Scarlatti
Domenico Scarlatti, perhaps the greatest clavier-player that Italy ever had, prefaces a collection of thirty sonatas, which appeared at Amsterdam,[44] with the following words: “Amateur or professor, whoever thou art, seek not in these compositions for any deep feeling. They are only a frolic of art, intended to increase thy confidence on the clavier. I had no ambition to make a sensation; I was simply requested to publish the pieces. Should they be not utterly unpleasing to thee, I shall all the more willingly undertake other commissions, in order to rejoice thee in a lighter and more varied style. Take then these pieces rather as man than as critic; so only shalt thou increase thine own content. To speak of the use of the two hands—D denotes dritta, the right, and M manca, the left. Farewell!” It is noticeable how here in a few words the whole essence of Italian clavier-music is summed up—the fresh, cheerful disposition of the artist; the respect for the amateur; the pleasure in mere sound and in musical construction; the thorough working-out of intellectual motives (in the manner of the Étude); and the stress laid upon the equal participation of both hands as essential factors in the “concert,” [using this word in its older sense as expressing the association of two or more vocal or instrumental “parts”]. The word “concert” was well understood in these early days to mean the combination of two viols; and music of such a kind was, in form and in content, the true precursor of clavier-music, in which the right and left hand “parts” are strictly on an equality both in difficulty and importance.
These are the distinguishing marks of Italian clavier-art, and within these limits it works.
But Scarlatti is especially remarkable to us in the present day, in that he occupies the position of an early writer whose pieces still play a part, though a small one, in modern public concerts. Liszt, for example, was partial to him, and arranged his “Cat’s Fugue”; while Bülow edited a representative selection from his pieces. Czerny published (through Haslinger) two hundred of his so-called Sonatas—though, by the way, the last of these pieces belongs really to the father, Alessandro Scarlatti. Before that time the remains of the master had formed no inconsiderable part of private manuscript collections, such as those of the Abbé Santini in Rome, and others.[45]
Domenico Scarlatti, the famous son of the not less famous Alessandro, who was a composer of operas and chief of the Neapolitan School, exhibits in old portraits a serious, severe, even pedagogic countenance. There is also much of the pedagogue in his pieces; yet I think him fresher, gayer, more happy in life and mind than this face would lead one to suppose. His “Exercises” move with vigorous strides, and are far too full of esprit to be pedantic. His life was that of an artist universally honoured, and rejoicing in his fame, a type of which his contemporary Handel is the model; and his biography reveals no less activity than his works. A pupil of his renowned father, in the midst of the volatile, melody-loving, easily-stirred Neapolitan world, he set out early for Rome, in order to become the scholar of the great theorist Gasparini and of the organist and clavier-player Pasquini. In 1709, at the age of twenty-six, he made the acquaintance of Handel at Venice, and in sheer admiration, followed him to Rome. There he remained ten years, and became kapellmeister of St Peter’s, gaining a reputation by the works of his genius. In 1720 we suddenly find him in London as clavicymbalist of the Italian opera. Here his “Narcissus” was performed. A year later again he was in Lisbon, where the King of Portugal made efforts to detain him, and where for a time he gave lessons to the Princess. At this time the fame of his playing and of his compositions reached the farthest bounds of Europe, and he ranked thenceforward as the first executant of the age. He returned again to Italy, and from Italy to Spain. He remained in Madrid from 1729 to his death in 1757. Here all kinds of honours were showered upon him; he was Knight of St James, and chamber-player to the Queen, who still retained a grateful memory of the lessons he had given her at Lisbon when she was Princess of Asturias. To her he dedicated his first-published pieces, prefixing to them the lively preface above quoted.
Italian music has to French the relation which Bull has to Bird, or the virtuoso to the poet. In Scarlatti we seek in vain for any inner motive, nor do we feel any need of an emotional rendering on the part of the performer; his short pieces aim only at sound effects, and are written merely from the love of brilliant clavier-passages, or to embody delicate technical devices. They are not denizens of Paradise, who wander, unconscious of their naked beauty, under over-arching bowers; they are athletes, simply rejoicing in their physical strength, and raising gymnastic to a high, self-sufficient art. We admire them, as we admire an acrobatic troupe of strong and stout character; we admire them—not too much, yet with a certain eager anticipation of the next interesting and unusual feat of skill. We wonder at their mastery of technique, and the systematic development of their characteristic methods; we rejoice that they never, in their desire to please, abandon the standpoint of the sober artists; but our heart remains cold. There is an icy, virgin purity in this first off-shoot[46] of absolute virtuosity, which kindles our sense for the art of beautiful mechanism, for the art of technique per se—an art which, after all, the historian of the clavier must not depreciate by comparing it with that of the inner music.
