u.n.d.e.f.i.n.e.d.

 

About the Program
Notes by Howard Posner
 
Modern concertgoers, Americans particularly, think nothing of listening to music from countries other than their own, sung in languages they do not understand. Three centuries ago, when travel was slow and expensive, eyes and ears were focused close to home, and anything from a distant land was considered exotic. Composers might explore foreign styles because they liked them, or might evoke foreign climes for political reasons or to trigger stereotypical associations in listeners.
 
Antonio Vivaldi’s La Senna Festeggiante, written for an official Venetian ceremony in 1726, is a serenata in which three characters – Virtue, the Age of Gold, and the Seine River – praise Louis XV, who was then 16 years old and had been king of France for 11 years. A Venetian ceremony honoring the French king was not as odd or unusual as it might seem to us. Venice, long past its day as the great maritime power in the Mediterranean, was too small to compete with the military power of the rising unified superstates around it: the Austrian and Ottoman empires, France, and Spain. Needing to choose and maintain its alliances carefully, it cultivated France. Of course, 70 years later Venice would surrender its independence to Napoleon.
 
The sinfonia that began large-scale Italian vocal works such as a serenata or opera in Vivaldi’s day had a fast movement followed by a slow movement and another fast one, which is to say it was no different from the sort of freestanding work without a soloist that Vivaldi sometimes called a sinfonia and sometimes called a concerto. Indeed, the fast movements of the Senna Festeggiante Sinfonia are revisions of the outer movements from Vivaldi’s Concerto RV 117, and the slow movement is taken from the Sinfonia of his opera Giustino.
 
Even while Vivaldi was composing music to accompany Venice’s cozying up to the French, Italian music remained as controversial in France as rock and roll was in mid-20th-century America, and for many of the same reasons: it was loud, raucous, emotionally extreme, and an indirect way of expressing political dissent in a regime that did not allow direct expression of dissent.
 
So it took a real love of intense Italian expression – or a certain artistic or cultural independence – for French musicians to adopt, or adapt, Italian style, but some of them did. The most obvious example is Couperin, an internationalist who wrote chamber sonatas in foreign styles and a suite in which the spirits of Lully and Corelli meet in Parnassus and achieve a Franco-Italian artistic synthesis.
 
Jean-Marie Leclair, a violinist and dancer a generation younger than Couperin, actually lived and worked in Italy, employed as a ballet master in Turin until he decided to devote himself to the violin, which he played better than nearly anyone. The only violinist who wrote more technically demanding music was Pietro Locatelli, with whom Leclair spent some time touring. At a concert they did together in Prussia in 1728, one observer noted that Leclair played like an angel and Locatelli played like the devil, which pretty much summed up the difference between the French sound and the Italian.
 
Leclair’s Opus 7 concertos were published in 1737, a time when the concerto was still a relatively recent thing in France. In the C-major Concerto, the opening movement’s bouncy energy, logical development, and serene, dignified air are all reminiscent of Bach. The dramatic ritornellos and intense solo part in the slow movement have much of the stage in them, and Vivaldi’s spirit is present in the finale.
 
The viola d’amore “is a distinctive kind of fiddle which sounds especially charming in the stillness of the evening,” wrote Leopold Mozart in his 1756 violin treatise. Like a viol, it has six or seven played strings (tuned a variety of ways) and a slope-shouldered, flat-backed body. Like a violin, it is held on the shoulder and has no frets. Like neither of them, it has thin wire sympathetic strings that run under the neck. Its sound is softer and sweeter than the violin, and, like the viol, it has an easier time playing chords. Many composers – Vivaldi, Handel, and Bach among them – occasionally wrote viola d’amore solos as special effects in arias. Even after its 18th-century heyday such composers as Meyerbeer, Janácˇek, and Puccini wrote similar cameo appearances for it, and Hindemith, an early music pioneer, wrote whole works for it. Vivaldi played the viola d’amore himself, wrote six solo concertos for the instrument, and included it in two concertos for multiple soloists. He was not alone in thinking it made a good combination with an obbligato lute; Bach used the same tandem in early versions of the St. John Passion.
 
The viola d’amore part in the Concerto RV 540 was played by one of Vivaldi’s students in its only documented performance, a 1740 concert for the visiting Prince Elector of Saxony at the Ospedale della Pietà, which Vivaldi served in one capacity or another for most of his career. In the Concerto’s outer movements, the two soloists answer each other or walk arm in arm. In the slow movement the lute is purely an accompanying instrument, playing arpeggios against the viola d’amore’s long-lined melody.
 
