Art in Rome in the Eighteenth Century

This essay discusses the possibility of incorporating aspects of classical music and music history into basic education. It presents elements of the lives and works of two composers from the classical music tradition, Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven, bridging them with everyday life and proposing their integration into pedagogical-musical work. In this regard, biographical and compositional aspects of both composers are mentioned, whose historical and musicological importance can contribute to the development of music education in basic education. It also reports on a workshop aimed at teacher training, offered to teachers from the Municipal Education Network of Porto Alegre (Rio Grande do Sul), in which activities were developed, starting from Bach and Beethoven, with the purpose of uniting classical music and music history in pedagogical plans within school settings. As a result, it was observed that there are many possibilities for introducing biographical elements of composers, which can enhance and underpin the teaching and learning of music in schools.

The recent release of a compact disc dedicated to piano works by Charles-Valentin Alkan (1813-88) performed by Paul Wee (BIS-2465 [2019]) is not only a feat of aggressive virtuosity but a rare manifestation of how music performance and other liberal professions can be so effectively integrated. When not at the keyboard, Mr. Wee is a highly successful lawyer whose court appearances represent global banks, major nation-states, energy disputes, and international law. Extraordinary, however, as Mr. Wee’s case may be, it is not unique in the complex world of integrated professions with music as a counterpart. Without evoking the ghosts of King David or Pope Gregory, the history of music boasts a great many examples of musicians who were able to fuse and advance their passions seamlessly once a “revelatory sign”– a reassuring nod–confirmed that they were on the right path. Noble Peace Prize winner, organist, musicologist, theologian, medical doctor, and humanitarian Albert Schweitzer referred to that moment as “reverence for life.” It was revealed to him on a slow boat trip on the river Ogowe in Africa on the way to a medical emergency 160 miles upstream.
  Today’s workshop focuses on the dual careers of Muzio Clementi (1752-1832), William Herschel (1738-1822), Charles Ives (1874-1954), and Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965).

ABSTRACTIn 1787 Artaria, Haydn's publisher in Vienna, issued three versions of The Seven Last Words: the original orchestral version, a quartet arrangement prepared by the composer and a keyboard arrangement sanctioned by him. A year later, in September 1788, Artaria issued three of the recent ‘Paris’ Symphonies, Nos 84, 85 and 86, in an arrangement for quartet. While the quartet version of The Seven Last Words has always been accepted as part of the canon, the three quartet arrangements of the symphonies have been ignored. Sympathetic consideration of a range of evidence, including the bibliographical, historical and text-critical, suggests that Haydn may have been the author of these three quartets.

The late piano trios of Joseph Haydn, which were published in London during his two trips there in 1791 and 1794, are neglected and misunderstood works. This study examines Haydn's late trios in the light of other works of the same type which were published for the same audience in order to gain a clearer perspective of this repertoire. A variety of cultural and economic factors influenced the music considered in this study. In particular, the pres­ ence in London of a large class of affluent but relatively unsophisticated musical amateurs provided a lucrative outlet for composers who could satisfy the public's demand for new music. The accompanied sonata, that is, the sonata for key­ board with accompaniment for other instruments, especially violin and cello, was a popular genre with London amateurs. Two varieties of accompanied sonata are found in the music studied: 1) the sonata with optional accompaniments, and 2) the concertante sonata, in which at least one of the acco...

DJ uring the eighteenth century, one of the most important educational experiences was the so-called Grand Tour, ajourney throughout continental Europe intended to bring the traveller into contact with the leading cultural centers and artistic figures of that time. Open to ...

"Una scienza volgare e mezzana: la produzione di copie a Carrara tra Sette e Ottocento"
"La fabbrica della copia a Firenze e Napoli tra Sette e Ottocento", Gallerie degli Uffizi, 1 ottobre 2021, convegno a cura di Antonella Gioli, Cristiano Giometti, Cinzia Maria Sicca, organizzato da Università di Firenze, Università di Pisa, Università di Salerno e Gallerie degli Uffizi.

While not directly traceable to the composer, the nickname “Emperor” usually ascribed to Beethoven’s last completed Piano Concerto in E-flat major, op. 73 (originally published in England as op. 64) does have musical and historical connotations which can be identified. The musical evidence will, for convenience, be presented first and will be followed by the historical evidence.

While not directly traceable to the composer, the nickname “Emperor” usually ascribed to Beethoven’s last completed Piano Concerto in E-flat major, op. 73 (originally published in England as op. 64) does have musical and historical connotations which can be identified. The musical evidence will, for convenience, be presented first and will be followed by the historical evidence.

