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The Orpheus of the Violin: Arcangelo Corelli's Music in Its Cultural Context
From: Columbia University
| By:
Robert Mealy |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
The name Arcangelo Corelli may be relatively unfamiliar today, but European elites at the turn of the eighteenth century would have recognized one of the great musicians of the era. Based in a Rome of popes and patrons, he was hailed as a composer and a violinist of striking skill. He was one of the chief architects of the Baroque sonata, and he inspired great composers such as Handel and Purcell.
 During this time, the violin was elevated from a relatively low-status instrument of itinerant musicians and dance bands to a gentlemanly instrument. A violin maestro, Corelli (left, in a painting by Hugh Howard, c. 1698) rose to prominence through strategic alliances with wealthy and influential patrons such as queens and cardinals, becoming a regular performer at their extravagant entertainments. Yet Corelli was a cautious publisher of his own music. He published only six volumes of music after much revision, and took more than 30 years to refine his collection of 12 concertos, which were finally published only after his death, in 1713.
On the 347th anniversary of Corelli's birthday, Robert Mealy visited Columbia University to recapture the political and cultural world of this great musician, interspersing his lively description of Corelli's life with music from the time. The musical excerpts are performed by Robert Mealy, Leah Nelson and Dongsok Shin. |
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| Corelli, Opus I, no. 5, in B-flat major; Grave and Allegro. | |
 f you were lucky enough to get invited to the Palazzo Riario in Rome around 1679, this is probably what you would have heard. There, Queen Christina of Sweden, who had recently abdicated her throne to convert to Catholicism, held her weekly accademia. |
These meetings opened with a sinfonia, followed by an address, some more music, two papers and a discussion. The music for these gatherings was provided by the Bolognese violinist Arcangelo Corelli, whom Christina had recently appointed as her musico da camera. |
In honor of Corelli's birthday, I thought we might re-enact one of these accademie today, with the topic being "that Orpheus of the violin," Arcangelo Corelli. I want to regard Corelli through the six publications--the six monuments--that created his immortality; and, through these monuments, to capture a sense of what Roman culture was like at the turn of the eighteenth century. |
We often think of Rome as being a conservative city. Venice, after all, had its carnival and its many public opera houses; by the turn of the eighteenth century, tourism was largely its chief economic engine. Roman culture was much quieter: its biggest show was the Sistine Chapel, still singing Allegri's Miserere after all these years. |
But Roman culture took its cues from the pope, and the Roman environment could be very different depending on who was on the throne of St. Peter at the time. Corelli arrived in Rome in 1675, while Clement X was permitting some spectacular staged productions. The next year, his successor, Innocent XI, promptly turned the opera house into a granary and prohibited women from appearing on the stage. In fact, women were forbidden to take singing lessons during his entire pontificate. |
Innocent's reign, which ended in 1689, was hardly austere, however. He did permit the concert performance of sacred oratorios featuring sumptuous orchestras. Roman taste favored dramatic instrumental effects, particularly in the form of the concerto grosso, in which a small trio of instrumentalists is set against an elaborate background of up to 100 string and wind players. |
It was this style that Italy exported to the rest of Europe, and it became a key element in Baroque music of the era. |
Corelli's arrival on the Roman scene: Opus I
By 1678, Corelli begins to show up in the records for these lavish celebrations. His name is often associated as part of a trio with two other players: Matteo Fornari, who was his principal second violin and lifelong companion as well as his student, and the brilliant and famous harpsichordist Bernardo Pasquini. |
These three soon became the preferred ensemble for work in the churches and oratorios of Rome, and they began to perform in private venues as well. In 1679, Corelli mentions in a letter that "I am at present composing certain sonatas which are to be performed at the First Academy of her Highness in Sweden whose service I have entered as the Musico da Camera." The works he performed there, presumably with Fornari and Pasquini, were published in 1681 as his Opus I. |
Opus I was a sensation throughout Europe. It went through more reprints than any other music until the time of Haydn, with more than 35 editions published through 1785. For an era that was usually interested only in the latest music, somehow Corelli had achieved the status of immortality with an instant classic, his first publication. |
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| Castello, opening of "Sonata Undecima," from "Sonate Concertante," Libro Primo. | |
What were the qualities that made Corelli's music so important at the time? To our ears, Corelli's language might seem very familiar, because in many ways it was the basic grammar for what became an international language of Baroque music in the eighteenth century. To put it in some context, here is a work from the previous generation: the opening of a sonata from Dario Castello, a Venetian writing in the 1620s. |
