Mr Zelenka's fame

Jan Dismas Zelenka's Missa votiva (E-minor), ZWV 18 is quite good. A competent performance by Collegium 1704 and Colegium Vocale 1704, under Vaclav Luks (available on Amazon) has been on the Czech and Polish radio lately. Mr Zelenka is another rediscovered composer, rediscovery being a bit of an industry with the ancient music lot nowadays. This Czech -- a little older than Bach -- lived and composed most of his life in Dresden and was thus Bach's neighbor. In a letter to Forkel CPE states that Zelenka was one of the composers J. S. Bach admired most; some think JS may have studied Zelenka's masses when working on his B-minor. Most of Zelenka's compositions have not yet been recorded, but one hopes the excellent Mr Luks and his ensemble will see to that.

The PR2 commentator asks why such good music could have been so totally forgotten and suggests the usual explanation -- offered also to explain the great forgetting of JS himself -- that it was composed in the old style (baroque) just when style was undergoing change (classicism). There is something to that, I suppose -- a change of style can be accompanied by vicious hounding, such as baroque architecture underwent in late 1700's, which destroys all, the good with the bad, but another explanation is probably closer to the truth: that neither Zelenka, nor JS, were particularly famous in their day. Neither had major royal sponsors, for example (unlike Dufay, or Mozart); neither was a famous child progeny (unlike Dufay, or Mozart), neither was a great commercial success in his day (unlike Dufay, or Mozart); in short, neither was famous for the sort of reason for which one becomes famous. One suspects that both were well known only in the narrow society of professional musicians.

The truth is that fame grows out of fame. Those who become famous in their lifetime tend to remain famous -- whether justly (Bellini, Mozart) or unjustly (Delacroix, Munch). Discoveries of unjustly forgotten are rare, as are forgettings of unjustly famous. For all we know, Madonna and Hirst are here to stay. There is no justice in fame and future generations are no more just than the contemporaries.