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Frutti Musicali

Francis Colpron
Susie Napper
Alexander Weimann

Eloquence, when at its highest pitch, leaves little room for reason or reflection; but addressing itself entirely to the fancy or the affections, captivates the willing hearers, and subdues their understanding.
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1748

The spirit of the Baroque, born in Italy at the very end of the sixteenth century, would profoundly change western art and music within just a few decades. The Renaissance had seen the triumph of vocal polyphony, under the guidance of Franco-Flemish masters who worked in all the courts and cities of Europe. However, taking advantage of the freedom permitted by the new accompanied monody and the principle of the basso continuo, Italians would soon give music an essentially expressive function, all the while flirting with virtuosity. They would break down the beautiful balance of contrapuntal writing, with its goal of representing the harmony of the world. In the process they would create, in parallel with the opera and the cantata, the first genuine instrumental music.

At first, this consisted of transcriptions for instruments of vocal forms—madrigals, songs, and even motets. Their interpretation of these polyphonic compositions tended towards playing only one of the voices, usually that of the soprano, on a melody instrument, leaving the other lines to the lute, organ, or harpsichord. The musicians embellished this solo line with divisions or other virtuosic passaggi. These were additions that ornamented the main notes of the melodies. Alternatively, the idea was to fill in intervals with passing notes in an inventive manner, using notes of much smaller values than those in the original melody. This brought about a wealth of treatises and collections with instructions for the composition and improvisation of these diminutions, among which was the Regole, Passaggi di musica by Giovanni Battista Bovicelli, published in 1594.

At this same time, around 1600, the canzona—which means “song”—became an autonomous instrumental form. Nevertheless, it often kept, as in the original Parisian model, an opening motif consisting of one long note followed by two short notes. Numerous dance forms also existed, with many variations, alongside the canzona; all of these, in a period of remarkable creativity and freedom, gave rise to the first sonatas. The proliferation of instrumental forms, the lack of precise definitions for them, and the diversity of their structures illustrate the extent of creative liberty experienced by these composers. Sudden rhythmic changes and unpredictable sequences of tempos, dynamic opposition between piano and forte, ornaments that embellished the melodies, often the fruit of improvisation—all of these reflect movements energizing the plastic arts at the time. This is well described by René Clemencic: “One would like to seize the entire period and its experiences as they flow by, and delight in the impetuous sparkle of the moment.” This freeing of the melodic line demonstrated that music, vocal as well as instrumental, would from now on seek to depict the affetti (affections), often unstable, that affect the human heart. Musicians cultivated the art of sound like a speech that is designed to persuade and, according to Nikolaus Harnoncourt, “‘eloquence’ in playing became the supreme demand of all music teachers of the period.” This will to move and to surprise was the very essence of the Baroque, where the individuality of the interpreter was supreme. Again according to Harnoncourt, “the period […] brought solo artistic production to heights that had never been known before, and in the course of which had to give birth to the virtuoso. One wanted not only to admire and celebrate an anonymous work of art, but above all the artist, especially if he achieved incredible feats and broke through the boundaries fixed for each instrument by nature.” Throughout the first decades of the seventeenth century, most of the canzonas and sonatas that publishers offered to their clientele—whether destined for the home or the church—did not specify the instruments to be used. Rather, the title pages included the indication, as in the Primo libro delle canzoni of Girolamo Frescobaldi, published in 1628, that they could be played “con ogni sorte de stromenti.” The violin, the cornetto, and the recorder remained the most popular melody instruments at the beginning of the seventeenth century, because they were thought to reproduce easily the inflexions of the human voice. Soon, however, many of the violinist-composers who emerged in diverse regions of the Italian peninsula would give their instrument, improved by the great luthiers of Cremona, an importance that has never been lost.

Born in 1571, Giovanni Battista Fontana worked successively in Venice, Rome, and Padua. An exceptional violinist, his playing earned him in his lifetime the nickname “dal violino.” His only extant works are the remarkable Sonate a 1, 2, 3 per il Violino o Cornetto published in Venice in 1641, eleven years after his death. Girolamo Frescobaldi, born in Ferrara in 1583, was appointed organist at St. Peter’s Basilica, Rome in 1608, a post he would keep for nearly thirty-five years. A virtuoso keyboard player, he is chiefly remembered for his organ and harpsichord works, the most important of the century in Italy, but he also published several sets of one- to four-part canzonas for various instruments. Marco Uccellini was born in 1603 in Forlimpopoli. A student of Giovanni Battista Buonamente, and ordained a priest in Assisi, he worked from 1641 to 1662 for the Estes at Modena while serving as maestro di cappella at the cathedral there. Soon after, he was in charge of the Farnese court entertainments at Parma. Probably a violinist himself, he was one of the first composers to write specifically for the instrument; his works especially highlight the advancement of bow technique. Angelo Berardi, also a man of the cloth, is important mainly for his theoretical treatises. Born in 1636, he began as an organist at Santa Agata Feltria before moving through various positions at Viterbo, Tivoli, and Spoleto, and ending his career in Rome as maestro di cappella at the church of Santa Maria in Trastevere. His writings and works attest to the continuing importance, perhaps above all for keyboard players, of being acquainted with the old contrapuntal style. Indeed, his sets propose “new and various [works] corresponding to both styles, the ancient and the modern.” The canzonas from his 1670 set of works are in the latter category, although this form had for some time already been abandoned in favour of the sonata.

