Are Mozart’s forgotten contemporaries worth reviving?

There are worse fates than posthumous obscurity. When Mozart visited Munich in October 1777, he was initially reluctant to visit his friend, the Bohemian composer Josef Myslivecek. Myslivecek was in hospital, undergoing treatment (as he told it) for a facial cancer brought on by a recent coach accident. But this being the 18th century, and Myslivecek having a reputation as a gallant, Mozart suspected venereal disease. When he finally appeared at Myslivecek’s bedside, he was appalled by what he saw: ‘The surgeon, that ass, has burned off his nose! Imagine the agony he must have suffered.’ Within four years, the luckless — and noseless — Myslivecek had died in poverty, aged 43. His music effectively died with him.

Well, he’s back again, on a recording by the British period-instrument ensemble the Mozartists that contains no Mozart, but does feature several composers who are now remembered principally as footnotes in Mozart’s biography. Myslivecek’s there, naturally, and Johann Wanhal — best known as the cellist in a celebrity super-quartet that convened in Vienna for one night in 1784 with Mozart on viola and Haydn playing first violin. There’s also a symphony by Johann Christian Bach: the ‘English Bach’, buried at St Pancras, whose great friend the castrato Tenducci was rumoured to have fathered a child years after the snip. Being triorchic, Tenducci carried a fully functional reserve gonad internally — or so he told Casanova, anyway.

Anyhow, Sturm und Drang 2 is the title of the disc — the second of seven proposed recordings devoted to the fashion for emotional turbulence that, according to the conductor Ian Page, ‘swept through music and other art forms between the 1760s and the 1780s’. Historically, it’s a slightly dubious concept. Much of the music that is now labelled ‘Sturm und Drang’ (‘Storm and Stress’ is the standard translation) actually predates the play by Maximilian Klinger, from 1776, that gave the trend its name.