Music in the Seventeenth Century

358 Pages·1987·21.61 MB·English

by  Lorenzo Bianconi, David Bryant

MUSIC IN THE
SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
LORENZO BIANCONI
TRANSLATED BY DAVID BRYANT
I CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS
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© Cambridge University Press 1987
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 1987
Reprinted 1989, 1992, 1996
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
Bianconi, Lorenzo.
Music in the seventeenth century.
Translation of: II Seicento.
Bibliography.
Includes index.
I. Music — Italy — 17th century — History and criticism.
I. Title
ML290.B513 1987 780'.947 87-11685
ISBN 978-0-521-26290-3 Hardback
ISBN 978-0-521-26915-5 Paperback
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Contents
Author's preface to the English edition page vii
Italian versification: a note by Steven Botterill xi
I. THE EARLY DECADES 1
1 The seventeenth-century madrigal 1
2 Giovan Battista Marino and the poesia per musica 7
3 Music for solo voice 14
4 Claudio Monteverdi before 1620 21
5 The 'crisis' of the seventeenth century 28
6 'Concerto' 33
7 Monteverdi after 1620 36
II. PROBLEMS OF SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY MUSIC 45
8 The classification of styles 45
9 Scientific thought and musical theory 51
10 Theory and practice 57
11 Musical publicity 65
12 Music publishing and music collecting 73
13 Social condition of the musician 82
14 Instrumental and dance music 91
III. SACRED VOCAL MUSIC 105
15 Music in the Catholic liturgy 105
16 Catholic devotional music 119
17 The music of the Lutheran Church: Heinrich Schiitz 133
18 Sacred music as music of State: France and England 147
IV. OPERA 161
19 The historiography of opera 161
20 Opera before 1637 170
21 The Venetian theatres 180
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Contents
22 The diffusion of opera in Italy 190
23 Formal and dramatic convention; the lament 204
24 Opera in German-speaking lands: Vienna and Hamburg 220
25 The tragedie lyrique: Jean-Baptiste Lully 237
26 Theatrical music in England and Spain 252
SOURCE READINGS 265
1 A musical banquet: Florence, 1608 265
2 A court ballet: Turin, 1620 271
3 The social and intellectual condition of the musician:
Antonio Maria Abbatini 285
4 Historical and stylistic awareness: Heinrich Schiitz 292
5 Celestial music and poetic topoi: Ode on the death of
Henry Purcell 300
6 The impresarial organization of Venetian theatres:
Cristoforo Ivanovich 302
7 Dramaturgy of opera: Barthold Feind 311
Bibliography 327
Index 337
VI
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Author's preface to the English edition
As one British reviewer has rightly observed, the present volume
'unashamedly concentrates on Italian music'. The Seicento, in my
opinion, is the final century in the history of European music for
which an Italian-oriented approach may not ipso facto be defined as
misplaced. Italy - and Italy alone - undeniably provides the back-
cloth for a number of the principal innovations, events and per-
sonalities of the period: the 'invention' of opera and the institution of
the first public theatres, the beginnings and development of a modern
concept of'concerto', the very name of Monteverdi (himself the most
celebrated of a series of major figures who span the century as a
whole). In musical terms, seventeenth-century Italy is undoubtedly
a centre - or, rather, a whole series of centres - of European signifi-
cance. This is amply demonstrated by the interest and enthusiasm of
northern Europeans - simple tourists or composers of renown (the
prime example is Schutz) - for all kinds of musical innovation of
Italian derivation, as also by the rate of flow of Italian musicians and
musical manuscripts towards the courts and major cities of northern
Europe. Seventeenth-century Italy, however, can no longer be
described - contrary to the situation in the previous century - as the
musical centre of Europe, but rather as one of several centres. Earlier
migratory trends are reversed. No longer does the foreign musician
settle and rise to fame on Italian soil; rather, Italy is increasingly
afflicted by an over-production (albeit excellent in kind) of local
manpower and its exportation and 'commercialization' in the north.
This is symptomatic not only of the vigour of contemporary Italian
musical life but also of an inherent weakness and increasingly
peripheral nature which, with the sole exception of opera, finds
definitive confirmation in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
developments. Yet the symptoms of this reorganization of European
musical geography - a reorganization which, by 1700, can be regarded
as all but complete - appear all the more dramatically in cases where
