There Are Always Surprises in Fasch: Profile of Fasch Scholar Barbara Reul
Barbara Reul just got back from an international Fasch conference in Germany
and she’s still agog.
Johann Friedrich Fasch studies are in such a state of explosion that during the
conference, discovery of a brand-new Fasch trio sonata was announced and rushed to the
table. To say nothing of two weeks of packed concerts and a whole bunch of scholarly
papers delving wider and deeper into an increasingly fascinating and pivotal musical
personality.
To top it off, Chandos was able to deliver Tempesta di Mare’s new Johann
Friedrich Fasch recording hot off the presses for everyone at the conference to admire.
“Very, very, very cool,” says Barbara Reul, one of the world’s distinguished authorities
on Fasch.
Reul, a musicologist, became aware of Fasch in the early ‘nineties when she was
at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, studying his friend Telemann. Fasch was
pretty obscure then. “All I knew was that he wrote a lovely trumpet concerto,” says Reul.
What a difference a little time makes. “I fell in love and I’m still in love with
Fasch,” says Ruel. “There are always surprises in Fasch.” Reul is practically
synonymous with Fasch now, as a scholar, organizer, President-elect of the International
Fasch Society, and in 2005, the first scholar outside Europe to receive the City of
Zerbst’s International Fasch Prize.
And Fasch has regained a large presence in the landscape of 18th-century music.
New discoveries of old manuscripts and a new generation of scholars and performers
rabid to get hold of them make this an exciting time for Fasch. Significant works are
under recovery from war damage in Dresden, including those that Tempesta di Mare will
be presenting on May 16 and 17. Fasch is also well represented in the Berlin SingAkademie Collection, the fabled treasure-trove of Baroque scores that was looted by the
Soviet Army in World War II but recently repatriated to Berlin.
Papers presented at the conference last month explored insider topics like the
strong relationship between Fasch and the Dresden Hofkapelle (the Berlin Philharmonic
of its time). But Fasch has entered the wider culture, too. Prominent playwright Itamar
Moses (The Four of Us) wrote a fictional but fact-based Fasch into his play Bach at
Leipzig, which premiered off-Broadway in 2005. Moses portrays Fasch as an outwardly
conventional character who is nonetheless restless and questing at the boundaries of his
music and beliefs.
Which doesn’t seem far off from the complex figure of Fasch emerging under
study: a Pietist who wrote lots of operatic-sounding sacred music, a visionary who kept
his employers happy, an artist whose creativity and fame flourished in the small
principality of Zerbst.
Reul can relate to living happily out of the mainstream. Her own home is on the
great Canadian prairies of Saskatchewan, where she teaches at Luther College, University
of Regina, 4,000 miles away from Fasch’s Germany. German-born, but a resident of
Canada since she was a teenager, Reul jumped at the chance to move to the plains.
“There are just too many tall buildings in Europe! I get back to Europe at least
once a year for my annual Fasch fix, but I love teaching here in Regina,” she says on the
phone. “I love space. When I first moved here, I would just spend hours lying on my
back in the park, looking up.”
Saskatchewan’s license plates carry the motto “Land of Living Skies.”
Considering the wide horizons stretching before Barbara Reul and her fellow scholars,
that could be a motto for Fasch studies, too.