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EVIDENCE OF THE PRACTICAL APPLICATION OF SOLFEGGIO PATTERNS IN THE MANUSCRIPT FOR THE 1707 NEAPOLITAN PERFORMANCE OF LA FEDE TRADITA E VENDICATA BY GASPARINI AND VIGNOLA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2021

ERIC BOARO
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Extract

The last two decades have seen the opening of several new paths in eighteenth-century musicology, and Robert O. Gjerdingen has opened one of these: schema theory. Schemata are ‘stock musical phrases employed in conventional sequences’ that function as harmonic, melodic and rhythmic frameworks for musical passages. Evidence of such schematic thinking has emerged through related studies on partimento and solfeggio. Solfeggio practice of the time manifests a schematic way of thinking about music, being mostly based on simple hexachordal patterns which, as studies progressed, could be embellished in different ways. Vasili Byros has addressed the ‘archaeology’ of hearing through reception history, and offered strong evidence that eighteenth-century ears did hear schemata. Interweaving corpus studies on music of the long eighteenth century (1720–1840), contemporary music criticism and reception history, as well as didactic documents from that era, Byros sheds new light on the ways in which schemata were perceived at the time. A recent contribution by Gilad Rabinovitch uses a live improvisation in the style of Mozart by Robert Levin to demonstrate the importance of conventional schemata for historical improvisation.

Type
Essay
Information
Eighteenth-Century Music , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , March 2021 , pp. 171 - 184
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Dr Cesare Corsi and the staff of the Biblioteca del Conservatorio di Musica San Pietro a Majella, Naples, for having provided me with high-resolution images of the manuscript examples reproduced in this essay.

References

1 Gjerdingen, Robert O., Music in the Galant Style (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 6Google Scholar.

2 Gjerdingen's Music in the Galant Style was inspired by studies by Meyer, Leonard B.: Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956)Google Scholar and Explaining Music: Essays and Explorations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978)Google Scholar. See also Gjerdingen, Robert O., A Classic Turn of Phrase: Music and the Psychology of Convention (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988)Google Scholar. A related field is partimento. See Rosa Cafiero, ‘La didattica del partimento a Napoli fra Settecento e Ottocento: note sulla fortuna delle Regole di Carlo Cotumacci’, in Gli affetti convenienti all'idee: studi sulla musica vocale italiana, ed. Maria Caraci Vela, Rosa Cafiero and Angela Romagnoli (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1993), 549–580; Giorgio Sanguinetti, The Art of Partimento (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Peter van Tour, Counterpoint and Partimento (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Uppsaliensis, 2015).

3 Vasili Byros, ‘Towards an “Archaeology” of Hearing: Schemata and Eighteenth-Century Consciousness’, Musica Humana 1 (2009), 235–306. Byros puts forward additional evidence for schematic thinking in ‘Meyer's Anvil: Revisiting the Schema Concept’, Music Analysis 31/3 (2012), 273–346. A more detailed discussion of related topics is included in Byros's PhD dissertation, ‘Foundations of Tonality as Situated Cognition: An Enquiry into the Culture and Cognition of Tonality, with Beethoven's Eroica Symphony as Case Study’ (Yale University, 2009).

4 Gilad Rabinovitch, ‘Reimagining Historical Improvisation: An Analysis of Robert Levin's Fantasy on Themes by W. A. Mozart, October 29, 2012’, Music Theory Online 26/2 (2020).

5 Hanns-Bertold Dietz, ‘Giuseppe Vignola’, in Grove Music Online www.oxfordmusiconline.com (28 April 2020). After his studies at the Conservatorio di Santa Maria della Pietà dei Turchini under Francesco Provenzale, Vignola begun collaborating with the Teatro San Bartolomeo. Revising pre-existing operas to fit the operatic tastes of the Neapolitans, including the ex novo composition of comic scenes, constituted his principal duty.

