Tonal Space in the Music of Antonio Vivaldi incorporates an analytical study of Vivaldi's style into a more general exploration of harmonic and tonal organization in the music of the late Italian Baroque. The harmonic and tonal language of Vivaldi and his contemporaries, full of curious links between traditional modal thinking and what would later be considered common-practice major-minor tonality, directly reflects the historical circumstances of the shifting attitude toward the conceptualization of tonal space so crucial to Western art music. Vivaldi is examined in a completely new context, allowing both his prosaic and idiosyncratic sides to emerge clearly. This book contributes to a better understanding of Vivaldi's individual style, while illuminating wider processes of stylistic development and the diffusion of artistic ideas in the 18th century.
Tonal Space in the Music of Antonio Vivaldi incorporates an analytical study of Vivaldi's style into a more general exploration of harmonic and tonal organization in the music of the late Italian Baroque. The harmonic and tonal language of Vivaldi and his contemporaries, full of curious links between traditional modal thinking and what would later be considered common-practice major-minor tonality, directly reflects the historical circumstances of the shifting attitude toward the conceptualization of tonal space so crucial to Western art music. Vivaldi is examined in a completely new context, allowing both his prosaic and idiosyncratic sides to emerge clearly. This book contributes to a better understanding of Vivaldi's individual style, while illuminating wider processes of stylistic development and the diffusion of artistic ideas in the 18th century.
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Overview
Tonal Space in the Music of Antonio Vivaldi incorporates an analytical study of Vivaldi's style into a more general exploration of harmonic and tonal organization in the music of the late Italian Baroque. The harmonic and tonal language of Vivaldi and his contemporaries, full of curious links between traditional modal thinking and what would later be considered common-practice major-minor tonality, directly reflects the historical circumstances of the shifting attitude toward the conceptualization of tonal space so crucial to Western art music. Vivaldi is examined in a completely new context, allowing both his prosaic and idiosyncratic sides to emerge clearly. This book contributes to a better understanding of Vivaldi's individual style, while illuminating wider processes of stylistic development and the diffusion of artistic ideas in the 18th century.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253028037 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/25/2008 |
| Series: | Music and the Early Modern Imagination |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 384 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Bella Brover-Lubovsky is Assistant Professor in the Department of Theory and Composition, Jerusalem Rubin Academy of Music and Dance, and a lecturer and reseach fellow in the Department of Musicology, Hebrew University.
Read an Excerpt
Tonal Space in the Music of Antonio Vivaldi
By Bella Brover-Lubovsky
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2008 Indiana University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-02803-7
CHAPTER 1
Vivaldi's "Harmony" and the Paradox of Historical Recognition
This science, which consists in the simultaneous employment of sounds, is the same throughout Europe; it is perhaps that part of the art on the foundations of which all nations best agree, notwithstanding the diversity of language; but the choice of instruments, and consequently the effects, differ in every nation. — Alexandre-Étienne Choron
Le quattro regioni
Nowadays, Antonio Vivaldi is considered the most prominent Italian composer of his generation. At the same time, an exploration of the vicissitudes of Vivaldi's life, the enigmatic circumstances of his death, and the reception accorded his works throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reveal striking and paradoxical characteristics. Despite his stature as a leading figure in the first decades of the Settecento — as virtuoso-violinist, teacher, impresario, and composer of far-ranging influence — Vivaldi still appears to have dropped far behind the mainstream during the last years of his life.
This drastic decline in renown was brought about through younger contemporaries. Charles de Brosses reported that Vivaldi's music had fallen out of vogue in his native Venice as early as 1739: "To my great astonishment I discovered that he is not as highly regarded as he deserves to be in this country, where everything has to be up-to-the-minute, where his works have been heard for too long, and where last year's music no longer brings in money." This evidence was later reinforced by Johann Joachim Quantz, previously reckoned one of Vivaldi's most fervent German admirers. After many years of support, Quantz claimed that Vivaldi's performances and compositions had lapsed into carelessness and presumption: "As a result of excessive daily composing, and especially after he had begun to write theatrical vocal pieces, he sank into frivolity and eccentricity both in composition and in performance; in consequence his late concertos did not gain as much approbation as his first." Vivaldi's extensive correspondence with Guido Bentivoglio elucidates the misfortunes he faced with his last operas, reflecting the extent to which his music had fallen from favor. As a result, Vivaldi lost his position in the Ospedale della Pietà, with which he had been affiliated since 1703. At sixty-one, he was forced to leave Venice in search of new commissions and patronage, both of which were to prove elusive. His death in 1741 in Vienna, center of the newly emerging modern instrumental style, passed almost unnoticed in musical circles.
