Aspects of 18th-Century Vocal Techniques from Tosi to Hiller
This lecture/demonstration will address different aspects of vocal techniques of the Italo-Germanic tradition including articulation, registration, and breathing and will examine their relationship to musical performance in areas such as phrasing, dynamics, declamation, tempo, and ornamentation. The lecture will also examine how certain aspects of vocal techniques changed over the course of the 18th-century as well as the line of transmission from Tosi to Hiller.
However, in the 2nd half of the 20th century, when Telefunken started to record all Bach's vocal music sytematically, the mutual inspiration between singers and players worked the other way around. Leonhardt, Harnoncourt and others had rediscovered the right instrumental approach to Early Music, but the singers lagged behind.
Consequently, when these maestri invited me to join them in their long-term adventure, I realised, after some hesitation and confusion, that my task was: reconstructing the early vocal style by observing and listening to the achievements of my instrumental colleagues.
This led to the most inspiring and fruitful experiences of my musical life.
1640. As soon as the castrati presented themselves on the operatic scene of Western Europe, the originally modest tenor singers were forced to withdraw, leaving their places to the stronger and skilled castrato voices. Some of the tenors remained; these were the light and flexible voices that could compete with the virtuosity of the castrati.
The heydays of the castrati lasted from about 1650 to 1800. By then the tenor had finished the educational tract which led to sing without falsetto registration.
Handel. In the first half of the 18th century Handel was dominant in developing and fixing the cast of the London opera. He preferred to work with female singers rather than smooth tenors next to his brilliant castrati. The Handelian opera showed equal casting. For example: the Radamisto role was alternatively adapted to Margarita Durastanti and the castrato Senesino!
Mozart. In Mozart's first works in ‘opera seria’ style (Mozart was not yet ten years old), he made use of the castrato voices (soprani and alti) and female soprani as well. Unlike Handel Mozart used the tenor voices too: he gave them freedom to use falsetto registration if they were to explore or to show off their extremely high topnotes as can be seen in several scores, for example in Il Sogno di Scipione .
Persuing his ideal to create a real German- Austrian ‘Singspiel’, Mozart guided the tenor to a new technique, he wanted to have the high falsetto abandoned. Therefore the tenor had to strengthen the former middle part, now the upper part of his voice, avoiding the physiological barrier on high c. From Idomeneo on (1782) Mozarts tenor sang in standard registration.
In Die Entführung the tenor was ready to prepare for the next step: the high c in standard register, which was asked for in Grand Opera after 1800.A survey of Italian Bass arias and cantatas from:
- the manuscript Martini 2.1 of the Biblioteca del Civico Museo Bibliografico Musicale in Bologna.
- the manuscript collection “Cantate a Basso solo” (twelve cantatas) by Antonio Caldara from the Santini Sammlung der Diözesan Bibliothek at Münster (Germany).
- the manuscript collection “Vinti Quatro Cantate a Basso solo” by Antonio Caldara from the Santini Sammlung der Diözesan Bibliothek at Münster (Germany).
- G.F. Handels operas and oratorios.
Melania Bucciarelli
From Rinaldo to Orlando, or Senesino's path to madness.
With Orlando, Senesino concludes his association with Handel. His interpretation of Ariosto's deranged hero could have easily marked the climax of a long and successful career. On the eve of Senesino's return to Italy, however, Orlando turned out to be a real anti-climax and resulted in the definitive rupture with Handel.
This paper takes Senesino's interpretation of the role of Orlando as a starting point for a discussion of his career in Italy, Dresden and London within the context of the contemporary Italian acting tradition, as it emerges through the operas themselves and the writings of Andrea Perrucci, Pier Jacopo Martello and Luigi Riccoboni. While attempting to contextualise a series of comments that defined Senesino as a 'good' or a 'bad' actor, this paper highlights the character of the musical and dramatic challenges posed to the singer by Italian dramatists and composers on the continent, as well as by Handel and Bononcini in London, in order to create a context for appreciating the disappointment of the 1733 Orlando.
The sopranos Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni went down in history as ‘The Rival Queens’ of the final period of the Royal Academy of Music in London (1726–1728). The notoriety of their London engagement (the infamous warfare of the soprano factions) has led to the Royal Academy works in which they performed generally being understood through the prism of their supposed rivalry; and the motive behind the decision of the Royal Academy to employ two sopranos of star stature has also been described as manipulative and deliberately sensation-seeking.
