the harpsichord music on this record dates from the central
years of the eighteenth century, a period of dramatic change in
music throughout Europe. We are generally much more familiar
with the Northern aspects of that change — that is, from the late
Baroque to the Classic era — and the differences between the
extremes are well known to all our ears. It may be a surprise,
then, to find that here in Italy, as exemplified by these works from
a span of well over half of the century, the transition was as
smooth as silk and, in a way, almost casual, straight from the
older to the newer music with the sunniest of Italian grace.
We should not really be surprised, of course, but there are
good reasons for our feeling thus. For as we look back at the
“great” composers of that time (i.e., the well known Northerners)
we seem to find the opposite; Baroque to Classic in Northern
terms would appear to have been a sudden and, indeed, almost
abrupt change, all within a few short years. Haydn’s earliest
symphonies, for instance, with all their suavely confident
modernity, were probably composed while Handel and Telemann
were still alive, and Bach dead only a few years. We find, indeed,
a massive overlapping of styles, an interlaced terracing of genera-
tions, the older and younger men at work all at once, conserva-
tives and progressives co-existing — as though German music
could not wait for a more gradual transition. The Bach family
itself, from old J. S. Bach to his youngest son Johann Christian,
epitomizes this: each Bach marks a kind of stylistic “plane”
along the one-generation path of transition. From J.S. to J.C.
Bach (writing in modern Italian style) was indeed a big change.
But as we listen to the present display of representative
Italian music of this same period, we wonder. For none of these
works is by a “great” composer, unless perhaps those of Domenico
Scarlatti. These are lesser men (by our usual terminology)
whose musical contributions are of about equal interest and of a
more or less uniform high competence. They were not “minor”
in their own day. Far from it. And so the question arises for
us: were “great” composers really necessary? And our thought,
listening to this graceful music, is that perhaps in Italy the
answer was — no.
The concept of the “great” composer-genius, towering in
isolation, is utterly out of place in eighteenth-century Italy.
Music then was much too busy, too fecund, to bother with such
mystical theorizings. Hundreds of Italian musical workmen were
turning out enormous quantities of new music on an over-all
level of craftsmanship that has never since been equalled. It
was not written for the ages, but for the day after tomorrow,
not in isolation but in the midst of a popular enthusiasm, seldom
long-lasting but always well built. We find this fecundity first
of all in eighteenth-century Italian opera, but things were the
same in other music, including that for keyboard. Each piece
here performed could be matched by a thousand more — and
thus, necessarily, the Italian musical art progressed from style
to style smoothly, in a kind of continuous average. With such a
teeming production, dizzying peaks of genius were bound to be
rare, and heathily so. The art as a whole was what mattered.
Each craftsman did his bit to carry it on.
We are bound to think on, one step further. Was it really
so different, then, in the North? Truth now compels us to say no.
Our recent emphasis on thé “greats,” the monolithic eighteenth-
century giants — Bach, Handel, then Haydn, Mozart — is
anachronistic. We have judged Northern music mainly in terms
of these giants and our historical picture has been shaped accord-
ingly. They were, in fact, big men and their music was, indeed,
strong and strongly individual. In their terms, history did seem
to jump in great, isolated leaps from style to style.
And yet, if the figures of genius “rose to the top,” as it were,
they did so against a background not much different from that
of their Southern colleagues. The German composer worked,
like the Italian craftsman, in the midst of hundreds as a semi-
equal —or even, as Bach,less than an “equal,” with no more
than a local renown. The truth is that the German scene was
much like the Italian for most of the eighteenth century — large
numbers of busy, fecund composers, a gradual, smooth transition
(if we listen to enough music) from style to style through the
years of change.
But still, a difference remains. The Germanic North did
foster the appearance of the genius type, the musical “great”
(even if he sometimes went unrecognized) as Italy did not.
Perhaps it was a matter of sunny, Southern temperaments and
effervescent minds, better at doing than thinking, versus the |
craggy involutions of Teutonic thought. In any case, by the tail-
end of this eighteenth century the German genius was right out
ih the open — as witness the Handel, revival, the awed worship
of Haydn in his later years, the rediscovery of J.S. Bach. And so
it is no coincidence that, at last, Italy lost its musical dominance
over Europe, and Germany took over — with a style, ironically
enough, it learned to a large part from Italy!
In the present graceful and melodious collection of Italian
works, then, we are looking at the end of an age in Italian terms,
the final late flowering of a peculiarly Southern way of musical
life, effortlessly unconcerned with the implications of genius.
After 150 years of neglect, that attitude is now re-emerging into
our own wide acceptance.
The musical Scarlatti family was large, though only two of
its members, Alessandro and his son Domenico, were outstanding
craftsmen. Pietro was Domenico’s older brother by six years.