Posthumous reception accorded Vivaldi's music in the second half of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries continued this pattern, revealing his gradual disappearance from the musical-intellectual scene. Despite widespread emulation of his structural models and textural techniques, Vivaldi's music was plunged into oblivion, and his colorful personal reputation as eccentric priest-violinist threatened to overshadow his illustriousness as a composer.
The fading of a composer's fame after his death was not uncommon in the eighteenth century, when each musician was personally responsible for his own promotion and dissemination as music director, performer, impresario, teacher, and possibly even publisher. (Under these circumstances, even retirement from musical activity entailed a real risk that one's music might disappear from the repertory!) Thus the reception history of Vivaldi's music delineates the "fame-oblivionrevival" curve so typical of eighteenth-century composers. Vivaldi's eclipse may also have been accelerated by social and cultural factors such as the decline in the musical activity of the Pietà and other ospedali, as well as the general decay of Serenissima Repubblica — and of its patronage system in particular. Also crucial might have been the typical Venetian's appetite for the music of foreigners. Vivaldi's decline might also have been related to his low social status, his scandalous personal history, and his commercial decision to sell manuscript copies instead of publishing his compositions.
Nevertheless, Vivaldi's swift fall from grace still appears surprising when compared to the relative situation of his slightly older concittaddino, Tomaso Albinoni. Albinoni (or dilettante veneto, as he preferred to style himself) was not generally considered a true professional. He was less prolific, did not enjoy as international a career, and to a great extent was overtly influenced by his more plebeian colleague. Yet music amateurs in Europe still remained much more familiar with Albinoni than with his more exuberantly endowed compatriot. A glance at the title page of one of the theoretical sources of the period, The Modern Musick-Master or the Universal Musician by Peter Prelleur, provides eloquent illustration. Prelleur supplements his compendium with "a large collection of Airs, and Lessons, adapted for several Instruments, extracted from the works of Mr. Handel, Bononcini, Albinoni and other eminent masters." Vivaldi's pieces do not appear — not even under the "eminent masters" — even though the collection includes a great number of illustrations from music by Mattheson, Bonporti, Torelli, Tibaldi, and Pepusch. Equally, the printing history of Vivaldi's works in London can bear no comparison with that of Albinoni: thirteen collections and separate works by Vivaldi were printed by John Walsh during the period 1715–32 against twenty-two of Albinoni's (1703–32.)
Modern scholars tend to blame Vivaldi's comparative eclipse on his stubborn individualism, his long-lasting stylistic immutability, and his failure to keep abreast of fickle taste and changing fashion. However, an attempt to take account of the intellectual history of the period should contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the factors behind Vivaldi's obscurity.
To begin with, a reassessment of the reception history of Vivaldi's music and personality in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries reveals strong national-cultural differences. The oblivion to which he was relegated in his native Venice and other Italian centers, along with the castigation of his harmonic practices common in writings by British men of letters, stands in sharp contrast to those sporadic flashes of interest in his music that emerged in France and to the all-embracing adoption of his style by German musicians.
The latter observation goes against the generally accepted belief that Vivaldi disappeared from the collective memory of younger contemporaries throughout Europe. Talbot considers mid-eighteenth-century critics fairly uniform in their disdain, although there were certainly a few who saw further: "The great English music historians and aestheticians and the great German critics and lexicographers of his century concur in relegating him to the margins. Only Burney in the first group and Mattheson in the second seem to have had an inkling of his full talent as a composer."
Taking crude national distinctions and preferences as a starting point, an exploration of the ambivalence of Vivaldi's reception may shed some light both on the cultural and purely musical aspects of this phenomenon.
