Johann Adolph Hasse

É risaputo che il prezzo elevato della pergamena e le difficoltà nel reperirla vanno annoverati fra i motivi scatenanti del riciclo di manoscritti. Tuttavia, chi lavora con i palinsesti è solito avere a che fare con manoscritti i cui fogli e bifogli furono riutilizzati in quanto tali, tutt’al più cambiandone l’orientamento originale. Fra quelli oggi conservati presso il Monastero di Santa Caterina (Sinai) si osserva però un’ulteriore strategia di recupero: alcuni di essi furono allestiti ritagliando e cucendo assieme pezzi di pergamena provenienti da fogli di manoscritti diversi, risultando dei veri e propri “patchwork”.
Dopo una panoramica sui manoscritti di questo tipo identificati sul Sinai, la relazione verterà su uno specifico caso di studio, il manoscritto Sin. ar. NF 8. Si tratta di un codice arabo (scriptio superior: Vangeli, seconda metà del IX secolo) che fu preparato riutilizzando fogli e ritagli provenienti da manoscritti greci, arabi, siriaci e latini, a volte perfino bis rescripti. In essi è stato possibile identificare 31 testi diversi, provenienti da almeno 20 libri. Come descrivere tale complessità? Nell’intervento verranno illustrate le modalità utilizzate per studiare questo inusuale manoscritto. Verranno inoltre proposte alcune osservazioni su tecniche e finalità della palinsestazione.

Comprehensive essay about the opera Li prodigi della divina grazia nella conversione e morte di San Guglielmo, duca d'Aquitania by Pergolesi (1731), published as programme notes for the recording by Ensemble Alraune. Analysis of the musical sources (including the Introduzzione), analisys of the libretto (sources and political significance), analysis of the musical dramaturgy.

A catedral de Lisboa é a mais antiga igreja da cidade e um monumento histórico e artístico de relevo. A vontade de engrandecimento, a vanguarda artística e o efeito de terramotos estiveram
na origem de sucessivas campanhas de obras, as quais lhe foram acrescentando e modificando elementos. O século XX foi responsável por diferentes interpretações da sua suposta imagem medieval, materializadas em diferentes projetos de restauro. O monumento que hoje se admira é o resultado dessa intensa atividade, cujo estudo detalhado se apresenta.

Nel 1727, in un palazzo nobiliare di Napoli, fu eseguita per la prima volta l’Enea in Caonia, dramma per musica di Johann Adolf Hasse. Il testo letterario era stato approntato da Luigi Maria Stampiglia e dipendeva strettamente dal racconto dell’Eneide  di Virgilio della sosta degli esuli troiani in Epiro, a Butrinto, mentre erano diretti verso occidente. I versi di Virgilio ambientano esplicitamente l’avvenimento a Butrinto, ma il libretto posto in musica da Hasse non ne fa menzione alcuna, limitandosi ad accennare a un “paesaggio troiano” caratteristico di tutte le città legate al mito del viaggio di Enea verso l’Italia. Questa omissione fa credere che la città dell’Epiro non fosse ben conosciuta nel Settecento, contrariamente a quanto avveniva per altre città antiche che furono teatro dell’opera seria di quel secolo. Al di là della stretta dipendenza del libretto dal testo dell’Eneide, non troviamo alcun riscontro con quanto conosciamo delle fasi più antiche di Butrinto, a conferma della quasi totale dimenticanza della città anche fra i ceti colti del tempo. Le ricerche archeologiche che hanno interessato la città nell’arco ormai di un secolo hanno rivelato tracce importanti di una fase arcaica (soprattutto VII-VI sec. a.C.), senza rivelare documenti  concreti di rapporti con la cultura e il mondo miceneo. Non mancano tuttavia alcune testimonianze  relative al periodo veneziano di dominazione di quella parte dei Balcani, che attestano per il XVIII secolo conoscenza e interesse per la realtà archeologica della città, che poi sarà scavata nel XIX secolo a partire dalle ricerche di Luigi Maria Ugolini (1928-1936).

Federico Cristiano Torelli, born in Dresden in 1743, was the grandnephew of the baroque master Giuseppe Torelli and a major composer of the late Bolognese school whose career developed between Dresden, Bologna and Saint Petersburg. The present paper is the first attempt at a biography of this hitherto almost unknown composer, inspired by his highly original version of Metastasio's Passione, performed at Bologna in 1786 and 1787 with extraordinary success. The autograph score of La Passione, preserved at the Biblioteca Internazionale della Musica, was digitalized for this paper and proves the originality, expressivity and peculiar stylistic position of a composer between three nations.

