The twenty-two articles selected by Michael Talbot for this volume form a representative selection of the best writing on Vivaldi from the last 30 years, featuring such major figures in Vivaldi research as Reinhard Strohm, Paul Everett, Gastone Vio and Federico Maria Sardelli. Celebrating its 100th anniversary, this extraordinary series continues to amaze and captivate its readers with detailed insight into the lives and work of music's geniuses. Unlike other composer biographies that focus narrowly on the music, this series explores the personal history of each composer and the social context surrounding the music. MICHAEL TALBOT is Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of Liverpool and a Fellow of the British Academy. He is known internationally for his studies of late-baroque Italian music, which.
‘Fuguist’, as Michael Talbot observes towards the end of his latest monograph, is not a word in common usage in modern English, for all its usefulness in encapsulating ‘the particular compositional qualities relevant to writing fugues, and only fugues’ (p. 227). The resurrection of this term as a description of Vivaldi, a composer whose name conjures up for most the sound-world of thrilling orchestral unisons and virtuosic solos with minimal, chordal accompaniment, may thus seem almost deliberately contrary. As Talbot reminds us in his preface, however, the main stylistic importance of a given composer when viewed in retrospect may often obscure equally important aspects of his or her musical identity that have ultimately proved less enduring. Such a facet is fugue in the music of Vivaldi, Talbot argues, at the outset of what amounts to a rehabilitation of the composer as a ‘fuguist’ of the calibre of his predecessors Legrenzi and Colonna, and perhaps even of Bach and Handel, Haydn and Mozart.
Few people can be better qualified than Talbot to undertake a task such as this, particularly in terms of the encyclopedic knowledge of the music of Vivaldi (as well as that of his contemporaries and compatriots) required to assemble such a comprehensive set of examples and provide so detailed and perceptive a context for them. Vivaldi and Fugue adapts a template that Talbot has previously used with success in several of his other important monographs (Vivaldi; The Chamber Cantatas of Antonio Vivaldi; The Sacred Vocal Music of Antonio Vivaldi; Tomaso Albinoni: The Venetian Composer and his World): a chapter on reception is followed by two detailing the background to Vivaldi’s fugues, leading in turn to two chapters exploring the music in question and ending with a summary placing Vivaldi’s music in a wider musical and historical context.
Michael Talbot Vivaldi Art
Within this structure, the heart of the study unfolds as a kind of spiral outwards from the discussion of the musical precedents for Vivaldi’s fugues in chapter 3, via the establishment of a taxonomy and terminology capable of describing ‘The Morphology of Fugue and Fugato in Vivaldi’s Music’ (ch. 4) to the detailed survey of fugal pieces and passages in chapter 5, organized primarily by genre. The inherent risk of repetition in such a scheme is skilfully averted through the careful choice of examples at each stage, although the frequent necessity to explain the omission of detailed discussion in one place in favour of more timely examination elsewhere does interrupt the prose sufficiently often enough to border on the tiresome when reading the book cover to cover; conversely, the judicious use of such cross-references together with the two detailed and intuitive indexes will no doubt be indispensable for readers searching for more specific details. The volume is very occasionally let down by typographical errors, and there are at least two small misprints in musical examples, but the overall impression is handsome and thorough.
What, then, do we learn about Vivaldi the fuguist? One of Talbot’s most important contributions is his insistence on a broad definition of the word ‘fugue’ to encompass uses of the word not only in a formal sense, but also as a genre and, most crucially, as a technique, thereby enlarging the field of discussion to include not only movements conventionally referred to as ‘fugues’ (found in many sacred works, as well as commonly in ripieno concertos and in the second movements of both ‘sepolcro’ works, RV 130 and 169), but also those works in ritornello form that adopt fugal procedures (found most notably in violin concertos and ensemble concertos) or use fugue in either an introduction or a closing passage. Even some binary-form movements and other less obviously fugal pieces that nevertheless begin with imitative incipits are included; Talbot coins the useful term ‘pendulum exposition’ to describe the hypermetrically regular oscillation between tonic and dominant common to such works as the Allemanda from the Trio Sonata in A, RV 75/3 and the opening movement of the Ripieno Concerto in D minor, RV 128/3, which begin with imitative expositions.