Adrian Willaert, of Venice, after the engraving
published in 1559 by Antonio Gardano, Venice.
The Scarlatti style is a genuine product of the Italian musical emotion. The Italian is not born for heavy, contrapuntal, “vain ticklings of the ears”; nor, on the other hand, for too intimate effusions or symbolic mysteries. He is sensuous through and through; delight in playing and in sound is the very life of his music, as delight in outline and in colour is the very life of his painting. The intoxication of absolute tone runs through the masses of his churches, the operas of his theatre, the chamber-music of his salons. Delight in sound gave the impulse to every Italian musician in his bid for fame. It created virtuosity, which loves playing for its own sake; it created the dramatic choruses, with which the Venetian school began its career; it created the melody predominating over the harmony, with the discovery of which in the Florentine opera the greatest blow was struck for the new principles of “secular” musicianship. From love of sound the Venetians cast the instruments free from their old corporate unity, and gave them an individual meaning and value. From love of sound Frescobaldi led the organ, Corelli the violin, Scarlatti the clavier, to undreamt-of technical creations. And the bel canto of the human voice almost attained the capacity of an instrument; so small was the influence of the mere words. They were enamoured of melody, which, unlike the ecclesiastical counterpoint, sought its new objective not in the manifold transformation, but in the natural development of a motive: they were captivated with the “da capo” repetition of concerted pieces or arias, a habit grounded on the psychological law of the higher effectiveness of all repeated passages. They rioted in the multitude of forms, in which they found a place for every kind of music, for every “tempo,” every rhythm, and for all kinds of expression. Throughout all this was to be perceived the sensuous Italian love for music, which expressed in this manifoldness its freedom of artistic activity, and in that freedom the unity of thematic construction and consequently the unity of formal repetition.
Frescobaldi.
Technical ability was appreciated in Venice earlier than elsewhere. The registers of organists at St Mark’s go back to 1318. In Venice not the office only, but the art, was honoured. The musician was not, as he was much later at Florence, interrupted by the ringing of a bell, if he continued his performance too long. The emancipation of artists, which in our own century we have seen carried out in the person of the orchestral conductor, was in Venice effected by the instrumental musician; and as to-day the orchestra has grown in repute by the agency of the conductor, so in those days the prestige of instrumental music advanced alongside that of the performer. At the beginning of the seventeenth century a Frescobaldi could already gain so important a position as player of the organ and clavier, that it was said that no clavier-player was respected who did not play after his new fashion. When he gave his first recital in St Peter’s, thirty thousand persons were there to hear him. What Frescobaldi was in the first half of the seventeenth century, that was Pasquini in the second half. In Italy, Austria, and France he was treated like a prince; and his tombstone bears the proud inscription, “Organist of the Senate and People of Rome.” With Scarlatti the art of clavier-playing reaches its height, and begins to decline. It is not clavierists but violinists, the wordless rivals of the singers, who have carried the type of Italian virtuosity into our own times—Corelli, Vivaldi, Locatelli, Tartini, Paganini.
This sensuous devotion to music apart from inner meaning, this passion for poetic beauty, the Italians have not yet, even under Wagnerian influences, wholly forgotten. The victorious rule of absolute tone, while it constituted their greatness, carried with it the germ of their decay. Virtuosity is the mark of their art and of their life. We must take them as they are, in the whole light-hearted temperament of their existence. This Bohemian type of the Italian musician of the time may profitably be compared with the similar French type. What a seductive brilliancy there is in the adventurous career of a Bononcini! His operas are received at Vienna with unparalleled enthusiasm. Queen Sophia Charlotte is the clavier-player at the production of his “Polifemo” in Berlin. In London he enters upon a contest with Handel, in which social intrigues are involved with high political aims. Next, he appears in a lawsuit, and is unmasked as a common plagiary[47] of a madrigal of Lotti’s; shortly after he is away to Paris with an alchemist, who swindles him of all his property, and leaves him to make his living by the sweat of his brow to his ninetieth year. Stradella’s fate is well known—how he ran away with the mistress of a Venetian before the first performance of his own opera;[48] was more than once attacked with a dagger, and finally actually murdered.[49] What, compared with this, is the story of Rameau’s youthful love and its punishment, and of his tardy attainment of the haven of fortune, or what the anecdotes of Marchand, with his love affairs, his expulsion from Paris, and his smiling return? The dangerous glitter of this Italian Bohemianism is the fitting framework of that sensuous, lively, irresponsible music.