The other papers were a smorgasbord that included English and French luxury goods at London pleasure gardens that were produced by slave labour in the West Indies (Ashley Greathouse, University of Cincinnati), the unpublished music treatise of the musician-turned-astronomer William Herschel (Sarah Waltz, University of the Pacific), early London musical-miscellany publications that presented excerpts from Handel's operas in new and surprising ways (Alison DeSimone, University of Missouri–Kansas City) and my own paper concerning a satire on French provincial orchestras (Beverly Wilcox, California State University Sacramento). Faith Lanam (University of California Santa Cruz) gave an update on her latest research on the Vezerro de lecciones manuscript, a collection of solfeggi by Feo, Leo and Ignacio Jerusalem that was used to train lower-status girls to enter high-status Mexico City convents as choir nuns. [...]Louise K. Stein (University of Michigan) presented new documentation about the first opera productions in the Americas, La púrpura de la rosa (Lima, 1701), Celos aun del aire matan (Mexico, 1728), El Zeleuco (Mexico, 1710) and La Partenope (Mexico, undated), explaining how they travelled via Spanish diplomatic networks from Naples and Madrid to the colonies and observed a number of typically Spanish performance conventions. Most used the Zoom desktop client, but a few relied on mobile phones, and about half left their cameras off during the talks, so that the audience conserved bandwidth while still giving speakers the sort of visual feedback that a live audience normally provides.

Naj Hölderlinovemu pesništvu pripisujemo še tako tehtne glasbene kvalitete, kljub temu ni bil preferenčen pesnik romantičnega samospeva. Že njegovi sodobni skladatelji, kot npr. Ludwig van Beethoven, ga niso upoštevali. Izjemo predstavlja Robert Schumann, ki ga je Hölderlin že v njegovi mladosti popolnoma očaral.

A consideration of Gibbon and early medieval history in the context of eighteenth-century European knowledge of the period might be thought to be worth no more than a passing observation in proportion to the amount of attention Gibbon himself accorded it. Gibbon discusses western medieval Europe in chapter 49 of his history; it occupies sixty-six pages and embraces 600 years of western European history from the eighth to the fourteenth century from a relatively limited perspective. Instead, one might simply wish to refer to the fuller and more authoritative accounts in the wealth of early French, German and Italian scholarship on the period, of which Gibbon himself gives only some inkling, were it not for the enormous influence Gibbon has enjoyed in England, especially since the later nineteenth century. The Decline and fall, for example, was recommended at Oxford in 1884 as a text for European history 1272-1519. The old Cambridge Medieval History, designed by Bury, editor of Gibbon, and old-fashioned, especially volumes 11 and in, even as it appeared, was manifestly within the Gibbonian political narrative tradition and conceptual framework, with its preoccupation with empire and adoption of similar chronological and thematic emphases. 1 Gibbon's assessment of the emergent barbarian successor states in the context of decline had an unfortunate effect on English scholarship on the European early Middle Ages, with the honourable exceptions of Edward Freeman

This paper demonstrates the change in position of the use of the counterpoint schema, entitled Romanesca, throughout the 18th century. The way of its use goes from a thematic opening procedure to different positions in the structure of the instrumental and vocal repertoire. Apparently, its recurrence, especially in the latter case, suggests musical topic implications that gradually removed the strong connotation of a musical opening formula, belonging to the 18th century repertoire, the so-called Galant Style, as presented and explained by Robert Gjerdingen. The paper focuses on the verification of this variability of use and suggests that in the process of maturation of its use, Romanesca may have been an expedient of syntactic construction with direction to different meanings, according to the creative project in which it was inserted.

The article aims at assessing the differences between Hasse's original setting of Metastasio's Siroe in 1733 and the composer's second setting of the same drama, exactly thirty years later, in terms of dramatic, vocal, and musical balance. The two versions will be comprehensively compared with a focus on two main issues. The first is the origin of the two settings, which goes back to two distinct versions of the libretto, originally conceived by Metastasio for Venice and Naples respectively; a different starting point which gave birth to two, largely separate dramatic projects, differentiated by a number of distinctive facets. On the other hand, special attention will be devoted to the play's characters, which, though basically the same in both settings, demonstrate remarkable differences in individual characterisation and overall balance, both as far as drama and music are concerned.