the modern historian attempts to preserve that same Italian-oriented
outlook which, a mere century before, had been taken for granted
by one and all. In other words: as author of the present study, I have
pushed my own personal inclinations in this field to the point of
vii
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Author's preface to the English edition
consciously embracing an attitude which any seventeenth-century
Italian musician would automatically have assumed: a blissful
unawareness of musical activities beyond the Alps, matched only by
disconcerted surprise on emigration to foreign parts (an event of
increasing occurrence as the century wears on) at the artistic vitality
of Paris, London, Dresden, Vienna and other northern centres. I can
only hope that the adoption of this not altogether traditional - yet his-
torically plausible - perspective will provide some compensation in
the eyes of English-speaking readers for the absence from these pages
of such figures as the great John Dowland.
Direct discussion of the instrumental repertory, now generally
regarded as providing what ranks among the great innovations of
seventeenth-century music, has been limited to few pages only. It
would, indeed, be difficult to overestimate the importance of the
first thoroughgoing attempts - part and parcel of the history of
seventeenth-century music - to create a musical structure which might
be capable of its own separate existence (independently of all questions
of text): a musical discourse which alone provides the laws, logic and,
indeed, raison d'etre for its own intrinsic morphology, phrasing and
syntax (laws which themselves can be defined as those of tonal har-
mony and related rhythmic and metrical organization). Enormous is
the benefit for instrumental music. The question, however, is more
radical in kind; it involves not just the instrumental repertory but
rather the whole complex of contemporary stylistic problems - above
all, with regard to vocal music (particularly affected by the very
diversity between verbal and musical structures). In 'practical' and
statistical terms, the role of seventeenth-century instrumental music is
essentially modest and of minority significance - not at all what its rela-
tively profuse cultivation on the part of modern 'baroque' musicians
would suggest.
Finally, the reader will not be unduly surprised if, contrary to all
expectations and, indeed, scholarly traditions, the term 'baroque'
finds no further place in the vocabulary of the present study. In con-
trast to certain other non-musical terms (e.g., 'classicism') which, if
nothing else, can boast a long history of accepted usage in musical
literature, the stylistic and historiographical concept of 'baroque'
applied originally to the architecture of mid-seventeenth-century
Rome and its derivatives, and to these alone can it be applied with any
degree of accuracy. It is doubtful whether its extension to music - as,
indeed, to the visual arts in general - of the period 1600-1750, though
in some respects quite legitimate, can offer any real critical advantage,
except (perhaps) as an aid to comparing the dominant characteristics of
viii
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Author's preface to the English edition
'baroque', Gothic, Renaissance or one of the many 'classical' move-
ments in the overall context of some broad, general appraisal of the
history of European music. It certainly represents a distinct disadvan-
tage as regards any attempt to understand the irregular and, at times,
conflicting interaction and/or co-existence of the many different -
indeed, antithetical - currents, traditions and individual phenomena
in seventeenth-century musical history. The 'shape of time' - to quote
the title of an excellent little book by George Kubler (New Haven,
1972) - has little of the smoothness, consistency and uniformity which
the use of such historiographical and stylistic categories as 'baroque'
might imply. The 'history of things', i.e., those 'things' produced by
man - and this, above all, is the case of the musical work of art - is as
discontinuous and many-sided as, indeed, is the history of their desti-
nation and use. It is this history which I here attempt to trace.
I am indebted to the translator, David Bryant, for his unfailing
attentions in remaining faithful to my original text, to Lucy Carolan
for her careful copy-editing, and to Penny Souster for supervising the
preparation of the present edition.
The five years since completion of my original Italian text have
served only - and in no small degree - to augment my indebtedness
and gratitude to its two first dedicatees: my wife Giuseppina and our
son Carlo.
IX
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