Category: Book

[ConNotazioni no. 12]
pp. XX+427 with 32 colour plates
LIM Editrice, 2016 ISBN 9788870968873 €60,00

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]rnaldo Morelli is a prolific musicologist, an organist, and the chief editor of Recercare – Rivista per lo studio e la pratica della musica antica.

Before producing this substantial book on Bernardo Pasquini’s life and work, he produced critical editions of oratorios of Stefano Landi, Marco Marazzoli, B. Pasquini, Sebastiano Lazzarini and G. F. Anerio. Many of his articles are on sacred music, the circulation of oratorios and their texts, patronage and dating in 17th-century Rome, on portraits of musicians, on musical spectacles and the spaces used for them in Rome in the late 1600s, on the function, transmission and sources of Roman cantatas and opera in and after the late 17th century, on performance practice and basso continuo on the organ in 17th century Italian music and in Corelli’s time, and on the lasting influence of Palestrina.

The title of the present work, which is not from a quotation, and appears in larger print than Pasquini’s name and dates, is hard to render in English. ‘Virtue at court’ would be obviously misleading. The virtue in question is that of quality and competence, and refers to Pasquini’s abilities and activities in multiple courts, even simultaneously, and alludes to his virtuosity. All chapters are is headed by the most superlative words of esteem, taken from contemporary quotations. This volume, masterfully researched and well written, is engrossing to read. Morelli’s command of the vast complexities of the period transcends the paucity of existing biographical documents.

Morelli extrapolates and judiciously speculates, carrying the reader from Pasquini’s Pistoian Tuscan origin (Massa in Valdinievole) and brief formative stay in Ferrara (a major musical crossroad between Rome and Venice) to his fame and musical influence, his positions at the courts of Roman society and church, the compositions that we know of (surviving or not) and what we might assume to be his aims in teaching. Morelli is especially enlightening in the many areas about which less was known. Without this book, Pasquini would still be regarded more as a keyboard player than a composer, under the frequent erroneous assumption that he was influenced if not actually taught by Frescobaldi, who died when Pasquini was only 6.

Pasquini went to Ferrara in 1649 at the age of 12, becoming organist of the Accademia della Morte in February of 1654. Perhaps he studied with Cazzati, or Marini, or Cappellini between 1648 and 1653, all of whom had held the post. By the end of 1655 Pasquini had moved on to Rome.

His connections there are covered at length, as he found patrons who commissioned his operas, oratorios, cantatas, and employed him as a keyboard virtuoso, alone and in combination with Corelli and others. The Roman nobility figure throughout the next 300 pages of the 450-page book. They loaned their musicians to each other, and an artist could enter the service of another court, widening his opportunities for work, without breaking with his former patrons. Employment by Cardinal Flavio Chigi (very supportive of opera) may have led to his becoming a musical factotum for Giovanni Battista Borghese from 1668, in Venice as well as in Rome, in his residences, theatres, and in S. Maria Maggiore (playing, teaching, writing, producing operas, oratorios and cantatas). Pasquini was shared between them, even replacing Antonio Cesti, who died in 1669, and ‘inheriting’ the Aretine composer’s connection with the librettist G. F. Apolloni.

When the theatres were closed for religious reasons, production turned to oratorios; when they reopened, more operas followed. The Borghese were related to the Pamphilj. From at least 1677 Benedetto Pamphilij was writing oratorios to be set by Pasquini, even into the 1690s. When the Church became more hostile towards opera (after 1681 under Pope Innocent XI), impresarios and aristocrats stepped in, the Bernini and the Capranica, and from Naples the Spanish marquis Del Carpio and prince Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna. Morelli takes the reader year by year, carnival by carnival, work by work, describing the operas alternating with the oratorios. Numerous operas were also produced for the Medici in Florence.

In presenting Pasquini’s compositions Morelli discusses them literarily and theatrically where the librettos exist, as well as musically if we also have scores, and he quotes from letters and contemporary criticism to describe them as well. Other works were produced for special spectacular events. In 1687, in the palace of Christina of Sweden, Pasquini set the Accademia per musica  to celebrate the coronation of James II. The performance lasted until 5 in the morning, with a choir of 100 singers, with 150 players led by Corelli, and with every player and singer holding a candle. It disappointed some by ‘seeming to fly by in an hour and a half’!

Pasquini had written an opera a year for twenty years, the last being L’Eudossia, performed in 1692. Cardinal Ottoboni managed to have it performed in his theatre by promising an oratorio, La Bersabea, to the Jesuit Seminary. Again Corelli organized the instrumentalists.

In the same year, for economic reasons, G. B. Borghese had to let Pasquini go, after 25 years’ service. Ottobuoni stepped in to give Pasquini an apartment, while the composer took the opportunity to go to his cousin Francesco Ricordati in Tuscany. This may have prompted the performance of the Tirinto  in Florence that year, and then L’Idalma  in Livorno in 1693. Soon back in Rome he was hired by Marcantonio Borghese (in competition with his father) and moved back into the Borghese palace.

The stream of personalities who came to Rome to hear, visit or study with Pasquini is historically interesting. It boosted his fame as an organist, which resulted in numerous manuscripts being prepared and finding their way into collections in England, Austria and Germany. At the end of 1704 Pasquini retired as organist of S. Maria Maggiore but continued to teach until 1708. He died on November 21, 1710, in the Borghese palace, his home for 40 years. This ends Morelli’s first chapter!

Chapter II takes the reader through 16 or so operas from 1672 to 1692. Musical examples help illustrate how different theatrical genres were conceived, and character roles typified. Comedies, in the 1670s are contrasted with dramas in the 1680s; types of comedies are distinguished by the comic roles themselves, whether lower class characters or quartets of lovers; dramas also reflect on the figures who commissioned them, and the public for which they were destined. Arias and recitatives are described, especially those with sections in contrasting meters and tempos, or with four instrumental parts in addition to the continuo. (In Example 8 a mistaken elision in the underlay, just where a comma may have been intended, caused the music-writing program to anticipate all the syllables from the end of bar 13 to the beginning of bar 17: as in the repeat of the phrase, the final rhyming syllables are on the same long melisma, with a breath before the principal initial upbeats.)

