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This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ The Chamber Duets of Agostino Steffani (1654-1728), with Transcriptions and Catalogue. Timms, C. R The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 10. Oct. 2021 175 9 THE TEXTS OP STEFFNI'S DUETS The first consideration in the study of alnxst any type of vocal music should be the text • After looking at this separately, one should be in a position to see why the music is in its present form, to distinguish between the contributions of the composer and poet and to point out eys in which they may have collaborated. This approach is particularly appropriate to the Baroque period, because the form of the music was often closely related to that of the text, and. music itself, like oratory and some types of poetry, was considered a rhetorical art whose primary purpose was to move the passions of the soul. The main difficulty in applying this approach to the study of secular Italian vocal music of the late seventeenth century is that there are so few independent sources of the texts. Most of the poetry is anonymous; little of it was printed, and the only manuscripts are often the musical sources. It is not always easy to tell from these what the shape of the original poem was. Since the Italian language shounds in rhymes and the poetry of the period displays a wide variety of form and line-length, with frequent use of interna]. rhyme, a number of permutations are sometlixes possible. If the composer attempted to disguise or contradict the poetic toxin, as Steffani and his contemporaries occasionally did, this difficulty may be aggravated. Since the chamber duet is one of the many types of secular Italian cantata, this discussion must begin with a brief account of cantata texts in general. These, like sixteenth-century madrigal verse, are almost exclusively amatory in nature • There are cantatas on historical, mythological, philosophical, moral, satirical and humorous subjects, but the vast majority are concerned with 'the sentimental effusions of Arca]ian nymphs and shepherds in an artificial pastoral setting' . The favourite topic by far is 1Boyd, 'Form and Style in Scarlatti' a chamber cantatas', Music Review, xxv (1964), p. 17. 176 unrequited love, and the texts are written in an affected, rhetorical style drawing heavily on figures of speech such as metaphor, antithesis and oxymoron. The style derives in part from the mannerisms of Giambattista Marini, whose work remained a model for countless imitators throughout the seventeenth century. Cantata texts have attracted a good. des]. of criticism on aocount of their subject-matter and style. Even the apparently bland description quoted above is pejorative in tone. Some of the earliest criticism is in the form of contemporary parodies. Dent cites a satirical text thought to have been set by BerTlardo Pasquini, 2 but perhaps the most extended and biting parody is Cesti' a A.spett ate adesso canto, 3 which satirisea all the clichs of contemporary cantata verse: La volete d' amore, Di adegno, di martello, di partenza, In rimprovero, in honore, 0 tutta quanta di. maledicenza'?... Non s'. d.unque da sentire Altro ma! che 'Pupillette, A morir, core, a morjre.' E su tarite barzellette 'Full,' 'Lilla,' 'bici belle,' 'Occhi vi chiamerei, ma siete stelle;' Roba coal mole sta Ch'ha fatta a]. mondo omai tanto di testa. Cesti' a text is rivalled in venom by the condenriation of Henry Prunires, who appears to have been the most outspoken critic of cantata texts in recent times: 'The chief grounds for criticism are the weakness, bombast, and the 2'Italian Chamber Cantatas', Musical Antiquary, ii (1910-11), p. 191, footnote. 3Ed.. Burrows, The Italian Cantata, I: Antonio Cesti (1623-1669). The Wellesley Edition, v (Wellesley College, Mass., 1963), p. 70ff. The text, which must have been written between 1653 and 1669, is translated in this edition and discussed in Burrows, 'Antonio Cesti on Music', Musical Quarterly, ii (1965), pp. 518-29. 177 b1 taste of the words.. • and it would certainly appear that the musicians were absolutely indifferent to the quality of the verses that they clothed with music..' Although cantata texts are worthless as poetry, they were clearly ideal as poesia per musica. The difference was recognized by Italians in the sixteenth century. The father of Torquato Tasso pointed out in 159 the special qualities expected of poems that were intended, for setting to rrL]sio: 'They are snoth; they are anrous in their affection; they are colortul; and they abound in phrases suitable for music.' 5 Cantata texts have all these attributes. The by now worn-out poetic images were brought to life by the affective imagery of the coaoser, and the argunnt was conducted through the music. There may be sa truth in Prunires' view of the cantata as 'the symbol of the revenge taken by music, upon literature, when the F].orentines attempted to make her literature' s slave' but it should also be borne in mind that nost cantata texts were specially written for setting to music and that the cantata would have been less successful as a union of words and music if the poets had not understood exactly what type of poetry was best suited to the style of the music for which they were writing. The very qualities that render cantata texts negligible as poetry also make them perfect poesia per musica, and those qualities appear to have been specially cultivated for their sical value. "The Italian Cantata of the Seventeenth Century', Music and Letters, vii (1926), p. 126. 5Bernardo Tasso, Lettere (Venice, l59), p. 270. Cited and. translated in Einstein, The Italian Madrigal, trans. Xrappe, Sessions and Strunk (Princeton, 194.9), i, pp. 209-10. 60p. cit., p. 1.32. 178 Concordances The texts of Steffani's chamber duets were clearly considered rather feeble by his first biographer. ter giving the names of the few known poets, Hawkins continues, somewhat circuitously: '...but the assistance he received from these persons was not so considerable as altogether to free him from the necessity of sometimes composing to words, that, to say the least, did not call for the utmost exertion of his genius: and when every other resource failed him, he would. sometimes, as an exercise of his fancy, make use of words that hed formerly been set by other masters; of these, the chief are the prince of Venosa, and the famous Alessandro Stradella, so celebrated for his singing and performance on the harp.' It is not known whether Hawkins had any reliable evidence for his final statement, but Steffani does not appear to have used any of the secular texts known to have been set by Carlo Gesualdo, 8 presumably the 'prince of Venosa' to whom Hawkins refers, or by Stradella. The original versions of Iingi dal idol mio and Vorrei dire are ascribed to Stradefla, but are not thought to have been composed by him, 9 and Stradefla' a Chi dir che nel veleno is in one source incorrectly ascribed, to Steffani. 10 It is possible, therefore, that Hawkins' statement is based in part on unreliable ascript ions. Though probably ineocurate, it prompts one to ask whether Steffani's texts are identical to those of any other composer or similar to those of Stradella or of anybody else • In fact, so far as I have been able to establish, five of Steffani' s duets are based on texts set by other composers: 7Gentleman's Masazine, xxxi (1761), p. 1.90. 8These are listed in Watkins, Gesualdo: the Man and his Music (London, 1973), pp. 323-5. 9They are included as 'unreliable' in Jander, Alessand.ro Stradella. WECIS, fasc. b (Weflesley, Mass., 1969). For discussion of Lungi dal idol mio, see below-, p. 324.ff.For Vorrei dire, see above, p. 116. 10See Appendix D, duet 814.. 179 Tu m' aspett asti Antonio Ce sti La fortuna an la niota Carl' .Ambrogio Lonati E spento 1' ardore Composer unknown No, no, no, non voglio Carlo Donato Cossoni se devo amare Dir che giovi Pirro Albergati Since the first two texts, at least, appear to be of Roman origin and the last two of Bologne se, these concordances tend to confirm the possible influence a discussed at the end of the previous chapter. Cesti's Tu in' aspettasti, a solo cantata, cannot have been written later than 1669, the year of his death, and.

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