It is little known, however, that the two singers had shared the stage in Italy earlier in their careers. The paper examines the libretti of the operas in which they performed in Venice and Milan, and the custom of wealthy Italian theatres to employ pairs of star sopranos. It is suggested that inviting a second soprano to London reflected an established practice that was aimed at achieving high-quality operatic entertainment, and that for Cuzzoni and Bordoni entering a shared London engagement was nothing unusual.
This paper tells the story of an opera production, its composer-impresario and its singers. It attempts to identify the decisions made in assembling the voices and arias, and compares the conflicting interests of vocal and dramatic identities. In the mid-1730s, the practice of passticcio-arranging had become an important vehicle for stylistic and technical competition in the European singers’ market. Vivaldi was keenly aware of this when he had ‘a free hand’ as musical director at the Teatro Filarmonico of Verona during carnival 1735.
On the basis of a libretto which he apparently appreciated, he plotted dramatic and virtuoso voices: he arranged for two of his sopranos (one castrato, one woman) to sing the recent most popular Farinelli arias from the repertory of his own competitors, but he pursued the opposite policies with his primadonna Anna Girò and his heroic tenor. This contrast between seemingly incompatible aesthetic worlds will be investigated in the musical score and the libretto.
Huub van der Linden
Francesco Antonio Pistocchi (1659-1726) as singer and composer
Though it is well known that in the 18th century composers were almost invariably also virtuoso instrumentalists, singers, on the other hand, seem to have been less often successful in both roles. Francesco Antonio Pistocchi was an exception to that rule: not only did he pursue a successful career as a singer and a tutor – having e.g. Gaetano Berenstadt and Giovanni Battista 'Padre' Martini among his students –, he was also a gifted composer. His opus 1, which was published when he was eight, was followed in later years by a number of operas and oratorios, as well as two other sets of printed music. Little has been published on Pistocchi so far, but much detail can be added to the information in the standard encyclopedias by combining scattered mentionings in (already published) archival documents with extracts from his more than 100 (for the large part unpublished) letters.
These documents also throw some light on how Pistocchi used his circle of Bolognese colleagues and his success as a singer to promote his compositions. One example will be his oratorio Il martirio di S. Adriano, which was composed for Modena in 1692. Thanks to both his own career as a singer and his professional 'network', this oratorio was heard the next year in Rome, and when Pistocchi later served at Sophia Charlotta’s court in Berlin, he reused the best aria from the piece in a cantata that can thus be attributed to him for the first time.
Es wird die Sequenz untersucht:
Text mit seinen rhetorischen Implikationen
–
Vertonung (1. Interpretationsebene)
- musikalische und gestische Realisierung
(2. Interpretationsebene).
Für die Untersuchung hilfreich ist die Vertonung des gleichen Textes durch verschiedene Komponisten. Als Vergleichsmaterial werden Francesco Gasparinis „Il Bajazet“ (Emilio Romana 1719) und Georg Friedrich Händels „Tamerlano“ (London 1724) herangezogen, auch deshalb, weil beide Opern in gedruckten Neuausgaben vorliegen. Ausgesuchte parallele Passagen werden hinsichtlich ihrer rhetorischen und musikalischen Struktur analysiert und die Konsequenzen dieser Analysearbeit für die musikalisch und gestische Interpretation dargestellt. Im Zentrum der Präsentation steht die sängerisch/gestische Demonstration unterschiedlicher Annäherungsmöglichkeiten.
- choice of a plausible pitch cq tuning
- castrati versus countertenors
- women voices in stead of castrati
- general technical abillities
- aesthetic problems casting baroque opera in general and Handel in particular (such as Latin voices versus Anglo-Saxon voices)
Opera and Enlightened Colonialism: State-Sponsored Operatic Production in Brazil in the Mid-Eighteenth Century
This paper will deal with the opera theatres established in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in the 1760s and 1770s by the Portuguese colonial administrators with the express purpose of encouraging sociability and cultural life in the context of the local elites, in keeping with the ideals of the Enlightenment.