All the examples illustrate the clarity of Pasquini’s style. As we’d expect when voice and/or instruments define the harmony, there are hardly any continuo figures. But there are occasional notes odd enough that if not erroneous, they should have been marked ‘?’ or ‘sic’ or even editorially corrected (e.g. in Ex. 12, bars 39 and 50). They may well be the notes a scribe wrote, but that doesn’t make them right. Morelli’s extended descriptions of the operas, whether by means of musical examples or descriptive plot synopses, make the reader yearn to hear them, because he always discusses the music in relation to the plot, and the style called for by the type of drama.

It was thought that no score of L’Eudossia  (1692) existed after one in Würzburg was destroyed in WWII. Another, copied possibly by Flavio Carlo Lanciani (employed by Cardinal Ottoboni), has come to light, and Morelli was able to examine it for one day and also make a copy of it. His discussion and the examples he gives are therefore a scoop.

The third chapter, halfway into the volume, is only a few pages long, with no examples. Pasquini was a prolific composer of cantatas (circa 50 for solo voice, a few for two or three, and a few with instruments). Morelli refers us to Alexandra Nigito’s highly recommendable edition of Pasquini’s Cantatas (Brepol, 2012). Most of the sources are in the Estense library in Modena, but a table of the titles, vocal ranges (the soprano parts are often high, reaching a” and b”; mezzo-soprano parts can be considered for altos, rarely going beyond d” and e”) and the locations of the manuscripts would have been very useful here.

In Chapter IV, Virtuosi trattenimenti  [moral entertainments], ricreazioni spirituali  [spiritual distractions], we get musical examples from some devotional works, whether for the Borghese family chapel or the magnificent palatial salons to which a vast public was invited. The oratorio Caino e Abele  1671), with Apolloni’s libretto, was for domestic consumption. It presents the only two couples on earth (Cain +Abel and Adam + Eve), plus Satan, God and a narrator, with recitatives, arias (including examples 34 and 35: Satan’s aria with two violins and Cain’s recit and lament with bass lira), duets, and choruses. Morelli includes a colour plate of a painting of Homer playing a 13-string lirone with 11 strings over the fingerboard and 2 off, noting that such a lira da gamba could accompany Cain’s lament better than inflexibly tempered continuo instruments such as organ or harpsichord. It could also play chords on three strings at once. The recitative requires the dominants of b, e and f# minor keys, with problematic leading notes a#, d# and e#. The juxtaposition of major and minor chords is not problematic, especially as it is confirmed by continuo figures. Morelli leaves the figures as found, even where they were misleading. In bar 4: 5-6/# is presumably over #3-4 and the hyphens mean to defer the chord change for quite a while; in bar 11: 6# here means 6/#3; in bar 14, # can only mean #4, not a major third; in bar 25 a surprising 9# for a #2 was not the normal way of indicating the dissonance in the bass (6/#4/#2) – which Pasquini used frequently in his figured bass sonatas – so ‘6 – 9#’ was shorthand for the exact skip in the voice. Morelli edited and recorded this oratorio in 1988.

This recitative of Cain shows another interesting characteristic of Pasquini’s that Morelli doesn’t mention: where Pasquini sets a single syllable to two slurred (beamed) notes, as happens in a downward skip, an appoggiatura, a resolving suspension, or an accented passing note (all occurring here), he deliberately halves the duration of the higher note, whether dissonant or not, suspended or not, in order to anticipate the lower note, which is then repeated on the next beat. This belies our penchant for stressing dissonances and also, very practically, cues the continuo player to the sharpened 3rd, 6th, or 7th coming on the next beat. This shying away from a higher note in order to play the lower note twice is also an expressive written-out ornament used in cadences and elsewhere in the melodic line (bars 4, 7, 10, 21, 23). I don’t know if there is a term for this slightly exceptional type of anticipation, and since most of the discretionary appoggiaturas are not indicated at all, it may even derive from the older use of ligatures for setting a syllable to a short melisma: all the paired notes on single syllables are in fact short enough to be beamable (quavers or semiquavers). Interestingly, Morelli says that the expressive effects in Caino e Abele  and in La sete di Cristo  (1689), both for small publics, are not found in Pasquini’s operas.

The insert of 29 beautiful colour plates on glossy paper precedes the next chapter. It is a welcome way to recall the ground covered so far. Or perhaps it increases the suspense, because as a harpsichordist and continuo player I did not expect the chapter on Pasquini at the keyboard to come so late in the book! It is also very short, and followed by an even shorter one on the seven – not all surviving – portraits of the composer.

The heading for Chapter V, ‘The truest, most beautiful and noble manner of playing and accompanying’ [La più vera, bella e nobile maniera di suonare e di accompagnare] describes Pasquini at the keyboard. These are the middle words of an immensely significant sentence about Pasquini by Francesco Gasparini (1708), who calls the manner and its effect ‘so full’ that one hears from his harpsichord ‘a perfection of marvellous Harmony’. Pasquini’s keyboard works, which he may have intended for didactic use, from the easiest pieces to the most virtuosic, remained in manuscript, unprinted for almost 200 years, and only in part surviving, principally from sources in Berlin and London. They are described without examples.