It was inevitable that the Italians should invent the opera—the opera, in which every thing tends rapidly to the spectacular; singers, scene painters, musicians, and the public. Apart from its relation to opera all Italian music is unintelligible, and it is no accident that for centuries the Italians stood in the forefront of opera. Those lucky misunderstandings are well-known, which led, about the year 1600, to the rise of this form of art. A circle of Platonic dreamers (led by Giovanni Bardi, Count of Vernio) in Florence, anxious to revive the ancient tragedy, engaged certain musicians to compose monodic songs with accompaniment. They merely meant by this to be antique; but as a matter of fact they were unconsciously acting along the line of the most modern of needs, which had long tended towards isolated melody. The dainty and delicate songs, which took their origin in this, the Venetians, and afterwards the Neapolitans, accepted eagerly as a material on which to construct forms of ravishing virtuosity, until a Jomelli, with his dashing bravura passages on the most solemn words, finally arrives at that very “laceramento della poesia”[50] which the Florentine reformer Caccini had once fanatically combated as a madness of the ancient song in several parts. In a very short time the opera runs through the whole gamut of the joys and sorrows of virtuosity. The sweet charm of sound, exhibited by a voice which bears the melody, so suited to the narrow outlines of poetry, is found in the old vestal airs of Caccini and Peri. The delight in a multitude of forms, in an alternation of different rhythms in short portions of the aria, lived in the songs of the Venetian Cavalli, in which we are reminded of the alternating tempi of the old instrumental pieces[51]—the toccatas, fantasias, and canzoni. Yet empty vanity shows itself all too soon. The original simplicity was overlaid by various corrupt accretions, first by songs, introduced in loose dependence on the action, then by complete concerted pieces, which are indicated in the libretto—together with directions to tailors, architects, and decorators, and alongside of the titles and orders of the performers. In Naples, worse still, the music gradually declines into a stiff and wearisome form and sweet playful nothingness. The well-defined outline of the aria appears, now regularly written “da capo”; it alternates to a tiresome degree with the accompanied recitative; the chorus recedes into the background before the soloists. It is the old typical form, skilfully adapted to virtuosity, precisely as a sonata of Scarlatti is differentiated from a toccata of Frescobaldi or Pasquini. Originality is vanquished; elegance has created a set of formalities in which technique can freely exercise itself. The substantive style, so to speak, has given way to the adjective, and matter is conquered by form. This Neapolitan class of opera, which thus exalts the virtuoso, begins with Alessandro Scarlatti. He is the father of that species of art which is afterwards included in the name of Italian opera, in which we see a contempt for the words, a love of vocal bravura, the supremacy of the aria, and a delight in the human voice as an instrument. In the forms of his ornamentations we discover again in antitype the passages of Domenico; in his love of the da capo and instrumental repetitions of vocal phrases we see once more in antitype Domenico’s repetitions of shorter or longer groups of bars. In the “Alessandro nelle Indie” of the Neapolitan Leonardo Vinci the hero sings arias full of slurred “divisions,” syncopations, unprepared sevenths, which to a man acquainted with Scarlatti’s sonatas appear to bear a strong family resemblance to Scarlatti. Old rubbish bears germs of new creations; released from the heavy burden of the words, the light play of the voices in the clavier-pieces introduces a fresh, youthful life that is full of promise for the future.
The isolation of the voice and of the instrument, the sensuous delight in sound, demands a chamber-music and a chamber-style. Chamber-music demands the Maecenas of the great house, and the wealthy amateur, who is so powerful a factor in every advance of art. Roman musical life, for instance, draws its strength from the practical encouragement of the Pope’s, or from the concerts and operas performed in aristocratic houses. A Venetian nobleman, Benedetto Marcello, became a distinguished and favourite composer, a poet and a satirist. A Roman nobleman, Emilio dei Cavalieri, became the founder of the modern oratorio, an opera-composer of the advanced school, perhaps even the very earliest composer of vocal monody. Vincenzo Galilei, the father of the astronomer, became known by his monodies in that circle of Florentine Platonists, to whose worthy amateurism is due the origin of the opera; and he wrote a work on the technique and fingering of all instruments.
Music in the home is in Italy not too intimate, but proud, splendid, mere pastime. Like the opera of the virtuosos, like the secularised church-music, it tends to rely upon effect, and lives on applause. It depends chiefly on the performer, and knows little of the mutual intelligence of souls. A subtle aristocratic love of music runs through the Italy of the Middle Ages. Many are the names of high-born men and women who had mastered the art of the lute by ear—for a notation was as yet unknown.[52] In the Decameron (1350), alongside of the novel-telling, it is song, lute-playing, viol-playing, dance and choral refrain, with which that pleasant company loves most to kill the time.
