Iacobus Leodiensis [Iacobus de Montibus, Iacobus de Oudenaerde]

(iv) Sacred music.

Foreign travellers such as De Brosses, Burney, Coyer, Lalande and Hadrava were struck by the amount of music performed in Italian churches. Burney, in particular, paints a picture of much sacred music, often of poor quality, being composed and performed for a non-class-specific audience. The principal causes for its weakness were the quasi-operatic character of the music, and the demands of composing quickly to order. Besides this ‘consumer’ output, the visitors also noted a rigorous ‘Palestrina’ style of strict counterpoint with or without instrumental accompaniment, unconnected with consumption or changing taste. Burney in 1770 indicates its use not only in Rome in the famous Cappella Sistina and Cappella Giulia and at the Chiesa Nuova, but also in Florence and Venice.

The stylistic colonization of sacred music, in particular of oratorio, by opera reflects the latter's economic dominance. The connection between the two is suggested by the title of Arcangelo Spagna's essay Oratorii overo melodrammi sacri (1706), in which he proposes that the lessons of contemporary opera should be taken on board to alleviate the monotony of oratorios. The oratorio of the early 18th century was divided into two sections with a total of 400 lines, split into recitatives and da capo arias. The most active librettists in Italian oratorio, apart from those who were also patrons, Benedetto Pamphili and Pietro Ottoboni, were Stampiglia, Zeno (from 1718) and Metastasio (from 1730).

Rome was the centre of oratorio: the Oratorio del Crocifisso, where Alessandro Scarlatti worked and Corelli was leader of the violins, was the home of oratorio in Latin until 1710; other locations were S Girolamo della Carità, S Maria in Vallicella, Chiesa Nuova, Seminario Romano Gesuita, Collegio Clementino, the Confraternita della Morte and the Confraternita della Pietà dei Fiorentini, and the many noble homes which hosted performances of oratorios and cantatas in Italian by Alessandro Scarlatti, Handel and Caldara. From 1720 Durante, Leo, Porpora, Jommelli, Piccinni, Cimarosa, Paisiello, Anfossi and Zingarelli worked at the Oratorio dei Girolamini, Naples; here a debate on sacred music saw the supporters of Durante (‘durantisti’), who wanted to distinguish between modern composition and the style of Palestrina, line up against Leo's supporters (‘leisti’) who looked instead for a fusion between the two. In Venice oratorio continued to be in Latin, cultivated first by Lotti, Gasparini and Vivaldi, then by Bertoni, Sacchini and Galuppi. In Bologna, the second papal city, Vitali, the Predieri family, Perti and his pupil Giovanni Battista Martini provided works for the cathedral of S Petronio and the academies: degli Unanimi, degli Anziani and delle Belle Lettere. Sammartini and Marchi worked for Milan Cathedral, where in 1724 there was a performance of the composite oratorio La calunnia delusa by ten local composers, in the manner of the operatic pasticcio. There is documentation of the fashion for such composite oratorios in Florence as well.

In the mid-century the papacy also made concessions to the prevailing operatic style: Pope Benedict XIV's encyclical Occasione imminenti Anni Sacri (1749) hopes for a middle way ‘inter cantum ecclesiasticum et scaenicas modulationes’. Teachers like Durante and scholars like Padre Martini safeguarded the strict Palestrina style. In his polemic with Eximeno, Martini takes Pergolesi's Stabat mater to task for paying little attention to sacred style, and in so doing Martini demonstrates an abstract idea of strict counterpoint that is at a remove from the actual music, and thus anachronistic.

Italy, §I, 5: 18th century art music

(v) Instrumental music.

For a long time instrumental music was also held to be a functional adornment which could be altered according to the occasion. The composer did not yet consider his own work to be an absolute ‘text’. The evidence for this lies in the details of for whom, and for what occasions, sonatas or concertos were composed: Corelli for private celebrations of Roman patrons, Vivaldi to provide music for teaching, Tartini for the solemn functions at the basilica of S Antonio in Padua, Sammartini ‘for the entertainment of those citizens who for amusement come to the ramparts [of the Castello Sforzesco in Milan] on summer evenings’ (Carpani). In the middle of the century there was a reaction against the predominantly lightweight nature of instrumental music in the period: Algarotti heard ‘motives’ and ‘subjects’ derived from Petrarch in Tartini's works; Tartini himself attributed to instrumental musical expression the natural imitation of ‘characters’ and ‘affects’, often clarified in short Metastasian verses placed at the head of the piece of music. Despite their differences, the two attitudes indicate the movement from a scientific concept of music (applied science) to the aesthetic idea (expressive fine art).

At the beginning of the century Rome and Venice were the leading centres: Burney saw in the Venetian school around Vivaldi (Albinoni, Alberti and Tessarini) ‘a light and irregular troop’; on the other hand, the Roman school formed by Corelli (Locatelli, Geminiani and Valentini) provided ‘the greatest performers and composers for the violin which Italy could boast during the first 50 years of the present century’. Historical distance, however, shows a proximity between the two, encouraged by the Borghese and Ottoboni families. In 1905 Schering established Corelli's thematic influence on Vivaldi; he saw Vivaldi's op.3, L'estro armonico, as an eclectic collection embracing both conventional Venetian elements and contemporary Roman elements taken from Corelli's pupil Valentini. There were two responses to Corelli's position as the archetype: for some his work was a model from which to develop according to the composer's own sensibilities: these include Vivaldi, Veracini and Tartini. Others took a more conservative approach and followed the Corellian forms of sonata and concerto to the letter; examples of this are his pupil Geminiani, Locatelli and Handel.