Morelli gradually works back to Gasparini, and to another composer who studied with Pasquini, Georg Muffat (1699), discussing the utmost importance of Pasquini’s teaching of continuo. It is impossible, however, to do so in general terms, as there really are too many aspects of it. In fact Morelli says that to reconstruct his style of playing and accompanying would ‘verge on utopia’. In addition to various treatises of rules attributed to Pasquini, his 14 solo Sonatas and 14 Sonatas for two harpsichords notated only as figured basses (and quite fun to play) do give an almost complete picture of his vocabulary of figures. Following Anthony Newcomb, Morelli assigns them to a new genre: compositions, whether written or not, designed to give the impression of being spontaneous improvisations. (The figuring in his vocal works, however, are typically incomplete because vocal and instrumental lines supply or imply all the necessary notes.) Before presenting only a few short examples, Morelli mentions the use of added inharmonic notes as described by Gasparini, even if not explicitly found in Pasquini. The evidence that his full sound must have been replete with such acciaccature and mordenti  is only that it ‘had to be witnessed’. Maybe so, but I would argue that this ignores Gasparini’s concluding words, precisely regarding its fullness: una perfezione di armonia meravigliosa. Both the perfection and the fullness would come from doubling the consonances and using good voice leading, not from strange ‘wrong’ notes and contrapuntal licenses. After all these references (including Marcello’s) to such false [false notes] Morelli does also admit that they aren’t actually to be found. However – and this is the point – the very title of Salvatore Carchiolo’s authoritative and indispensable book on Italian continuo practice is Una perfezione d’armonia meravigliosa  (LIM 2007-2011). He, too, is quoting Gasparini on the marvellously harmonic continuo style of Pasquini.

Example 60a on p. 343 is given an improbable realization in 60b (oddly termed ‘an acciaccatura … between the vocal part and the basso continuo’) which Morelli says ‘only the continuo figure 2 makes evident’. Ex. 60a is seen in context in Ex. 12 on p. 157: the figure 2 in question is not in a recitative passage, but in a 3/2 arioso phrase between a few bars of recitative. It refers to the only note that the continuo must supply, so that the voice’s B flat, which we would call the root of the coming harmony, will be immediately heard as such, before and while the suspended dissonant bass note resolves down to the 3rd of the chord. It is true that in his figured bass sonatas Pasquini loved 6/4/2 chords, usually figured 4/2 and always followed by a chord change, which is not what happens in this example. Why would one play an f minor chord between the continuo’s e and the singer’s b flat? The beauty of a 5/2 chord is that when it is held while the bass drops it becomes a 6/3. The B flat is even dotted, a further indication that it is an essential note, a cue to the continuo player to play plenty of B flats and Fs and to hold them over the next bass note as well. Another observation on the realization proposed might be that if an accompaniment is to be ‘full and harmonious’, why shy away from playing the singer’s notes? This applies to the last note of the following bar as well, where the realization seems so constrained to remaining below the voice that it doesn’t play at all! Again, if a chord does not change it can be held or repeated.

Let me end by saying that all of the 62 musical examples (many long) in this book are exciting to discover. I think that the quotation of 1679 that heads Morelli’s Chapter II (Pasquini and the theatre) is indeed an understatement: ‘Of the most excellent composers in Rome, he is second to none.’

Barbara M. Sachs

Updated edition, OUP: 2016
204pp, £14.99
ISBN 978-0-19-049012-6 (paperback)

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his indispensable handbook for all interested in performing, exploring and listening to Bach’s remaining Passions was first published in 2005. Now Daniel Melamed has revised and updated it in the light of recent research and some new discoveries, as well as the changing fashions in historically informed performance practice. Alongside up-to-date bibliographies and discographies, it has a set of tables in the back with the contents of the Good Friday Vespers in Leipzig in Bach’s time, the Passion repertory in Bach’s possession and a Calendar of all his known passion performances in Leipzig; there are lists of the vocal parts for the 1725 John, the 1736 Matthew and the anonymous Mark passion. There are lists of the various movements in the different versions of the Passion, including the Mark BWV 247 and the anonymous Luke BWV 246, and there are suggestions for further reading and a good index. All this makes this slender volume – 178 pages in all – an enormously useful guide to the issues around current research and performance.

Melamed’s Preface to this 2016 edition lists the new discoveries: a printed libretto for the ‘lost’ St Mark Passion BWV 247 of 1731 dated 1744, confirming that this Passion entered Bach’s repertoire and was not just a one-off; a Nuremburg publication of 1728 containing a number of church texts including a libretto that corresponds to the 1725 version of Bach’s St John Passion; and a libretto for a Leipzig performance directed by Bach of a poetic Passion by Heinrich Stölzel, containing no direct biblical text, but only a paraphrase on the lines of the Brockes passion set by Telemann and Handel amongst others. A Passion without the actual biblical text seems to have been frowned on in Leipzig.

He lists other important published sources, including the www.bach-digital.de website that reproduces most of the surviving autograph scores and parts, outlines the areas where research continues – in the connection between the Cöthen Funeral Music and the Matthew Passion, for example, and draws our attention to significant recent studies – Eric Chafe’s J. S. Bach’s Johannine Theology  (OUP, 2014) and John Butt’s Bach’s Dialogue with Modernity: Perspectives on the Passions  (CUP 2010) among them.

His introduction is impressively comprehensive: Melamed takes us through questions of performing forces, the liturgical context and the text of Bach’s Passions and then comes to the music itself and the way we hear it compared to Bach’s listeners. Novel to them would have been the recent Oratorio Passions, with their operatic sounding ariosos and arias. But while we can pretty accurately reconstruct the instruments and the size of both playing and singing groups, what can we discern about the ears through which these compositions were heard and the sound of those voices through which they were realised?

Part I rehearses the evidence for Vocal Forces in Bach’s Passions, and their numbers in relation to the instruments – still, in spite of the evidence marshalled by Joshua Rifkin and Andrew Parrott, a hotly contended issue – and follows this with a section on Singers and their Roles in the Passions. Melamed reminds his readers of the evidence for the size of the chorus, and of the nineteenth century origins of the tradition of performances with large choirs. He then helps his readers to step behind the modern operatic convention that one singer ‘represents’ a particular character and realize that Bach’s singers sing all the music in their voice-part, and so – like us – find themselves exposed to contradictory demands and emotions. This is important if listeners are to feel drawn into the liturgical action of the Passions and experience the challenges they pose, and not merely observe them from their seats as concertgoers. He also rehearses the diversity of practice between different performances, and asks why subordinate roles were sometimes given to the principal singer or to a ripienist  or even sometimes written in an entirely separate part – were these parts perhaps sung by an instrumentalist? We have no means of knowing, as each performance produced its particular revisions. Certainly my own conducting scores are littered with names of performers who took roles on different occasions, crossed or rubbed out when other singers’ names were inserted. This is a useful summary of the discussion that was generated first by John Butt in Bach’s Dialogue with Modernity  (CUP 2010), who has put into practice much of what we know about the place of the Passions in the liturgical life of the worshippers in Leipzig in the first third of the eighteenth century in his recording with his Dunedin Consort of the St John Passion in 2012/3 (LINN CKD419).