The result is a collection of some eighty fugal movements and passages, from among which Talbot selects generously in order to demonstrate Vivaldi’s facility as a fuguist as well as the relevance of fugal terminology to the discussion of works that would not traditionally have been considered ‘fugues’, such as the ritornello form opening movement of the violin concerto in C major, RV 182 (discussed on pp. 175–8). As Talbot shows, ritornello form movements such as this use fugal principles but are nevertheless easily distinguished from more conventional fugues in that subsequent ritornello restatements demand the wholesale transposition of the original exposition, resulting in both an extreme reduction of texture and greater tonal range (since statements of the answer in dominant ritornelli will bring about the introduction of the supertonic key).
Anyone who, like Talbot and indeed the present reviewer, has studied or taught the composition of fugues in eighteenth-century style, will quickly recognize the origins of some of the most fundamental questions Talbot asks of this corpus of fugues by Vivaldi. Put simply, they relate to the key skills that students are encouraged to acquire, that teachers and lecturers seek to nurture, and that those who continue to compose fugues (even if ‘semi-clandestine’, as Talbot reveals in his preface) endeavour to put into practice: the use of contrary motion and rhythmic complementarity to create strong counterpoint and the avoidance of certain vertical intervals in order to achieve invertibility; the derivation of secondary materials from the subject and countersubject(s) in order to increase thematic coherence; the observation of structural niceties, such as the order of subject and answer entries in the initial exposition, and the retention of the subject throughout the fugue, culminating in a final entry in the closing bars; the concern to demonstrate the contrapuntal potential of the subject by subjecting it to learned devices such as inversion, augmentation, or stretto.
In some of these respects, notably his contrapuntal facility and motivic concentration, Vivaldi passes with flying colours, yet in others his music seems to fall short: expositions frequently adopt ‘unconventional’ orders of entries; fugue subjects are dropped well before the ends of pieces, in some cases even before the music has returned to the tonic key; and finally, Vivaldi seems to show relatively little interest (though even this is more than has previously been acknowledged) in devices such as augmentation or stretto. Much of Talbot’s detailed commentary on the music is thus devoted on the one hand to the demonstration of Vivaldi’s fugal ‘strengths’, and on the other to the explanation of the apparent ‘weaknesses’: an attempt, at heart, to determine whether or not Vivaldi is a ‘great fuguist’. Sinhala english dictionary.
The methodological value of such a goal is not entirely self-explanatory, and if I had one criticism of the overall conception of Talbot’s book it would be that it does not explicitly address the question of why Vivaldi’s fugal prowess, not to mention its relationship with the later ideals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is important to listeners and scholars of his music today. For the general reader, an audience occasionally referred to in the text and obviously envisaged to some degree by Talbot, the niceties of fugal technique described in the previous two paragraphs may seem almost impossibly esoteric, while scholars of Italian instrumental music of the period today, though recognizing the issues Talbot raises, are arguably no longer likely to approach these works from the point of view of later techniques and formal models. Future generations of scholars without the benefit of (or perhaps unencumbered by?) a rigorous training in fugue as part of their formal education may even wonder what all the fuss was about in the first place, perhaps reading Talbot’s book as directly analogous to Philip Hayes’s riposte to Charles Avison, described in chapter 1: an attempt to defend Vivaldi’s style against charges of superficiality by establishing his contrapuntal skill, thereby legitimizing his canonic status.
