Early Swiss Romantics

Although musicologists have long since consolidated his outstanding position, the early Swiss Romantic composer Friedrich Theodor Fröhlich (1803-1836), who voluntarily left the world of music, still has a difficult time in musical life. A complete edition of his extensive, predominantly vocal oeuvre is still lacking. With the first recording of the Piano Quartet in D minor (1835) and the Piano Sonata in A major (1831), a major addition to the repertoire has finally been made to the few CDs available.

The quartet, written in his birthplace of Brugg a year before his early death, was only discovered in 1942 in private ownership in Zurich and was published in 2017 by Amadeus-Verlag in Winterthur based on the manuscript in the Basel University Library.

While the stormy opening movement and the musical finale are characterized by romantic pathos, the Mozartian theme of the variations (2nd movement) and the dance-like scherzo are reminiscent of Viennese Classicism. The sonata, also in four movements, is also based on this style. Her work, published in 1937 by Walter Frey and Willi Schuh in the collection Swiss piano music from the classical and romantic periods (Hug, Leipzig/Zurich) features a special recitative-like adagio insertion that testifies to Fröhlich's individuality.

If these two first recordings are not cheerful, it is due to the predominance of keyboard instruments in the quartet and the historicizing interpretative approach of Alena Hönigová (fortepiano), Miki Takahashi (violin), Daila Dambrauska (viola) and Ilze Grudule (violoncello), who are audibly committed but do not differentiate much dynamically. Instead of awakening Fröhlich's music from its long slumber and dusting it off, the dry-sounding fortepiano by John Broadwood & Sons and the string instruments in the old scale with their colorless, pale sound take us back to the nebulous beginnings of Swiss Romanticism, without being able to convincingly demonstrate the stylistically close relationship to Schubert.