Part II is headed: Passions in Performance, and devotes a chapter to each of the Matthew, John and Mark Passions. The focus of that on the Matthew is: Is Bach’s St Matthew Passion really for double chorus and orchestra? To which his answer seems to be both yes and no. In some ways I find this a less satisfactory chapter, though its fuller form published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, 2004, vol. 57, no. 1 is more persuasive. Unlike other chapters, it does not seem to me to address the essential question that those who listen to or perform the Matthew need to grapple with. For me, that question is not about the two cori and whether they have independent or merely intertwined lines: several of the motets are in two choirs, and there are those cantatas like BWV 67, Halt im Gedächtnis, which have a Vox Christi responding to disciples or some other form of one against three like Eilt, eilt  in the John Passion. Nor does Melamed refer to Peter Seymour’s recording with the Yorkshire Bach Soloists of the early version of the Matthew with its single continuo line (Signum SIGCD 385) as I imagine that his revised book was already with the publisher before Seymour’s recording was published.

The Matthew is nowhere as dramatic as the John in its setting of the biblical narrative, but the quality of the melodic material in the ariosos and arias has an instinctive appeal. In a work where each singer covers many different roles, how does the principle, enunciated by Luther in his sermons on the Passion in 1519 and 1521, that it is wrong to blame others – the Jews or Judas – for the death of Christ as we are all we are fallen sinners so corporately responsible, work out in practice for the listeners – the congregation? The more pressing question for me about the Matthew is how Bach works with the two cori, a step beyond the single coro with the additional four ripienists of the John, to help us understand the theology of Matthew’s passion narrative and develop our reflection on it. In other words, how does the dramatic interplay between the ‘Daughter of Zion’ (coro I) and the ‘Believers’ (coro II) contribute both musically and theologically to the evolving work?

The Chapter on the John Passion is called Which St John Passion BWV 245: What do we do when a composition survives in several versions? Here we are on ground that performers have been grappling with for some time, and where the questions of how a ripieno group or second coro was used seem relatively clear: you cannot perform Mein teurer Heiland  without a second bass singer, and ripieno parts for all four voices survive, making it clear that the St John Passion was performed by eight singers in the coro.

What is more complex is to establish with some clarity just which of the four known versions any one performance will follow. Clearest is the second, from 1725, because it is from this version that the bulk of the surviving parts date. But that is also the least typical, with a large number of substitutions of different arias, choruses and chorales steering the work in a more apocalyptic theological direction, made perhaps to distinguish the work from the previous year’s performance. In the third version from around 1732, Bach restored a good deal of the material from 1724, though he substituted muted violins and a keyboard for the violas d’amore and lute of 1725 in Betrachte  and Erwege, and in this version, Ach, mein Sinn  and Zerfließe  had a substitute aria and an instrumental sinfonia respectively, both of which are now lost. For the final revision in 1749, there was a more wholesale return to the earliest version musically with only slight tweaks musically, but this time the rather striking imagery in the text of a number of the arias was toned down in a more rationalistic manner, and we can only imagine what theological controversies or undercurrents may have provoked this. Again, what developing theological understanding of his own might lie behind Bach’s changes? We cannot know, and can only surmise from the textual history.

The third chapter in this section is called A St Mark Passion Makes the Rounds: What should we make of the eighteenth-century practice of reworking passion settings for performances in various times and places? This section is on how working church musicians like Bach used and adapted other people’s work to fulfil a liturgical requirement, when there was not the reverence that would now be felt for the integrity of a composer’s composition. The working example is the St Mark Passion that was long thought to be by Reinhard Keiser, and first surfaces in a performance in 1707 at Hamburg. Some arias in a more Italianate style were added to this Passion – these were  by Keiser – before this bundle reached Bach for the first of his performances of it somewhere in Weimar between 1711 and 1714. In making a set of parts, Bach seems to have added a couple of arias of his own. This was the Passion that he performed in his third year in Leipzig, in 1726, and at least again in the 1740s for which a number of further arias were added from Händel’s Brockes passion, as evidenced by the very few parts that survive from that revision, prompting Melamed to conjecture that someone somewhere is sitting on the surviving set! What these substitutions and borrowings show is that Bach was adapting other people’s material, but with each revision making it closer to the theological conception behind his own setting of the Mark Passion, to which he turns next.

In Parody and Reconstruction: The St Mark Passion BWV 247, the question he asks is Can the eighteenth century practice of reusing vocal music help us recover a lost Passion setting by Bach? Here there are two examples: first the extensive parodying of the Matthew Passion and the Trauerode  in 1729 to produce the funeral music for Prince Leopold in Cöthen. Those familiar with Andrew Parrott’s 2004 reconstruction and have had the opportunity to compare that with Morgon Jourdain’s more recent version by the Ensemble Pygmalion under Raphäel Pichon will have seen the ‘restorer’s’ skills at work. The second is the St Mark Passion which we know that Bach presented on Good Friday 1731, and we can reconstruct some of it, because the libretto survives in a collected publication of Picander’s – Bach’s favourite librettist’s – verse published in 1732. To use the rhythms of Picander’s verse to recover suitable music is sometimes easier, and the Trauerode  seems again a likely source for at least the opening and closing choruses. The chorales too can mostly be traced in Bach’s extensive oeuvre. Arias can sometimes conjecturally be matched, but the ariosos and the recitative carrying the narrative never. So he concludes that all the versions – and there are several by reputable conductors – are ersatz, and at best can be no more than a modern pastiche in the eighteenth-century tradition. I think that this is right, and have never felt able to present one of these versions, as they have never seemed to me to be what it says on the tin.

