Twenty-four papers were given at this conference on historically informed performance, organized by Divino Sospiro and the Centro de Estudos Musicais Setecentistas de Portugal (CEMSP) at the National Palace in Queluz, Portugal. In the keynote address, ‘Artistic Act and Historical Performance Practice: A Permanent Dialectic’, Vittorio Ghielmi (Universität Mozarteum Salzburg) posed a series of fundamental questions about the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of early music today. His iconoclastic vision was both panoramic and down-to-earth, positioning the early-music performer between the worlds of intellect and intuition, academia and artistry: two ‘different spiritual moments’ with ‘different ontologies’. Ghielmi pleaded for a view of the past that keeps open the door between musicological study and the embodiment represented by performance. His subsequent paper, ‘The Secret of Monsieur Marais: The Distance between the Sign and the Art of Music’, worked through some of the implications of the keynote address. He concluded by asking how it might be possible to recover the secrets of European performing traditions that are absent from the sources: traditions that were handed down from master to pupil and not written down before the late eighteenth century. These secrets would be well placed to help us navigate today's many questions about early-music performance. Ghielmi also delighted conference delegates with an exquisite performance on unaccompanied viola da gamba, entitled ‘Voix humaines: A arte de falar com a viola da gamba’ (Human Voices: The Art of Speaking with the Viola da Gamba), with music by Marais, Hume, Forqueray, Abel and Ghielmi himself.
Several papers explored what Illés Szabolcs (Zenetudományi Intézet, Bölcsészettudományi Kutatóközpont) termed ‘research on the soundscapes of the past’. Szabolcs analysed styles of performing early music from the 1950s onwards, suggesting that most ensembles could be described as either aiming for ‘reliable baroque performance based on historical research’ or introducing ‘modifications according to the expectations of modern concert life’. He appealed for a return to the experimental spirit of the initial phases of the early-music movement. Lluís Heras (Conservatori de Terrassa) spoke on the use of the tenor violin in Spanish music from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. In a technically detailed paper he explored the etymology of the word ‘violón’, indicating exactly when and where the instrument was used. A series of iconographical examples from a database of Iberian artworks showed the organological diversity of stringed instruments of the time, and Heras concluded that the tenor violin ‘had a place of its own, albeit a lesser one’ in Spanish music in the period under consideration. Paolo Cavallo (Università di Pavia; Conservatorio di Brescia) presented examples of mid-eighteenth-century concertante and battente organ writing in the polychoral sacred music of Piedmont and Lombardy, which showed that the organ was increasingly treated as a solo instrument in addition to its basso-continuo role. Maryse Legault (McGill University) explained the difficulties of establishing historically informed solo performance practices for the clarinet. From her study of Josef Beer (1744–1812) she shared some surprising results: his use of vibrato and extensive rubato, and the shorter-than-expected length of his cadenzas.
Dominique Lauvernier (independent scholar, Caen) took delegates on a whistle-stop tour of the archives of the French royal household, spanning the years 1667–1792, which contain over one hundred thousand pages of accounts, together with drawings for decorations and costumes, floor plans, librettos, scores and a few preserved theatre wings. These items provide detailed information on almost all aspects of theatrical performance, from machines to seating for musicians. Lauvernier showed how the materials could also be used to create 3-D reconstructions of historical performance spaces: he invited all those interested in collaborating on the material to contact him. The eighteenth-century painted theatre curtain was the topic of a paper by Armando Fabio Ivaldi (independent scholar, Genoa). Describing its function as a mediator between the real and the imaginary, Ivaldi suggested that, in the end, the metaphor of the curtain was overridden by the power of its artistic figuration. Teresa Chirico (Conservatorio di Musica di Roma Santa Cecilia) outlined the history of Italian puppet theatre in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, focusing on Cardinal Ottoboni's theatre at the Palazzo della Cancelleria in Rome, and his collaboration with set designer Filippo Acciaioli and composers such as Alessandro Scarlatti and Giovanni Battista Bononcini. The currently little-known history of the Ottoboni theatre will be covered in Chirico's forthcoming monograph ‘Magnificence in Miniature’.
