A birthday homage to Corelli
Even during his lifetime Arcangelo Corelli (1653–1713) was revered as the ‘new Orpheus of Our Times’. His countrymen called him the ‘divine Arc Angelo’, punning on his Christian name and the Italian word for a bow (arco). An English dilettante Roger North described Corelli’s music as ‘transcendant’, ‘immortal’ and-tempting blasphemy-like ‘the bread of life’ to musicians.
Corelli cultivated a personal mystique, acting more like a gentleman than a common-or-garden musician. His patrons, the highest cardinals of Rome, treated him almost as their equal; he had the aristocratic hobby of collecting paintings. Rather than writing music on the demand of his patrons, he composed selectively and at his own pace. He shunned the customary dash of musicians to get their name in print. Only six books of his music ever appeared and these contained pieces solely for strings: trios, concertos and solo violin sonatas. He took his time revising these pieces, releasing them to public gaze relatively late in his career.
Such careful polishing made Corelli’s published pieces into models of economy and elegance. Their concision and urbanity seemed like a beam of clear light after the wild passion and unpredictability of music earlier in the seventeenth century. Corelli wrote with a clear sense of key, directing every phrase firmly to a cadence. Typically he used a trio texture with two violins intertwined in mild dissonances. As Roger North said, these pieces were ‘plain and truly harmonious consorts’. They rapidly became a model to composers across Europe: soon Corelli was, in the words of John Hawkins, ‘a classic author’.
Yet in performance Corelli’s pieces could sound quite otherwise. An eyewitness of his violin-playing said that his ‘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’. Such fire and passion were never recorded in his publications. Books were for posterity, not for the mercurial ways of particular renditions: Corelli’s classicising influence existed on the page rather than in his performances.
Among Corelli’s most celebrated pieces were his Op.6 concertos. Travellers to Rome reported hearing these or similar pieces as early as the 1680s. Yet Corelli was so reluctant to commit them to print that they were only published in 1714, the year after his death; for decades their existence was mainly a matter of rumour. These concertos were written for festivals in Rome when a huge orchestra was assembled in a piazza or palace. The elephantine ensembles-sometimes with more than a hundred players-were more flexible if a trio was singled out as soloists, allowing contrasts between the massed tutti and the delicate ornamentation of the best players. Indeed Corelli’s concertos also abound with other kinds of contrasts. To paraphrase Georg Muffat, sometimes the orchestra plays so slowly that you can hardly wait, and sometimes it plays with a dashing vivace. Sometimes it plays with a soft, tender tone and sometimes with a vehement fortissimo. With the many alternations ‘the ear is ravished by a singular astonishment, as is the eye by the opposition of light and shade’.
[Extract from a programme note by Stephen Rose]