Showing Off the New Instruments

With this development of exquisite instruments, came the desire to use them and to write new compositions to show them off. These instruments gave unlimited possibilities for technic and tone, and created the school of Italian violinists and composers of the 17th and 18th centuries. If polyphonic music had still been in the lead, the development of solo instruments would have been impossible, but in trying to find new forms, the first opera inventors had broken the backbone of polyphony, and had replaced it with monody, or single line melody. Then, too, folk dances had taken the public fancy and had been made into suites, which could be played on solo bowed instruments with accompaniments, on spinets and organs, or on groups of instruments. The sonata da camera was really a suite of dances and was the first form used by these new composers for violin. About the middle of the 17th century, instrumental performances without any vocal music came to be a part of the services of the Catholic Church for the priests were quick to see in the violin playing, a refining influence. Here the sonata da camera or “room sonata” was turned into the more serious sonata da chiesa or “church sonata” gradually losing its dance character, and thus became the seed of the sonata form of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.

Giovanni Battista Vitali (1644–1692) is the first great master of the violin sonata; after him, Torelli (1657–1716) added a new and important kind of violin composition,—the Concerto. He called his compositions, Concerti da Camera and Concerti Grossi, which names and form were used by Vivaldi, Corelli, Handel and Bach. This Concerto Grosso was a sonata da chiesa accompanied not by a single instrument as was the habit with the sonata da chiesa and the sonata da camera, but by a group of bowed instruments to which a lute, organ and, later, a harpsichord were added.

At this time, all musicians were, as a matter of course, violinists, just as today all great composers can play the piano. One of the greatest of these composer-violinists was Arcangelo Corelli (1653–1713), whose works are often played by violinists of our own time, and have served as models for composers. He was one of the first to try to write music that should show off the beauty and possibilities of the violin.

The “Golden Age” of the Italian violin composers dated from 1720 to 1750, and was the time of Locatelli, Pugnani, Nardini, Veracini, Tartini and Vivaldi who added oboes and horns to the orchestral accompaniment of the Concerti Grossi. Corelli and Vivaldi were the models used by the German school of violinists who appeared about this time. Tartini was the musical authority of his century, and no violinist felt sure of his place as an artist until he had been heard and approved by Tartini. He was the composer of the famous piece called The Devil’s Trill. Although Vivaldi was not looked upon with great esteem in his own time, he was used as a model by Johann Sebastian Bach.

Padre Martini, recognized by all Europe as the greatest authority on musical subjects, lived in Bologna where he was visited by such musicians as Grétry, Gluck, Mozart and one of the sons of Bach. Padre, or Father, Martini was a Franciscan monk, a fine composer, a learned historian, a master of counterpoint, and the owner of a musical library of 17,000 volumes! He helped everyone who sought him, and was loved by the entire musical world.

Once a year a great music festival was held in Bologna by the Philharmonic Society and new works by the Bolognese composers were performed. One hundred musicians took part in the orchestra and the choruses, and each composer conducted his own work. It was an honor to be present at this annual festival, and Italian and foreign musicians came from all over Europe to attend it. Young composers sometimes became famous over night here, for the critics were all invited and serious decisions were made as to the value of new music. Dr. Burney, a famous English musical historian of the 18th century, tells of meeting Leopold Mozart and his young son, Wolfgang Amadeus, at one of these festivals. Through the kind scheming of Padre Martini were they admitted!

Rome, in the 18th century was still the great music center, and guided the religious music of the world. It had wonderful collections of old music which attracted students from all over; it had seven or eight very famous theatres, where opera seria and opera buffa were given. (Today we call them grand opera and comic opera.) The Roman public was very difficult to please and because of the severity of their judgments, opera writers suffered every time their new works had first performances. Just think how you would feel if you had composed an opera, and by accident had put in a melody that sounded something like one that Mozart, Wagner, Puccini or Verdi had composed, if the whole house should break into shouts of “Bravo, Mozart!” or “Bravo, Wagner!” or “Bravo, Puccini!!” etc. This is what used to happen in Rome, but no doubt it was a good thing because it stopped a habit the composers had in those days, of helping themselves to each other’s melodies.

Domenico Scarlatti

But here we must pause for a moment to tell you of the life and work of Alessandro Scarlatti’s son, Domenico, who was born in Naples in 1685, the same year as Bach and Handel. When you recall how many operas the father wrote, it seems queer that his son did not follow in his footsteps. The truth is that he did write operas for the private theatre of the Queen of Poland in Rome, and also sacred music while he was chapel master of St. Peter’s, but he became immortal as a composer of harpsichord music. In the influence he had in the growing up of piano music, he can be compared to Chopin and Liszt, and is a founder of piano music style, an honor, which he shares with the French Couperin and Rameau, his contemporaries. The difference is that the two Frenchmen have a delicacy and grace that recall their period of wigs and satins and laces, while Scarlatti’s works have strength, vigor and daring that take them out of any special period and place them beside the great piano compositions of all time.