The music of dances, songs, and instrumental pieces, which was soon to find its proper home in the clavier, is a child of the world, and, in the view of a serious theoretician like Pietro Bembo, it is exposed to all the dangers of emptiness and vanity. In 1529 he writes to his daughter Helena, who like many of the women in her position, intended to receive instruction on the clavier in her convent: “As to your request to be allowed to learn the monochord,[53] I answer that you cannot yet, on account of your youth, understand that playing is only suited for idle and volatile ladies; whereas I desired you to be the most pure and loveable maiden in the world. Also, it would bring you but little pleasure or renown if you should play badly; while to play well you would have to devote ten or twelve years to practice, without being able to think of anything else. Consider a moment whether this would become you. And if your friends wish you to learn to play in order to give them pleasure, reply that you do not wish to make yourself ridiculous in their eyes; and content yourself with the sciences and domestic occupations.”
A hundred years later chamber-music is at its zenith. The great Carissimi (d. 1674) put the flourishing chamber cantata[54]—that half-dramatic, half-lyric song of the seventeenth century—by the side of the monodic church-songs of Viadana; and Steffani added his renowned chamber-duets. The case was precisely similar with instrumental music; by the side of the “sonata da chiesa,” with its free and independent style, came the “sonata da camera,” as a suite of favourite dance forms;[55] and the “concerti,” with their several instruments playing to a small accompanying orchestra. Above all, the possibility is now realised of suitably accompanying monodies and concerted works on the clavier, from the figured bass; and this in its turn contributes not a little to the victorious advance of the melodic song. But as a solo-instrument, the clavier suns itself in the light of the chamber-style, in which brilliancy, dexterity of hand, and elasticity of form are not less admired than the many small and spirited caprices, which in the “grand” style of music have perhaps not yet been attempted.
A Clavier Lesson.
Painting by an unknown Dutch Master, 17th century, in the Royal Gallery at Dresden.
Among all the instruments of tone which achieve an independent existence in Italy, the clavier naturally takes its stand last. From its first movement towards this independence, in Venice in the sixteenth century, to the full liberty of a Scarlatti, stretches an interval of a hundred and fifty years. It was in fact partly too much occupied in the orchestra, and partly too dependent on the technique of the organ. We find it already in the orchestra in the first operas of Peri; under Monteverde, the first of all great orchestral geniuses, there were two claviers, on the right and left of the stage. They serve to accompany solo singing, or, along with small organs, to fill up the harmony of the orchestral body. As a rule the operatic composer writes only the figured bass, but occasionally adds some of the melodic voice-parts; the conductor completes the score, leaving to the several players, however, a certain freedom of improvisation in colouring, a freedom which a well-trained musician would not abuse to the detriment of the tout ensemble.
But clavier-pieces pure and simple had a characteristically dependent existence. Even in that Venetian circle where Willaert (1490-1563) Gabrieli,[56] and Merulo moved, in which instruments were first emancipated, in which they were boldly introduced into church-music, and solo-pieces were written for orchestral or for keyed instruments, even here the soul of the clavier lay still fettered. It is the organ that indicates colour and takes the lead. In the pieces of the two Gabrielis, or of Merulo, the old contrapuntal, pictorial fashion lives still almost untouched by external disturbances; and the picture seldom allows us to anticipate that stiff adherence to the theme, and that well-wrought harmony which, in the England of the same age, we found so full of promise. Down to the time of Frescobaldi, organist at St Peter’s in 1615, who stands as a landmark in this development, the Italian sense for absolute music is far too strong for an “applied” music to be able, as it did in France and England, to modernise the instrumental pieces by their necessary dependence on song and dance. Canzoni[57] are treated in a light fugal style; the so-called Ricercari[58] represent another and freer fugal form; the toccatas, capriccios and fantasias are variegated attempts to unite all tempi and all kinds of playing in one piece. The composers are aiming at typical forms, and only attain an unrestrained formlessness which all these pieces with their trifling differences alike exhibit. The juxtaposition of chords, successions of canonic imitations, free alternations of tempo, piquant applications of the newly-discovered chromatic possibilities—all these interest these writers much more than character or expression. All these ricercari, canzoni, fantasias, toccatas, are alike “sonatas”—pieces which exist for the sake of their tones and technique, and, as Couperin says, not in the least for the sake of their soul or content. Dance-suites and variations on songs, which as time went on gained in popularity, sharpened, here as elsewhere, the sense for form; but these never became the predominant class. The free form of the fantasia always ranked as the principal species of the higher clavier-pieces. In Frescobaldi we already see the process of crystallisation. His canzoni and fugues not only exhibit for the first time the good fugal style familiar to us, but also betray the modern sense for arrangement and method in their frequent division[59] into three movements, and in their progressive quickening of tempo. He it is also who reduces under a distinct law of arrangement the various movements of the whole instrumental fantasia.
