The Italian Traditions and Puccini

Nicholas Baragwanath

Description

The theory and practice of Italian musical composition

In this groundbreaking survey of the fundamentals, methods, and formulas that were taught at Italian music conservatories during the 19th century, Nicholas Baragwanath explores the compositional significance of tradition in Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi, Boito, and, most importantly, Puccini. Taking account of some 400 primary sources, Baragwanath explains the varying theories and practices of the period in light of current theoretical and analytical conceptions of this music. The Italian Traditions and Puccini offers a guide to an informed interpretation and appreciation of Italian opera by underscoring the proximity of archaic traditions to the music of Puccini.

Preface and Acknowledgements
A Note on Translation and Terminology
1: Musical Traditions in Nineteenth-Century Italy
I. The Italian Schools
II. An Introduction to the Primary Sources
III. Puccini and the End of the Great Tradition
2. Studies in Lucca and Milan
I. Composition as Craft
II. The Istituto musicale in Lucca
III. Scarpia and the Partimento Cadence
IV. The Conservatorio di Milano
3. Lessons in Dramatic Composition I: Rhythm
I. Rhythm without Measure, Accent without Beat
II. Rules of Versification, Lippmann's Rhythmic-Musical Types, and Two Case-Studies
III. Historical Survey of Writings on Ritmo
IV. Short Case-Studies from Bellini and Puccini
4. Lessons in Dramatic Composition II: Harmony and Counterpoint
I. The Partimento Tradition
II. Michele Puccini's Corso pratico di contrappunto (1846)
III. The Bolognese Attachment, or "Little Keys for Winding Clocks"
IV. Regular Motions and Melodic Composition
5. Lessons in Dramatic Composition III: Affect, Imitation, and Conduct
I. Dominant Affects and their Movements
II. Physical and Sentimental Imitation
III. Form and Conduct
IV. Case-Studies from Verdi, Boito, and Puccini
6. Vocalizzi, Solfeggi, and Real (or Ideal) Composition
I. Lessons in Singing and Counterpoint
II. Lessons in Singing and Solfeggio
III. From Solfeggio to Ideal Composition in Puccini (and Bellini)
Notes
Bibliography
Index of Concepts
Index of Names and Works

Sujets

• Musique
• Histoire de la musique
• Technique musicale
• Technique musicale
• Techniques musicales
• MUSIC
• Multiple signal classification
• Italian opera
• Study
• Theory
• Musicology
• Instruction
• Opera
• Giacomo Puccini

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 08 juillet 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253001665
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 9 Mo

Extrait

The Italian Traditions & Puccini

MUSICAL MEANING & INTERPRETATION

Robert S. Hatten, editor

The Italian Traditions & Puccini

This book is a publication of

Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, Indiana 47404-3797 USA

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© 2011 by Nicholas Baragwanath All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

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Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Baragwanath, Nicholas. The Italian traditions and Puccini : compositional theory and practice in nineteenth-century opera / Nicholas Baragwanath. p. cm. — (Musical meaning and interpretation) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-253-35626-0 (hardcopy : alk. paper) 1. Opera—Italy—19th century. 2. Puccini, Giacomo, 1858-1924—Criticism and interpretation. 3. Music theory—Italy—History—19th century. 4. Composition (Music)—History—19th century. 5. Music—Instruction and study—Italy—History—19th century. I. Title. ML1733.4.B37 2011 782.10945’09034—dc22 2011008988

1 2 3 4 5 16 15 14 13 12 11

In Memory of Meta Lilian Baragwanath

CONTENTS

•Preface & Acknowledgments

•A Note on Translation and Terminology

1 MUSICAL TRADITIONS IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY ITALY

I. The Italian Schools II. An Introduction to the Primary Sources III. Puccini and the End of the Great Tradition

2 STUDIES IN LUCCA AND MILAN

I. Composition as Craft II. The Istituto musicale in Lucca III. Scarpia and thePartimentoCadence IV. The Conservatorio di Milano

3 LESSONS IN DRAMATIC COMPOSITION I: RHYTHM

I. Rhythm without Measure, Accent without Beat II. Rules of Versification, Lippmann’s Rhythmic-Musical Types, and Two Case Studies III. Historical Survey of Writings onRitmo IV. Short Case Studies from Bellini and Puccini

4 LESSONS IN DRAMATIC COMPOSITION II: HARMONY AND COUNTERPOINT

I. ThePartimentoTradition II. Michele Puccini’sCorso pratico di contrappunto(1846) III. The Bolognese Attachment, or “Little Keys for Winding Clocks” IV. Regular Motions and Melodic Composition

5 LESSONS IN DRAMATIC COMPOSITION III: AFFECT, IMITATION, AND CONDUCT

I. Dominant Affects and Their Movements II. Physical and Sentimental Imitation III. Form and Conduct IV. Case Studies from Verdi, Boito, and Puccini

6VOCALIZZI, SOLFEGGI, AND REAL (OR IDEAL) COMPOSITION

I. Lessons in Singing and Counterpoint II. Lessons in Singing andSolfeggio III. FromSolfeggioto Ideal Composition in Puccini (and Bellini)

