"The composers of our time should study Mayr’s operas. They would find there everything what they are looking for and what would be useful for them.” (Gioachino Rossini)
Johann Simon (Giovanni Simone) Mayr was born June 14, 1763 in Mendorf, near Ingolstadt (Bavaria). His father Joseph taught at the school in Mendorf, and was also the church organist. It is from him that Simon received his first keyboard and organ lessons, and he also sang in the church choir; in 1769, he began taking lessons in Weltenburg. His talent did not go unnoticed: an unnamed admirer offered to make it possible for young Mayr to study in Vienna. However, Mayr’s parents turned the offer down. In 1772, most likely on account of his musical talent, Mayr received a scholarship to the Jesuit College in Ingolstadt, where he studied grammar, rhetoric, logic, physics and theology until 1777, when he enrolled at the university in Ingolstadt. Not surprisingly, he devoted himself less to his studies of theology, law, rhetoric, logic and medicine, than to playing “quasi tutti gli stromenti d’arco e da fiato” (almost all the string and wind instruments”), as he himself reports is his autobiographical notes (Cenni autobiografici). As a student, Mayr earned a living by playing the organ in churches in Ingolstadt.
It was at this time that Mayr also became acquainted with Baron Thomas (Tommaso Francesco Maria) von Bassus (1742-1815), a member of the Graubünden branch of the Bassus family, and a professor at Ingolstadt University who, in 1780, inherited the title and property (including Schloss Sandersdorf) of the Bavarian family line. Bassus was a member of the Order of the Illuminati, and maintained a printing press in Poschiavo; from there he distributed enlightenment literature in northern Italy. When the Order of the Illuminati was finally banned in 1787, Bassus returned to Graubünden, taking the twenty-four-year old Mayr with him. (To what degree Mayr himself was actually involved in the Order is not known. There is, of course, nothing about this in his Cenni, which in any case, reveals very little about his youth. But one can assume that it is no coincidence that in 1815, the year in which Thomas Bassus died, Mayr wrote the cantata Annibale – Hannibal was Bassus’s name within the Order).
Most likely, the art lover Bassus already had Mayr involved in domestic music in Sandersdorf. In Cantone, Bassus’s property near Poschiavo, Mayr (whose Lieder am Klavier zu singen were published in Regensburg in 1786) only catered to his Maecenas’s lightweight needs – a task that he may not have found entirely satisfying, or so one might conclude from a remark in his Cenni: “ogni composizione studiata d’intreccio e d’imitazione, di fughe era quasi bandita” (“Every composition with an interweaving, an imitation or a fugue was almost banned”). But it must have been through Bassus that Mayr made contacts that ultimately allowed him to study with Carlo Lenzi, the Kappellmeister at Santa Maria Maggiore in Bergamo.
Mayr’s first stay in Bergamo lasted just a few months: Mayr, as he writes in the Cenni, was dissatisfied, “che non poteva ottenere di essere istrutto ne’ primi principi dell’ arte di contrappunto” (complaining “that I did not get an instructor who taught me the art of counterpoint”). Lenzi’s teaching was obviously not what Mayr was hoping for, since the latter still hadn’t received any basic instruction in composition; moreover, as he wrote earlier, in Ingolstadt he had only been able to hear a few operettas by Hiller and a single concert in Munich.
If we take this account of things in the Cenni seriously, this means that up to the age of 26, Mayr was self-taught. In frustration, Mayr had decided to leave Bergamo and return to Bavaria when a new Maecenas came into view: Conte Canonico Vincenzo Pesenti. Pesenti sent Mayr to Venice around 1789-90 to take lessons from Ferdinando Bertoni at the Conservatorio di Mendicanti, albeit with the condition that he was to devote himself exclusively to church music. But it soon turned out that Mayr, who wrote of himself in the Cenni that at this time he was still a beginner, whereas his peers Paër and Nasolini were already getting to see their operas staged in Venice, did not get what he wanted from Bertoni either. Bertoni gave some formal hints, but didn’t give him any basic instruction. So once again, Mayr turned to teaching himself; and after Pesenti’s death in 1793, he had to give harpsichord lessons to earn a living.
In Venice Mayr became acquainted with Piccinni and Peter von Winter, both of whom encouraged him to compose for the stage. On February 17, 1794, the premiere of Mayr’s first opera Saffo took place at the Teatro La Fenice. Previously he had already made a name for himself in Venice with his oratorios Iacob a Labano fugiens (1791), Sisara (1793) and Tobiae Matrimonium (1794). From 1794 to 1815 Mayr wrote at least two operas each year, without ever turning his back on church music.
In fact, Carlo Lenzi had not forgotten his former pupil, and proposed him as his successor. On May 6, 1802, Mayr was named Maestro di Cappella at Santa Maria Maggiore in Bergamo, a position he maintained to the end of his life. Though Mayr was not granted the happiness of finding the right teacher himself, it was for just this reason that he became very engaged with the training of young people. In 1805, Mayr’s music school Le Lezioni Caritatevoli di Musica was founded in Bergamo; alongside his work as Kappellmeister, he was the school’s director and also responsible for teaching theory. For his pupils, Mayr wrote works like solfeggios, songs and arias, as well as a series of stage works, including Il piccolo compositore di musica. The title role of this two-act Scherzo musicale was written for Gaetano Donizetti, who began studying at Mayr’s school in 1806.
Concurrently with his activities in Bergamo, Mayr was writing operas for most of the leading opera houses across Italy, as well as fulfilling requests to contribute sacred and secular works. His music was played throughout Europe. The degree of fame Mayr had achieved at this point in his career is proven by the numerous offers made to him beginning in 1803. Among others, Vienna, St. Petersburg, Lisbon, London, Dresden and Milan competed to bring him to their opera houses. But Mayr did not take up any of these options; he rejected the offer to become Maestro di Cappella at St. Peters in Rome, as he did Napoleon’s offer to make him Directeur du Théâtre et des Concerts with an annual salary of 20,000 francs. Officially, Mayr justified his refusal saying he didn’t want to ask his wife to live in a foreign country (in 1804 he had married Lucrezia Venturali, the sister of his first wife Angiola, who died in 1803).
Mayr formed a warm friendship with his star pupil Donizetti. Once Donizetti left the Lezioni in Bergamo, the two men engaged in a lively exchange of letters and references. In 1824, Mayr asked Donizetti for a contribution to his St. Cecilia festival in Bergamo. From Naples, Donizetti sent him a Credo in which he clearly alludes to Mayr’s Credo di Novara (1815). Mayr in turn used parts of Donizetti’s Credo in his Messa a Quattro (1826) written for the Einsiedeln monastery. Following the premiere of Anna Bolena (1830), Mayr addressed his former pupil as Maestro. Mayr’s last opera was Demetrio, premiered in Turin in December 1823. For the rest of his life, alongside works for his Lezioni, and a few commissioned cantatas, Mayr mainly composed church music. Why Mayr completely turned his back on the stage remains a mystery.
Equally hard to understand is Mayr’s outright refusal to let his church music be published; in a letter written to Giovanni Ricordi in 1840 he explained: “e fu costante mio sistema di non dar fuori musica di chiesa” (“it has constantly been my intention not to publish church music”). Mayr died December, 2, 1845 in Bergamo. An eye ailment that led to near-blindness had made writing almost impossible for him. In his final years, he occupied himself by copying out some older sacred compositions on paper with widely-ruled staves.
Text: Oliver Jacob. Translation: Richard Toop