Václav Jan Tomášek (Wenzel Johann Tomaschek) - Symphony in D major, Dvořák Chamber Orchestra, Vladimír Válek (conductor)
I. Adagio. Allegro - 00:00
II. Andante Con Espressione - 08:35
III. Scherzo. Allegro Ma Non Troppo - 17:40
IV. Allegro Moderato - 23:02
“Václav Jan Křtitel Tomášek (17 April 1774, Skuteč, Bohemia - 3 April 1850, Prague) was a Czech composer and music teacher. He is generally listed in historical records under the German version of his name, Wenzel Johann Tomaschek.
Tomášek was undoubtedly the most significant Prague musician and widely respected authority of the Prague music scene during the first half of the 19th century. This is all the more amazing for the fact that he was entirely self-taught, never having had a formal, professional musical education, especially in those areas in which he made his most significant contributions and which he later taught, i.e. piano performance and music theory (composition).
The sixteen year old Tomášek (who had begun his education in Jihlava, then a German town) arrived in Prague In 1790 in order to continue his education, first at a grammar school, then later at the Charles-Ferdinand University school of philosophy and law. The music-loving Count Jiří Buquoy however, turned him from his planned career as a lawyer by offering him an extraordinarily convenient and lucrative post as personal composer and family music teacher. After 1824 Tomášek left the Count's service for good, devoting himself primarily to his teaching activities in the following years. In his apartment in Prague's Lesser Quarter he entertained such major representatives of the musical and cultural world as Hector Berlioz, Ole Bull, Clara Schumann or the young Richard Wagner when they visited Prague. Additionally, he regularly presented private musical performances featuring his best students, including Eduard Hanslick, who would go on to become an influential Viennese music critic, Alexander Dreyschock and Julius Schulhoff, both later internationally famous pianists, and Jan Friedrich Kittl, who later became director of the Prague Conservatory. Tomášek was also named an honorary member of music associations in Innsbruck (1831), Vienna (1836), Rotterdam (1836), Pest and Buda (1838), Stuttgart (1839), Lvov (1849) and Berlin (1850). Because of his authority in the field of music, his contemporaries called Tomášek “the music pope˝ or “the music Dalai Lama˝.
In his autobiography, which was published in instalments in the Libussa yearbook between 1845 and 1850, he covered events only up to the year 1824 when Tomášek married. A major part of these texts deal with his meetings with various famous persons (Jan Ladislav Dusík in 1802, Georg Joseph Vogler in 1801 and 1802, Johann Nikolaus Forkel in 1802, Muzio Clementi in 1803, Joseph Haydn in 1808, Ludwig van Beethoven in 1814 and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1822), appraise performers and composers and impart his aesthetic principles.
Tomášek retired from the limelight in the last years of his life, dogged by health problems and personal disappointments.
Tomášek’s work is quite extensive and varied in genre: it comprises 114 compositions with opus numbers and 60 without. Vocal works predominate, especially art songs, which make up about one half of his compositions; one fourth are piano works. In the area of the art song, he has no rivals in the Czechlands until the 1830s. Tomášek also composed one opera (leaving fragments of a second), sacred pieces, chamber works and settings of dramatic scenes. His composition proceeds on the principles of late Classicism, but at the same time, we can find some features of Romanticism in it. One might then even term him the founder of Czech Romantic style. Tomášek works can be found today in manuscripts from his age and in print form in libraries, museums, archives and private collections, particularly throughout Central Europe. His larger orchestral works-symphonies, overtures and concertos-written mostly around the year 1800 are still awaiting their rediscovery and well-deserved rehabilitation.
(extracts from notes by Jarmila Gabrielova, professor for the Music History Department of the Faculty of Arts, Prague, and from notes 2012 by Markéta Kabelková )