The nineteenth-century composer has a persistent image problem: inspired, unworldly, male, writing works of genius for posterity. If it has been the project of musicologists for the last 30 years to erode this checklist, he lingers still like a bad smell. This book uses Antoine Reicha (1770-1836) as a case study through which to develop alternative approaches to the nineteenth-century composer. That Reicha was a composition teacher and prolific writer of instruction manuals, for example, provides an opportunity (and new types of sources) to focus on composers’ attempts at becoming composers. How can we catch them ‘in the making’, exploring not a body of works and achievements, but the priorities and anxieties of these individuals (the knowledge they followed or created) in crafting their artistic identities for the public? What modes of music historiography and analysis might help explore Reicha’s and his contemporaries’ music beyond mapping it within local or national traditions and their transfer? Can a networked model of music-history writing – we might call it ‘a history of music with no protagonist’ – assist musicologists in working on non-canonical composers without retrospectively making monuments out of them? These and other questions frame this volume, in order not only to reassess Reicha, but also our disciplinary toolkit: to ask how/why/to what end we tell stories about composers in musicology more generally.

CONTENTS and ORDERS: https://www.utorpheus.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=3587

Beethoven held Muzio Clementi’s piano music in high esteem. Consequently, many authors (among them Leon Plantinga, Alexander Ringer, and Georges de Saint Foix) have posited a general influence of Clementi on Beethoven’s music, though the discussion seldom turns to specific evidence of this influence. In the early-to-middle 1790s, Clementi published around a dozen impressive solo piano sonatas, including a revolutionary Sonata in G minor, Opus 34, no. 2, in 1795. One of this work’s most noteworthy features is the largo e sostenuto introduction, a broadly conceived opening gesture that was unique at that time for the solo keyboard repertoire, which Clementi integrates motivically into the allegro con fuoco that follows. (Subsequently, this material returns as the goal of the development section.)

Three years later, in 1798, Beethoven composed his Sonate Pathétique, Opus 13, couched in his characteristically stormy C minor, a piano work that was symphonic in concept and scope. Like Clementi’s Opus 34 no. 2, it begins with a slow introduction (marked Grave) that returns prominently in the development section. Though the formal placement of this return is different, the overall conception is quite similar. This study will explore the musical consequences of these works’ slow introductions and their subsequent integration into the form. Furthermore, we will consider whether Clementi’s musical precedent influenced Beethoven in other formal and tonal decisions he made in his Opus 13, and if so, to what extent, thereby disentangling questions of musical influence, inspiration, and possible homage of Clementi, on the young Beethoven’s part.

Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata, Opus 53 (1804) is widely considered a landmark in piano music. Its extended upper range and expanded role of the damper pedal stems from his acquisition of a 5½ octave Erard piano in 1803, while its harmonic boldness furthers the experiments of his Opus 31 piano sonatas. Its rondo finale explores new sonic vistas with its middle-register arpeggios, embedded in a wash of pedal, which Heinrich Schenker calls “a spiritual, almost transcendental, binding together of larger groups,” while Alfred Casella praises its “ethereal and diaphanous sound.”

Despite the finale’s novel opening sonority, the movement has a clear precedent in a movement written nearly a decade earlier by Muzio Clementi: the concluding rondo of his Sonata in C major, Opus 34, no. 1, published in 1795. Clementi’s finale begins with a wash of sound in the upper register, whose sonorous quality greatly resembles the sound-world of the Waldstein’s rondo. (The Erard for which Beethoven composed Opus 53 resembled the English keyboards for which Clementi wrote his Opus 34 sonatas.) Moreover, both rondos feature a distinctly Hungarian B section, and a lengthy, mysterious retransition to their A section’s final statement.
Beethoven likely knew of this precedent: he held Clementi’s keyboard music in high regard, and owned many of his works. While acknowledging Beethoven’s more expansive conception (his vast 141-measure coda has no equivalent in Clementi’s rondo), internal evidence suggests that Clementi’s work served as a model for the Waldstein rondo, which Beethoven composed as a respectful homage.

Il mercato dei quadri a Roma nel diciottesimo secolo: la domanda, l'offerta e la circolazione delle opera in un grande centro artistico europeo. By Paolo Coen. Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore. 2010. 2 vols. 876 p. 32 col. plates. €80 (hb). ISBN 978-88-222-5895-9.

