In 2014 Cafagna Editore launched the series Le vie dei suoni with Vincenzo Pucitta: Il tumulto del gran mondo, edited by Annamaria Bonsante. The book includes an introduction by Philip Gossett.
Below, Marilyn Hill Smith and Della Jones sing Un palpito mi sento, a duet from Pucitta’s La Caccia di Enrico IV (1809).
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Filed under Classic era, New series, Opera
Mozart’s wittiness is famously illuminated through many of his letters. Less known are his small humorous sketches, which appear here and there throughout his correspondence.
The sketches range from mysterious stick figures to bizarre caricatures; some are still riddles to scholars.
This according to “Mozart, der Zeichner” by Gabriele Ramsauer, an essay included in Mozart-Bilder–Bilder Mozarts: Ein Porträt zwischen Wunsch und Wirklichkeit (Salzburg: Pustet, 2013, pp. 25–28).
Above, a drawing at the top of a letter from Mozart to his cousin Maria Anna Thekla Mozart, known as Bäsle, dated 10 May 1780, titled Engel (Angel), with labels fig. I Kopf (head), fig. II Frißur (hairdo), fig. III Nasn (nose), fig. IV Brust (breast), fig. V Hals (throat), fig. VI Aug (eye); inscribed below VI: Hier ißt leer (Here is empty).
The full text of the letter (untranslated) is here; below, the finale of Mozart’s Ein musikalischer Spaß, which ends with his celebrated foray into polytonality.
More articles about Mozart are here.
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Filed under Classic era, Curiosities, Humor, Visual art
Balázs Mikusi, the chair of RILM’s Hungarian committee and the head of the music collection at the Országos Széchényi Könyvtár in Budapest, was recently leafing through one of the library’s folders of unidentified manuscripts when he encountered four pages of what looked to him like Mozart’s handwriting.
He soon realized that he had stumbled upon the original score of the piano sonata in A, K.331—one of Mozart’s most beloved sonatas, with the famous “alla turca” finale! The finding has additional significance because the score clears up long-standing questions regarding certain passages.
Congratulations to RILM’s own Balázs Mikusi! Below, Olga Jegunova performs the work in 2012.
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Filed under Classic era, RILM, RILM news
Libreria Musicale Italiana launched the series Miroirs in early 2014 with Prassi esecutive nella musica pianistica dell´epoca classica: Principi teorici ed applicazioni pratiche, a translation of Sandra P. Rosenblum’s Performance practices in Classic piano music: Their principles and applications (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).
The book discusses the principles of performing the piano music of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and their contemporaries as revealed in such sources as their autographs and letters, early editions of their music, original instruments, and contemporary tutors and treatises. Rosenblum’s findings are then applied to dynamics, accentuation, pedaling, articulation and touch, technique and fingering, ornaments and embellishments, choice of tempo, and tempo flexibility.
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Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s Heilig (W.217) is closely akin to his keyboard writing in that the presence of many different, not necessarily closely related, musical ideas drives the piece more than a specific form. Seemingly random choices of key, texture, voicing, and text placement all have a purpose: to make the listener feel something, not just hear it.
The choral sections illustrate the quick tonal shifts and changing of harmonic rhythm that are a large part of C.P.E. Bach’s Empfindsamer Stil, which is customarily thought of in terms of his keyboard writing. Heilig is a part of that tradition which would later become the Sturm und Drang of Haydn and the inspiration for the Romantic generation. This according to “Elements of Empfindsamkeit in the Heilig Wq. 217 (H.778) of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach” by Brian E. Burns (Choral journal XLVI/9 [March 2006] pp. 10–23).
Today is C.P.E. Bach’s 300th birthday! Above, a pastel portrait of the composer from 1773 drawn by his godson Johann Philipp Bach (click to enlarge); below, a performance of Heilig by the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin and the RIAS Kammerchor.
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Boccherini’s posthumous reputation has suffered because his works do not emphasize the structural coherence and teleology emblematic of 18th-century Classicism; but regarded through the lens of performance—the sensations and images involved in its bodily presentation—his works evoke those aspects of the era characterized by urgent, even volatile, inquiries into the nature of the self.
Contemporaneous theories of embodiment illuminate the heart of Boccherini’s oeuvre, the chamber music for strings, which presents sensibilité through repetitiveness, a hyperattention to details of dynamics and articulation, the grotesque and bizarre timbres and registral excesses, and Newtonian mechanistic philosophy through gestural enactments of rapidity and rigidity.