Due to the lack of European-trained performers, these theatres were mostly staffed by Negro, mulato and Amerindian singers and instrumentalists, often trained by missionaries. Their repertoire seems to encompass Neapolitan operas on texts by Metastasio by David Perez and Portuguese-spoken, Singspiel-like musical comedies with libretti by António José da Silva, a Jewish playwright burned by the Inquisition, and music by António Teixeira and other Portuguese composers who worked mostly for the Lisbon Chapel Royal. The study of the forgotten manuscript diaries of the Governor of São Paulo, the Morgado de Mateus, from 1765 to 1774, preserved in the National Library of Rio de Janeiro and in the archives of the Palace of Mateus, in Northeast Portugal, reveals a wealth of new information in regard to this topic.
No other city in the world has assumed the emblem and even the name of a musical symbol such as Partenope, the ancient name of Naples. The myth of foundation of Naples deals with the singing siren Partenope, one of three sisters beaten by Ulysses, the only mortal able to resist their singing.
Partenope’s body washed ashore on the coast of Naples thus giving her name to the city. After being the capital of the Aragonese Kingdom, from 1503 Naples became a peripheral colony of Spain until 1707, followed by a brief Austrian domination until the restoration of the Neapolitan monarchy under Carlo di Borbone in 1734. In the beginning of the Spanish domination, the Neapolitan men of letters (such as Pontano, Sannazaro, Summonte) discover the ancient myth of the siren-founder of the town and Partenope represented the personification of Naples, the singing city.
As a character Partenope appeared several times on the Neapolitan stage during the seventeenth century, in feste, balletti or serenate. Meanwhile the first opera entitled Partenope appeared in Naples in 1699, on a libretto written by the Arcadian poet Silvio Stampiglia: in the plot is acting not the siren is acting but the protagonist of another myth of foundation of Naples, the virgin queen Partenope, the daughter of Tessalia’s king. The two parallel myths are mixed with many other symbols. Stampiglia’s libretto enjoyed a strong success since it was set to music by a number of composers including Luigi Mancia, Antonio Caldara, Domenico Sarro, Antonio Vivaldi etc. in several Italian and European theatres. La Partenope even reached Mexico City in 1711 with the music of the local composer Manuel de Zumaya. But the zenith of the triumphal career of Partenope on stage arrived in Venice 1725, when Leonardo Vinci presented the previous score of his colleague Sarro arranged with all the arias and other numbers newly composed by him. George Frederick Handel in London became acquainted with Vinci’s music for Partenope in the pasticcio entitled Elpidia which he performed in London in 1725. Eventually, Handel composed on the same libretto his own Partenope, one of the last hommages to Naples as the music capital of Europe and to the myth of the siren-queen.
Opera Buffa
Within few years (basically the 1760s) 18th Century Opera buffa succeeded in conquering the opera centers of Europe. Basis of his success was a network of Buffo singers and Buffo troops, who in changing personnel composition and in the constant professional exchange among themselves, provided from upper Italy for the rapid spreading of a repertoire and a representation practice, which was enthusiastically applauded in Vienna, Dresden, Prague or London as well.
This development will be described illustrating the careers of individual prominent Opera buffa singers of the 1760s to 1780s, as e.g. the Baglioni sisters, Francesco Carattoli, Filippo Laschi, Celeste Coltellini and others.
Italian acting and singing was known in Madrid long before the arrival in 1738 of the professional opera company contracted for the Teatro de los Caños del Peral. In fact, the arrival of a troupe of Italian actors in the summer of 1703 was just one episode of a longstanding Italian influence in Spanish court spectacles which can be traced back at least one century before.
On the other hand, the last ten years of research about theatrical music in Eighteenth-century Spain have redressed the traditional vision of a fundamental “break” of Spanish theatrical practices as a result of an “Italian musical invasion” and have shown a much more complex and rich panorama where the Italian operatic style interacted with a strong tradition of spoken theater with different kinds of musical interventions.
This paper will center on the reconstruction of the professional background of the known Italian comediants of the different companies which acted in Madrid between 1703 and 1725 and on some other Italian singers which may help to understand the significant changes in the theatrical music produced in Madrid around 1700. Libretti and documentary evidence will be contrasted whith some musical examples taken from the Spanish court and public theatre productions by composers such as Antonio Literes (1673-1747) and Giacomo Facco (1676-1753) in order to show the Italian impact on the performance of the Spanish actresses who sung in zarzuelas and drammas armónicos of the three first decades of the century.