MY title is a metaphor which is useful so long as it is not overworked. It is obviously so loose an expression that it cannot be misunderstood. Ruskin has somewhere pointed out that accurate writers are much more often misunderstood than those whose inaccuracy coincides with the inaccuracy of the average reader. Far be it from me to insult my audience by suggesting that any such mythical person is present among us. I only wish to make sure that we shall all mean the same thing when we talk of the main stream of music; though you may find food for thought in the fish which I propose to catch in those waters. But you will be disappointed if you expect me to mention other than the most hackneyed musical subjects. The main stream of music is what we all think we know. The metaphor is obviously useless if it is extended to speculations as to the source of the stream. The source of a river is usually supposed to be that spring which lies farthest from the mouth; but many tributaries must have been united before the waters were worth calling a main stream, and the title is not earned until, as a pious teleologist once preached, it has pleased Providence to bring large rivers into contact with important towns. We need not trouble ourselves about origins, nor about branches of art which are too remote for any but specialists to understand. The Siamese have, I am told, two principal musical scales, so constructed that, if one note is identified with a note in the scales of our classical music, none of the others can be placed in our scheme. There are musicians in Europe and America who tell us that we have no right to talk of the main stream of music until we have incorporated the Siamese and hundreds of other oriental scales into our own system. Ostensibly this attitude represents breadth of mind. Practically, it is quite compatible with views about our own music which are almost absurd enough and narrow enough to deserve the status of fashions. The exquisite urbanity of the oriental musician usually conceals his contempt for our claims to understand his art. There is, doubtless, a main stream of Siamese music for the Siamese. My present purpose is to sum up the important facts about the main stream of music as I understand it in other words, as I think 1 The Annual Lecture on Aspects of Art (Henrictte Hertz Trust) of the British Academy, read 29 June 1938.

Francesca Lui, Roma antica e moderna nelle vedute di Jean Barbault (1761, 1763), in Architetti e Ingegneri a confronto, II. L'immagine di Roma fra Clemente XIII e Pio VII, a cura di Elisa Debenedetti, Roma, Bonsignori, 2007 ("Studi sul Settecento Romano", 23), pp. 95-112.

There are works attributed to G. P. Panini derived from Piranesi's The Campidoglio from the side, which prompts an investigation of how Panini in fact represented the Campidoglio compared to Piranesi. It looks at the sightlines they employed. Whereas Piranesi privileged the Trofei di Mario,  Panini wrestled with the relationship between the statues of Castor and Pollux and the buildings behind depending on the purpose of the image.

The Roman noble residences, as the celebrated Galleria Colonna under construction in the early eighteenth century, become for the Buonaccorsi family, as attested by archival sources, an unavoidable point of reference in the ambition to retrace the antique taste and splendor, in the perspective of a social and worldly reflection, as well as cultural. In order to under stand and motivate the double aspect of this emulation, we will make use of the Pietro Rossini’s Mercurio Errante essay, in his re-edition, the third, of the 1715 and the Roman itinerary of the young englishman Thomas Coke, whom was in Rome from 1714 to 1717. With the exception of the significant cultural differences that exist between an english protestant lord and a nobleman of a province of the Papal States, it will be attempted to highlight the kind and the diffusion of the Roman cultural and artistic model of the early eighteenth century, as it emerges from a well known and widespread guide of Rome, from the experience in the Urbe of a traveler at the beginning of the Grand Tour experience and, finally, from the fitting out of an fashionable apartment on the borders of the Papal State.

In the 1660s in France, we found the generalization of learning methods of a single instrument and not a set of instruments, as was commonly the case before. This tendency is particularly clear with the methods for viols and more precisely with, in 1687, Le Traité de la Viole of Jean Rousseau and L’Art de toucher le dessus et la basse de viole of Danoville. Other methods followed and that of Brijon in 1766 on the pardessus viol, comes to close a series of old methods of viola da gamba. During the 20th century, new methods for viola da gamba appear, some of which are based on older ones.
As part of this presentation, we will conduct a comparative analysis of old and new methods for viola da gamba. Do contemporary gamba-composers / teachers reproduce the rules for learning and interpreting old methods? Do they propose new rules and explanations, based on old methods, to facilitate the learning and practice of the instrument by contemporary performers? What is the place of the spirit of the works of the seventeenth century within the new learning strategies and interpretation techniques? We will try to assess the fortune of the ancient heritage of the teaching of the viol, between restitution patrimonial of the old music and the introduction of modern teaching methods.
For this purpose we will firstly compare them to The Division Viol of Christopher Simpson and we will try to pinpoint any similarities and whether or not has been influenced to them.