The basic compositional element for Corelli is variety, the juxtaposition of contrasting elements. The op.6 collection of concerti grossi brings together paratactic elements written at different times and on different occasions, assembled as constructional building-blocks according to the basic criterion of contrast (counterpoint–harmony, tutti–concertino, cantabile–virtuosity, slow–fast, sonata da chiesa–sonata da camera).

While the form of the Corelli sonata with a prelude and two or three movements spread quickly to the Venetian school (Caldara, op.2, 1699; Albinoni, op.3, 1701), there are some differences between the two schools when it comes to concerto writing: the make up of the ensembles is different and Vivaldi tended to establish a uniform style of writing in five parts (principal violin, first and second violin, viola and cello/basso continuo). The concerto for one or more soloists was developed much more in Venice, and the Venetians reduced the formal variety of the Roman concerto to the form Allegro–Adagio–Allegro.

The Corelli model was disseminated not only through his influence in Venice but also by his pupils: Locatelli and Geminiani brought the Italian concerto grosso to the Netherlands and England, Somis (in Rome from 1703) began the Turin school of violin playing which led to Giardini, Pugnani and Viotti, and lastly, for Tartini the starting-point was a Roman source in a Venetian manner.

It was Tartini, with his work after 1735, who exceeded the bounds of the Corelli tradition. In his concertos for violin and strings the three movements are planned tonally and have four tutti sections alternating with three solo interventions. Tartini's sonatas, on the other hand, follow a scheme of increasingly fast tempos (Lento, Allegro, Vivace), and are in a two-part form – tonic-dominant–retransition. The slow movements demonstrate the ‘instrumental cantabile which constitutes the real achievement of Tartini's art’ (Petrobelli).

De Brosses (1799), while recognizing Tartini's eminence, had a high opinion of the Lombard instrumental school, which benefited from the region's political links with Vienna. There were many composers active in Milan, with G.B. Sammartini at their head, who wrote ‘sinfonie’ (works for four-part strings, also known as ‘ouverture’ or ‘sonate’): Brioschi, Scaccia, Giulini and Lampugnani (who also composed operas). Sammartini's sinfonie, from the 1740s, constitute a model which J.C. Bach, Boccherini, Haydn and Mozart must have looked to. The key to Sammartini's mature symphonic style is rhythmic organization and his ability to maintain an intense musical flow giving rise to continuity of structure: this gives his style an eminently logical and dynamic structure which is also to be found in Tartini, distinct from the static-architectural conception of the late-Baroque concerto. In his Dictionnaire de musique (1768) Rousseau signals Tartini as an exemplary composer of Adagios, Sammartini of Andantes and Locatelli of Allegros.

With Boccherini the diaspora of Italian instrumentalists became evident. Boccherini sums up the history of Italian instrumental music: from the neo-classical composure of Corelli assimilated during his student year in Rome (1757), to the Tartini style which he came to know through his teacher G.B. Costanzi and his collaborators Nardini and Manfredi, all pupils of Tartini, and the symphonic style of Sammartini, with whom he collaborated in person in 1765. Boccherini unites this Italian legacy with an eclectic international experience that ranges from Gluck to Gossec to the Mannheim school. But his assimilation of such elements was consciously directed towards a ‘stylistic originality’ (Degrada) that would support his authoritative role and individual creativity (‘I would not be Boccherini if I had written as you advised’).

Keyboard composition shows less vitality. The harpsichord was used principally to realize basso continuo, as can be read in the treatise L'armonico pratico al cimbalo by Gasparini (1708) and in Burney's documentation (1771). While Zipoli, organist of the church of the Gesù in Rome in 1716, and Durante introduced a distinction of timbre and idiom between organ and harpsichord, this came to fruition only in Domenico Scarlatti's sonatas, a personal development which has few connections with the Italian experience.

In 1711 in the Giornale de' Letterati d'Italia Scipione Maffei announced the construction of the first pianoforte by Bartolomeo Cristofori, harpsichord builder to the grand ducal court of Tuscany; but the new instrument was slow to become established. Sonata composers in the Venice area, Pescetti, Platti, Alberti, Galuppi, Paganelli, remained tied to harpsichord thinking. Some melodic ideas, however, and a broad use of functional dynamic accompaniments to suit the new melodic manner (the ‘Alberti bass’) show some evidence of interest in the new instrument. Here we can see a model for that ‘singing Allegro’ which became widespread in Europe for several decades. The Neapolitan school shows individual features in keyboard music too: Rutini, Paradies and Vento became famous abroad in particular (in England especially) more as harpsichordists than as opera composers. One of the flood of Italian composers who travelled to London was Clementi, and it was due to him that the piano became completely independent from earlier instruments. His sonatas op.2 (1773) display a modern, independent thematic style while introducing a whole range of pianistic techniques which remained in use up until the time of Schubert.

Italy, §I: Art music