Where does that leave Melamed with the Luke Passion to which the nineteenth century editors of the BG confidently assigned the number BWV 246? Clear for internal reasons and from what we can discern about the music’s transmission that it cannot be genuine Bach, and uncertain as to whether it was ever performed by Bach, Melamed concludes that it will be its fate to be Bach and Not Bach forever.

While it is good to be reminded of the reception history of these imperfect works, my take on this guide is that it is those performance issues that surface in the earlier part of the book that are the most useful practically to performers and listeners alike. Other performance issues that might have deserved a mention include the use of the harpsichord, the pitch of the violone, the use of the Bassono Grosso in the 1749 revision of the John – does it really mean what we mean by a Contra-bassoon, or was it used more as the wind equivalent of a G violone? – and the pitch and temperaments of the organ(s). Another table might have given the ranges of the voice-parts in the various Passions, including the bit-parts.

But performers and listeners alike will learn something they did not know from this brief work, and the publishers should be congratulated on this revision and reprint.

David Stancliffe

A Translation with Commentary of the Code de musique pratique and Nouvelles réflexions sur le principe sonore  (1760)
Foreword by Robert Zappulla
Teorie Musicali, 2
LIM, 2015
pp. xxv + 653
ISBN 9788870968460 €40

[dropcap]M[/dropcap]ark Howard’s translation of the two final treatises (1760) by Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764) is a staggering and long-awaited achievement! If reading these close-to-literal translations at times requires some effort, the reader is guided by the in-depth, in-detail, chapter by chapter commentaries that follow every section. Actually the word “commentary” is an understatement for what Howard provides, which goes beyond summarizing, to paraphrase, quote at length and explain Rameau’s thinking, his theories and his convictions as a composer and teacher. The commentaries also lend Rameau a defense he requires, by helping the reader to adopt his personal musical terminology, which is essential for following his reasoning, and seriously entertaining his conclusions.

Dr. Howard’s discussion explains the methods, rules and analyses of the Code  and Rameau’s supplementary réflexions  in their historical context (another understatement), including point by point comparisons with Rameau’s previous Traité de l’harmonie  (1722), Nouveau système de musique théorique  (1726), Dissertation sur les différentes métodes d’accompagnement  (1732), L’Art de la Basse Fondamentale  (unpublished, ca. 1737-44), and Réflexions de M. Rameau sur la maniere de former la voix e d’apprendre la Musique… (1752). This hefty (1 kg?) volume is 1/3 Rameau and 2/3 Howard, which fact alone recommends it highly.

Since the chapter commentaries follow their respective chapters, multiple bookmarks are recommended; a finger won’t do because of the many cross-references to other chapters. (Putting the History, Commentaries, bibliography and index into a separate volume might have helped this minor problem! But the plan works amazingly well, and one can choose when to skip backward or forward to the original or to other relevant sections. The 9-page Table of Contents is in itself a useful detailed outline of the headings of the 17 chapters of the Code  with their subdivisions (articles, lessons, means, and observations). In the text itself, Rameau’s numbered paragraphs (¶) appear. Those original paragraph numbers are similarly clear in the commentaries, where they may cue the reader to other chapters. Howard also puts the original page numbers in the margins, for those with access to volume 4 of E. R. Jacobi’s 6-volume facsimile edition. Rameau’s footnotes are distinguished from Howard’s: there are very few of either. The LIM gets as much as possible on every line and every page, and for a bit of comic relief the English reader might chuckle at some arbitrary hyphenation (such as an-yone  or id-ea  or theat-er).

Now – why do the codes of practical music require decoding?

The translation gives a feeling for how Rameau actually expressed his rules, theories, and recommendations, without being hopelessly obscure. A more idiomatic English version would have spawned ambiguities, because the idiosyncratic terminology of Rameau, innovative in itself, is integral to his meaning, and to his arguably scientific premises (e.g. from Adam to Pythagoras, the frequency ratios of intervals and harmonics ‘must’ explain music, but in the end the human ear somehow accepts their distortions while still apprehending chromatic and enharmonic effects).

Concepts explained and better left in French (e.g. corps sonoré, accord sensible, goût, pleureuse  [Ex.N6, p. 343, the first b’ needs a flat], and règle de l’octave) or in non-standard English usage (e.g. broken  cadence, added, reigning  tonic), are in italics. Normal words used differently (e.g. scales, dominant, fingers 1-2-3-4 = our 5-4-3-2), or coined as necessary (e.g. supposition, intertwining suppositions, double employment) are just temporary hurdles. New terms are indispensable for new understanding of composition. A very tiny complaint might be that when details in the musical examples are discussed, the notes are referred to by capital letters, and not designated by their precise pitches (C, c, c’, c”), which would have made the points discussed easier to appreciate.

Rameau’s controversial theories were disputed by his contemporaries, and he was bent on having composers, musicians, singers, players, continuo accompanists and listeners all on the same page! His fame as a teacher and composer obliges us to try very hard to comply. It is sometimes hard, but often enlightening. For example: his theories about modulation – each modulation expresses a different ‘situation’ or frame of mind, and whether it is within the corps sonoré  of the reigning tonic  or not determines the degree of its effect on the listener; his didactic strategies – a beginner at the keyboard must first learn to play the Scales of Thirds [i.e. c-e-g-b-d] and of Fifths; recommendations for an accompanist – one is above all to play four notes to every chord, in the right hand, and without the thumb, because otherwise his fingering for the voice leading patterns will simply not work, and the thumb will not be available for an optional doubling of the note played by the highest finger (if allowable). Even if one tries these procedures, they may or may not be deemed practicable, because our modern techniques do not enable us to do some of these things! As for the analyses, he derives and posits Fundamental Basses determined by melody, or harmony, to explain compositional intentions, and whatever theoretical background the reader has, he may not expect the rules to differ, according to his choice of an unwritten ‘B.F.’! (The brilliant lecture on creativity by John Cleese comes to mind: the creative mind does not choose quickly, but can tolerate being uncertain for a long time.)