6 ‘La musica è dell'ammirabilissimo signor Francesco Gasparrini [sic] con qualche cosa di più del signor Gioseppe [sic] Vignola’. (The music is by the esteemed Signor Francesco Gasparini, with something more by Giuseppe Vignola.) Unless stated otherwise, all translations are mine. Libretto in the Biblioteca Universitaria, Bologna (I-Bu), A.V.Tab.I.E.III.16.5, 6–8, http://corago.unibo.it/libretto/DRT0017869. After its 1704 premiere in Venice, La fede tradita e vendicata was staged in Florence (1704), Verona (1705) and Livorno (1706). In 1707 the opera arrived in Naples, where it was adapted by the poet Carlo De Petris (including the addition of comic scenes).

7 Francesco Bartoli, Notizie istoriche de’ comici italiani che fiorirono intorno all'anno MDL fino a’ giorni presenti, two volumes (Padua: Conzatti, 1781), volume 1, 187.

8 See two handwritten librettos, Pasquale Gastaldo and Lisetta e Caican turco, in the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense, Milan (I-Mb), 5086.

9 See Rosa Cafiero, ‘La formazione del musicista nel XVIII secolo: il “modello” dei conservatori napoletani’, Rivista di analisi e teoria musicale 15/1 (2009), 5–25.

10 Nicholas Baragwanath, The Solfeggio Tradition: A Forgotten Art of Melody in the Long Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).

11 Baragwanath, The Solfeggio Tradition, 156.

12 Baragwanath, The Solfeggio Tradition, 156–159.

13 The examples, originally cited in Baragwanath, The Solfeggio Tradition, 130 and 137, are from Penna, Lorenzo, Li primi albori musicali (Bologna: Giacomo Monti, 1679), 42Google Scholar (Amen-rule) and Banchieri, Adriano, La Banchierina: overo, Cartella picciola del canto figurato (Venice: Alessandro Vincenti, 1623), 24Google Scholar (Appoggiatura-rule).

14 Baragwanath, The Solfeggio Tradition, 129.

15 See Toscani, Claudio, ‘La nuova edizione degli “opera omnia” pergolesiani’, Studi pergolesiani / Pergolesi Studies 6 (2011), 253–270Google Scholar.

16 This semiquaver may appear to look like a quaver. However, the hook of the semiquaver is wavier than that applied to the quaver, owing to the hand gesture that copyists employed to write semiquavers. In the first bar of the recitative in Figure 6 (fifth staff from above, bar 1, last two notes), two clearer semiquavers appear. Their hooks are realized through a brief return of the pen stroke towards the vertical line. This is the same gesture as that found in connection with the semiquaver in Figure 3, only less pronounced.

17 The ottonario is an eight-syllable line with mandatory accents on the third and seventh syllables. Translation of the line: ‘Hope, which is a damsel’.

18 At first glance, the C might appear to be sung on ‘mi’. Yet if this were the case, the following stressed word, ‘vuoi’, would fall on a weak beat (F), disrupting the following syllable positions.

19 Eighteenth-century vocal scores for personal use usually included two staves: the voice and the bass, or the voice alone. See, for instance, a manuscript of a Dixit Dominus by Gennaro Manna kept in the Biblioteca Statale Oratoriana dei Girolamini, Naples (I-Nf), 105, accessible through the website www.internetculturale.it.

20 On comic singers and canterine (female comic singers) see Piperno, Franco, ‘Buffe e buffi: considerazioni sulla professionalità degli interpreti di scene buffe ed intermezzi’, Rivista italiana di musicologia 18/2 (1982), 240–284Google Scholar.

21 The score is in the Biblioteca del Conservatorio di Musica San Pietro a Majella, Naples (I-Nc), Rari 1.6.25, or 18.4.1, or 14.7.33. Online access: www.internetculturale.it.

22 The libretto is in the Biblioteca Musicale Governativa, Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia, Rome (I-Rsc), Carv. 14240.

23 Second stanza, page 45 of the libretto: ‘Mia tenerina, | cara Lesbina, | che vai destando fiamme d'amor, | ho per le membra | un pizzicor’ (My tender, dear Lesbina, who awakens love's flames, that I feel tickling through my body).

24 The manuscript is kept in the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense, Milan (I-Mc), Noseda F 81. Example 10 transcribes precisely what appears in the manuscript, omitting the violin staff.