Tomaso Albinoni Twelve concertos, op.9
In his famous study of the Baroque concerto Arthur Hutchings described Albinoni’s Concerti a cinque, op.9, as his ‘longest, most highly organised and best’. Longest they certainly are, and the structure of their movements is certainly more complex than in Albinoni’s earlier concertos. Whether they really are ‘best’ depends on one’s scale of values. They lack the élan, the sense of being ‘state-of-the-art’, of Albinoni’s early concertos (six in Op. 2, 1700, and twelve in Op. 5, 1707) but have greater maturity and sophistication. Whereas Albinoni’s last set of concertos (Op. 10, c.1736) betrays a certain weariness and is not wholly convincing in its adoption of galant stylistic features, Op. 9 shows a composer at the height of his powers and reputation.
At the heart of Albinoni’s art lies a quality that we may describe in general terms as ‘classicism’. To quote Hutchings once again, he ‘did not attempt such expression as could not be stylised convincingly — shaped in clear and readily understood ideas and extended into almost perfect forms’. It is deeply ironic that the piece by which Albinoni is today best known, the Adagio in G minor for organ and strings (which is in fact a modern invention owing nothing to him), is marked by a studied emotionalism, for nothing could be more foreign to his musical language. No composer of the late Baroque wrote with greater emotional restraint, hinting with a single slightly unexpected chord at a whole unexpressed world of feeling, or constructed his movements more regularly or transparently. Even in its most wistful moments (there are no tragic ones!) Albinoni’s music conveys a sense of order and well-being. Part of the reason for his immense popularity all over Europe in the first three decades of the eighteenth century was this reassuring quality, which one might liken to the mandatory ‘happy ending’ of the contemporary dramma per musica. The other factor was the technical facility of his music. True, the solo parts for violin or oboe encountered in his concertos are not easy, but their demands fall well short of those one would expect to find in a concerto by Vivaldi, to say nothing of those by Locatelli. Charles Burney noted in his General History of Music that around 1740 Albinoni’s concertos had been popular at English provincial concerts for this very reason.
One distinguishing feature of Albinoni’s instrumental music is its firm adherence to vocal ideals of melodic shape. Today, when it is overwhelmingly his instrumental works that are heard, it is easy to forget that he was, if anything, more productive as a composer for the voice. He was active as a singer in his youth, when he flirted unsuccessfully with the composition of church music. In 1694, when his first collection of instrumental music (the Suonate a tre, Op. 1) came out, the first of his more than fifty operas was produced in Venice. Around 1700 he was also very active as a composer of chamber cantatas. In 1705 he married a singer, Margherita Raimondi, whom he doubtless coached and accompanied during the rest of her career (she died in 1721). This deep immersion in vocal music betrays itself remarkably early in his instrumental music — it is already evident in certain lyrical passages in the slow movements of his Op. 2 concertos — and became even stronger as time went on. In Op. 9 one cannot failto notice the perfect arch-form of so many of his phrases and lines (in vocal parts, this shape is ideal for breath control) and his general preference for smooth, stepwise motion over wide leaps. Even the arpeggiated patterns in his writing for violins follow, in their implied polyphony, a fundamentally linear approach.
Albinoni is celebrated as one of the great dilettanti of Venice. The word ‘dilettante’, as used in the eighteenth century, had no pejorative associations: it meant, simply, that the artist belonged for official purposes to a different profession (or to no profession, if he was a nobleman). In this sense Schubert, too, was a ‘dilettante’. Albinoni’s father had inherited from his former employer, a widow, a licence to manufacture playing cards. Legally speaking, Albinoni, who had a full craft training, followed in his father’s footsteps, but his need to concentrate on music was recognised within the family, since, when his father died in 1709, two younger brothers took over the management of the business.
As the flautist Johann Joachim Quantz recognised in his celebrated treatise of 1752, Albinoni was a pioneer in the history of the concerto. His early concertos affirmed the ‘classic’ three-movement (fast-slow-fast) plan and have the thematic incisiveness and fondness for motor rhythms that Vivaldi was to absorb and take a stage further. His combination of fugal texture and concertante writing for the principal violin, seen in the last movements of his Op. 5 concertos, provided a model for other composers; Albinoni writes finales of this type for the fourth and tenth concertos of Op. 9.
Op. 9 is a sequel to an earlier collection, Op. 7, which Albinoni had committed to print in 1715. Both collections are titled Concerti a cinque. In theory, this ought to mean that there are five obbligato parts plus continuo, but the number in fact varies. The strings are disposed in the usual four parts (Op. 9 has, in addition, a separate part for principal violin containing solo passages for use in concertos 1, 4, 7 and 10), and there are additional parts for one oboe in four concertos, and for two oboes in another four. The three types of scoring are organised in a regular pattern typical of the Baroque. In Op. 9 the concertos with one oboe come second in each group as nos.2, 5, 8 and 11; those with two oboes follow them as nos.3, 6, 9 and 12, reversing the order found in Op. 7. Oboe concertos were still quite a novelty. It is very doubtful whether our composer invented the genre, which probably originated in Germany, but the sixteen oboe concertos in these two collections must have done much to popularise it.