Rameau’s treatment of figured bass is imbued with everything he knew from experience playing and teaching. Much of it has to do with fingering. But was the following exquisite hint ever expressed elsewhere, on how to time the notes of a chord? Code… Chap. V Method for Accompaniment, Lesson 28 ¶250 (the emphasis is mine):

‘…to bring the basse continue  and the chords together  … Its entire art consists in playing the basse continue  with the left hand along with  the 4[th] [i.e. the index] finger of the right. Without this precaution, one of the hands would not be in time… Then  the other fingers of the right hand fall successively, forming an arpeggio. This is done with much more exactitude when the hand is supple and the movement only comes from the fingers.’

His innovations for how to figure  a bass were also eminently practical. Rameau was bothered by the informational defects of a complicated notation that sometimes indicated the exact intervals, but otherwise the nominal intervals, susceptible to alteration respect to the key signature. (We have inherited various contradictory systems, the shorthand notation of different schools, periods, and composers, and we need a legend for each one, plus our own preferred method.) Rameau refined an ingenious system, with an ambitious agenda: to ensure that every chord be intelligible with the least possible number of figures, and to enable the player to instantly know its function in the fabric of the composition. He called ‘dominant-tonic’ the V7, in any inversion, as well as the VII, of any fleeting or prevailing tonic. He called ‘dominant’ any chord proceeding downward along the circle of fifths. The first, in any inversion, is always distinguishable by a cross (+, or X) indicating a note acting anywhere as a leading-note (be it a 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 or 7), whether implied by the key signature or not, and whether in a momentary modulation or the reigning  tonality; accidentals and slashes are relegated to all other cases. The player has more information with less to remember: he sees the intervals to be produced, in a manner that defines the form and purpose (which may depend on the composer’s idea of the actual basse fondamentale) of any unequivocally figured chord. In fact, this distinction in itself, along with the French règle de l’octave  and Rameau’s original observations about dissonances, is a cogent reason for every continuo player to read the Code. A lot of what a continuist has to do is to play unfigured basses, and one could do very well to adopt personally these final figuring recommendations. which Rameau made after encountering these problems throughout his life!

Today, as heirs of Rameau, we probably study harmony before counterpoint, with or without composition, and lastly, if ever, decide to learn thorough-bass. This is totally backward, and we find ourselves needing to ignore especially harmony in order to play basso continuo  fluently! Rameau is therefore a sort of Rosetta stone, coming from the other side. The basse fondamentale  (fundamental bass, b.f. as opposed to b.c.) was his invention, expressing a hypothetical analysis of a passage, alongside the given basse continue  to be realized. Various ones are possible, requiring different treatments. Rameau’s b.f. defined new rules for composer and player alike, and was invoked to explain why music can effect listeners as it does. It often made these rules and explanations simpler. In fact there are striking similarities between the theories of Rameau and those of both Schönberg and Schenker – due to their basic correctness.

I apologize to readers for a review that cannot possibly say much about so detailed and comprehensive a work, but I’d like to add that Rameau is not all heavy-going. He is synthetic when discussing taste, imagination, how to obtain beautiful effects, how music was to be understood, etc. He is likeable for his passion, guidance, rules, his intellectual reasons, his ‘tough-love’ for his students. Dr. Howard’s expertise puts Rameau’s final writings into the widest historically informed context, and keeps the reader from giving up at bewildering moments. And, most importantly, the Code  is finally available – especially to players of French Baroque music – ‘decoded’ into English thanks to his mammoth undertaking, and in a soft-cover format with two useful flaps by the LIM.

Barbara Sachs

The Theology of J. S. Bach’s solo violin works
Pickwick Publications, Eugene, Oregon
ISBN 978-1-4982-3941-7
xxvii+267pp, $28.00

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his is not the first monograph to employ a variety of disciplines to delve beneath the surface of a group of surviving compositions by Bach in the hope of finding a hidden key to their understanding and interpretation: nor will it be the last. But what is unusual about Benjamin Shute is that he does not go overboard for the one-and-only solution, instead adopting a multi-faceted approach to unearthing the composer’s intentions.

For those who are not persuaded that the key to Sei Solo  is to be found exclusively in just symbolic numbers, or key sequences, or symbolic references, or Biblical typology, studies that acknowledge the complexity of Bach’s mind, the diversity of his accomplishments and the range of Biblical, social and cultural influences under which he was formed as a person stand a greater chance of winning my sympathy, and this is certainly one of them.

Benjamin Shute is a violinist and musicologist who has lived with and performed the Sei Solo  on both modern and period instruments. He has a range of academic studies to his credit and knows the Bach oeuvre inside out – he clearly knows the keyboard works and the cantatas as well as he knows the instrumental music. But, more significantly for the task he has set himself, he has done a substantial amount to penetrate Bach’s intellectual and theological mindset. While we know tantalizingly little about Bach’s personal beliefs, we know a good deal about that generation’s commonplace assumptions about symbolic language and Lutheran typology – two areas in which their basic assumptions are notably different from our own. But more specifically, we also know how Bach marked and underlined his prized copy of Calov’s Die deutsche Bibel. In these important areas where few musicians are totally at home, Shute seems surefooted. This is a good omen for a study that is complex, detailed and seems to me to reach pretty plausible insights.

