The Concerto Part I Professor Robert Greenberg THE TEACHING COMPANY ® Robert Greenberg, Ph.D. San Francisco Performances Robert Greenberg was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1954 and has lived in the San Francisco Bay area since 1978. He received a B.A. in music, magna cum laude, from Princeton University in 1976 where his principal teachers were Edward Cone, Daniel Werts, and Carlton Gamer in composition; Claudio Spies and Paul Lansky in analysis; and Jerry Kuderna in piano. In 1984, he received a Ph.D. in music composition, with distinction, from the University of California, Berkeley, where his principal teachers were Andrew Imbrie and Olly Wilson in composition and Richard Felciano in analysis. He has composed over 45 works for a wide variety of instrumental and vocal ensembles. His works have been performed in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, England, Ireland, Greece, Italy, and the Netherlands, where the Amsterdam Concertgebouw performed his Child’s Play for String Quartet. He has received numerous honors, including three Nicola de Lorenzo Composition Prizes and three Meet-the-Composer Grants. Recent commissions have come from the Koussevitzky Foundation at the Library of Congress, the Alexander String Quartet, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, San Francisco Performances, the Strata Ensemble, and the XTET ensemble. Professor Greenberg is a board member and an artistic director of COMPOSERS, INC., a composers’ collective/production organization based in San Francisco. His music is published by Fallen Leaf Press and CPP/Belwin and is recorded on the Innova label. He has performed, taught, and lectured extensively across North America and Europe. He is currently music-historian-in-residence with San Francisco Performances, where he has lectured and performed since 1994, and resident composer and music historian to National Public Radio’s “Weekend All Things Considered.” He has served on the faculties of the University of California at Berkeley, California State University at Hayward, and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where he chaired the Department of Music, History and Literature from 1989–2001 and served as the Director of the Adult Extension Division from 1991–1996. Professor Greenberg has lectured for some of the most prestigious musical and arts organizations in the United States, including the San Francisco Symphony (where, for 10 years, he was host and lecturer for the symphony’s nationally acclaimed “Discovery Series”), the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the Van Cliburn Foundation, and the Chautauqua Institute. He is a sought-after lecturer for businesses and business schools, speaking at such diverse organizations as the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco and the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, and has been profiled in various major publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Inc. magazine, and the London Times. ©2006 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership i Table of Contents The Concerto Part I Professor Biography............................................................................................i Course Scope.......................................................................................................1 Lecture One The Voice in the Wilderness......................................3 Lecture Two The Baroque Italian Concerto....................................6 Lecture Three Baroque Masters........................................................9 Lecture Four Bach’s Brandenburg Concerti .................................12 Lecture Five Mozart, Part 1 ..........................................................16 Lecture Six Mozart, Part 2 ..........................................................20 Lecture Seven Classical Masters .....................................................23 Lecture Eight Beethoven ................................................................26 Timeline.............................................................................................................30 Glossary.............................................................................................................33 Featured Composers .......................................................................................38 Bibliography......................................................................................................40 ii ©2006 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership The Concerto Scope: There is no doubt about it: The concerto has all the blood, sweat, tears, and triumph of the opera house from which it was born! It is, at its core, a theatrical construct. Ringing forth against the mass of the orchestra, the individual solo voice (or voices) is a metaphor for the empowered individual reveling in his individuality. This relationship between the soloist and the orchestra gives the concerto an extra dimension that underlines its theatricalityit is as much about the performers as about the music itself. The various relationships between soloist and orchestra, embodied collectively in the concerto repertoire, demonstrate almost every human relationship we can imagine, from the most tender to the most confrontational. On top of this, the relationship between the soloist herself and her instrument represents life lived at the edge, as the concerto genre affords the composer an opportunity to explore the extreme capabilities of solo performers. Our own explorations of the concerto will reveal a huge repertoire, dating all the way back to the late 1600s, when the genre was invented. We will survey the concerto’s history from its conception as a child of Renaissance ideals through the 20th century, and as we go, we will observe this genre’s metamorphosis and the degree to which its development reflected changing social and artistic environments. We will also observe the concerto’s evolving theatricality, which as we will see, increasingly becomes a metaphor for the individual and the collective. The concerto’s evolution began in Italy in the late 1500s, when homogenous musical textures were being replaced with music that explored the idea of contrast. In the polychoral music of such Venetian composers as Giovanni Gabrieli, we hear the first great flowering of the concerto principle, or concertato stylemusic that explores the concepts of contrast and even conflict. By the turn of the 17th century, the Humanism of the Renaissance and its celebration of individualism had inspired the invention of opera: The concept of tune evolved; new harmonies evolved to accompany singers; the orchestra was born; and opera’s dramatic essence required that composers experiment with emotionally expressive musical materials. By the 1680s, opera’s influenceits melodic, harmonic, structural, and expressive elementshad found its way into instrumental compositions, and the first true concerti began to appear, including those of Arcangelo Corelli (1615–1713), who laid the genre’s foundation. Corelli wrote a type of concerto known as a concerto grosso: Instead of one soloist, this genre had a small group of soloists, called the concertino, which was contrasted with the main instrumental ensemble, called the grosso. The concerto grosso was brought to its full flowering in the High Baroque by Italian and German composers, including the greatest master of them all, Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), whose concerti had no equal until those of Mozart. Alongside the development of the concerto grosso was that of the solo concerto. It first appeared as a result of the use of the solo trumpet in Bolognese civic traditions, and its development owed a great deal to the perfection and cult of the violin in the 17th century. Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741) expanded the expressive capabilities of the violin and made the concerto the most important type of instrumental music during the High Baroque. By this time, a three-movement structure had been established for the concerto (fast–slow–fast), while the contrast between soloist and the main ensemble (also known as the grosso or the ripieno) became much more pronounced and the soloist’s material, more virtuosic. The violin was typically the solo “star” of the High Baroque Italian concerto, although many concerti were written for wind and brass instruments. Thanks in large part to music publishers based in Amsterdam, the Italian concerto became known in northern Europe, where it quickly became a favorite genre of composition. Such German-speaking composers as Telemann, Handel, and J. S. Bach brought the concerto to a new level of sophistication and compositional complexity that far exceeded their Italian models. By the mid-18th century, the Enlightenment era was in full bloom, and its doctrine of accessibility what is good for the greatest number is what is bestwas translated into a musical aesthetic that defined the best music as music that appealed to the greatest number of listeners. Importantly, it was understood that such music would be well crafted and in “good taste.” In practice, this put the focus on clarity and balanceclarity of phrase structures and clear, carefully balanced formal structuresbeautiful melodies, and expressive restraint. The emphasis on clear, vocally conceived melody necessitated the creation of more flexible forms that could accommodate multiple themes and stressed, far more than before, thematic contrast and departure and return. Among the formal structures from the new musical aesthetic of the Enlightenment (or what is now called the Classical era) are sonata (or sonata allegro) form and