At the suggestion of Carl Maria von Weber, who had declined the position, Spohr applied for and was granted the post of concertmaster in Kassel—capital of the Duchy of Hesse—which he was to hold until just before his death 37 years later. The contract was signed February 4, 1822. The new Elector, Wilhelm II, had acceded to the throne the year before, and wanted the court opera to win renown. With security and the good will of the musicians, the public, and the court, both the Kassel musical establishment and the ever-prolific Spohr entered a new era of achievement. His friendly rivalry with Weber led not only to productions of that master's Der Freischütz, Euryanthe, and Oberon at Kassel, but prompted the composition of his own most viable stage work, the opera Jessonda (1823). In the year of his appointment, Spohr founded the Cäcilienverein, a choral society intended to "awaken the taste for fine and serious music...and unite the talented dilettanti of Kassel." It is not, perhaps, fortuitous that the oratorio Die letzten Dinge—whose enormous popularity seems incredible today—followed in 1826. In the midst of directing the opera, preparing public concerts, giving command performances at court, and participating in private soirees, work on the imposing Symphony No. 3 was proceeding apace when Prince Sondershausen's concert director, the brilliant clarinet virtuoso Johann Simon Hermstedt (1778-1846) (for whom Spohr had composed enthusiastically received clarinet concertos in 1808, 1810, and 1821) appeared with a request for a new piece for the Nordhausen Festival. Spohr began work on his Clarinet Concerto No. 4 in August 1828, rapidly completing it with the easy mastery of a practiced hand. It is the most substantial and least satisfying of the four, hovering throughout between taking its ostensibly dramatic minor key feints seriously and dissolving in mellifluous effusiveness. A doggedly earnest development through the first-movement Allegro vivace fails to settle the issue, and the second-movement Larghetto leaves the clarinet to pensively pursue the matter in a heavily embellished, if unmemorable, melody spun out over an alternately declamatory and march-like accompaniment that never effectively gels. With the concluding Rondo à l'espagnol, effusive melodiousness wins out, as Spohr, the bürgerlich purveyor of mock-serious sentiment and eupeptic entertainment, comes to the fore with rhythmic exoticism stimulating the dithering clarinet to virtuoso flourishes. The Clarinet Concerto No. 4 is a masterpiece only in the sense that it is formally and technically executed with an enviable degree of polish. Its failure is due to the same bourgeois shallowness of feeling that renders Spohr's operas and oratorios such dead letters—they promise, but do not deliver, profundity, pathos, and tragedy.

© Adrian Corleonis, All Music Guide