His thesis in brief is ‘that the nativity of Christ is represented in the first sonata in G minor while the juxtaposed D minor partita and C major sonata are the locus of passion-resurrection imagery.’ He acknowledges that there have been both numerological and emotion-based interpretations in these areas, but none relying on firm musicological bases. These he begins to lay out, undergirding his research with a sketch of the shift from thinking of music as en expression of the divine wisdom, an essentially Aristotelian absolute, towards music as a more subjective expression of human feeling, revealing the drama and rhetoric of the ‘seconda prattica.’ In Germany these two traditions – ratio and sensus – remained side by side until the 18th century, and the struggle to balance the two is evident in Bach’s work. So stand-alone instrumental music has a theological proclamation in its conviction that the compositional complexity of contrapuntal music reveals the inherent order of the cosmos, while texted music has a more obvious emotive power to communicate the particularity of the Word. It is the activity of the Holy Spirit that animates both the composer’s mind and the hearers’ ears to receive the divine breath of life.

In instrumental music such as the Sei Solo, therefore, we can expect the structure and the relationships of keys for example to carry a symbolic or allegorical significance, without being tied to particular texts. Music does not need a religious or theological text to be a witness to the divine nature of music. Just as Luther saw Josquin’s music as a microcosm of grace superseding law, so Bach and his Lutheran forebears understood a whole complex world of sound and notation as embodying the divine harmony of the Trinity: the relationship of key to key, note to note within the traditional solmization overlay a rich and symbolic theological language.

One obvious model for Bach’s Sei Solo  was Heinrich Ignaz Biber’s set of 15 sonatas for violin and continuo, where each is preceded by an engraving of one of the fifteen mysteries of the Rosary. The set ends with a monumental Passacaglia for unaccompanied violin ‘that is the most striking precursor of Bach’s Ciaccona’.

In the Lutheran tradition, Bach’s predecessor as Kantor at St Thomas’, Johann Kuhnau, had composed a set of Biblical sonatas for keyboard. Kuhnau and Bach had met in 1716 to examine a new organ in Halle, and his six sonatas of 1700 had been reprinted in 1710. Many of Bach’s works are in sets of six: the Brandenburg concertos, the Sonatas for Violoncello solo, the Schübler Chorale Preludes, the French Suites, the Trio Sonatas for organ as well as the Sei Solo. The number six reflects the Biblical six days of creation, and came to be viewed as a complete number. But there is no superficial evidence for an obvious programmatic plan behind Sei Solo, as there is in the Biber and Kuhnau. Is there any evidence of a hidden schema? To discover one is the underlying purpose of Shute’s study.

First he examines the chiastic structure of the Ciaccona, and notes its parallels in the Actus Tragicus  and the Credo of the B minor whose central movement, the Crucifixus, has a one sharp (cross) key signature. He only briefly refers to the central chiastic structure of the Johannespassion, though he notices Chafe’s J. S. Bach’s Johannine Theology, an important study. He sees a likely antecedent in the Ciaccona in the wedding cantata composed by Johann Christoph Bach and preserved by Johann Sebastian in the Altbachisches Archiv, which has a virtuoso violin part over the repeated bass. and sets a text studded with references to The Song of Songs, where the lovesick bride longs for her groom – a theme that occurs frequently in the cantatas and in the opening of the Matthäuspassion. From this he moves to consider the descent-ascent pattern, related key structures and concludes that the Ciaccona and the C major sonata that follows it represent a strong crucifixion-resurrection motif. I recount this chapter in some detail, as it gives an insight into Shute’s detailed working on a number of interlinked fronts.

The following chapter analyses the musical reversal of the descent theme in the D minor Ciaccona in the C major fuga, and speculates on the links with the two chorales, An Wasserflüssen Babylon  and Komm, heiliger Geist, both discernable in the subject Mattheson set for the audition in Hamburg where Bach gave such an impressive display. Shute links this to the theme of exile and restoration in Israel’s history as a type of Christ’s dying and rising, which accomplishes the restoration of the fallen human race, showing how Luther and his successors used Psalm 137 – An Wasserflüssen Babylon  – as a type of longing for our restoration in Christ to our heavenly home. This is the context in which Shute comments on Bach’s words ‘al riverso’, written just before he presents the subject and countersubject of the fugue exclusively in inversion. ‘The exile theme, with its possible secondary association with the passion, is turned emphatically upside-down as the very material that had previous formed an unequivocal descent . . . . is turned on its head to create a similarly unequivocal, glorious ascent.’ (p.57)

I find his detailed musical analysis, his knowledge of the wider context of Lutheran theology, and his ability to relate musical structures to the broad sweep of Christian theology very compelling. Of course, there are occasional slips: the wonderful aria at the end of the Matthäuspassion  “Mache dich” that signals the way in which the dead Christ is wrapped in the warmth of our embrace is accompanied by the warm, rich tones of oboes da caccia, not oboes d’amore. But such slips are very rare, and the wealth of references to musical, theological and historical sources – there are 87 substantial footnotes to this chapter alone – gives me confidence in his modest judgements.

The Chapter ‘A Broader Theological Schema in the Sei Solo? looks at the whole collection, and explores the key sequence in relation to among other things, the stringing of the violin, the hexachord and the fulfillment of the work of creation, commenting on the emerging associations of both keys and rhythms. Chapter 5 examines number correlations in the Partitas, and the final chapter is entitled ‘A Hermeneutic Overview of the Sei Solo’. Appendix A examines Helga Thoene’s Premise of Symbolism in the Sei Solo, and Appendix B looks at two further case studies: the Harpsichord Concerto in D minor, BWV 1052 – does a lost violin concerto with similar references to a chiastic structure and its Christ-on-the-cross references lie behind the various versions of this material? and then the Adagio in the first Brandenburg, BWV 1046 – do the blank staves for the horns in this movement hint at some hidden theological comment on the strange break harmonically exactly one third of the way through the movement. This reflection introduces novel possibilities: do wind instruments carry overtones of ‘spirit’?

Throughout this detailed and imaginative monograph, Shute provides not only tables displaying chiastic structures and key sequences but a wealth of musical examples: Appendix B alone has 15. This makes it possible to follow the detailed musical arguments without always having to go to the volumes of the NBA. Is the same true for the non-theologically trained reader, who puzzles over the unfamiliar world of Johannine theology or Lutheran exegetical typology? I think so, as although theologically literate, I am not a specialist in Lutheran exegesis. I found the book demanding to read, but raising interesting questions – not all of which I had considered before even in works which I regularly study and perform like the Johannespassion, the B minor Mass or some of the cantatas. The footnotes are full of cross references, the bibliography very thorough and up-to-date and the indices excellent.