These works often distance and ironize the performer, particularly in regard to virtuosity. They thereby make a sophisticated contribution to the central Enlightenment tension between subjectivity and appearance so memorably articulated in Diderot’s Paradoxe sur le comédien.
This according to “‘One says that one weeps, but one does not weep’: Sensibile, grotesque, and mechanical embodiments in Boccherini’s chamber music” by Elisabeth Le Guin (Journal of the American Musicological Society LV/2 [summer 2002] pp. 207–54).
Today is Boccherini’s 270th birthday! Below, a work cited by Le Guin as an example.
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Indiana University Press launched the series The symphonic repertoire in 2002, with volume 2. Subsequently production was stalled following the death of the founder of the series, A. Peter Brown; it was revived in 2012.
For Volume 1, The Eighteenth-Century Symphony, 22 of Brown’s former students and colleagues collaborated to complete the work that he began on this critical period of development in symphonic history. The book follows Brown’s outline, is organized by country, and focuses on major composers.
Contributors address issues of historiography, the status of research, and questions of attribution and stylistic traits, and provide background material on the musical context of composition and early performances. The volume features a CD of recordings from the Bloomington Early Music Festival Orchestra, highlighting the largely unavailable repertoire discussed in the book.
Below, the Amadeus Orchestra performs a symphony by the little-known Czech composer Johann Baptist Vanhal (1739–1813).
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In 2012 Carus-Verlag launched the series Bach-Repertorium to make available for study and performance the compositions of all members of the widespread Bach family of musicians from the 17th into the 19th century.
For the first time, as a result of systematic research covering all musical and archive sources, all compositions attributed to members of the Bach family will be categorized according to the same criteria. In addition to details of scoring, succession of movements, and history of the works and sources, information is given concerning editions, authentication, and the most important literary references.
In the case of vocal works the origins of the texts, editions of the librettos, and the chorale melodies used are verified. Also covered are arrangements of works by other composers, editions with which the composer was involved, and—as far as it can be reconstructed—his music library.
An appendix includes arrangements by others, and spurious works are also described. The accompanying music examples document in short score the beginning of each movement and the structurally important sections of the compositions, providing for an initial insight into the works. The use of the volumes is facilitated by numerous indices.
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Filed under Baroque era, Classic era, New series, Resources
What was the interplay between plumbing and the routines of audience behavior at London’s 18th-century opera house? A simple question, perhaps, but it proves to be a subject with scarce evidence, and even scarcer commentary.
“Pots, privies and WCs: Crapping at the opera in London before 1830” by Michael Burden (Cambridge opera journal XXIII/1–2 [March–July 2011] pp. 27–50) sets out to document as far as possible the developments in plumbing in the London theaters, moving from the chamber pot to the privy to the installation of the first water-closets, addressing questions of the audience’s general behavior, the beginnings in London of a listening audience, and the performance of music between the acts.
Burden concludes that the bills were performed without intervals, and that, in an evening that frequently ran to four hours in length, audience members moved around the auditorium and came and went much as they pleased (to the pot, privy, or WC), demonstrating that singers would have had to contend throughout their performances with a large quantity of low-level noise.
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Filed under Classic era, Opera, Reception
The increasing range of Beethoven’s performance indications paralleled the growing depth of expression in his music. While his predecessors had been content with four basic tempos—adagio, andante, allegro, and presto—he began to add qualifiers, indications of gradual tempo change, and descriptive words and phrases in German.
Still unsatisfied, he began to rely on metronome markings, although he stressed that they only provide a point of departure for a performance in which “feeling also has its beat, which cannot wholly be conveyed by a number”.
He started to favor graphic treatments of crescendo and diminuendo, ensuring dynamic shapes that would not necessarily be intuited by the performer. He used sforzando in structural as well as expressive ways, and expanded volume markings beyond the range from pp to ff.
His pedaling indications usually reinforce harmonic contexts, though sometimes they cause harmonic areas to overlap; this might explain why some of Beethoven’s contemporaries complained that his pedaling resulted in a confused sound. His articulation markings often reinforce motivic structure and development.
All of these performance indications are most fully understood in the context of the particular instrument he was using at the time.
This according to “Interpreting Beethoven’s markings: A preliminary survey of the piano sonatas” by Tallis Barker (The music review LV/3 [August 1994] pp. 169–182). Below, Sviatoslav Richter demonstrates his approach to Beethoven’s performance indications.
More posts about Beethoven are here.
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