Angels & devils of the violin
The violin pieces which form the cornerstones of this programme [11 June 2002] might be described as baroque ‘war horses’. Baroque music, and Italian baroque music in particular, has always been subject to the whims and fancies of its performers and musical fashions. Simple lines were ornamented, cadenzas added and melodies altered to the point of paraphrase. For example, Corelli published his violin sonatas in 1700 but literally dozens of ornamented versions survive, some of them by Corelli himself. In a period when there was little distinction between composer and player, personal interpretation was a desirable ingredient of any performance. This process was taken further by the post-revolutionary, romantic violinists. In 1798, Jean Baptiste Cartier published L’art du violon, a large volume of mainly baroque sonatas and concertos faithfully and accurately edited. Within a few years, however, violinists were unashamedly using this music of a bygone era to display ‘modern’ virtuosity. The baroque pieces in Ferdinand David’s Hohe Schule des Violinspiels (1863) owe more to Kreutzer and Spohr than to Corelli and Tartini, and Kreisler’s notorious baroque ‘fakes’ were no more than late manifestations of this process.
Giuseppe Tartini
For years many of Tartini’s autograph manuscripts held a secret: prefatory inscriptions concealed in a cipher. This code was only cracked in the 1930s and revealed lines of poetry, mostly by Petrarch, Tasso and Metastasio, sources of inspiration which Tartini evidently wanted to keep to himself. The traditions which grew up around certain pieces, such as the present sonata depicting Dido, Queen of Carthage, abandoned by Aeneas, hero of Troy and future founder of Rome, perhaps have more authority than was previously thought. The autograph of Didone abbandonata is long since lost, but one editor of the sonata, Michelangelo Abbado, suggests lines from Metastasio’s play of the same name which fit the three movements:
‘Behold! Alone, betrayed, abandoned without friends and without kingdom.’‘May Carthage perish, the palace burn, and may its ashes be my grave.’‘And in the splendour of the Iberian stars, may the kingdoms of the sea rest in peace.’
Arcangelo Corelli
Corelli published Op.5 on 1 January 1700. An assiduous polisher of his compositions, he could probably have issued these sonatas in some form to his already adoring, international public, anytime during the previous fifteen years. But he was also a master of timing. He waited until the wheel of history provided him with a date worthy of his achievement. There is a contrast between the music’s appearance on the page — elegant and perfect, but also (heresy of heresies!) bland and formulaic — and its unparalleled celebrity status in the eighteenth century. The same might be said of its composer. Corelli dressed and behaved soberly, lived modestly and spent most of his career in Rome as an employee, lodger and friend of some of the Church’s most exalted personages. He was the ‘divine Arc Angelo’ (a pun on his Christian name and the Italian word for bow, arco), and his music was ‘like the bread of life’ (Roger North). It was fitting that this semi-divine, adopted son of Rome, the ‘new Orpheus of our time’ (Berardi, 1689), should have been buried in the Pantheon. So much for the hagiography, which was perhaps responsible for posterity’s one-sided view of the man, and of his music. Where is the ‘conceited fellow half madd’ so many eyewitnesses described ‘whose Eyes will sometimes turn as red as Fire; his countenance will be distorted, his eyeballs roll as in an agony, and he gives in so much to what he is doing that he doth not look like the same man’? This is the Corelli who could write a bitter and insulting letter to his former colleagues in Bologna who (wrongly) accused him of grammatical errors in his counterpoint. This is the man who ends Op.5 with the Follia, a piece of ‘madness’.
Tomaso Antonio Vitali
The Vitali Chaconne has been subject to more misunderstandings, misprints and editorial maulings than almost any other piece in the baroque repertoire. For a start, the title is a modern invention. The original manuscript, now in Dresden, is headed Parte, which roughly means ‘variations’. To the composer’s name two extra letters were added later: Tomaso Vitalino. These are usually explained away as being intended to distinguish Tomaso, the ‘little Vitali’, from his more famous father Giovanni Battista, although they could equally imply that the piece is written in the Vitali style rather than actually by one of the family. One striking element of that style is the way this Chaconne changes key wildly, reaching the far-flung territories of B flat and D sharp minors. Despite its uncertain provenance, the piece has been ever popular amongst violinists. For example, Heifetz chose it to open his New York debut at Carnegie Hall in 1917.
Pietro Antonio Locatelli
Baroque violinist-composers are often described as ‘the Paganini of their day’. In the case of Locatelli, this description is for once wholly accurate. Not only did Locatelli further the frontiers of violin playing in terms of the instrument’s range and technical possibilities, but his twenty-four Caprices, which are actually cadenzas in his Op.3 concertos, provided the real Paganini with the inspiration, model and opening few bars of his famous Op.1 Caprices. Locatelli called his Op.3 L’arte del violino, a title Cartier was later to adopt. The Caprice which ends the Op.6 sonatas has the more specific subtitle Prova del’Intonatione, ‘test of intonation’. It contains some of the highest notes ever written for the violin and for this is popular among canine audiences.