Simon Mcveigh & Jehoash Hirshberg, the Italian Solo

McVeigh, Simon & Jehoash Hirshberg, The Italian Solo Concerto 1700-1760, Rhetorical Strategies and Style History. Woodbridge, UK :The Boydell Press, 2004, 372 pp. This book stemmed from an independently shared everyday teaching experience of two authors, Simon McVeigh of Goldsmiths College, London, and Jehoash Hirshberg of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem—a search for a typical ritornello form to demonstrate the essential principles of late Baroque music. Both authors not only failed completely to find any concerto that encapsulated the supposed ‘model’, but also learnt far more from the experience: that it was a limited and meaningless attempt in the first place. Indeed anyone who has performed or studied the concertos of Vivaldi will already have recognized the endlessly rich inventiveness and variety of this repertoire. But we became increasingly rankled by the memory of Stravinsky’s glib quip that Vivaldi ‘composed the same form so many times over’: Certainly our further intensive research has revealed that no two concertos can be described as identical even at larger levels of formal analysis. To appreciate the subtlety and sophistication that Vivaldi brought to the concerto requires a listening experience that goes well beyond the daily sampling of Vivaldi concertos as acoustical backdrop in airports, lifts and department stores. And then what about the hundreds of other concertos by the many other Italian violinists whose music was heard and admired all over Europe? As our project developed, we turned in two different directions: uncovering the deeper musical secrets of this instrumental genre, and unraveling the history of style change in an enormous and neglected repertoire. It was, after all, Vivaldi’s Harmonic Inspiration (L'Estro Armonico, op. 3) that proved the most significant guide to Bach in his search for musical ‘order, connection, and proportion’: Johann Forkel even went so far as to claim that it was the study and transcription of Vivaldi’s concertos that taught Bach how ‘to think musically’. The solo concerto with its sophisticated, unitary musical form signaled the momentous process of the emancipation of instrumental music from its linguistic and functional dance models. The listener of Vivaldi’s time, whose daily repertoire consisted largely of new music, locally composed, would surely have been alive to subtle variants and novel formal strategies in each new concerto; and would have appreciated and comprehended the selection of choices the composer was trying out. Yet the listener of today can, through extensive and attentive experience, build up a similar sensitivity to compositional strategies. The book commences with six detailed performative analyses of ritornello movements by Antonio Vivaldi, Tomasso Albinoni, and Andrea Zani, each focusing on particular aspects, and illustrating the multi-layered strategies developed by concerto composers in the early eighteenth century. The movements are treated as a live, rhetorical experience, by contrast with the existing static alleged `models' of the ritornello form. Three detailed chapters are dedicated to a thorough study of the Vivaldian Revolution (as described by the greatest Vivaldi scholar, Michael Talbot, in his Grove article). The authors discovered numerous misconceptions attached to Vivaldi due to studies based on small random samples which had led to statistical fallacies. Therefore the book proceeds with a thorough analysis of ritornello movements from 380 concertos by Vivaldi – his entire output for solo and for two solo instruments. A detailed questionnaire separating the musical parameters has been devised, enabling the comparative study of such an enormous and diverse repertory. The next chapters turn to a historical study of the repertory of Italian solo concerto. It has been found that the Vivaldian revolution reached everywhere, yet at the same time earlier local practices, and even more individual temperaments, also exerted their own powerful influence. The concerto composers were itinerary virtuosos, so that the local properties were far weaker in the history of the concerto compared with that of the early symphony. The book proceeds from the strongly individual Roman concerto (Montanari, Mossi, Valentini), the Venetian composers alongside Vivaldi (the strongly individualistic Albinoni, the Marcello brothers, Bonporti, and the prolific Tessarini), the trans-Alpine Italian `diaspora' (Brescianello, Veracini, Locatelli, and the truly great Platti), Mauro d'Alay in Parma, Bologna (G. M. Alberti, Laurenti, Zavateri, and Schiassi), the culturally related Milan and Vienna (Zani, Scaccia, Brivio, Zucari, the cellist Perroni, and the brothers Sammartini), Turin (the brothers Somis and Ghignone), and finally the great contribution of Tartini in Padua. The concluding chapter offers the Malleable Model. The history of the popular genre is viewed as a constant exploration of options inherent in the flexible concept of the ritornello movement as a dynamic, ever changing process. Vivaldi is revealed as an imaginative explorer who provides numerous options in all parameters, while his colleagues and followers select some of his options and discover others. At the same time certain options were found wanting and were dropped in a constant process of exploration and elimination, which started as soon as 1730 and reached far into the late eighteenth century and merges into the sonata form..

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