Lyriarte (Rüdiger Lotter / Olga Watts)
Veracini · Geminiani: Sonatas for Piano and Violin The violinist Rüdiger Lotter, Baroque specialist and concert master of the Neue Hofkapelle München, founded the ensemble “Lyriarte” together
with the harpsichordist and international prize-winner Olga Watts. Lyriarte has meanwhile become an important part of Munich’s music life.
Correlli´s successors:
Geminiani the industrious
and Veracini the eccentric
If we examine the history of music, we can
observe that musical styles and fashions
seldom develop steadily and in a direct line.
Often there is an initial revolutionary leap
forward, opening the way for the next stage of
modification, adaptation, variation, and finally
of differentiation and refinement, before a new
revolutionary leap establishes a new style or
fashion. Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) created
the concept of monody, music which is
characterized by a melody with accompaniment.
Heinrich Schütz (1585-1672) or Jean-
Baptiste Lully (1632-1687) adapted it, adding
their own national features. Other composers
transferred to instrumental music the same
principle that Monteverdi had developed for
vocal music. This had far-reaching consequences,
as only through the principle of the
hierarchy of melody and accompaniment was
it possible to create the prerequisite and
basis for instrumental virtuosity. This was to
be subsequently employed by the musicians
who united the composer and the instrumentalist,
finding its form in sonatas for violin with
general bass – bringing examples to mind of
Arcangelo Corelli (1653-1713) in Italy, Heinrich
Ignaz Franz Biber (1644-1704) in Germany, or
Johann Heinrich Schmelzer (1623-1680) in
Austria. Above all Corelli’s sonatas became
the model for many successive composers.
In this respect Roger North, the essayist
and chronicler of English musical life, could
ascertain: „Then came over Corelly’s first
consort that cleared the ground of all other
sorts of musick wahtsoever. By degees the
rest of his consorts, and at last the conciertos
came, all of which are to the musitians like the
bread of life.“
Against this historical backdrop the violinists
and composers Francesco Geminiani
(1679-1762) and Francesco Maria Veracini
(1690-1768), both of whom belong to the generation
of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
and George Fredrick Handel (1685-1755),
must be classified in the last phase of the
sonata as characterized by Corelli, whose
principles they vary, differentiate, and refine.
Geminiani’s first concertos are apparent in
their basis on the Sonatas, op. 5, for violin and
continuo of his violin teacher Corelli; during
his stay in England he also rearranged trios
by Arcangelo Corelli into concertos. In this
sense he was surely both acquiring a style as
well as jumping aboard a model for success.
He applied the same procedure to a sonata of
George Fredrick Handel, himself a one-time
student of Corelli’s, who accompanied Geminiani
on the harpsichord in a performance for
the King of England, George I.
If we examine the sonatas for violin and
general bass by Geminiani and Veracini
against the background of Corelli’s model, we
can observe that correspond to an astonishing
degree with the characteristics of their
respective creators: according to everything
that we know about Geminiani, he must have
been a hard-working, ambitious, systematic,
and adaptable person, who – held in high
regard by his contemporaries – moved very
successfully in the international centres of
music and who spoke English and French as
well as his native Italian. These qualities also
reveal themselves in his sonatas, which take
up the principle of Corelli’s four movement
Sonata da Chiesa with its predilection for
imitative-contrapuntal methods. Geminiani
initially takes the Corelli’s prototype one step
further, only to progressively mask it with a
marked technique of ornamentation. In this
we see in his sonatas a turning to the gallant
French style, which correspond with his long
residence in Paris. Veracini, in comparison,
was entirely dissimilar and who, as related
in many contemporary accounts, falls into
the category of the eccentric and arrogant
genius, giving his two violins the names Peter
and Paul. The analogous attitudes are also
tangible in the sonatas, which are on the one
hand freer, but also follow Corelli’s model in
a much less concentrated way, on the other
hand raise the level of virtuosity and make
bold use of unusual chromatic and harmonic
passages.
A further phenomenon, which typically
accompanies the beginning or ending points
of a given musical style, are the tracts and
theoretical writings, which either present the
substantiation and the assertion of the new,
or the compilation, preservation, and defence
of the old. It is in keeping with Geminiani’s
historical stage of development, that he wrote
numerous treatises on the subject of violin
playing (“The Art of Playing the Violin”, 1731),
on the subject of general bass (“The Art of
Accompaniment”, ca. 1754), or on the subject
of musical taste (“Rules for Playing in a True
Taste”, 1748). And also Veracini, in his “Sonate
accademiche” op. 2 (1744), summarized and
perfected his style, outlining the basis of his
musical ideology in the treatise with the title
“Il Trionfo della pratica Musicale” op. 3 (1750).
Notable is also the consecutive numbering of
the theoretical and musical works with opus
numbers, which gives rise to the observation
that there was no basic difference between
theory and practice. Surely it is no coincidence
that these rather retrospective texts
come at the time of the change of style from
the baroque to the rococo and early classical
periods.
Translation: Kelvin Hawthorne