Many Italian virtuoso violinists pursued careers in the German-speaking countries, contributing to the dissemination of the new style. Among them was Biagio Marini, born in Brescia around 1587. Probably a student of Claudio Monteverdi in Venice, having briefly been a violinist at San Marco’s, Marini was Kapellmeister for the count of Neuburg, in Germany, for twenty years. Returning to the Italian peninsula in 1645, he worked in Parma, Milan, Ferrara, and Vicenza, and spent the last ten years of his life back in Venice. His many and diverse works make him one of the century’s most important Italian composers, while his violin technique had been enriched through contact with his German colleagues, who were already practicing double-stopping and scordatura. Born in Mantua around 1600, Carlo Farina worked during four years for the Elector of Saxony under the direction of Heinrich Schütz. He spent the years 1636 and 1637 in Mülhausen and Danzig. Farina produced five books of sonatas and various dances in which he demonstrated a brilliant style of writing that was to have a great influence on German violinists of the next generation. Little is known of Giovanni Antonio Pandolfi Mealli. Born around 1600, perhaps in Perugia, he was an excellent violinist, influenced by Fontana, Marini, and Uccellini, and was in the service of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria at Innsbruck during the 1650s. Two books of six sonatas published in 1660 are all that remain of his works. Each sonata bears the name (feminized, as was the custom) of a court musician; La Cesta pays homage to his colleague the great opera composer Marc-Antonio Cesti, who was then living in Innsbruck. In the passacaglia section of the work, the resemblance with certain grounds by Henry Purcell indicates that Mealli’s volumes most probably crossed the English Channel.

In keyboard music, the Italians were no doubt less prolific and more conservative than when they composed for melody instruments, yet if they cultivated the old contrapuntal forms instead of writing sonatas, they nonetheless pursued the same ideals of expressiveness and virtuosity. Giovanni Picchi, organist at the Scuola di San Rocco in Venice and who Marco Caroso’s treatise Il Ballerino describes as “professori de ballere,” is one of the first—in his Balli d’Arpicordo of 1621—to propose dances for the harpsichord and to take advantage of the plucked instrument’s rhythmical precision. Almost nothing is known of Bernardo Storace, except what is learned from the title page of his collection Selva di varie compositioni d’Intavolatura per cimbalo ed organo, published in Venice in 1664. This tells us that he was “vicemaestro di cappella to the very illustrious senate of the noble and exemplary city of Messina.” Along with the virtuoso pieces, dances, variations, and passacaglias found in the volume, the ricercars show the endurance of the contrapuntal style and are particularly well suited to the organ. Alessandro Scarlatti is renowned foremost for his many operas and cantatas, in which grace of melody rivals keenness of expression. At the end of his life he composed wonderful toccatas for the harpsichord, which, although having remained in manuscript form, were possibly destined for publication. Alongside their free, quasi-improvised sections, their fugues demonstrate a deep understanding of counterpoint.

The appearance and development of instrumental music in seventeenth-century Italy were so sudden and rapid as to seem almost miraculous. The composers, who were often exceptional virtuosos, saw quickly that the varied instruments at their disposal had technical and expressive possibilities very different from those of the voice. In his important treatise Der Vollkommene Capellmeister of 1739, Johann Mattheson confirmed this feature of the instrumental writing that became established around 1600. Stating that this writing, like a daughter with respect to her mother, became more and more independent of vocal music, he described their characteristic differences: “Instrumental melody generally has more vigour and freedom than vocal melody, because instruments can perform leaps that are not possible when sung, because vocal melody cannot be as lively and articulated as instrumental melody, because singers have narrower limits than instruments, and because instruments are better than vocal cords at doing tricks.”

The human voice would certainly remain an ideal model for a long time to come. However, the desire to seduce, to persuade, and to astonish—or to communicate, as we would say today—would in future do without words, or at least replace them by a larger rhetorical principle, giving music itself a new dimension.

— © François Filiatrault, 2004.
Translation: Sally Campbell, Jacques-André Houle