Albinoni dedicated Op. 9, published in Amsterdam in 1722, to Maximilian Emanuel II, Elector of Bavaria. He already had well-established connections with the Munich court via his wife, who had sung there in 1720. Perhaps as a result of the good reception of Op. 9 by the Elector, Albinoni was invited to contribute an opera and a serenata to the wedding celebrations of the electoral prince Karl Albrecht in October 1722, directing the performances in person. Pierre de Bretagne, the official chronicler of the festivities, pays enthusiastic tribute to Albinoni’s ‘belle et charmante musique’ and his ‘savantes compositions’. It is possible that some of the new concertos served as entr’acte music during the opera; they were certainly being so used at the Hamburg opera a few years later.
In assembling his twelve concertos, Albinoni had regard both for the taste of his electoral dedicatee and for broader market needs, especially in northern Europe (the near-collapse of the Italian music-publishing industry during the 171Os was both the symptom and cause of the decline of interest in instrumental music in the peninsula). The number of surviving examples of the publication — fewer than ten are known — suggests that its success was no more than moderate. Perhaps the concertos were too long, too intricate, for mass consumption. Undeniably, they contain a certain amount of padding (in contrast to the spruce works of Op. 5), but they do not lack strong ideas or contrapuntal finesse.
Concerto No. 1 is a typical specimen of an Albinoni violin concerto. In the outer movements the short solo passages flow out of and back into the tutti sections unobtrusively and spontaneously. Unlike a Vivaldi violin concerto, the mode of scoring is never allowed to dictate the structure. The central Adagio is a little old-fashioned: a chordal pattern with some elaboration on the principal violin. The cheerful swagger of the finale is quintessentially Albinonian.
Concerto No. 2, with one oboe, is the best-known concerto in the set. There are great similarities between the form Albinoni uses for the outer movements of his oboe concertos (including this one) and that of the da capo aria in operas and cantatas. The slow movement, which has been christened Albinoni’s ‘second’ Adagio, is an expressive cantilena with a busy, but entirely subordinate, string accompaniment.
Concerto No. 3, with two oboes, pays tribute to Elector Maximilian Emanuel by simulating the sound of hunting horns, emblematic of courtly life. its middle movement provides a respite from the horn signals and tramping hooves in the shape of a melancholy siciliana. We return to all-string scoring for
Concerto No. 4. In its slow movement Albinoni pays tribute to the French style (very familiar at Munich, as at all German courts) by employing dotted rhythms and suggesting the manner of a chaconne fugal finale has some attractive cross-rhythms.
Concerto No. 5 has the bluff, no-nonsense manner of all Albinoni’s C major works. Its outer movements proceed at a leisurely pace, but their apparent repetitiveness conceals some attractive variations. In the elegiac Adagio, which moves to A minor, the solo oboe interweaves contrapuntally with the violins.
Concerto No. 6 once again offers homage to Maximilian Emanuel, this time not as a huntsman but as a military leader (he participated, none too successfully, in the War of the Spanish Succession). In the first movement the sound of fifes (represented by oboes) and drums is unmistakable. The finale forsakes the parade-ground for the ballroom; we catch here the strains of the fashionable minuet.
Concerto No. 7 is perhaps the jewel of the set. It has a slow movement that in its lachrymose languor conforms to a familiar ‘Venetian’ tradition. To accentuate the atmosphere, the harpsichord continuo is suppressed and the double-bass plays pizzicato. The effervescent finale is, in structural terms, the most complex movement Albinoni ever wrote in a violin concerto.
Concerto No. 8, in Albinoni’s favourite ‘stormy’ key of G minor, reminds us that these are (as the title-page says) concertos ‘with’ rather than ‘for’ oboe. In each movement the first violins have an important role as foils to, and partners of, the wind instrument. The monumental, almost ponderous quality of Concerto No. 5 returns in
Concerto No. 9, the second work of the set to be cast in C major. Arthur Hutchings described its finale very accurately as ‘pulsating yet urbane’.
Concerto No. 10 is the last of the four violin concertos. Its brisk first movement is noteworthy for its see-sawing syncopations and irrepressible high spirits. After a pensive slow movement comes a lively fugue. As he did earlier in Concerto No. 4, Albinoni imparts great zest here by means of hemiola cross-rhythms. A solo oboe returns for
Concerto No. 11. Its first movement has a Handelian athleticism combined with a welcome generosity of phrase-length. In the slow movement, in G minor, Albinoni reverts to his most conservative style; the opening is very reminiscent of that of the first movement of the sonata published as the penultimate work of his Op. 2 (1700). A ‘modern’ touch appears, however, in the finale: the composer mixes minor and major phrases in a manner anticipating the galant, and after it the Classical, style.
Concerto No. 12 is slighter in its outer movements than the other three concertos with two oboes, returning to the scale of the prototypes in Op. 7. It recalls Op. 7 also in its many allusions to the style of the trumpet. The Adagio, however, conforms fully to type, featuring the dense but variegated texture that makes these concertos so individual.