Classical music, as we know it today, began in the 18th century, reaching its finest flowering in the two centuries and more between Bach, born in 1650, at the height of the Ottoman revival, and Brahms, who died in 1897, ten years after the invention of the gramophone.
For the Dutch conductor Frans Brüggen, co-founder of the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, there was no more splendid period in music. He devoted his life to restoring to public consciousness the sound of the Enlightenment, using instruments based on the technology of the time and featuring music for the harpsichord and the recorder (of which he was an acknowledged master).
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“We try to play music in its original language,” he said, and he did so to standing ovations across the world.
It would be a cliché to describe Brüggen as a much-loved figure. But it would also be true — not least, perhaps, because he drew the same salary as the most junior member of his ensemble. A tall, elegant man, with long, floppy hair, once black, later grey, he preferred to conduct bare-handed, with his two little fingers outstretched, his entire body swaying to the music.
He conducted his final concert, aged 79, from a wheelchair in May, with the orchestra doubled in size by the addition of students from the Royal Conservatory of The Hague.
Brüggen’s many recordings down the decades continue to be highly regarded, especially his interpretations of the Beethoven symphonies for Polygram in the 1990s, swathes of Haydn, Bach and Mozart, works by Schubert and his definitive Gesti, a recorder sequence by Luciano Berio, which he himself had commissioned as a young musical director and in which he was the soloist.
Franciscus Josef Brüggen was born in Amsterdam in 1934, the youngest of nine children. The Brüggens were prosperous and deeply musical. The joke was that they had among them enough gifted musicians — including uncles and aunts — to perform the Brandenburg concertos en famille. But the good times came quickly to an end. The German occupation of the Netherlands began when Frans was just five, and it was as much out of boredom as anything that he began to take recorder lessons from his older brother Hans.
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Hans Brüggen, a keen oboist, soon realised his brother’s talent and introduced him to his friend Kees Otten, a recorder virtuoso, then aged about 20, who took the youngster under his wing, developing his interest not only in the recorder but in the world of early music. Otten said: “He was very small, but he could blow the stars out of the sky, even though he didn’t sometimes feel like playing the recorder at all.”
Otten and Brüggen continued to play together, as equals, after the war, but as time passed the younger player gradually became the master. “Kees gave very good lessons,” Brüggen said, “and his approach had a good effect on me, but straight away I wanted to be better than him. Shortly after I passed my exams, I stopped seeing him completely.”
Brüggen’s ambition was soon realised. After studying at the Amsterdam Muzieklyceum, he progressed to the University of Amsterdam, achieving such high marks and praise that, in 1954, when still only 21 he was appointed a professor at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague.
Over the next quarter of a century, Brüggen’s reputation as a flautist and recorder player, as well as teacher, continued to grow. In the 1960s, rather like the violinist Nigel Kennedy 30 years later, he was perceived not only as a serious classical musician but as a pop star. The Dutch newspaper Het Parool observed that he was attracting young men in jeans and girls in mini-skirts to his concerts.
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But it was Brüggen’s decision, along with the Dutch musicologist Sieuwert Verster, 20 years his junior, to form the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century (Het Orkest van de Achttiende Eeuw) that changed everything. The new ensemble was at first startling to Dutch audiences used to the brilliant orthodoxy of the Concertgebouw.
Controversy was never far away. In 1970, Brüggen announced, unabashed, that “every note of the Concertgebouw Orchestra when it is playing Mozart is a lie from beginning to end”.
As he matured, he grew more tolerant, frequently taking charge of conventional orchestras, including the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and, finally, the Concertgebouw. His determination to revive the authentic sound of the Golden Age never wavered, and it was the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century that remained his truest passion. He also became, for a time, joint chief conductor of his orchestra’s chief rival, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, sharing the role with Simon Rattle.
Brüggen married twice. His first wife was the Dutch actress Ineke Verwayen, best known for her role in the Second World War drama The Dark Room of Damocles, with whom he had two daughters, Laura and Alicia. Laura is a concert violinist who, in 2013, was musical director of the first Western opera to be staged in Bhutan, Handel’s Acis and Galatea. Brüggen later married Machtelt Israëls, a specialist in Italian renaissance art at the university of Amsterdam. She survives him along with their two daughters, Zephyr and Eos.
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In 2012, as his health began to fail, he said in an interview that his task had been, as far as possible, to recreate the previous age, using replicas of old instruments and restricting the repertoire to the period from Bach to Berlioz. “We try to do our best and assemble as much evidence as possible . . . we try to restore the sound of those periods and of those composers. But God knows if it is really the truth because so many things are lost forever . . . We can only hope.”
Frans Brüggen, conductor, was born on October 30, 1934. He died on August 13, 2014, aged 79
CORRECTION: In our obituary of Frans Brüggen (Sept 4) we said that Johann Sebastian Bach was born in 1650. The correct year is 1685. We apologise for the error.