Italy
Many connoisseurs claimed that he was deficient in counterpoint and did not compose basses correctly. — Carlo Goldoni
Venetians repeatedly ridiculed Vivaldi for his lack of formal training and for careless compositional procedures. Even after his music became ubiquitous, his reputation and prestige hardly matched the incontestable authority of "learned" composers such as the musicians affiliated with the chapel San Marco or such noble dilettanti as Albinoni or the Marcello brothers. In Il teatro alla moda Benedetto Marcello clamorously attacked Vivaldi (nicknamed Aldiviva) and satirized his professional ignorance: "Every modern composer should drop an occasional remark that he writes in a rather popular style and violates the rules frequently." Marcello was equally contemptuous of Vivaldi's allegedly oversimplified tonal vision, as will be shown later. In addition, Carlo Goldoni, Marcello's younger compatriot, quoted contemporaries who considered Vivaldi a mediocre composer. Goldoni's amusing description of his meeting with il Prete rosso in 1735 appears to be the ultimate comment on someone once termed il famoso Veneto.
The intriguing history of Vivaldi's (recently discovered) late sacred works (Psalms Nisi Dominus RV 803 and Dixit Dominus RV 807) reveals the extent to which Vivaldi's music came to be discounted in his native city. The manuscript copies of these psalm settings, which are believed to date from 1739, were intentionally wrongly ascribed to Baldassare Galuppi, Vivaldi's younger fellow-countryman. This deliberate slip of the pen was apparently motivated by the fact that Vivaldi was an almost forgotten figure by midcentury, and testifies to the oblivion to which he was subjected even in Venice.
By the turn of the nineteenth century, Vivaldi's name appears more and more fleetingly. A brief entry in Dizionario della musica sacra e profana by Pietro Gianelli, which was published in Venice in 1801, may be the last allusion to its author's formerly distinguished concittaddino. Though extolling Vivaldi as a "celebrated Italian musician ... a famous player on violin and an excellent composer," Gianelli assumes the roughest distortions of biographical detail: Vivaldi's death is reported to be "about 1760"! The conciseness and casualness of such an entry eloquently reflects Vivaldi's perceived lack of importance at the time.
Equally, Vivaldi's name is absent from Giuseppe Bertini's Dizionario, a substantial work in four volumes containing a detailed chronological table of composers. (This deficiency appears especially flagrant in light of Bertini's stated purpose of filling in the gaps regarding musical activity in his native Italy). The collective memory lapse of Vivaldi's successors becomes still more glaring upon perusing Pietro Lichtenthal's comprehensive Italian lexicon. This author manages to avoid mentioning Vivaldi even when describing the celebrated Italian violin school, while Albinoni remains Venice's sole representative.
Evidence of Vivaldi's reception in Italy is eventually exhausted with Francesco Caffi's seminal study of sacred music in Venice, written slightly more than a century after Vivaldi's death. Caffi mentions Vivaldi as a son of the violin player at the San Marco:
Among these, I will name, in particular, to give them their just honor, in the first place as the most celebrated violinist Francesco Veraccini, then D. Antonio Vivaldi (son of the instrumental player Giambatista), who shone also as an excellent theatrical composer, and as maestro of the girls of the choir at the Pietà, of whom I will speak in the parts concerning theatrical and concert music.
Indeed, a volume of notes toward a projected history of Venetian opera that Caffi referred to but never accomplished, contains this intriguing excerpt:
And since among the great artists, even caprices and trifles are precious gems, I would like to add this, that among the entertainments with which the nobles used to enliven their splendid visits to the country were the concerto of cuckoos, the chorus of the nuns, the tongue of weathervanes, and similar pleasant extravagances composed by Vivaldi ... and such other very ingenious musical jokes.
It is evident that Caffi, despite establishing the historiography of music in Venice, was absolutely ignorant about Vivaldi and his music, merely borrowing such snippets of information as Burney and other British historians had already published, as will be demonstrated. Italian writers continued to bypass Vivaldi as a part of their national — and pan-European — inheritance up to (and including) Amintore Galli's otherwise impressive Estetica della musica, published at the beginning of the twentieth century, although Luigi Torchi's La musica istrumentale in Italia almost immediately redressed the balance in Vivaldi's favor.
