Program Notes

Torquato Tasso (1544 – 1595) was probably the most famous and influential Italian poet of his time. His epic poem Gerusalemme liberata, an imaginative retelling of events during the First Crusade, inspired other poets, painters, and musicians in his time and after, as did his lyric poetry.  In fact, just about every European composer of the late 16th and early 17th centuries set at least some Tasso. Most early settings of his poetry are polyphonic madrigals for four, five, or six singers. However, there are quite a few settings for one or more voices and basso continuo, in the stile moderno which gradually replaced the polyphonic madrigal starting in the late 16th century.

Torquato was born in Sorrento. His father, Bernardo Tasso was a nobleman and courtier from Bergamo, and a poet himself. When in 1557 Bernardo accepted a position at the court of Urbino Torquato he became friends with the Duke’s heir.  Not unusually for a 16th-century Italian court, the court of Urbino patronized many poets and scholars, so Torquato grew up in a rich environment of poetry and literature. Bernardo did not initially wish his son to follow in his footsteps, and so he sent Torquato to study law at the University of Padua where, however, he continued to concentrate on poetry. By 1562 he had composed an epic poem, Rinaldo, which cemented Torquato’s reputation as a very promising poet. During this time Tasso frequently visited the court of Ferrara, and from 1565 he lived there under the protection of the princesses Lucrezia and Eleonora d’Este. The first two books of his lyric love poems were addressed to famous singers of the Duke’s Concerto della donne, first Lucrezia Bendidio and then Laura Peverara, both of whom  Tasso seemed to have courted.

Tasso’s magnum opus Gerusalleme liberata was completed in 1574, and although he meant to emulate Virgil’s epic style and did so for the main theme, the many romantic episodes are the parts that have proven more popular with composers. The central theme is that of Goffredo (Godfrey), the leader of the First Crusade, and the capture of Jerusalem. But more captivating for most people were the stories of the knights Ruggiero, Rinaldo, Tancredi, and the beautiful witch Armida, the female warrior Clorinda, the chivalrous Saracens they both love and fight. In fact, the sensitive stories of Armida and the other ravishing heroines were perfectly in harmony with the affective revolution occurring in music during the period we call the Baroque. The new texture of a florid melody based on expressive declamation of the lyrics, supported by chords on a bass line, suits Tasso’s poetry wonderfully. Our two early Tasso settings, by Giovanni Stefani (d. 1626) and the more famous madrigalist Sigismondo d’India (c.1582 – 1629) bear this out.

Torquato Tasso’s personal story after his time in Ferrara is a sad one, involving disputes with other poets and his noble patrons and mental illness resulting in years of imprisonment at the Mantuan madhouse of Santa Anna. After his release at the hands of the Prince of Mantua, Vincenzo Gonzaga, he became increasingly frail and continued to be unstable, though he traveled between Florence, Rome, Mantua and Naples. In 1594 Pope Clement VIII and his nephew Cardinal Aldobrandini invited him to receive the crown of laurels, the same honor granted to Petrarch, on the Capitol. Before he could be crowned poet laureate and receive a desperately needed pension, he went to the Roman convent of Sant’Onofrio and announced to the prior that he had come there to die.  He did so, in April of 1595 at the age of 51.

The violin acquired its modern form in the hands of northern Italian makers like Andrea Amati (c.1520 – 1578). Since the 16th century the instrument has evolved somewhat with a longer neck, introduced in the 19th century, steel strings and shoulder rests in the 20th, and important changes in bows.  However, Amati and his contemporaries got the design right in the first place. Sixteenth-century instrumental music is for the most part not specific to a particular instrument, and the violin family was used primarily by professional players for dance music, although fiddles start appearing in courts and large ecclesiastical musical ensembles like the one at San Marco in Venice.  Interestingly, there the violin begins taking pride of place over wind instruments right about the beginning of the 17th century.  This is also the time when instrument-specific virtuoso music begins to appear in quantity, not just for the violin, but the keyboard, lutes, and viola da gamba.

The violinist Biagio Marini (1594 –1663) was from Brescia, although he traveled widely in the course of his career.  He was employed at St. Marco in Venice from 1615 to 1620, so worked under Monteverdi for a time.  Marini wrote a good bit of vocal music, and later in his career focused on the larger concertato forms combining instruments and voices. But it is as a composer of violin music that he is best known. Marini’s sonatas are always musically interesting and he contributed substantially to the development of violin technique.

Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583-1643) was a native of Ferrara and studied with the influential madrigalist Luzzaschi, though he was not, apparently, a well-rounded or well-educated person. A contemporary theorist said that he “was a very coarse man” and that “all his knowledge is at the ends of his fingertips.”  Be that as it may, his playing was highly prized, and his arias and instrumental works can be as dramatic and engaging as any of the time. He is probably the first great composer to focus mostly on instrumental music; the canzona performed here is a forward-looking work, overtly dramatic and harmonically progressive.

Barbara Strozzi (1619-1664?) was a Venetian singer and composer, known as the “virtuosissima cantatrice,” or most virtuoistic singer, of her city.  Strozzi was the “adopted” daughter of the librettist Giulio Strozzi. She was probably his natural daughter, legitimized in Giulio’s will in 1628. Barbara Strozzi grew up in Venice, where public opera originated, and she studied composition with Monteverdi’s pupil Francesco Cavalli, but did not herself perform or compose opera.  Instead, she sang primarily at her father’s house for the academy he founded, and made her public career in a new way for a woman—as a published composer. Between 1644 and 1664 she published at least seven volumes of vocal music, almost all for solo soprano voice and continuo. We can say at least seven, because Opus numbers 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, and 8 were published and survive, while Opus 4 is a bit of a mystery (we do not have a copy; it may have only existed in manuscript). In any event, with seven or more volumes of her works, Strozzi was more prolific than many more famous published composers of secular song, including Giacomo Carissimi, Luigi Rossi, and Marc’ Antonio Cesti. Her compositions range from simple strophic songs to extended laments and cantatas. Not unexpectedly, she was expert at writing for the voice, and her arias and cantatas demonstrate a fine sensitivity to the meaning of her texts and can be harmonically daring.  She was a major figure in the development of the cantata.

Giuseppe Tartini (1692 – 1770) was a virtuoso violinist, composer, theorist and pedagogue who stands out as a unique individual even in an era rich in violinists with interesting lives and talents. His Florentine father was a peasant, the manager of salt mills in Pirano. Giuseppe’s parents wished him to be a priest (his early studies included some musical instruction), but in 1708 he entered the university in Padua to study law. According to his fellows he primarily worked on improving his fencing, a sport at which he excelled. In 1710, against his parents’ wishes, he married a girl of lower social rank and went to the convent of San Francesco in Assisi expressly to study violin. From this point on his life was focused on music — performing, teaching and theoretical writing. In 1726 he returned to Padua and remained there for the rest of his life, and founded his famous violin school, “the school of nations,” so called because he accepted students from all over Europe. His compositions are almost all solo violin concertos and sonatas, like our example this evening. His debt to Corelli is clear, and in fact in the one engraved likeness of Tartini we have, under the pedestal of his bust there is a piece of music with Corelli’s name on it. A striking feature of his music is his fondness for folk and folk-like melodies. In one of his sonatas, for instance, he uses the “Aria del Tasso,” a melody used by Venetian gondoliers to sing stanzas of Gerusalemme liberata. In our chosen sonata, Didone abbanonata, there is no real program, but the affect alternates between Queen Dido’s grief and her anger at Aeneas. Tartini was always strongly inclined toward mysticism, and behind his theoretical and compositional ideas was a desire to reveal to humanity the principles of God’s universe.

Marin Marais (1656-1728), because of the popular film Tout les Matins du Monde (1992), enjoyed a belated measure of fame around the turn of this century, although connoisseurs of the viol and French baroque music in general have always recognized the quality and expressivity of his work. In the film, Marais (played by Gerard Depardieu) studies with the mysterious Monsieur de St. Colombe (he is no longer as mysterious as he was when the film was made, due to recent research), becoming romantically involved with the older composer’s daughter. Much is made of the isolated purity of St. Colombe’s existence contrasted with Marais’s life of worldy opulence at court. It is not until Marais is an older man (again, in the film) that he is able to satisfy his stern teacher’s insistence on music as an expression of the human condition, and not as a mere decoration of court life. In terms of actual history, all of this is, of course, a fabrication. Marais did study with St. Colombe, and there is a charming anecdote relating Marais’s habit of sneaking under St. Colombe’s garden tree house to hear his teacher practice the latest ornaments (this anecdote, with some cinematic embellishment, is represented in the film). After about six months of study, St. Colombe is reported to have found he had nothing more to teach his talented pupil. At any rate, Marais did have a long and successful career at court, being appointed “musician ordinaire de la chambre du roy” at the age of 23. Marais was reputed to play with an “airy” style, “like an angel,” and with “fire.” At a time when virtuosos mostly played their own music, it is fortunate that we have enough of Marais’s music to know that he must have been a formidable performer indeed. His five books of pieces for viol represent the pinnacle of the repertoire for the seven-stringed French viole, and the prefaces to them constitute a short course in fingering, ornamentation, bowing, and continuo realization. His pieces range from gracefully simple little dances to dazzlingly difficult extended movements. The Sonnerie de Ste Genevieve du Mont de Paris, published in 1723, adds violin to the texture of viol and continuo that is primarily found in his published music. The incessant repetition of the three notes representing the bells of Ste Genevieve in the bass supports a dazzling series of variations for the viol and violin.