As you can hear, this is full of extravagant gestures and a kind of willful fantasy that was the hallmark of the sonata in Castello's time. A popular dictionary first published just prior to Corelli's Opus I defines the sonata as a free form; its only rule was that there were no rules for its structure. Theorists at the time discussed it as being in the stylus theatralis or the stylus phantasticus. It was entirely up to the imagination of the composer. |
The interesting thing about that dictionary (Brossard's Dictionnaire de Musique) is that when it was reprinted after Corelli's works began to appear, the definition of "sonata" changes. Now it says the sonata is a series of movements--slow, fast, slow, fast--"for examples, see the works of Arcangelo Corelli." |
Corelli established an architecture for the sonata, one that became its standard form for the early eighteenth century. It is made up of separate elegantly proportioned movements, sometimes linked with some kind of thematic continuity. Gone is the kind of wayward modality that was a mark of earlier seventeenth-century compositions. |
Instead, the sonata was now subject to the gravitational pull of tonality. For the first time, progressions like I-IV-V-I, which to us are absolutely the bread and butter of all music, come into high relief. Now, they are the real building blocks of music. Corelli is one of the very first people to exploit this power, and to create a kind of balanced architecture out of these harmonic periods. |
What Corelli did to instrumental music, you could say, is what Dryden did to English around the same time: he found it brick and he left it marble. Corelli was very conscious of classicizing his art (and his social position), and he applied an extraordinary degree of polish to these sonatas. |
Unlike most violinists before him, whose social position was roughly like that of saxophonists in the early twentieth century, Corelli was seen as a professore, a master, and his status was accordingly very high. He was also immensely well regarded as a performer, an aspect of his artistry that we can no longer capture today. Many reports at the time speak of how extraordinary he was to listen to, and how eloquent his playing was. |
Corelli's rise: Opus II
Corelli's next monument was not to appear for four more years. By this time, Queen Christina had fallen on hard times. While Clement X had provided her with generous support, Innocent XI was much less interested in this woman who was foreign, extremely smart and potentially dangerous. He revoked her sizable pension of 12,000 scudi, and the next year Corelli left her service to seek a better position. He was taken up by an even more splendid patron. |
This was Cardinal Benedetto Pamphilij, the recent heir to two great Roman fortunes. With his newfound power and money, Pamphilij enjoyed himself rather more than cardinals were supposed to do. By 1684 he had even built a new theater in the Palazzo al Corso, designed by Carlo Fontana, one of the most popular architects of the time. |
Pamphilij opened his theater with a comedy in music for which he himself had written the libretto. We don't know the music or its composer, but we do know that both Corelli and Fornari were very involved and received extremely generous sums to perform. There were a total of 12 performances of this opera, which is extraordinary for private events in that era. Around this time, we also have the first detailed account of what exactly Corelli was up to with these large forces that appear in Pamphilij's household accounts. |
The German organist Georg Muffat came to Rome in 1682 to study with Pasquini. He was amazed to hear what he described as "some extremely beautiful sonatas by Arcangelo Corelli, the Italian Orpheus on the violin, performed with the greatest precision by a large number of musicians." Muffat was so impressed that he wrote his own concertos in imitation of Corelli, which spread Corelli's work to Germany and the rest of Europe. |
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| Corelli, "Ciaconna," Opus II, no. 12. | |
Corelli also frequently played at Pamphilij's villa in Cecchignola. It is quite likely that the party music he played for these festivities was what he gathered into his Opus II (1685), which are a set of sonate da camera dedicated to the cardinal. This collection ends with a particularly wonderful ciaconna that is a fine example of his lighter style. |
Managing music: patrons and orchestras: Opus III
By 1687, Corelli and Fornari had moved into Pamphilij's palace, and the next year Corelli begins to appear on household rolls performing in and directing musical events. His next book of sonatas, Opus III, reveals how his reputation was beginning to spread. |
These were dedicated not to Pamphilij at all but to the ruler of Mantua, Francesco II d'Este. Francesco had heard Corelli play at the Palazzo al Corso in 1686. He was so impressed that he ordered his agent in Rome to get him at any cost. The agent replied that he was a great violinist but "there is so much doubt he would leave Rome because he is so highly esteemed, cherished, and very well paid here." Francesco really didn't want to take no for an answer, and Corelli had to explain as diplomatically as he could that he did owe it to Christina and Pamphilij to stick around in Rome. The best he could do was to dedicate his Opus III to Francesco. |
