Johann Adolph Hasse

L’Ottocento napoletano, fucina di compositori, di virtuosi e di costruttori di strumenti a fiato, affonda le radici in una oscura ma laboriosa tradizione settecentesca, illustrata da oltre 130 concerti superstiti entro un arco di tempo che va da Alessandro Scarlatti alla morte di Cimarosa. L’origine di questo repertorio coincide cronologicamente con l’introduzione di nuovi strumenti, l’oboe e il flauto traverso, accanto al tradizionale flauto dritto e all’ormai obsoleto cornetto. Dall’apporto iniziale di virtuosi forestieri come Ignazio Rion e Giuseppe Besozzi — il primo stabilitosi a Napoli nel 1712, il secondo nel 1734 — trasse origine una tradizione oboistica che in epoca borbonica acquisì rinomanza europea. L’affermazione del traversiere fu più stentata: dopo una serie di apparizioni sporadiche, la cui discontinuità possiamo solo in parte imputare ad una documentazione lacunosa o reticente (la più antica testimonianza databile con sicurezza risale al 1718), lo strumento divenne d’uso comune solo nella seconda metà degli anni Venti, avviando una convivenza almeno ventennale con il flauto dritto. Il breve soggiorno napoletano di Quantz del 1725, peraltro, non sembra avere il significato storico che gli è stato attribuito dalla letteratura musicologica, né ha alcun rapporto con la composizione dei 24 Concerti di Flauto Violini Violetta, e Basso Di Diversi Autori (I-Nc, Mus. Strum. 34–39), collettivamente datati 1725 nel corso del XIX secolo, ma in gran parte risalenti agli anni 1710–1715. [...]

During the middle of the eighteenth century, one of the dominant streams of European musical culture was Metastasian opera seria. Composers including Hasse, Galuppi, Gluck, Pergolesi, and Vinci composed dozens of settings of Pietro Metastasio’s librettos, each one containing twenty or thirty arias in da capo form.

This dissertation develops a theory of the Metastasian da capo aria as a dialogic form, in the spirit of Hepokoski and Darcy’s *Elements of Sonata Theory*. It proposes a hypothetical reconstruction of the “generic contract” of the mid–eighteenth-century aria, whereby the individual musical features of the richly conventionalized form attain expressive meaning as the agents of the genre’s cultural uses. In particular, the intellectual and theatrical climate to which the Metastasian da capo aria was adapted demanded many of the musical features central to Hepokoski and Darcy’s conception of sonata form: its orientation toward predictable punctuating cadences, its “vectored trajectory” toward closure, and its rhetorical layout in a series of musical “rotations.”

The da capo aria’s features can be interpreted as a musical construction of a particularly eighteenth-century conception of subjectivity and ethical experience. Metastasio’s librettos theatricalize the moral philosophy of Descartes’ *Les passions de l’âme*, depicting characters who struggle to regulate their passions in order to act appropriately. The dissertation interprets the musical and textual parameters of the aria in this light, with emphasis on musical form and the interplay between the purely musical and the poetic text. Its chief theoretical tool for approaching musical form is the “characteristic action,” a formal “schema” or “family resemblance” that unites the character’s dramatic agency (as musically embodied in the vocal line) with a series of musical goals (rhetorically highlighted punctuating cadences). The chief of these goals is the “essential structural closure” that provides tonal closure for the entire aria, as in sonata form.

«Al canto, al ballo, all’ombre, al prato adorno». Derive pastorali del melodramma tra Sei e Settecento, in La tradizione della favola pastorale in Italia. Modelli e percorsi, a cura di A. Beniscelli, M. Chiarla e S. Morando, Bologna, ArchetipoLibri, 2013, pp. 517-537.

The passion oratorio La morte di Cristo, attributed in two German sources from the late 18 th or early 19th century to Johann Adolf Hasse, was identified in 1976 by Reinhard Strohm as a sacred pasticcio, based on opera arias by Hasse and other composers of the Neapolitan school like Francesco Feo and Leonardo Leo. A comparison with surviving libretti shows that this pasticcio score is identical with the oratorio La vittima d'amore o sia la morte di Giesù Christo salvatore nostro, attributed to Josef Umstatt and performed 1741 in Brno and 1744 in Prague. Czech musicologists found out that one aria which hadn't been identified by Strohm, is a borrowing from Antonio Caldaras Viennese oratorio Morte e sepoltura di Cristo. A Berlin score of this work, which can be linked to a performance in Brno, has the words of the aria from La vittima d'amore written under the orginal text. Umstatt, who worked in Brno at the time when these performances took place, might have been the arranger of the pasticcio and composer of the sinfonia, the recitatives and the final chorus.

Discussions of how musical genres have evoked the exotic have largely omitted the many Baroque-era serious operas that feature non-European characters. The present article studies an opera seria libretto whose plot occurs on the Indian Subcontinent — Metastasio’s Alessandro nell’Indie (1730) — and two operas (both from the year 1731) that were based on that libretto: Handel’s Poro re dell’Indie and Hasse’s Cleofide.
    Understanding how exoticism is manifest in serious Baroque opera is impossible using a narrowly stylistic approach (here called the “Exotic
Style Only” Paradigm). Much richer is a broader approach (the “All the Music in Full Context” Paradigm) that also considers sung text, staging, and cultural stereotypes. Metastasio’s libretto contains previously undiscussed references to India, its customs, and the (supposed) tendencies and behaviors of its leaders (male and female) and common people.
    Handel and Hasse enlisted various normative musical means of the day — e.g., musical devices that were considered appropriate to an angry character or to a weak-willed one — to intensify the various “foreign” characterizations in the libretto. The comic element in a scene for the two main Indian characters (Poro and Cleofide) contrasts sharply
with the dignified treatment that is consistently granted to Alexander the Great (Alessandro). And a scene involving the secondary Indian couple (Erissena and Gandarte) shows how characters supposedly living “over there” could be used to comment on European customs.
[Versions of this paper were also published in Italian and in German. Both lack the musical examples and the illustration. The Italian lacks the section on the "marriage quarrel" duet between Poro and Cleofide. The German lacks that section and another: on a comic scene between Erissena and Gandarte.