With Pasquini in the second half of the seventeenth century, we meet the visible line of demarcation between organ and clavier. Hitherto the organ had been in everything the predominant partner. The whole aspect of the clavier-pieces was that of the organ. The old Venetians had frequently written for it in three or four parts and brought the instrument into popularity. But even Frescobaldi had written no piece for clavier alone. Diruta, organist at Chioggia, the pupil of Merulo, wrote a dialogue between 1597 and 1609 on the best method of playing organ and clavier, and had of course drawn attention to the characteristic features of clavier-playing; but all his observations on holding the hands horizontal,[60] on the good and bad fingers (the second and fourth are the “good,” and fall on the strong accents of the bar), or on the ornamentations and their execution, are in the first instance written with reference to the organ. Indeed, he actually begins his book with a panegyric on that instrument. As a matter of fact the true emancipator of the Italian clavier was Pasquini. He wrote for the clavicymbal alone; in his figures and style of play he thus early showed a genuine sense for the clavier; he abandoned the practice of setting chord passages and runs in close juxtaposition, but elaborated out of the two the proper clavier style; he brought into strong connection with a theme the quicker and slower parts of his sonatas, and set them clearly over against each other; and he attempts, as in his Capriccio on the motive of the cuckoo’s song, to draw from the clavier all kinds of characteristic effects, still wild and confused, but full of the freshness of spring.
Virginal in shape of a work-box.
The same opened, showing the instrument
within, which can be taken out.
The instrument taken out.
Constructed in 1631 by Valerius Perius Romanus.
De Wit collection, Leipsic.
So far is the early Italian clavier (when the violin begins its victorious career) from assuming a leading position, that the cembalo can do nothing better than make use of the experiences of the violin. For we must give up the legend of the genius of Michel Angelo Rossi. This story is one of the most amusing freaks of musical history. We find in many popular collections of old music an andante and allegro in G major by this man, who is tolerably well known as an operatic composer and violinist. He was a pupil of Frescobaldi and died in 1660. This piece is so captivating in its melody, so decided in its form, so restrained in its arrangement, that it would have done honour to Mozart. Had these pieces truly sprung from the intavolatura of Michel Angelo Rossi, the modernity of their form and melody would give such a shock to musical history that it would be shivered into fragments. Yet a man like Pauer, who published them, could actually believe that this music was possible before 1660.[61] A later historian, Rolland, in his “Histoire de l’Opéra avant Lully et Scarlatti,” led astray by the same mistake, fancies he detects in the choruses of Rossi’s opera of Hermione anticipations of the Zauberflöte.[62] Parry alone, the author of the brilliant article on the sonata in Grove’s Dictionary of Music, has boggled at this pseudo Rossi. Heaven knows to whom the pretty little pieces really belong. It is not unlikely that Scarlatti wrote them in his old age.
Italian cembalo, from a monastery, of the 18th century. Made of cypress wood. The pictures on the lid represent a concert of monks and a landscape. On the sides of the case are Cupids and garlands. De Wit collection, Leipsic.
The thematically precise sonatas and concertos of Corelli, the old violin master; the pieces of Vivaldi, so wonderfully rich in melody; the intellectual suites of Locatelli; it is in these violin works that the form of the Italian instrumental piece first appears, deriving itself from the joint experiences of the free toccata and of the fettered dance. Corelli, who died so early as 1713, was one of those strange phenomena in the history of art, which reach the utmost heights of an epoch, without freezing into an icy classicism. His pieces are even to-day of a ravishing sensuousness, and must be produced in the flowery dress of an improvised coloratura.[63] They mark the highest point in the monodic style of the virginal Italian music. From the point of view of melody they are the freshest dances and arias written about 1700, full of unparalleled invention and of a rhythmical freedom which anticipates the scherzi of Beethoven. They are indeed the works of a genius in form. But they never stiffen into one shape, like the operatic overtures.[64] In Corelli the sonata still stands in the full bloom of its manifold forms. Among his numerous pieces there are not many which exhibit precisely the same arrangement of the movements and of their tempi, or of the various dances. Even the number of these movements varies, so that one can lay down no precise rule. Slow movements begin, or stand in the middle, or come at the end; or even, with a modernised reminiscence of old times, introduce themselves for a few bars[65] between the allegros and the vivaces. This is, from the point of view of form, the same rhythmic freedom which Beethoven, on deeper material grounds, reintroduced in his latest sonatas and quartets. All is held together by an ornamental, delicate, and thematic filigree-work. More rarely, as in the fourth Sonata da chiesa and in the fifth Sonata da camera, a certain thematic relation between the several movements is to be detected; but within the movement the thematic conception is so worked out that it is treated with natural modulations and appropriate intermediate passages. The movement falls into two parts which are repeated as a matter of course; the second part begins with the modulated main motive of the first. Occasionally, as in the allemande of the tenth concerto and in the allegro of the twelfth, we find an exact return to the first theme. This combination of the da capo system with the modulation of the theme; and in the midst of this the miniature da capo system of the concerted violins imitating each other; and especially the favourite concluding repetitions of bars, alternating from forte to piano,—all these became the groundwork of the Scarlattian style.