Francesco's brother also got to experience the Corelli phenomenon when he came to Rome to be invested as a cardinal in 1689. A grand oratorio, Santa Beatrice d'Este, was performed in his honor. The music was composed by Giovanni Lulier, with an "Introduction and Sinfonia by Signor Arcangelo Corelli," and performed by 75 instrumentalists. |
Most of Corelli's music outside his publications is lost, but his contribution to this production actually does survive. Interestingly enough, one movement of this actually reappears much later in 1713 as part of the Opus VI concerti grossi. Clearly, in this, his last Opus, Corelli used orchestral material that he was developing throughout his career in Rome. |
Managing orchestras of the Baroque
The enormous orchestra used in this oratorio production was hardly unusual at the time. Corelli's ability to manage these large-scale forces was frequently commented on at the time. Contemporaries were especially impressed with how uniform the string playing was; one witness noted how Corelli would stop the rehearsal instantly if any bow were going in the wrong direction. They also remark how vividly Corelli brought out the contrasts of forte and piano, of fast and slow, and of the small group of the concertino against the force of the ripieno orchestra. |
This display of instrumental precision was something very special. It's interesting that the development of orchestral discipline should happen simultaneously in Rome and in Paris, where Lully was effecting the same phenomenon in the opera world. In both cases, these musicians were working for regimes that were particularly interested in a massive display of state power. Think of, on the one hand, Versailles, where Lully was employed, and, on the other, Rome, where the popes and the cardinals were very concerned with making a grand display of Counter-Reformation spectacle. |
Representations of orchestras from Corelli's time reveal the orchestra as spectacle, both inside the concert theater and outside in the sumptuous settings of Baroque Rome; essentially the orchestra is the show. This is the first time this exists as a phenomenon. It may well be simply because, in Rome at the time, opera was no longer permissible, and even oratorios were suspect if they were too obviously staged. Large orchestras were a way to have a lavish musical spectacle without the dangers of secular emotion or plot. |
Ottoboni's extravaganzas: Opus IV
By 1689, Queen Christina had died, and Pamphilij became the papal legate of Bologna. This eliminated two sources of Corelli's large-scale employment. Corelli had little interest in returning to provincial Bologna, especially after becoming embroiled in an acrimonious dispute with connoisseurs there over some apparently illicit counterpoint in a movement of his Opus II. |
Luckily, a new pope was invested in 1689. This was Alexander VIII, who was very interested in the arts. Carnival began again, public theaters opened, and the opera house once again offered grand spectacles. The new pope soon made his 22-year-old grandnephew Pietro Ottoboni a vice-chancellor, one of the highest offices in the church. |
Pietro Ottoboni, who was already extremely wealthy, took over the lavish Palazzo della Cancelleria in Rome, and soon gained a reputation for extravagant entertainments. De Brosses described him a bit later in vivid terms: the Cardinal, he said, was "sans moeurs, sans credit, dibauchi, ruini, amateur des arts, grand musicien" (Without morals, without reputation, debauched, ruined, a lover of the arts, and a great musician). By April of 1690, Corelli and Fornari were listed in the cardinal's household, with Corelli getting 12 scudi a year, more than any other musician in the household except the singer Pasqualino, who got 25. |
An English diarist recorded the scene of Ottoboni's weekly festivities: |
His Eminence keeps in his pay the best musicians and performers in Rome, and amongst others the famous Arcangelo Corelli, and young Paolucci, who is reckoned the finest voice in Europe, so that every Wednesday he has an excellent concert in his Palace, and we assisted there this very day. We were there served with iced and other delicate liquors, and this is likewise the custome when the Cardinals or Roman Princes visit one another. But the greatest inconvenience in all these Concerts and Visits, is that one is pestered with Swarms of trifling little Abbés, who come thither on purpose to fill their bellies with those Liquors and carry off the Crystal Bottles, with the Napkins into the bargain. |
Corelli was to live at the Cancelleria for the rest of his life. He enjoyed a very warm relationship with Ottoboni; many accounts stress how the cardinal "treated him with distinct honor in his presence and loved him tenderly." Corelli's duties were not only to play for the cardinal's salons but also to organize the orchestras for Ottoboni's many operas and oratorios. |
By 1693, a contemporary report noted that "His Eminence Ottoboni has instituted in his palace of the Cancelleria an academy of Belle lettere and music which will take place every fifteen days in the presence of Cardinals, Ambassadors, and high nobility." The music for these academies is presumably what makes up Corelli's last collection of 12 trios, Opus IV (1694), "composte per l'Accademia dell'Eminentissimo, e Reverendissimo Signor Cardinal Ottoboni." |
