Vivaldi violin concertos Op 6
ANTONIO VIVALDI
Violin Concertos, Op.6
Concerto in A major, RV 335 ‘The Cuckoo’
Michael Talbot writes:
The Vivaldi violin concertos that are best known today belong to the four collections that have titles: L’Estro Armonico, Op. 3 (1711); La Stravaganza, Op.4 (1716); Il Cimento dell’Armonia a dell’lnventione, Op. 8 (1725); and La Cetra, Op. 9 (1727). Each of these contains twelve works grouped in two volumes, and carries a dedication from the composer to a patron. Opp. 3 and 4 were published in Amsterdam by the firm of Estienne Roger, Opp. 8 and 9 by Roger’s son-in-law and successor Michel-Charles Le Cene.
There are, however, four additional published collections whose profile in the Vivaldian canon is somewhat lower. These are Opp. 6 (c.1719), 7 (c.1720), 11 and 12 (both 1729). Each contains only six works (except for Op. 7, which, in circumstances as yet unexplained, contains several spurious works in addition to some undoubtedly genuine ones) and lacks a dedication. The first two appeared under the imprint of Roger’s daughter Jeanne (this is the case with all Roger’s productions between 1716 and 1722, the year of his death); the last two were issued by Le Cene. We would nowadays describe all of these collections as ‘commercial’. They were issued, probably at the publisher’s behest, to satisfy a growing public demand for new concertos — which had been greatly stimulated, of course, by Vivaldi’s first two collections.
It is unlikely that Vivaldi had much to do with the collection that became Op. 6 after despatching the scores to Amsterdam, possibly as early as 1712–14 while Op. 4 was still at press. The title pane mentions his post as director of instrumental music (maestro de’ concerti) at the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice, but fails to mention the one that succeeded it in late 1717: that of maestro di cappella to the Governor of Mantua. The engraved parts contain an unusually large number of errors that proof-reading by the author would certainly have weeded out. In some cases the directions for instrumental doubling in the score were misunderstood, and many accidentals were added or amended by someone who obviously intended to correct the musical text but instead deformed it. The modern edition of Op. 6 by Ricordi leaves many of these problems unresolved, and it therefore poses a real challenge to performers to identify and rectify the mistakes.
In many ways, the Op. 6 concertos are more ‘typical’ of their composer than any previously published. Both Op. 3 and Op. 4 contain many concertos that are old-fashioned in form and style or have solo parts for other instruments besides the principal violin. Op. 6 represents exactly the kind of concerto that Vivaldi was putting into circulation via his patrons, pupils and customers during the 1710s and which other composers were beginning eagerly to imitate. In short, these six relatively unpretentious works offer a conspectus of the ‘classic’ Vivaldi concerto in the period of its early maturity. Concerto No. 1 became sufficiently popular to be reprinted by the London publisher John Walsh in 1739 in an anthology entitled Select Harmony. Its key of G minor was, for Vivaldi, a vehicle to express turbulent rather than melancholy emotions (an interpretation that links him to Haydn rather than Mozart). The fierce upwards sweeps (tirate was the technical term used in Vivaldi’s day) first heard in the second bar of the opening movement are a conventional expression of anger or passion. The second movement, in the gently rocking rhythm of a siciliana, is scored for solo violin and continuo. From the beginning of his career, Vivaldi frequently exercised the option of scoring the central slow movement of a concerto for soloist (or soloists) and continuo alone. This is a mode of scoring borrowed from the sonata, and it is not surprising that Vivaldi on occasion simply appropriated a pre-existing sonata movement for use in a concerto. The present movement resembles an aria in a chamber cantata, in that a continuo ritornello frames (and twice, very briefly, punctuates) the solo line. Jagged rhythms and fierce emotions return in the finale.
Concerto No. 2 was likewise chosen for Select Harmony. For Vivaldi, E flat major is a mellow, gentle key, and lyricism remains dominant in all three movements. Once again, the slow movement has ‘sonata-style’ scoring. An attractive feature of this Largo is the participation of the bass in imitative exchanges with the violin. This concerto exists in a non-autograph manuscript score preserved in the music library of the Counts of Schönborn at Wiesentheid, Germany. The score is dated 1717 and was previously believed to have been copied from the engraved parts. The revised dating of Op. 6 (1719), which we owe to an authoritative recent study by the Dutch scholar Rudolf Rasch, makes this explanation an impossibility. It appears, therefore, that Op. 6 No. 2 circulated in manuscript form in the years preceding its publication.