Whatever its political virtues, the Restoration of the English monarchy in 1660, after a decade of Parliamentary rule dominated by the Puritans and Oliver Cromwell, was a great thing for English theater and music, which were inextricably intertwined in that era. Every play needed music before each act and songs and dances interspersed with the action. It was also a time in which women were freer to exercise choices, or to descend into moral depravity, depending on your point of view. For the first time, women acted on the English stage, and some became theater managers or playwrights. Aphra Behn, a pro-monarchist, anti-slavery world traveler and sometime spy, has been called the first woman professional writer in the English language. She earned her stage reputation with comedies about the marriage market before penning Abdelazer, or the Moor’s Revenge, a tale of adultery, murder, and vengeance, in 1676. It was revived in 1695, six years after her death, with music by Henry Purcell, who had established himself as the preeminent composer for the London stage. He supplied music for eight theater projects that year (including two Behn plays), a remarkable number, even if he hadn’t died in September. Of the ten numbers for Abdelazer, the most familiar to modern audiences is the Rondeau, which Benjamin Britten, an avid Purcell devotee, souped up and used as the theme in his Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra.
 
Vivaldi’s L’Estro Armonico was the most important statement of Italian style, and the most important musical publication, of the 18th century. It made a huge sensation when the Amsterdam publisher Etienne Roger brought it out in 1711, introducing Vivaldi’s energetic, dynamic, and flamboyant concerto style to Northern Europe. Before long it had appeared in pirated editions in London and Paris, Vivaldi was an international star, other composers (Bach chief among them) were studying and assimilating his style, and the three-movement, soloist-dominated Vivaldian concerto was pushing out the multi-movement Corellian concerto grosso.
 
Of the twelve concertos in L’Estro Armonico, the eleventh caused the biggest stir, and even at a distance of nearly 300 years, its boldness is still remarkable. The segmented introduction is a device taken from Corelli, but where Corelli, or nearly anyone else, would have used that form to settle in and make everyone feel at home, Vivaldi hurls headlong into a driving canonic opening by the two violins alone, which are then pushed aside by the cello and continuo moving twice as fast. A brief recitative leads to a pounding, vigorous fugue. Music of such sustained intensity raised eyebrows, blood pressure, heart rates and, ultimately, expectations. The face of instrumental music was changing, as was the notion that the profound or the dramatic was the domain of the human voice. The rest of the Concerto is a comparative respite, though the mood of the last movement is much like the first.
 
The easiest way for a composer to evoke the foreign and exotic for listeners and players was to write something in a foreign style and state clearly in the title that he was doing so. Thus there is an ample supply of pieces titled with a nationality, though it is not always clear to modern ears what made a piece sound English or Danish or even Chinese. Fabio Biondi has concocted a suite of such pieces by a trans-European group of composers.
 
Baldassare Galuppi, a Venetian who could lay some claim to being the most popular opera composer of the mid-18th century, actually did go to far-away exotic places. He spent an opera season in London and three years in St. Petersburg, where he introduced an Italianate lightness of texture to Russian church music.
 
Georg Muffat was rather an international synthesis all by himself. He was born into a family of Scottish descent in Savoy (an area since split between Italy and France), studied with Lully in Paris, worked as an organist in Alsace (a border area long in contention between France and German states), and lived in Vienna, Prague, Salzburg, and Rome (where he hobnobbed with Corelli). He finally settled in Bavaria, but he never went to Spain, so his “Young Spaniards” is probably just another piece of exotica.
 
André Campra became Master of Music at Notre Dame cathedral in 1694, which made him proceed cautiously – indeed anonymously at the time – as an opera composer, because the Church disapproved of opera, with its pagan gods doing unseemly things. His “Chinois” comes from his Carnaval de Venice.
 
Georg Philipp Telemann was the most cosmopolitan composer of the 18th century, though his actual physical world was bounded by Poland on the east and Paris on the west. His vast output is full of pieces with titles like “The English” and “The Danes.”
 
The Austrian violinist Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber (von Biber, after he was formally ennobled) was Kapellmeister in Salzburg in the last decades of the 17th century and composer of extraordinarily colorful and inventive violin music. His “Barbarians” might serve to remind us that the word was originally Greek for “foreigner” or “anyone who doesn’t speak our language,” a sentiment still common, if not much expressed, in our own day.
 
André Cardinal Destouches was himself something of an exotic who moved in different worlds. The son of a prosperous Parisian merchant, he was schooled by Jesuits in the days when Jesuits were in the forefront of Catholic missionary work. Destouches accompanied a Jesuit priest to Thailand in the 1680s, and he joined a company of the King’s Musketeers in the 1690s and fought in Belgium. After leaving the army to devote himself to music, he progressed quickly, studying with Campra and contributing three numbers to Campra’s 1697 opera-ballet L’Europe Galante. He hobnobbed easily and often with the high-born, some of whom he had met in the military, and was appointed inspector general of the Royal Academy of Music by Louis XIV. There was nothing intrinsically exotic about the chaconne, which by Destouches’ day was common in French ballet, but its variation form lent itself to the insertion of exotic elements.