The nearly complete abandonment of Jan Ladislav Dussek's music shortly after his death in 1812 can pretty much be blamed on Beethoven. No, the brilliant Bonn-born musician bore Dussek no animus; but by the 1820s Beethoven's new, volatile brand of music making had so captivated European audiences that for the next half century, many seemed willing to forget that there ever had been a composer filling the gap between the age of Mozart and Haydn and their new hero. Dussek was himself one of the greatest pianists of his era, and his music, the vast majority of which features the piano, shows it. The performer must travel a difficult course, one not just virtuosic and physically tiresome but also emotionally dense and psychologically complex. Dussek has been labeled a mere showman, but he was not a one-sided figure at all. No touring pianist who adds a bit of glass harmonica playing to his programs, as Dussek did, could ever be called one-sided.

The list of Dussek's works is long. First and foremost are 41 sonatas for piano or piano four-hands. These pieces were the first to receive posthumous attention, when Breitkopf and Härtel reprinted them in the 1860s and 1870s, and among them are a few works that rightly belong with the masterworks of the genre. The two-movement Sonata in F sharp minor, Op. 61, an "Élégie harmonique sur la mort du Prince Louis Ferdinand," of 1806 is one, as is the Piano Sonata in C minor, Op. 35, No. 3, of 1797, whose imprint some hear in the sonatas that Beethoven composed around the same time. At the end of the Dussek timeline is L'invocation, a sonata in F minor, Op. 77, composed in 1812; it is a long four-movement thing, weighty and noble—a brilliant valedictory work.

Dussek composed about 18 piano concertos (some alternately for harp), a few of which are no longer extant. They occupy a unique realm of the Classical concerto: not the prim and proper concertos of Haydn and Mozart but also not the square, vigorous ones of Beethoven. They are today less well known than the sonatas, though one cannot help but be surprised that more harpists have not taken this body of work into their repertoires. Dussek also composed chamber music, including 87 sonatas or sonatinas for piano and violin (sometimes with cello accompaniment) and more than a dozen quintets, duos, etc. for other instruments. There is one 1797 item for violin, cello, piano, and percussion that goes by the unlikely name The Naval Battle and Complete Defeat of the Dutch.

Schooled by Jesuits and having pursued a course of university study in theology, Dussek inevitably put his talents, at least once, towards a sacred end—one of his last works is a Missa Solemnis without opus number for chorus, vocal soloists, and orchestra. While living in England in the 1790s he also tried writing music for stage, but without much success. Works like The Captive of Spilberg (1798) are best assigned to footnotes in the Dussek biography.

© Blair Johnston, Rovi