•Notes

•Bibliography

•Index of Concepts

•Index of Names and Works

PREFACE&ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Although it focuses on his life and operas, this book is not primarily about Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924). It concerns the Italian musical tradition of which he remains, by common consent, the last great representative. What, precisely, “tradition” might mean in this context forms the main subject of the book. The methods of musical training current in Lucca during Puccini’s formative years had remained essentially unchanged since the eighteenth century. In many respects they differed profoundly from conventional modern teachings. Nineteenth-century Italian accounts of rhythm and its relation to phrase structure, for instance, bear little resemblance to the German tradition represented by Koch (1787), Hauptmann (1853), and Riemann (1884), which continues to underpin contemporary theory. Similarly, the modern understanding of musical “form,” based on a notion of abstract templates that may be traced to such sources as Reicha (1824–26) and Marx (1837–47), began to influence Italian publications only toward the end of the nineteenth century. The study of harmony and counterpoint, as undertaken by Rossini, Verdi, and Puccini (principally through playing and singing), was entirely at odds with modern approaches to similarly named disciplines. In the broadest sense, these teachings comprised a body of guidelines and rules that had evolved over centuries to meet the demands of the church, the court, and the opera industry by allowing trained professionals to produce compositions and performances in the appropriate styles effectively in a remarkably short time. The pedagogical tradition gradually faded away during Puccini’s lifetime, together with the practices and industries that gave rise to it, and is now largely forgotten. It was replaced—or, some might argue, superseded—by an alternative and in many ways antithetical tradition, the legacy of which continues to inform attitudes and approaches today. Music history still belongs to the victors of this century-long struggle for cultural supremacy. (To describe it in blander, more objective, and less provocative terms as part of a general process of cultural transformation would be to deny the conscious intent with which it was carried out and to provide alibis for both the historical agents and their commentators.) The new tradition could be said to have begun with the birth of Romanticism and German artistic self-consciousness, and in particular with the formulation of a new philosophy or “metaphysics” of instrumental music around the turn of the nineteenth century, in the writings of Achim von Arnim, Johann Forkel, Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, Novalis, the brothers August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, Ludwig Tieck, Wilhelm Wackenroder, and others. The battle lines were already drawn by 1834, when Austrian music philosopher Raphael Georg Kiesewetter laid claim to the future of music on behalf of the German nation in his blatantly one-sidedGeschichte der europäisch- abendländischen oder unserer heutigen Musik (History of Western-European, or Our Modern, Music). By reducing the entirety of music history to a succession of Hegelian “Epochs,” determined through the actions of superior males in touch with theZeitgeist and spiraling toward some absolute liberated consciousness, he sought to depict Beethoven’s instrumental style as the foreordained culmination of an inexorable process of historical development. Within this vast dialectic of inspired innovations and outdated former novelties, Kiesewetter acknowledged the hegemony of the Italian tradition only until the year 1760, conveniently categorizing it into epochs defined by Palestrina (1560–1600), Monteverdi (1600–40), Carissimi (1640–80), Scarlatti (1680–1725), and Leo and Durante (1725–60). Evidently, the Neapolitan schools from 1680 to 1760 had yet to give way to Bach and Handel in terms of historical significance. The fateful turning point, Kiesewetter maintained, after which European music became “Our” music, occurred with the operatic

reforms (1760–80) of honorary-German Christoph von Gluck, who corrected some of the worst abuses of the Italians and paved the way for the “golden age” of Haydn and Mozart 1 (1780–1800). These two “classic” composers in turn created the conditions for the next radical world-historical breakthrough toward the Ideal, in Beethoven’s further emancipation of music (German, instrumental) from the word (Italian, operatic). Kiesewetter’s inclusion of Rossini’s name in the title of his final chapter, which would otherwise have been called “The Epoch of Beethoven: 1800 to 1832,” testified to nothing more than a grudging acquiescence to the inescapable reality of Franco-Italian opera’s status as representative of a mainstream of European music. To pass over the most celebrated international composer of the age without mention would have revealed too obvious a prejudice, even for his purpose. The promised commentary on Rossini amounted nevertheless to just a couple of sentences, commending his partial assimilation of some of the achievements of the Austro-German 2 orchestral tradition. Considered within the context of its own times, Kiesewetter’s overtly partisan reading of history may be understood to reflect the optimism and enthusiasm that accompanied the drive toward German self-determination and the associated ascendancy of Romantic ideas such as the “spirit of the people” (Volksgeist). In the lead-up to the revolutions of 1848, this kind of celebratory cultural nationalism was regarded as a developmental force for freedom and progress. The magnificent, exciting, and newly configured instrumental traditions from Bach to Beethoven appeared worthy of assistance in their struggle to overcome the stuffy conservatism and, worse, continued popularity of a formula-ridden and historically (or philosophically) obsolete opera industry. Such was the opinion of Young-German firebrand Richard Wagner, who advocated a more explicit variety of cultural imperialism for the good of less advanced peoples like the French and Italians. In a Parisian article of 1840, entitledÜber deutsches Musikwesen(On the Essence of German Music), he took up and intensified Kiesewetter’s identification of “Our Music” with the European mainstream by making the claim that to annex and nationalize foreign traditions was, forGermanartists, to render themUniversal:

The German genius would almost seem predestined to seek out among its neighbours what is not native to its motherland, to lift this from its narrow confines, and thus make something Universal for the world. Naturally, however, this can only be achieved by him who is not satisfied to ape a foreign nationality, but keeps his German birthright pure and undefiled; and that birthright is Purity of feeling and Chasteness of invention. Where this dowry is retained, the German may do the grandest work in any tongue and every nation, beneath all quarters of the sky. Thus we see a German raising the Italian school of Opera to the most complete ideal at last, and bringing it, thus widened and ennobled to universality, to his own countrymen. That German, that greatest and divinest genius, wasMozart.… He 3 made the foreign art his own, to raise it to a universal.

A similar point of view was graphically expressed in Josef Danhauser’s well-known painting of the same year,Liszt at the Piano, in which a drawing room full of Romantic artists—including Liszt at the keyboard, his mistress Marie d’Agoult at his feet, Alexandre Dumas (père), George Sand, and Victor Hugo—are portrayed as worshipping at the altar of the all-conquering German tradition, as represented by a floating, luminous, deified bust of 4 Beethoven. Observing the scene from the shadows in a similarly awed but far less enraptured manner are two musicians of the purportedly outmoded and outclassed Italian tradition, Paganini and Rossini, who appear to comfort one another in mutual resignation to their subordinate place in the new musical order. Much the same basic claim determined the overall historical framework of Leipzig

professor Franz Brendel’sGeschichte der Musik in Italien, Deutschland und Frankreich von den ersten christlichen Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwartof Music in Italy, Germany, (History and France from the Earliest Christian Times to the Present, 1852), which appears to have been intended to update and supplant Kiesewetter’s earlier study. Not only did it affirm the success of Mozart in wresting opera from the Italians, purging it of substandard elements, and returning it to the world in Ideal form, stamped with a German seal of quality, but it also promoted Wagner and his theories as the latest breakthrough (Aufschwung) in the world- 5 artistic dialectic. Brendel’sGeschichtecontinuously in print until 1903 and, together was with its guiding principle of a nationally determined “universal” tradition, provided the foundation for many subsequent music histories, including Hugo Riemann’s widely read Geschichte der Musik seit Beethoven (1800–1900) (History of Music since Beethoven, 1800–1900, 1901). During the same period, a proliferation of more specialized studies began to adapt and (according to their own rhetoric) “improve” age-old Italian (and French) theories and practices according to the norms of the Austro-German instrumental tradition. Moritz Hauptmann, for instance, another Leipzig professor, made a conscious attempt to subvert and refashion the traditional Italian teachings on rhythm he had received through composition lessons with Francesco Morlacchi, a student of Zingarelli in Naples and Mattei in Bologna. That, at least, was how the Italians received his theory (as will be documented i nchapter 3). InDie Natur der Harmonik und der MetrikNature of Harmony and (The Meter, 1853), Hauptmann inverted the central Italian concept of the primacy of free expressive melodic rhythm (ritmo melodico) over the regular pulse of the accompanying harmonic rhythm (ritmo armonico)—perfectly encapsulated in the oft-cited observation that Chopin maintained a strict pulse with his left hand at the piano, while allowing the right hand considerable freedom—by insisting that “the rhythmic phrase finds its artistic meaning first 6 of all in meter.” Henceforth in the German (universal) tradition, the rational divisions of meter, or the “harmonic-metric,” provided order and therefore aesthetic value to the allegedly irrational and chaotic “melodic-metric.” Early twentieth-century theories of analysis and composition, such as those of Guido Adler, Heinrich Schenker, and Arnold Schoenberg, were equally committed to consolidating 7 and furthering the dominance of German music. One consequence of this century of composition and associated scholarly activity, subsequently aided and abetted by the migration of Austro-German scholars to the United States and elsewhere, was that the ancient Italian traditions, unable to compete either with the new instrumental repertories or with an influx of disarmingly intellectual musicological publications, and undermined, moreover, from within by a fifth column of Germanophile progressives in Florence and Milan, gradually dwindled to a meager canon of historically 8 second-rate (but stubbornly popular) “masterworks.” Lost to European art were not only an enormous number of perhaps deservedly forgotten operas and opera composers but also an entire musical culture, a way of thinking about and making music that represented, in a profound sense, the antithesis of much that Austro-German Romanticism had come to stand for. However magnificent the tradition of instrumental masterpieces from Bach to Brahms may be, the persistent claims to universality made on its behalf (compounded, of course, by relevant social and economic factors) contributed to the erosion and eventual disappearance of other European musical cultures. This book sets out to explore some of the Italian traditions of compositional theory and practice in more detail—to establish a framework for further studies—through a survey of contemporary and historical sources that underpinned the training received by composers throughout the nineteenth century. It aims to distil from the extant documentary evidence a coherent theory that reconstructs the once commonplace fundamentals, methods, and