The printing of music and the problem <br>with ornaments: Opus V
Corelli's most striking monument from this period is not actually this set of trios at all but a collection that appeared on January 1, 1700: his Opus V collection of solo sonatas. This lavishly engraved work may have not been able to come out previously, as Peter Allsop suggests in his wonderful new biography of Corelli, from which much of this material is drawn. Why? Simply because Roman engravers weren't up to the technical complexities of Corelli's sonatas, with their chords, arpeggiation and lavish figuration. At the time, printing was an affair of small stamps of music, and printers could not handle anything much more complicated than single lines of music. |
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| Corelli, opening of Opus V, no. 1; Grave-Allegro-Adagio. | |
I'd like to play the opening of these sonatas, as a way of talking about Corelli's perceived monumentality. In particular, here is Opus V, no. 1, played strictly according to the score. Now, this is what the notes say, but everyone who came through Rome knew that something else was going on. |
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| Corelli, opening of Opus V, no. 1; Grave-Allegro-Adagio, with ornaments. | |
Some years after this first publication, a publisher in Amsterdam, Estienne Roger, published another version of the score that, he claimed, contained Corelli's own ornamentation. It sounds rather different! In fact, we have a considerable amount of period graces for this particular collection. Opus V became the bible for eighteenth-century violinists, and movements from it survive in violin tutors and anthologies right through the nineteenth century. Part of a violinist's training was to learn how to ornament this music. |
The relation between graces and text is always a very complicated one. For some, Corelli's perceived stature as the great classicist of the sonata meant that no ornaments at all were appropriate. Roger North, the English Corelli enthusiast, complains about this edition in 1728: "Upon the bare view of the print any one would wonder how so much vermin could creep into the works of such a master... Judicious architects abominate any thing of imbroidery upon a structure that is to appear great." |
Visual arts and musical architecture: Opus V
North's architectural metaphor is particularly interesting in light of Corelli's great interest in the visual arts. Living in Ottoboni's palace, Corelli could indulge his passion for art, and when he died in 1713 he had collected more than 142 paintings. Corelli was particularly fond of Poussin, the great French painter who spent most of his adult career working in Rome. It's interesting that Corelli would think so highly of this master as to collect 22 of his paintings. I think there is a real relationship between the serene geometry that Corelli himself practiced in his music and the kind of architecture and organization of space that Poussin mastered in his great works. |
By 1706, Corelli was not only playing for Ottoboni's academy, he had become a member of it. This was the famous Arcadian Academy, where every member received a new name upon induction. Corelli was now Arcomelo, while Pasquini became Protico and Alessandro Scarlatti was Terpandro. |
Corelli's music for these occasions, as with other accademie that he was involved with, continued to involve large-scale orchestra maneuvers, which he was beginning to think about publishing. Two years later, Handel came to town, and his encounter with Corelli's musical language was extremely important; Handel emerged as one of the masters of the Baroque concerto grosso form. Corelli led the orchestra for Handel's oratorio "Il Trionfo del tempo" at the Cancelleria, as well as "La Resurrezione" at the Palazzo Bonelli, where Cardinal Ruspoli held court. The latter work, a wonderfully theatrical expansion of Corelli's idiom, even does Corelli the honor of quoting a popular gavotte from Opus V. |
Corelli's last opus: concerti grossi
Alas, Corelli was not to see the publication of his concerti grossi that had become so much a part of the musical architecture of Rome. Corelli had been polishing these works for more than 30 years, and by 1711 Andrea Adami reported that Corelli was "presently perfecting his last opus that would shortly render his name immortal." |
Opus VI was finally published just after his death, in 1713, by his partner Fornari, to whom Corelli had willed the plates, along with all his violins. Corelli's devoted patron, Cardinal Ottoboni, chose to bury Corelli in the Pantheon, alongside Raphael and other great Romans. Ottoboni created a funeral monument in the spirit of Corelli: a simple plaque and a bust. The bust now resides in Corelli's birthplace. If you go to the Pantheon today and turn left, you will find Corelli lying there in state. |
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| Corelli, Opus VI, no. 5; Concerto Grosso in F major. | |
For many years after Corelli's death his memory was celebrated in Rome in a musical monument that I think he would have found very appropriate: the musicians of Rome would gather together and perform his concerti grossi on the Spanish Steps in a grand convocation. It would be most appropriate to end this celebration of Corelli by performing a selection from one of these concerti grossi in honor of Corelli. |
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