History of the pianoforte and pianoforte players

by Oskar Bie

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.