Analysis 11 - Abramo Basevi (1818–1885)

Summary

As can be seen in the first volume of the present work, Baini set forth his classification of Palestrina's music in ten ‘manners’ or styles in 1828 (vol. I, Analysis 14); and Fétis, von Lenz and Ulïbïshev aired their classifications of Beethoven's music in three ‘manners’ between 1837 and 1857 (vol. I, Analyses 16b–d). It was in 1859 that the Florentine music critic Abramo Basevi published his own classification of Verdi's operas (up to but not including A Masked Ball) in four ‘manners’, and in doing so showed himself well acquainted with the work of all four of these earlier writers. On Baini he remarked: ‘The Memorie storico-critiche […] is a work of much greater value. […] But […] its critical side is too general’. Citing Baini's discussion of the seventh-manner Mass Papae Marcelli he observed: ‘precisely because the music is so remote from us, it cries out for a minute analysis demonstrating clearly its distinctive features and its particular qualities’. Of von Lenz (Analysis 3, above, and vol. 1, Analysis 16c), Basevi says that he offers here and there some judicious analysis, ‘but much of it is nothing more than poetic sometimes to the point of eccentricity and freakishness’.

In Basevi's view, when Ulïbïshev, in his New Biography of Mozart of 1843 (see vol. I, Analysis 15) discusses ‘music and words together, he may create some confusion in the mind of anyone who wishes to fathom the organic part of music’.