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Wenceslao Pichl (1741-1805) was he a member of the Bologna Accademia Filarmonica?

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When the talented singer, violinist, composer, capellmeister and music historian Vaclav (Wenceslao) Pichl (1741-1805) was born in Bechyne in South Bohemia in 1741, he was entering the political and musical Europe of the Empress Marie Theresa and the Prussian King Frederick II, who were just making the Peace of Breslau. The same year saw the birth of the composers A. M. Gretry, J. G. Krebs, A. L. Tomasini, Jean-Pierre Duport and B. Giacometti. Handel was completing his oratorio The Messiah in 23 days and J. Ph. Rameau finishing his famous harpsichord cycle Pieces de clavecin en concerts. Vitus Bering crossed from Russia into Alaska and Anders Celsius introduced the decimal system for measuring temperature.

When Pichl died aged 64 in 1805, Napoleon was just about to win at Austerlitz and the American expedition of Lewis & Clark was approaching the Pacific. It was the year when Friedrich von Schiller and Luigi Boc-cherini died. Pichl was still alive when the deaf Beethoven conducted his "Eroica" in Vienna, but did not live to see the October premiere of his "Fidelio".

On a visit to Prague in 1809 the Berlin composer and musical traveller Johann F. Reichardt noted that spring came earlier to Bohemia than to Vienna, referred to a much earlier visit in 1773 and quoted Risbek's view that "Bohemia is a promised land and has a wonderful climate". (1) And the musical reputation of Bohemia? In Berlin the composer Reichardt had married the daughter of another Czech, Frantisek Benda, and he knew about the flood of Czech musicians in the orchestras at German courts. He was most probably the "Professore di Musica di Germania" and "il mio amico a Berlino", whom Pichl in a letter recommended for membership in the Bologna Accademia (1781).

We can generally rely on the non-partisan assessment of the development of music "in Germany" (Bohemia was considered a part of Germany) from the pen of the correspondent of the Leipzig newspaper Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung Johann K. F. Triest (1764-1810) in 1801. He confirms the claim made by the English musical historian Charles Burney in the early 1780s, that Bohemia was the "conservatory of Europe". Triest asserts that alongside Saxony, Schleswig and Swabia, Bohemia is a province with "a natural disposition for music" and elsewhere adds that "people in Vienna, Dresden, Prague, Leipzig, Munich and in Hamburg ... very much appreciated and supported the art of music". The importance of Prague and the Bohemian Lands for the musical culture of the Austrian monarchy is indirectly illustrated in Oesterreichische National-Encyklopadie of 1835/36, a six-volume encyclopaedia that contains as many as 90 (or respectively 155) entries on musicians born in Bohemia or working there up to 1835/36. According to...

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