These potential criticisms are nevertheless addressed in the content of the book, and rather surprisingly by the existence in particular of the second chapter, ‘The history of fugue’. I say surprisingly since it was this chapter, with its ‘audaciously sweeping generalization’ (p. 24) concerning the development of fugue—from the first attempts at musical notation to Shostakovich’s interest in the genre in the twentieth century—that I found least convincing on the first reading: the landmarks of this story are so obviously chosen to foreshadow those aspects of Vivaldi’s fugal writing deemed most praiseworthy that the naive reader could well come away with an impression of the book as a retelling of the whole history of music in which the perfection of fugue is the ultimate goal, and Vivaldi one of the key protagonists of its achievement. It is also in this chapter that Talbot’s research uncharacteristically lets him down, in the discussion of what he calls ‘modally alterable subjects’ (pp. 45–9). The argument that the design of subjects for use in both the major and minor mode was an innovation of the generations immediately prior to Vivaldi’s is no doubt sound, but Talbot’s dating of the first fugues to employ this technique to 1696 (p. 47; in the music of Johann Kuhnau) feels far too late for me. Apart from anything else, it is well beaten by the very fugue from Purcell’s Trio sonata in E minor, Z. 796, published in 1683, from which Talbot quotes three pages earlier, and this is only one of numerous movements from Purcell’s sonatas to use this technique.
Despite these problems, however, this chapter plays a key role in Talbot’s implicit argument in relation to the issues raised above. For the general reader, it provides an indispensable introduction to the techniques of fugal writing and the vocabulary used to describe it; this makes the rest of the book intelligible and will no doubt enhance the enjoyment of many listeners not just to Vivaldi’s music but to the whole of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century repertory. From a scholarly point of view, though some of the details will seem superficial, it is through its inclusion that Talbot is able to historicize not only Vivaldi’s fugues, but also the later fugue d’école, thereby enabling him to place Vivaldi’s fugal writing in a more appropriate context while simultaneously justifying the continuing presence of the familiar idealized conception of the fugue in his account, both as a touchstone for comparison and a corrective against the accounts given by nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers.
As Talbot acknowledges, the increased awareness of the historical specificity of the various conceptions of fugue is a feature of recent musicological writing (associated in particular with the work of Paul Walker), but this is the first book-length study of which I am aware to take this principle and apply it to a specific composer. It is above all this historicization of fugal techniques that makes possible the inclusive approach to fugue in Vivaldi’s music described above, which in turn sets Talbot’s book apart from the conventional nineteenth- and twentieth-century attitudes that impeded recognition of the composer’s fugal skill by demanding that his works live up to the values of later models such as the works of Bach or the so-called fugue d’école. By emphasizing the seventeenth-century origins of Vivaldi’s approach to fugal writing, Talbot neatly reconnects the music with the traditions from which it grew, thereby laying the groundwork for a more nuanced appreciation not only of Vivaldi’s handling of the familiar techniques of his immediate predecessors, but also of his innovations in terms of harmony and tonality, texture, form, and orchestration.
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Play ratty catty online, free. For all Talbot’s advocacy, it seems unlikely that Vivaldi will ever be known as a great ‘fuguist’. Not that Talbot fails to convince the reader of Vivaldi’s abilities; it is in fact hard to imagine that future work on Vivaldi will continue to neglect this aspect of his style, but it remains the case that the small fraction of his works in which Vivaldi exercised his fugal skills significantly undermines the significance of these pieces to the history of fugue as a whole. On the other hand, Talbot’s success in drawing attention to the composer’s contrapuntal heritage and to his ability to manipulate that style in his own music is clearly an important contribution to a body of work on the composer that has previously underestimated the importance of fugue in his music. The way is open for others to consider in more detail the reasons why, despite possessing comparable contrapuntal skill to that of his predecessors and contemporaries, Vivaldi ultimately chose to include fugal writing in fewer than a tenth of his works, and indeed what it was that seemed to draw him back to the fugue in the instances, perhaps few in number but nonetheless carefully crafted, that Talbot has described.
Michael Talbot Vivaldi