The changes to dance style in Naples after the arrival of Jean Georges Noverre in 1772 were taken up by Maria Venuso (Accademia Nazionale di Danza, Rome). She pointed to the influence of Noverre's pupil Charles Le Picq, and the latter's collaboration with Gennaro Magri, asking to what extent they built an experimental basis for changes in the relationship between dance and music. János Malina (independent scholar, Budapest) gave a paper on the little-known late eighteenth-century theatre in the house of Count Erdődy in Pressburg. Two theatrical almanacs (from 1787 and 1788) provide a treasure trove of information about the musical and theatrical activities of this private opera house, where, from 1785 to 1789, there were forty-five premieres and over three hundred performances in total – more than at Haydn's Eszterháza. Manuel de Cavaza's treatise El cantor instruido y maestro aliviado (Madrid, 1754) was introduced by Carlos González Ludeña (Universidad de Salamanca), whose paper compared this relatively unknown work (the first Spanish treatise to provide instruction for singing in Italian) with other Spanish treatises and Italian and French theoretical works from the first half of the eighteenth century. Diana María Cura dos Santos (Universidad de Salamanca) explained her research on keyboard temperaments in eighteenth-century Portugal, which shows that equal temperament was commonly applied, at least in Lisbon, in the secular music of the second half of the century, while meantone temperament was used in churches. This ‘battle’ between temperaments was shown to mirror the sacred–secular conflict in Portuguese society at the time. Sources relating to lesser-known improvisational practices in the accompaniment of songs on guitar in Paris during the period 1757–1799 were examined in a paper by Damián Martín-Gil (Conservatorio Oficial de Música Hermanos Berzosa de Cáceres).
Ivana Tomić Ferić, Maja Milošević Carić and Mirko Jankov (Sveučilište u Splitu) curated a generously documented panel on musical and theatrical practice during the eighteenth century in Dalmatia, the coastal region of Croatia. Ferić drew attention to musicians such as the remarkable Guilio Bajamonti (‘one of the most learned and progressive personalities in all Croatian history’); Carić described the theatre in Hvar, the first public theatre in Europe, founded in 1612 and restored in 2019; and Jankov detailed several of the twenty historical organs that have been preserved. All three scholars emphasized the close cultural and musical links that existed between Dalmatia and the rest of Europe. They concluded in the hope that the baroque music of Croatia might have ‘the right to be passed on to future generations’. A further panel, on the singer Luigi Bassi, Mozart's first Don Giovanni, was presented by Magnus Tessing Schneider (Aarhus Universitet), João Luís Paixão (Universiteit van Amsterdam) and me (Mark Tatlow, Göteborgs universitet). Tessing Schneider painted the background, explaining how the study of singers’ vocal profiles contributes to the development of historically informed performance practices. Bassi is of particular interest because he had a long and distinguished career despite developing serious problems that affected his voice in his late twenties. I suggested that Bassi's unusual vocal profile could be a stimulus for both historical speculation and practical experimentation, indicating what kind of freedoms Bassi might have demanded of his orchestral accompanists. Paixão's performance paper (with me at the synthesizer) demonstrated the results of his historical-artistic research into gesture, facial expression and vocal nuance. The panel concluded with a fully acted performance of a recitative and aria probably sung by Bassi at the Prague premiere of Ferdinando Paer's romantic horror opera Camilla (Vienna, 1799).
Two papers focused on opera librettos. Scot Buzza (University of Kentucky) presented a wide-ranging and entertaining study of Baldassarre Galuppi's working relationships with librettists. He illustrated some of the liberties Galuppi took with librettos, and the concomitant reactions he received from his librettists, ranging from Carlo Goldoni's ‘adoration and adulation’ to Metastasio's ‘antipathy and acrimony’. Using Silvio Stampaglia's La Partenope as an example, Yseult Martinez (Université d'Angers) spoke about the consequences of different understandings of a libretto for the staging of baroque opera today. Partenope has been described as a comedy, qualified with adjectives ranging from ‘ironic’ and ‘anti-heroic’ to ‘erotic’. Martinez proposes a way around these contradictions by enlisting the new eighteenth-century paradigm of ‘companionate marriage’.
In other papers, Aimee Brown (University of Sydney) outlined a method of improving musicians’ and dancers’ collaborative experience when performing eighteenth-century French dance music, presenting a new simplified notation derived from Beauchamp-Feuillet; Carla Conti (Conservatorio di Musica di Roma Santa Cecilia) placed female improvisational practices from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the wider context of today's understanding of gender performativity; Laurent Guillo (Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles) explained the available options for restoring Bach's St Mark Passion; and Brian Robins (independent scholar, Salisbury), surveyed the intractable problems surrounding the staging of Italian baroque opera.
The conference also hosted a roundtable conversation in memory of the late Hans Ernst (Giovanni) Weidinger (1949–2023), a regular collaborator with Divino Sospiro and CEMSP, who founded the Don Juan Archiv in Vienna in 1987. In conclusion, great thanks are due to the organizers (especially Divino Sospiro's Massimo Mazzeo and Iskrena Yordanova) for putting on a conference which demonstrated both the depth and the breadth of contemporary research on historically informed performance, and which generated so much constructive debate among delegates.
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