So I commend it to anyone who wants to experience a testing, but rewarding series of arguments, and above all to those who know less about Bach as a highly intellectual, organized and reflective Lutheran of his time than they would like.

David Stancliffe

Vol. I xxx+532pp, Vol. II (Abbreviations and Indices) vii+119pp.
LIM, 2015. ISBN: 9788870968101. €50

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hat follows is a preliminary response rather than a thorough review, let alone a comparative one of the new publication respect to the previous one. The earlier editions of Roberto Pagano’s greatest work, the culmination of 40 years of research, are already known to interested Italian and English readers. Sadly, Pagano passed away last July 13, only a few weeks before LIM issued his re-revised dual biography of Alessandro and Domenico Scarlatti. Reviews, some polemical, of the 1985 and 2006 editions, can be found online, which induces me, instead of covering any of the same ground, to describe the new format and to translate some of Pagano’s prefatory remarks.

The Bibliography and the Index, both formatted in detailed tables, now occupy a separate, smaller volume, ideal for carrying to a library, or for browsing topics, works, names, events, and subjects discussed in the text or footnotes (which are on the appropriate pages of the text). Under the author’s name 17 of his publications on the Scarlattis between 1969 and 2015 are cited. Under ‘A. Scarlatti’ and ‘D. Scarlatti’ one finds five and seven pages respectively of references to works, events, historical hypotheses, motives, opinions, and important discussions in the book.

The original dual biography, Scarlatti: Alessandro e Domenico. Due vite in una  was published 1985. Twenty years later the first revision was made for the English translation by Frederick Hammond: Alessandro and Domenico Scarlatti – Two Lives in One  (Pendragon Press, 2006). Thanks to Hammond, a Scarlatti scholar in his own right, English readers have access to a version updated only ten years ago. To readers of either previous edition Pagano now explicitly points out new findings or new deductions that affect his original conclusions. He also answers his critics again. New readers may be somewhat distracted by these work-in-progress ‘flashbacks’, but they are valuable, if only because so much general Scarlatti research, still in print and circulating, has turned out to be incorrect.

In 2006 Pagano still surmised, as Kirkpatrick had done, that Antonio Soler (1729-1783), who had been apprenticed with Domenico, was possibly the main scribe of the large Venice and Parma codices of Domenico’s sonatas. This hypothesis has now been modified, reluctantly, by the research (2012) of Águeda Pedrero Encabo (in favour of the copyist Joseph [José] Alaguero), though the new discussion includes convincing evidence for Soler’s involvement in supervising the copying of the two collections, and also in making copies of other sonatas, possibly realized from various types of shorthand, such as keyboard tablature or continuo notation, or indeed by dictation, while hearing them improvised or played by Domenico. This information comes from Soler’s testimony to that effect in his Llave del la Modulación, along with his reason for not writing double sharps (e.g. writing G instead of #[#]F), which he said Scarlatti did not use.

Pagano wrote the entries on both Scarlattis in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians  of 2001. After the second version of his book he wrote an article for Early Music  xxxvi/3 (2008), ‘The Two Scarlatti’, which began:

First of all I am surprised to find unnoticed an important element of my biographical hypothesis, openly announced in the title of my book: the complementarity of the human and artistic lives of the two Scarlattis. It is impossible to re-examine in detail here their parallel biographical trajectory, but the most recent discoveries make even clearer Domenico’s metamorphosis after the death of his father; the year of black-out and sickness following Alessandro’s death is highly significant and his subsequent development arose from impulses that combined emulation with a desire for identification…

Other important contributions between the middle and final versions of the biography are found in the Rivista Italiana di Musicologia, XLI, 2006/2, in Domenico Scarlatti: Musica e Stori a (Turchini Edizioni, 2010), in Studi musicali  XXXVIII/I 2009, and in Devozione e Passione: Alessandro Scarlatti nella Napoli e Roma Barocca  (Turchini Edizioni, 2014).

All the above and more is in the present posthumous edition. The twists and turns of Pagano’s Italian are extremely challenging, even to Italian readers, and a distinct pleasure at the same time. A quote from his preface (p. xiv) will give not only a taste of his style and standpoint, but of the task of a biographer as he saw it:

Forty years ago, while writing Alessandro Scarlatti’s biography, I happened to bring to light certain aspects of his personality that tarnish his halo as the saint at the head of the controversial Neapolitan School, a gallery of myths. It is always risky to swim against the current in the streams of tradition: the few remarks made about my efforts by generous and illustrious reviewers mainly concerned my suggested resizing of the image of a boss whom evidently all would have liked to continue to see as a long-bearded God-father, eternally intent at radiating benevolent influence on relatives and disciples.

When… Malcolm Boyd declared… that my judgment on the disparity between [A. Scarlatti’s] artistic merit and human weaknesses… was in contradiction with everything I had narrated about the musician, I, in turn, was thunderstruck, because I continue to believe – and this book ought to finally make it clear – that all the elements of that biography contribute to reveal the fragility of the man: a fragility rooted in that very Sicily that I am certain to know better than others, as Boyd himself was loyally to admit [in 1986] when he saw in my new book a happy combination of “scientific accuracy” and “profound knowledge of Sicilian history and culture”, judging me absolutely “without rivals” in my knowledge of the Sicilian “psyche”.

(My translation)

It goes without saying that the new edition ought to be translated into English, an enterprise which would take quite a while to realize. For now I’d recommend a compromise for English readers: have both the 2006 Frederick Hammond version and the 2015 final version, and use the fabulous new index to update the information in the former as needed. Enjoy what you can of Pagano’s interpretive dialogue with his readers, whom he invites to engage with his methods, both rigorous and imaginative.

Barbara Sachs