At present, the theory of musical form is still dominated by the notion that elements of sonata form in composition began to penetrate into vocal genres or, more specifically, into the opera aria only by the end of the 18th century, when they had already been fully established in instrumental music. In the latest studies devoted to sonata forms, both in Russia and in other countries, there is no mention of the emergence or manifestation of the principles of sonata in opera and vocal music. Nevertheless, in Italian aria (both in serious and comic opera) the principles of sonata form have been forming intensively since the end of the 1720s, i.e., long before these processes were noted in instrumental music. The article analyzes the composition in a number of arias from serious and comic operas by Leonardo Vinci, Johann Adolph Hasse, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi and Gaetano Latilla. In these arias, the sonata principles are reflected in the compositional, thematic and tonal-harmonic planes. All arias are variants of the early two-part (binary) sonata form enclosed by the outer sections of the da capo. The conclusions are as follows: 1) sonata form in arias is based on interaction with the strophic arrangement of the poetic texts containing figurative contrast; 2) sonata form was established in stages, from a distinctly structured exposition (without clear signs of sonata in the second section of the form) to a full binary sonata form with thematic repetition and tonal subordination in the reprise, the priority role in this process played by comic opera. The article contains musical examples and tables.

It would be difficult to think of a more remarkable father-and-son relationship in Western music history than that of Alessandro and Domenico Scarlatti. The complex and precarious psychology of this relationship has been discussed with brilliant insight by Roberto Pagano in his book Alessandro and Domenico Scarlatti: Two Lives in One 1. In musical terms the unique aspect is that both father and son must be rated as of equal genius and originality. The creative impact of each of them is individual, highly intellectual, and above all communicative. The music of Domenico is of course much better known today than his father's-a reversal of the situation in their lifetimes, reflecting the different survival paths of the genres to which each devoted his creative energies.

Fur Silke Leopold zum 70. Geburtstag vorgelegt von den Mitarbeitern der Forschungsstelle »Geschichte der Sudwestdeutschen Hofmusik« der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften. »Oper – Sudwest« beleuchtet Aspekte des Musiktheaters vor allem an den sudwestdeutschen Hofen des 18. Jahrhunderts. So werden neue Moglichkeiten zur Rekonstruktion des Opernrepertoires in Rastatt, Baron Sigismund von Rumlings Musiktheater fur Zweibrucken und die besondere Finalgestaltung von Niccolo Jommellis Didone abbandonata am wurttembergischen Hof, aber auch der Kompositionsprozess von Johann Adolph Hasses Dresdner Opern thematisiert. Daneben widmen sich drei Beitrage Franz Danzi und dessen Auseinandersetzung mit Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Mo b i l i t a z i o n e p o l i t i c o-e c o n o mi c a u r b a n a e p r o g e t t o i mp e r i a l e f a s c i s t a : i l c a s o n a p o l e t a n o d i s c u s s a n t : Lu i g i Mu s e l l a Un i v e r s i t à d i Na p o l i F e d e r i c o I I 1. Da r i o S a l v a t o r e Un i v e r s i t à d i S a l e r n o I l n e mi c o n e l l e t e s t i mo n i a n z e d e i s o l d a t i i t a l i a n i s u l f r o n t e i t a l o-a u s t r i a c o (1 9 1 5-1 9 1 8) d i s c u s s a n t : Ma r c o Mo n d i n i Un i v e r s i t à d i P a d o v a Mo d e r a I l a r i a P a v a n

Musicology is a small discipline within the wide spectrum of human knowledge, yet it is already divided into various branches, each with its own societies, conferences, journals, jargons, degrees, prejudices, …, and jobs. Although they share their object of investigation-"the art of music as a physical, psychological, aesthetic, and cultural phenomenon" [4, p. 153]-, these branches very often ignore one another. Research in musicology is mostly a solitary task, as investigations, papers, and publications are commonly signed by single authors, in contrast with STEM disciplines where teamwork is the rule. This is in part the result of tradition-the "Musicological Toolbox" [22]-but also the aftermath of the job market and financing programs. Large funding schemes such as the European Research Council (ERC) grants are becoming a major disruptive factor in many disciplines in the humanities, including musicology. Scholars in all fields now have the opportunity to build research teams, and most of their members receive their salaries to exclusively work on the project. In other words, we are starting to build what could be called a Musicology Lab, learning along the way how teamwork is reshaping and transforming the Musicological Toolbox, the look and feel of our discipline, the way we work as well as the way we publish and disseminate our results. This paper presents some of the key features of the ERC Didone project, one of its principal tasks being to create a digitally encoded corpus of some 3,000 arias in MusicXML format from about 180 musical settings of a small number of opera librettos by Pietro Metastasio. It focuses on some of the project's research tasks, emphasizing how the skills of a team of eighteen scholars with very different expertise-historical musicology, music theory and analysis, cultural history, librettology, archival research, music performance, music engraving, MIR, computer science, and statistical modeling-combine to explore the potential answer(s) to the main research question of the project: How are emotions expressed through music?