The da capo is in fact the scaffolding of this formal music. To our modern minds it appears pointless; but in those days it was natural enough. Some day the history of musical repetition ought to be written; it would be indeed the history of quite half of music. Even in Greek writings we meet melodic repetitions; it is on the principle of imitation that the contrapuntal style of the Middle Ages[66] is built; from the repetition of parts, or the rearrangement of the themes, musical sentences become capable of new effects; and further, there was the germ of progress in the thematic conception of whole bars, whole groups of bars and whole movements, which finally, whether arias or sonatas, were taken da capo. This is the last step of thematic music which has shaken off the contrapuntal forms. To-day we are in a period of repetition which, for want of a better word, we may call “Thematic.” In dependence on the old beginnings of programme-music, which were greatly developed by Beethoven, the new subjective repetition takes the place of the older. This new form works chiefly in the idée fixe, in the Leit-motiv, which is subtly treated and varied according to the situations represented. Founded deep in the essence of music, the principle of repetition has at all times been an ever-changing, ever re-incarnating characteristic of the condition of the tonic art.
Old engraving representing Scarlatti playing a Harpsichord with two rows of keys; and certain well-known contemporaries of his. A satire on the unheard-of successes of the famous Italian Soprano, Cafarelli. From the Nicolas-Manskopf collection, Frankfort-on-Main. Cafarelli’s cat is sitting in the foreground singing an Italian parody. The persons represented are named on the right. The two verses are as follows: “The concert of these great Italian masters would be beautiful, if the cat did not join in. Just in the same way, the sweet harmony of two souls joined by the god of Love is constantly being interrupted by some animal or other.”
It gave to the Italian sonata of its time the same character of unity which the rhythm of the dance gave to the French clavier-piece. But, before the separate movements could reach their full formal development, the emancipation of the thematic subjects from counterpoint, and their absolute self-dependence, must be completed. The Italian ear, from its mere pleasure in motive and its development, released the subject from obligatory contrapuntal treatment. From the old thin forms of toccata and capriccio sprang fugal exercises with poor and limited themes, to which, so early as 1611, the old Francesco Turini gives the sounding title of sonatas. They are full of the passages associated with solo-instruments; they sound with flexible melodies; they run off in the measured steps of the dance, and circle round with repetitions of motives, groups, and movements. The point which a Rameau, in his “Cyclopes,” attains by an extension of the rondo-form—perhaps under the gentle influence of the sonata—is reached by the Italian by formalising the free fantasia, under the influence of the dance. It is form at which everything on all sides aims.
In Scarlatti’s sonatas we have very rarely more than one movement; the two-movement groups of the sonatas, numbered by Czerny 122 and 123, are exceptions. The pieces might be combined into sonatas on the Corellian model but for the lack of slow movements, which Scarlatti did not willingly write for the brilliant and spirited clavier. The structure of the movements displays that perfect freedom which still reigned in that springtime of the age of musical form. If we are so inclined, we may often detect, as in the prototype, a[67] first and a second theme; but the signs of this later form of the typical sonata are still so hidden that in many pieces we might, with equal justification, detect five or six themes in the more melodious or decorative passages. All is in transition, but the thematic conception is never left utterly in the background. The motives come out in apparently reckless profusion, but scarcely one remains without its adequate treatment. We observe all possible arrangements. Sonata 110 has a perfectly incongruous middle movement; in Sonata 111 a moderato alternates with a presto, and both are repeated in fuller elaboration. On the other hand some sonatas preserve throughout the same rhythmical movement. As a rule the second part of a movement concludes like the first, but in a different key, just as it began like the first, but again in a different key; or sometimes Part II. begins with some different motive from that of Part I., or even with one absolutely new. Usually the beginnings of both parts are somewhat stiff in their thematic, while their later course is usually more free. The development of a main motive—which in later times begins the second division of a movement in sonata form—is as yet confined to no definite part. Not rarely it is despatched in the first part, as in Sonata 169, where the dactylic-trochaic motive is so taken up, more or less decidedly, in the first part, that only the very briefest reminiscence is left for the second. The general construction is well illustrated in the eighth sonata—runs of five semiquavers (sic) in A minor[68]—a fugal movement proceeding in crotchets, diatonically rising and chromatically descending—groups of diminished sevenths descending to C—conclusion, the semiquaver motive again. Part II.: the latter motive modulating from C, through G minor to D minor, with an insertion of the former figure in crotchets, developed as in the conclusion of Part I., and returning from D minor to A minor.
