Heinrich Eduard Winter’s portrait of Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf, made in 1816 after the composer’s death in 1799 (from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)
This past Thursday saw the latest video uploaded to the Chamber Music Series streamed by SFSymphony+. Like its predecessor, the music was scored for two instruments from the string family. This time the performers were San Francisco Symphony (SFS) musicians Gina Cooper on viola and Scott Pingel on double bass. Their selection was an E-flat duet by Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf, Kr. 219 in the Dittersdorfiana catalog compiled by Carl Krebs. The lower part was originally scored for violone but may also be played by both bass and cello.
On this site Dittersdorf is probably best known as the violinist in Vienna that led a string quartet whose other members were Joseph Haydn (second violin), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (viola), and Johann Baptist Wanhal (cello). There is no shortage of wit in Kr. 219, which may suggest that Dittersdorf was well aware of the witty turns that both Haydn and Mozart exercised in their own compositions. In this duet Dittersdorf seems to enjoy poking fun at the formalities of the minuet; and the set of variations in the final movement prompts no end of virtuosic turns, many of which are given an exclamation mark when executed by the bass.
Dittersdorf himself subsequently became an object of wit about 30 years ago, when the film version of Fredric Brown’s science fiction comic novel Martians, Go Home was released. While Brown’s protagonist, Luke Devereaux, was a rather pathetic character having to endure being divorced, in the film (where he is portrayed by Randy Quaid) he writes commercial jingles, one of which plagiarizes Dittersdorf’s music (which he happened to hear on his car radio). As might be guessed, no one detects the theft, except for the Martians that invade Earth because they have nothing better to do.
Fortunately, both Cooper and Pingel concentrated on Dittersdorf’s own capacity for wit; and no Martians were offended as a result of their performance.
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