It is a frequently remarked irony that the person we consider to be the founder of French baroque style was a Florentine. Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632 – 1687) was the son of a Tuscan peasant who, with relatives, owned a chestnut grove. Giovanni Battista, according to an early biographer, first learned music from “a good Franciscan friar.” We do not know how, but in 1646 he was chosen to become the Italian tutor to Louis XIV’s cousin Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orléans, and so he moved to Paris. Thanks to his employer, Lully was able to complete his musical and balletic education with French masters and entered the service of Louis XIV himself in 1651. Due to his personality, ambition, and musical and political skills he rapidly rose to a high position at court. When Louis XIV began his personal and absolute rule in 1661, one of his first acts was to grant Lully the title of Surintendant de la musique de la chambre du roi. This office, which included his direction of the King’s famous string ensemble, the 24 Violins, along with his numerous theatrical projects (including collaborations with Molière) and ecclesiastical connections, made Lully the absolute czar of music under the Sun King, who was absolute czar of everything else in France.

French musical theater was quite different from Italian opera. What was first called the Opéra in Paris, founded to present visiting Italian operas, became the Academie Royale de Musique. Lully’s first tragédie en musique, as these pieces were called, was presented there in 1673; Louis XIV came to see it in person. Armide, with a libretto based on the characters of Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, was produced in 1686, and is probably Lully’s best-known tragédie in musique. In Act II, Scene 5, Armide (in Tasso, Armida) stands over the sleeping Renaud (Rinaldo) with a dagger, intending to kill this “proud conqueror.” She cannot, because she realizes she loves him; the sorceress obligingly summons demons to fly the two away. Around this time, Louis, much influenced by Mme de Maintenon’s dislike of theater and her preoccupation with morality and religion, became aware of Lully’s seduction of a page named Brunet, so Armide was never performed in the King’s presence.

George Frideric Handel was undoubtedly among the greatest composers of the Baroque and has always been recognized as such. Unlike Bach and other illustrious contemporaries, Handel’s reputation (at least in English-speaking countries) never experienced a long decline and subsequent revival. This fact is certainly due to the unbroken tradition of performances of his oratorios, especially Messiah. It is notable, however, that Handel only turned to composing oratorios when, on account of shifting English tastes, he could no longer viably produce Italian opera in London.

Handel had been born in Halle, Germany, in 1685, and died in London in 1759. He received excellent early training in the German musical tradition, and then from 1706 to 1710 lived in Italy, where he met and worked with most of the great Italian musicians, including Corelli, Vivaldi, and the Scarlattis. In Italy, he polished his gifts and incorporated the wonderful melodic freedom and inventiveness that was to enrich all of his subsequent composition.

It was not long before Handel made his first visit to London, the city that was to become his permanent home. He was commissioned to write an Italian opera for the Queen’s Theatre in the Haymarket. The manager of the theatre, Aaron Hill, hired an Italian company for the 1710 – 1711 season, and prepared the scenario himself. In addition to choosing Handel to compose the opera, Hill hired the Italian poet Giacomo Rossi to write the libretto. Hill chose Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata as the subject and called the opera Rinaldo after Tasso’s principal protagonist. The two arias we have chosen from this, the first Italian opera composed for the London stage, are sung by Almirena, the daughter of Goffredo, the leader of the First Crusade. Almirena is betrothed to Rinaldo, and Goffredo promises the two that they will be married after the conquest of Jerusalem. We present these arias out of their original order in the opera. In Act I, Almirena sings Combatti da forte encouraging Rinaldo to fight well and promises “everlasting contentment” for him after the battle is won. However, things don’t go so well initially for the couple. Almirena is imprisoned by the Saracen sorceress and warrior Armida in her enchanted garden. In Act II Almirena sings perhaps Handel’s most famous and lovely opera aria, Lascia ch’io pianga, lamenting her fate and yearning for her liberty. In the end, Jerusalem is conquered, Armida converts to Christianity, and the lovers are reunited. Rinaldo is composed primarily of recycled music from the composer’s time in Italy, a practice he followed throughout his career (there is plenty of recycled material in Messiah as well). Handel’s work has remained incredibly but understandably popular, and it seems pointless to dispute the judgment of those who subscribe to Benjamin Victor’s 1752 declaration that he would “ride forty miles in the wind and rain to be present at a performance of the Messiah in London.”