Concerto No. 3, again in G minor, is an oddity. In both of its outer movements the orchestral violins are treated as a single part. This is not in itself unusual (the same strict doubling occurs in the outer movements of the last two concertos in Op. 6 and in the last movement of Concerto No. 4), but in the finale of this concerto the principal violin merges with the other violins to produce a very lean, purely orchestral three-part texture (violin, viola, bass). Despite this inconsistency in the treatment of the principal violin, the concerto is perhaps the most powerful in the set. Its first movement conveys an elan similar to that in the well-known sixth concerto, in A minor, from Op. 3 (indeed, some of the thematic material is very reminiscent of the earlier concerto), while the finale, in a binary design with two repeats, reminds one of some of Handel’s short finales in his Op. 6 concertos (1739). In this movement Vivaldi successfully exploits the contrast between loud and soft dynamics, and between high and low registers. The slow movement follows a popular model in Venetian concertos of the time whereby phrases made up of repeated tutti chords alternate with rhapsodic flights of equal length on the solo instrument.
The first movement of Concerto No. 4, in D major, features note raddoppiate: reiterations of rapid notes that produce a stuttering effect (as in the opening of Bach’s Fifth Brandenburg Concerto). The slow movement of this concerto is cast in a miniaturised ritornello form in which three tutti sections formed from pulsating chords alternate with two short solo episodes.
Concerto No. 5, in E minor, evidences in its opening Allegro the high degree of development that Vivaldi’s solo writing had by this time attained. Most remarkable is the cadenza-like final episode, in which the soloist ascends nearly three octaves above middle C. Vivaldi’s fame as a violinist owed more to his command of perilously high positions on the instrument than to any other aspect of his technique. The slow movement follows the pattern already seen in the third concerto, while the finale typifies the ‘gallopping’ style encountered in many finales in 3/8 metre.
Concerto No. 6 also survives in a non-autograph manuscript in the Sachsische Landesbibliothek, Dresden. Vivaldi had a special relationship with the Saxon court orchestra, which collected and performed his concertos more assiduously than any other institution outside the Pietà. This copy, too, probably predates the published edition. The key of the concerto, D minor, signifies robustness and sinewy strength in Vivaldi’s hands (just as the Double Violin Concerto of J. S. Bach). Both outer movements are fine examples of the ‘modular’ construction favoured by Vivaldi, with a handful of short musical cells being endlessly repeated, juxtaposed or superimposed. The intervening Largo returns to the pattern of Concerto No. 2, except that the bass is now a simple accompanist rather than a partner in dialogue.
The most popular of all Vivaldi’s works in England was his so-called ‘Cuckow’ Concerto (RV 335), which belongs to a small group of his concertos that may be termed ‘onomatopoeic’, since they imitate familiar outdoor sounds (a goldfinch, a nightingale, a posthorn, blasts on a conch, and so on). In his Memoirs (and later in his General History of Music) Charles Burney recounted how during his youth this violin concerto had been ‘the wonder and delight of all frequenters of country concerts’ and how Thomas Woodcock (brother of the famous flautist Robert Woodcock and proprietor of a coffee house in Hereford), ‘was sent far and near to perform it’. It was ‘printed single for the violin’ in London in 1717 and went through several subsequent editions. Manuscripts of it are preserved in Oxford, Stockholm, Uppsala and Trondheim. A variant (RV 335a) surviving in Ancona has the title ‘il rossignuolo’ (‘The Nightingale’), and one wonders whether ‘Cuckow’ is not a rather free translation of the same word. Certainly, the bird song imitations do not exploit the familiar interval of a third (as used by Vivaldi in the ‘cuckoo’ episode of his ‘Summer’ Concerto, RV 315). If the outer movements are rather slight, the short slow movement (which exchanges A major for E minor) has a certain wistful charm.