Formal structure is the be-all and end-all of the Italian sonata. Technique is its very life. An inexhaustible brilliancy and exclusive adaptation to the clavier is the characteristic of Scarlatti. He has in his eye the thousand possibilities of clavier-technique, and throughout his pieces there breathes a glow of enthusiasm which draws us easily from beginning to end with the sweet grace of an irresistible rhythm. The successive retardations, as in the arias of his father Alessandro’s Rosaura, the changes of hands, the rivalry of concerted violins, the delight in passages of quavers with thirds and sixths as their harmonic accompaniment, such as is seen in the pieces of Corelli, long-sustained notes with sudden leaps which seem to be derived from the violin—all this is yet treated from the point of view of the clavier, and, so to speak, new-born from it. There is little song in Scarlatti, and a singing phrase is preferably repeated with brilliant decorations; for the leggiero is much better adapted to the spinet than the arioso. As a rule, both hands roll on in a two-voiced exercise in pure and simple movement without any additional encumbrance of heavy harmonies. It is a spectacle of fireworks. Deep bass-tones are suddenly introduced; high thirds fly off; thirds and sixths are darted in; close arpeggios swell into monstrous bundles as they are filled in with all possible passing-notes; octaves are vigorously introduced; the hands steer in contrary motion, to one another, away from one another; they are tied into chains of chords; they release themselves alternately from the same chords, the same groups, the same tones; unison passages in the meanwhile run up and down; chromatic tone-ladders dart through, then slowly moving phrases or still-standing isolated treble notes are seen confusedly dotted over the changing bass as it runs up and down, in a kind of upper pedal point; harsh sevenths one after another; repeated notes, syncopated effects, parallel runs of semiquavers with leaping side-notes, such as we know so well in Bach; sudden interchanges from major to minor, a device of which the Neapolitan operas are so fond; bold characterisation by means of sudden pauses; startling modulations by means of chromatic passages; embellishments rarely introduced; a delicate arrangement of tones from the severest fugues to the most unrestrained bourrées, pastorales, or fanfares—such is the world of Scarlatti’s clavier-music. The “plucked” clavier (clavichord)[69] as yet does not admit of the delicacies of touch[70] which delight us in the pianoforte; and its technique, too, will have to consider the three main problems—how to arrange the musical conception in the light and lively style suitable to the clavier, how effectively to combine the two hands, and how to use the opportunities which spring from the divided movements of the single hand. These three problems—what the fingers can do, what the hands can do, and what the clavier can do—are solved by Scarlatti with all the readiness of his Italian temperament. His style luxuriates in the liveliest crossings of the hands—a practice he is said to have diminished as years increased his bodily dimensions; and his ideas blossom out into a captivating, often eccentric freshness, as, for example, in his fugal theme G, B♭, E flat, F sharp, B♭, C sharp [D] (ascending), which he has taken as the foundation of his best known and perhaps most splendid composition, the Cat’s Fugue. Legend indeed asserts that these boldly combined tones were suggested to him by a cat gliding along the keyboard.
The most distinguished names of those who have laboured with success at the Italian clavier are those of Alberti,[71] whose preference for the skilfully broken chord-accompaniment has given rise to the title “Alberti Bass”; Durante, who was dry, calculating, and destitute of emotion; Galuppi, the graceful and courtly; the somewhat superficial Porpora; the subtle Paradies; and Turini, who is by far the most brilliant of all the Italian inheritors of the mantle of Scarlatti. They take two or three movements for a work; they combine dance-pieces and sonata-pieces; they pursue new melodic and rhythmic graces; but they all group themselves around or after their hero, Domenico Scarlatti, who, as first and greatest, has ushered in the pure Italian delight in sound as voiced by the clavier.[72]
An Octave Spinet (tuned an octave higher than usual).
18th century. De Wit collection.
[44] Before 1746. Burney says they were printed in Venice.
[45] The engraving and printing of music was rare, even in the case of popular masters, till late in the eighteenth century. In most cases short and simple clavier pieces were copied privately. This method of spreading works about in our own time when printing has made everything democratic is not lost, but made aristocratic. When Wagner copies the Ninth Symphony, or when a scholar copies an old, unpublished work, we have an instance of the personal love of manual labour in a dilettante or scholar—the work of the hand in an age of machinery.—[Author’s Note.]
[46] A far earlier exponent of pure virtuosity is found in England in Dr John Bull, whose pieces, written a century and a half before Dom. Scarlatti’s, bear every mark of devotion to “pianistic,” as Bülow would call it. The author seems to recognise this a few lines back.
