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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 March 2021
Pierre Baillot (1771–1842), an eminent French violinist and pedagogue of the early nineteenth century, offers a surprisingly modern role model to musicians in today's fast-changing world of music. First, Baillot's career foreshadows the resilience and versatility required of entrepreneurial musicians today. Baillot lived in turbulent times through the French Revolution, the Napoleonic years, and restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. His life spanned the transition from Classical to Romantic eras of music and he combined a virtuoso performance career with that of teacher, composer, concert entrepreneur, exponent of new music and violin textbook author. Second, as in the case of contemporary creative performers, Baillot sought to extend his art by experimenting with ways to extend the range and expressiveness of the violin. This essay discusses Baillot's embrace of old and new approaches to violin music and practice. Drawing on his textbook, L'Art du Violon (1834), and research literature on music-making of the era, this essay analyses three of Baillot's innovative approaches: harmonic preluding as an improvisation method, his four-string Adagio composition using an extended bowing technique, and his empirical exploration of acoustically enhanced Tartini tones. While Baillot regarded the art of harmonic preluding, for example, as a link to improvisational traditions, he also saw it as integral to creative development and to technical mastery of harmony, the latter sometimes lacking in violinists more accustomed to playing the melodic line. Even today we find Baillot's extended violin techniques surprising.
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23 Pierre Baillot, Méthode de violon par Mm. Baillot, Rode et Kreutzer (Paris, 1803).
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27 Christina Bashford, The Pursuit of High Culture: John Ella and Chamber Music in Victorian London (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press. 2007): 26.
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29 James H. Johnson and American Council of Learned Societies, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History, vol. 21 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995): 264.
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32 Weber, The Great Transformation of Musical Taste, 131.
33 Jean Mongrédien, French Music from the Enlightenment to Romanticism 1789–1830, ed. Reinhard G. Pauly, trans. Sylvain Frémaux (Portland: Amadeus Press, 1996): 247.
34 Joël-Marie Fauquet, ‘Chamber Music in France from Cherubini to Debussy’, in Nineteenth Century Chamber Music, ed. Stephen E. Hefling (New York: Schirmer, 1998): 287.
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37 McClellan and Trezise, ‘The Revolution and Romanticism to 1848’, 119.
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41 Katharine Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past, 15.
42 Vandoros, ‘Pierre Baillot (1771–1842)’, 43.
43 François-Sappey, Pierre Marie François de Sales Baillot, 154.
44 Mongrédien, French Music, 249.
45 R. Larry Todd, Mendelssohn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003): 35.
46 Todd, Mendelssohn, 35.
47 Bruce Schueneman, ‘The French Violin School: From Viotti to Bériot’, Notes 60/3 (2004): 77.
48 Morabito, ‘Theatrical Marginalia’, 15
49 Morabito, ‘Theatrical Marginalia’.
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70 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile (London: Dent, 1911, first published 1762).
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72 Stefan Knapik, ‘Vitalistic Discourses of Violin Pedagogy in the Early Twentieth Century’, 19th-Century Music 38 (2014): 169–90.
73 Baillot, The Art of the Violin, 278.
74 Gianmario Borio and Angela Carone, eds, Musical Improvisation and Open Forms in the Age of Beethoven (New York: Routledge, 2017): 104.
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76 Mai Kawabata, Paganini: The ‘Demonic’ Virtuoso (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2013): 119.
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81 Louis Spohr and Henry Pleasants, The Musical Journeys of Louis Spohr (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987): 168
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83 Lydia Goehr, ‘Does it Matter Where We Begin? Or, On the Art of Preparation and Preluding’, Music Theory Online 21/3 (2015), https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.15.21.3/mto.15.21.3.goehr.html.
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85 Valerie Woodring Goertzen, ‘By Way of Introduction: Preluding by 18th- and early 19th-Century Pianists’, The Journal of Musicology 14/3 (1996): 299.
86 Carl Czerny, The Art of Preluding, as Applied to the Piano Forte, Consisting of 120 Examples of Modulations, Cadences, and Fantasies in Every Style, Opus 300, ed. John Bishop (London: R. Cocks, [1848]).
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88 Catherine Coppola, ‘Didacticism and display in the capriccio and prelude for violin, 1785– 1840’, in Musical Improvisation and Open Forms in the Age of Beethoven, ed. Gianmario Borio and Angela Carone, 156.
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121 Baillot, The Art of the Violin, 459.
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123 Baillot, The Art of the Violin, 442.
124 Abdala, Caroline and Visser-Dumont, Leslie, ‘Distortion Product Otoacoustic Emissions: A Tool for Hearing Assessment and Scientific Study’, The Volta Review 103/4 (2001): 281–302Google ScholarPubMed.
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129 Baillot, The Art of the Violin, 410.
130 Baillot, The Art of the Violin, 409.
131 About 150 years after the investigation of combination tones by Tartini, in 1863 Hermann von Helmholtz published his scientific exploration, Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen (‘On the Sensations of Tone’).
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138 Baillot, The Art of the Violin, 9.
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