He was undoubtedly given the solid family training that Domenico
had; he became organist for the Royal Chapel at Naples and
received one opera commission, which apparently was his first
and last. His only surviving music is a set of six keyboard
toccatas, of which this is one. The music makes an interesting
comparison with that of Domenico which immediatey follows:
Pietro’s Toccata is a well-made but conventional bravura piece,
full of expertly turned sequences built on characteristic finger
figurations, the music understandably sounding not unlike that
of his father, Alessandro.
In contrast, the three short sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti
possess that recognizable and strong individuality of style which
so easily distinguished their composer from his contemporaries :
the memorably brief “motto” ideas, each with its own personality ;
the free-flowing phrase-by-phrase repetitions ; and the deceptively
simple binary form. These three works were evidently intended
as a “tryptich”; they are from the fifth of thirteen manuscript
volumes of Scarlatti’s sonatas copied out for his royal pupil,
Queen Maria Barbara of Spain; the volume is dated 1753.
Domenico Zipoli is of the same generation as Domenico
Scarlatti, born in Prato, Tuscany, in 1688. His composing career
ended eatly, in 1717, when as a Jesuit he left Europe for
Argentina. His harpsichord suite. the earliest music on this
record, combines an Italian graciousness of line with a somewhat
academic type of melody and harmonic sequences in the manner of
Vivadi. The movements are in the expected Baroque binary form
and offer the usual opportunity for changes of registration on the
repeats of each half.
The nineteenth century did not think too much of Baldassare
Galuppi (cf. Robert Browning, for example). Yet as we hear him
now, the composer writes a strong and forward-looking sonata
style, reminding us of moments in the Haydn piano sonatas, as
well as the keyboard music of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. His
use of the minor mode in particular was modern for its time,
already suggesting the strong feelings to be associated with the
minor mode from Mozart onward. This sonata is one of some 90
believed to have been composed between 1755 and Galuppi’s death
in 1785. Like most Italians of his day, Galuppi wrote voluminously
in the other major forms—including quantities of opera and many
oratorios. He was briefly very successful, even acquiring the posi-
tion at St. Mark’s in Venice that had been Monteverdi’s and,
before him, Willaert’s. But though he was clearly an intelligent
and original pioneer of the new Classic expression of the mid-
century, the times moved too fast for him and at his death he had
been virtually forgotten. His strength, however, is easily evident
in this music.
Pietro Domenico Paradies (often known as Paradisi) is of
the same generation as Galuppi, born about 1707 in Naples, living
somewhat longer, until 1791. His style is less advanced than
Galuppi’s but of a good solidity, combining the square, tuneful
motives and figuration of Domenico Scarlatti with an occasional
graceful turn of ornament or a 6-4 chord that brings us close to
Haydn. This impressively large work is one of twelve published
in London in 1757, during Paradies’ long residence in England as
a celebrated teacher and composer. The sonatas were very popular
and were reprinted on a number of occasions.
-So much of the music attributed to the short-lived Giovanni
Battista Pergolesi has turned out to be spurious that a first
question—in about all but his La Serva padrona and Stabat Mater
—is that of authenticity. The present short keyboard piece, ac-
cording to the latest word, is very likely from Pergolesi’s hand—
a favorable prognosis.
“In the field of keyboard music, Rutini was one of the most
significant composers of his time. Refined elegance, along with
dramatic traits, characterize his keyboard sonatas.” So writes the
noted Italian organist-musicologist L. F. Tagliavini. Giovanni
Maria (or Placido) Rutini (1723-1797) was born in Florence,
travelled widely throughout Europe, even becoming music teacher
to the future Catherine the Great, and finally returned to his
native city as an old man. With his music we plunge at last into
the fully developed Classic sonata, only a step from Haydn and
the much younger Mozart — who was born 33 years after Rutini.
The sonata, in three movements, opens with the familiar “Alberti
bass” (named after another Italian composer of the time); the
brilliantly Italianate writing which follows is wholly removed
from the older Baroque solidity. The slow second movement is a
true example of the profound, thoughtful minor-key andante so
wonderfully exploited by C.P.E. Bach and Haydn, while the final
minuet is already akin to those of early Haydn—aristocratic,
elegantly decorative and graceful. The trio is in the minor, fol-
lowed by the expected return of the minuet in the major.
The youngest of our composers, Domenico Cimarosa (1749-
1801), was a product of Naples and a successful opera composer
—at the heart of the opera country—by his thirties. In 1787 he
went to Russia as composer for the Western-oriented Catherine
the Great, then briefly to Vienna and back to Naples—where he
almost lost his life in the 1799 uprising there, part of the turbulent
early Napoleonic disturbances. He was spared, for his music’s
sake—several notable figures intervened for him—and managed
to live on at Venice into the beginning of the new century. His
two one-movement sonatas hark back to Scarlatti, but betray their
later origin in some daring harmonies and Mozartean tuttis in the
first and, in the second, the graceful turns and “Alberti bass” of
the Classic period.
EDWARD TATNALL CANBY
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