Schweizer Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft 30 (2010), pp. 117-161. – In 1675 the monastery of Einsiedeln (Switzerland) acquired by the Jesuits a residence in Bellinzona. This house used until 1852 represents a very important ‘pied-à-terre’ to Italy and especially to Milan. An exceptional cultural transfer occurs along this way with an intense circulation of musical sources. Aim of this study is, on the one hand, to investigate the modalities of circulation of music between Milan and Einsiedeln; on the other, to show how this swiss connection has influenced the selection of Italian music.

Discussions of how musical genres have evoked the exotic have largely omitted the many Baroque-era serious operas that feature non-European characters. The present article studies an opera seria libretto whose plot occurs on the Indian Subcontinent — Metastasio’s Alessandro nell’Indie (1730) — and two operas (both from the year
1731) that were based on that libretto: Handel’s Poro re dell’Indie and Hasse’s Cleofide. Understanding how exoticism is manifest in serious Baroque opera is impossible using a narrowly stylistic approach (here called the “Exotic
Style Only” Paradigm). Much richer is a broader approach (the “All the Music in Full Context” Paradigm) that also considers sung text, staging, and cultural stereotypes.
    Metastasio’s libretto contains previously undiscussed references to
India, its customs, and the (supposed) tendencies and behaviors of its leaders (male and female) and common people. Handel and Hasse enlisted various normative musical means of the day — e.g., musical devices that were considered
appropriate to an angry character or to a weak-willed one — to intensify the various “foreign” characterizations in the libretto and to contrast these with the dignified treatment that is consistently granted to Alexander the Great (Alessandro).

L’articolo  analizza  l’endecasillabo  nei  recitativi  di  Metastasio  per  approfondire  la  concezione  dell’autore in merito al rapporto tra poesia e musica nel melodramma. La premessa è che tra la scrittura del libretto e della partitura vi è sempre un orizzonte di attese che può influenzare il lavoro del librettista e del musicista. Alcune affermazioni di Metastasio mostrano che egli era pienamente  consapevole  delle  esigenze  dei  compositori.  I  dati  ottenuti  dall’analisi  del  primo  atto di sei melodrammi, inoltre, sembrano suggerire che egli prendesse atto di tali esigenze per sviluppare strategie metriche in grado di produrre una sintesi ideale tra poesia e musica e una collaborazione virtuale con i compositori.

Hasse's two versions of Sant'Elena al Calvario (the first performed in Dresden in 1746) have been subject to research by Lucian Kamienski and Michael Koch, neither of whom, however, fully considered the Viennese version (1772) within the context of the specifically Viennese oratorio tradition to which it belongs. Hasse's response to a commission from the Tonkünstler-Sozietät was similar to that described by Dittersdorf, composer of Ester, the society's next oratorio, in his memoirs: Hasse must have recomposed Sant'Elena with the knowledge not only of the large size of the forces that were to perform it, but also of the music by Florian Gassmann (in the first Tonkünstler-Sozietät oratorio, Betulia liberata) to which his would surely be compared. We, for our part, cannot fully understand and appreciate the Viennese Sant'Elena unless we know Gassmann's oratorio and the tradition to which it gave rise.

The article is based on a paper presented at the conference "Johann Adolf Hasse in seiner Zeit," Hamburg, 23–26 March 1999, and published in the conference proceedings, ed. Reinhard Wiesend (Stuttgart: Carus-Verlag, 2006), pp. 261–72.

Conflicting attributions among flute concertos by either Neapolitan or German composers are frequent: see, e.g., the cases of Gerosa (B-Bc, D-MMm, I-MTventuri) vs. Hasse (Op. 3, No. 7), Leo (A-Wn) vs. L. Chevalier (A-KA), ?Palella (S-Skma, possibly by Gerosa) vs. Hasse (Op. 3, No. 2), Pergolesi (S-Skma) vs. Hasse (lost, formerly in D-HRD), and again Pergolesi (D-B, DK-Kk; listed in the 1763 Breitkopf catalogue, p. 20) vs. Hasse (Op. 3, No. 11; also for mandolin, D-B). Perhaps because of preconception, the general tendency of scholars has been to dismiss the possibility that such works originated in Naples. Yet every case must be judged individually; and regardless of their accuracy, such attributions offer clues for an understanding of how wide the circulation of Neapolitan instrumental music was—possibly no less than that of opera and sacred music.
A remarkable example is the flute concerto that has been handed down to us (also in a version for oboe) in the names of both Hasse and Domenico de Micco. Harmony, texture, and specific formal devices strongly diverge from the very homogeneous output of over 80 flute concertos by Hasse. On the other hand, they indicate a high degree of coherence with a Neapolitan composer from the late 1730s and may be seen as highly characteristic of the works of de Micco.