[47] Plagiarism of the most thorough-going character was common in the eighteenth century, and can hardly have been accounted disgraceful, considering how frequently Handel himself practised it, appropriating subjects of fugues, long passages, and whole movements, from Stradella, Kerl, Urio, Steffani, and others.
[48] A “spiritual” opera, or oratorio.
[49] A doubtful story. S. died circa 1681, probably in his bed.
[50] “Tearing the passion to tatters.”
[51] For instance, in the numerous seventeenth century English “cantatas” for solo voice, and the contemporary instrumental fantasias, where it is common to find short sections in triple time breaking the continuity of the more ordinary quadruple time.
[52] A notation for the lute was published as early as 1512.
[53] “Monochord” is synonymous with “Clavichord” here. The word was often used for the keyed instrument, probably because the “German” clavichord had tangents at the ends of the levers, which cut off the right length of the string, just as the moveable “bridge” of the acoustician’s monochord of one single string does.
[54] Our modern notion of a “cantata” includes the free use of a chorus; whereas the seventeenth century “cantata” was for a solo voice with accompaniment of a single instrument, harpsichord, lute, or viol da gamba.
[55] For instance, Corelli’s trios, two books (out of four) of which are “suonate da camera,” chamber music, the rest being “da chiesa,” for church.
[56] Two Gabrielis, uncle and nephew; the former, Andrea, dating 1510-1586, the latter, Giovanni, 1557-1612. Andrea was a pupil of Willaert and he succeeded Merulo as “second” organist of St Mark’s, Venice, in 1566.
[57] “Canzone,” a sixteenth and seventeenth century term for a sort of vocal madrigal.
[58] “Ricercari” (compare French “recherché”), the name of a class of pieces for organ or cembalo in which the object was to include as many ingenuities of counterpoint as possible.
[59] Compare Byrd’s Cantiones Sacræ, 1575, where the pieces are divided in this way, e.g., Pars Prima, Pars Secunda.
[60] Meaning that the fingers were held straight out, and consequently only the first, second, and third (in so-called “German” notation, 2, 3 and 4) would be in common use, the ends being nearly of a length.
[61] It is difficult to set the limits of what is possible in such matters; e.g.—John Jenkins wrote a “Fancy” for three viols, before 1667, which modulates from F major through the whole set of flat keys, up to G flat, whence he coolly turns a rather sharp corner home to F. No one would have dared to suppose this possible.
[62] This might well be. Compare the first phrase of the Recitative, which precedes Dido’s dying song in Purcell’s “Dido and Æneas,” with the first phrase of Wolfram’s recitative before the “Star” song in “Tannhäuser.”
[63] This coloratura means the elaborate ornamentation with which Corelli used to overlay the plain written violin part. Joachim’s edition gives Corelli’s own version of the sonatas as he himself used to play them.
[64] These in France were usually arranged adagio, allegro, adagio; in Italy, allegro, adagio, allegro, but in both countries they had found very early a stereotyped form for the succession of their movements.—[Author’s Note.]
[65] Such things are found as late as Mozart; cf. overture to Zauberflöte.
[66] The true origin of imitative counterpoint is almost certainly the Rota, what is nowadays called a Round. This sort of infinite canon was already perfect in the thirteenth century in England. No doubt the Rota itself was invented by an accident.
[67] The “first” and “second” subjects are often very clearly distinct in the binary form of Scarlatti. The “second subject” is not a mere continuation of the “first” in the subordinate key, as more generally it is in J. S. Bach, but it is another melody altogether.
[68] The movement here described is apparently the “Presto” on page 25 of the first volume of Mr Thomas Roseingrave’s edition of Scarlatti. The groups, so-called, of “five semiquavers,” are of four descending semiquavers, followed by a crotchet, making five notes altogether.
[69] The action of all these keyed instruments, whether called virginal, spinet, clavecin, clavichord, harpsichord, cembalo, is the same, namely, a “plucking” of the string by a projection of quill or leather. The exception is the German clavichord, which was not a keyed harp, but a keyed “monochord,” with key levers in connection with “tangents” of metal, which sounded the string and cut off the right length of it at the same time.
[70] The German clavichord referred to in the note was able to produce a most delicate effect of tremolo or repetition, called Bebung. This was possible simply on account of the “tangential” action of the German instrument.
[71] Alberti rather deserves the title of an early “decadent.” His broken-chord formula is mainly a way of avoiding trouble in writing real passages.
[72] Pieces by Durante, Galuppi, Porpora, Paradies, and Ferdinando Turini (1749-1812), also the disputed movements mentioned on p. [82], which bear Rossi’s name, may be found in Litolff’s publication “Les Maîtres du Clavecin.”
German Clavichord, 17th century, “gebunden” (explained on [page 22]). De Wit collection.