France
Vivaldi (Don Antonio), a Venetian, ... Master of Music at the Pietà conservatory and a very skillful violinist. He was a savant; and since he was peculiar in everything, he often employed in his compositions felicitous singularities that made them succeed. — Jean-Benjamin de Laborde
Despite slipping into obscurity in his native Italy, Vivaldi reignited his career in France. Original publications of the six cello sonatas in 1739–40, along with a dozen reprints of earlier collections between 1739 and 1751, reflect a growing appreciation, although records for Amsterdam and London, the two former centers of Vivaldian printing activity, both show a marked decline of enthusiasm for his new works. (Indeed, after the second reprint of Select Harmony by John Walsh, and a publication of separate concertos by Gerhard Fredrik Witvogel, the publishing history of Vivaldi's works in London and Amsterdam has been exhausted). The collection of six sonatas, entitled Il pastor fido (op. 13) and published in ca. 1737 under Vivaldi's name, recently has been proven to be a pastiche by Nicolas Chédeville. (Such demonstrable commercial lure makes the misascription of Vivaldi's Nisi Dominus and Dixit Dominus in Venice still more remarkable.) This continuing interest in Vivaldi's concertos is further supported by the Fonds Blancheton manuscript collection dating from the early 1740s, which contains three of Vivaldi's violin concertos, and by reports of performances of his separate works.
As might be expected, discussion about his instrumental music flagged during the 1750s–70s, when the French intellectual elite was absorbed in discussing the relative merits of French and Italian opera, a controversy popularly known as la Querelle des Bouffons. Vivaldi's name reappeared only sporadically around the turn of the nineteenth century, in writings by Charles Henri de Blainville, Jean-Benjamin de Laborde, Alexandre-Étienne Choron, François Fayolle, Grigorii Orloff, and François-Joseph Fétis. (It is interesting to note that the French refused to adopt the condescending attitude of Vivaldi's compatriots with regard to his compositional procedures, with Laborde particularly praising his great skill both as excellent violinist and erudite composer.) Excerpts from Vivaldi's instrumental music also feature in such late eighteenth-century violin manuals as L'Art de se perfectionner dans le violon by Michel Corrette, where — among works by twenty-nine composers — no fewer than eight of Vivaldi's concertos are cited.
Later French reception more nearly mirrors other early nineteenth-century trends, emphasizing Vivaldi's turbulent individualism and aberration from social norms. Anecdotes about his abrupt retirement into the sacristy in the middle of celebrating Mass are reconstructed with differing embellishments in Choron/ Fayolle, Orloff, and Fétis, though each serves equally to underpin the romantic concept of composer both as madman and as unrecognized genius:
[O]ne day, whilst saying mass, a theme for a fugue suddenly struck him, when he immediately quitted the altar where he was officiating, and hastened to the sacristy to write down the theme, afterwards returning to finish the mass; for this conduct he was brought before the Inquisition, who happily considered him only as a musician, that is to say as a madman, and confined their sentence to the forbidding him to say mass in future.
Notwithstanding this reputation, Vivaldi was not esteemed as a "romantic composer" or treated as a national hero in the nineteenth century, apparently because his music had already lapsed from communal memory.
England
The harmony ... and the artful contexture of the parts, is its [Vivaldi's music] least merit. — John Hawkins
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Tonal Space in the Music of Antonio Vivaldi by Bella Brover-Lubovsky. Copyright © 2008 Indiana University Press. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
Editorial Conventions and Abbreviations
Introduction
Part 1. Estro armonico
1. Vivaldi's "Harmony" and the Paradox of Historical Recognition
2. Theory of Tonal Organization in Eighteenth-Century Italy
Part 2. Key and Mode
3. Tonality and Key Characteristics
4. Modal Implications in Tonal Organization
5. The Interaction of Major and Minor Modes
6. Functioning of Tonality in Large-Scale Composition
Part 3. Harmony and Syntax
7. Lament Bass
8. Sequence
9. Pedal Point
10. Cadence
Part 4. Tonal Structure
11. General Premises
12. Functioning of Harmonic Degrees in Tonal Structure
13. Tonal Structure and the Choice of Tonality
14. Tonal Structure in Cyclic Compositions
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
What People are Saying About This
This will be a significant contribution to Vivaldi studies and 17th- and 18th-century harmonic and compositional theory. . . . It opens a new and necessary chapter in the scholarship on Vivaldi.