée et ses partisans changés en pierres. 

    A later performance of two of the Ovid symphonies in Naples, organized by the Austrian diplomat Norbert Hadrava, can be connected with other documents: an extract of the explanatory pamphlet in Italian and an account by Hadrava of the concert that included the Ovid symphonies.

The full article is in Studi musicali 29 (2000), 453–98; PDF at academia.edu