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ISSN: 1089-747X
Volume 22 (2016) No. 1
Published 2017
The Italian Cantata in Vienna: Entertainment in the Age of Absolutism. By Lawrence Bennett. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. [119 pp. ISBN 978-0-253-01018-6.]
Reviewed by Janet K. Page*
1. Introduction
1.1 The cantata in Baroque Vienna has engaged Lawrence Bennett’s attention all his scholarly life. Bennett has tried to find as many sources as possible, and he has contemplated the circumstances of each work’s composition, the reasons why the works are as they are, and how composers’ styles changed over time.
1.2 The cantata was particularly suited to the needs of the Habsburg court in Vienna. It provided sophisticated entertainment for the court’s musically accomplished rulers and courtiers; it was in Italian, a favored language; it often dealt with the topic of love in its various aspects, as did the court’s academies; and it was (mostly) small in scale and suited to exclusive performance and to a court with a huge appetite for music and a fondness for singers, but sometimes not a lot of money. Many of the sources are unica, and almost all survive in manuscript only, emblematic of the court’s desire to hold on to its exclusive repertoire, thus claiming the prestige of having something artistically unique.
2. Organization and coverage
2.1 The book is straightforward in format. Part I deals with the cantata in Vienna from 1658 to 1700 and Part II with the cantata in that city from 1700 to 1711. Part II is the larger half of the book, the music being treated in the greatest detail. Each section begins with an introduction to the political and cultural milieu, followed by an introduction to the composers. Bennett then provides an overview of repertoire and sources. The overview is followed by discussion of the music, which in Part II is divided into a “Style Overview,” “Aspects of Form,” “Melody, Harmony, and Rhythm,” and “The Relationship of Text and Music.” A concluding chapter provides a brief account of what happened to the genre and its composers in the period of instability that followed the death of Emperor Joseph I in April 1711. The book continues with several indexes: text incipits and sources, a catalogue raisonné of Viennese sources, and texts of arias analyzed in chapters 10–12. These are followed by endnotes, bibliography, and index.
2.2 The sections on milieu and composers are based primarily on secondary literature, which Bennett has admirably summarized. Having the biographies together is extremely useful, allowing the reader to see links between the composers and even between different European courts. Archival work on the court music or composers’ lives and careers has not been the focus of Bennett’s attention, and his many speculations make clear that there is much to be done here. The sources for some of the older studies need a revisit—in particular, those for Ludwig Ritter von Köchel’s much-cited Die kaiserliche Hof-Musikkapelle in Wien von 1563–1864 (Vienna, 1869). Indeed, research in this area has recently begun to advance, too late for Bennett to absorb it for his book. Marko Deisinger’s work concerns Empress Eleonora II as patron of music.[1] Greta Haenen has begun work on a reconstruction of Emperor Leopold’s library.[2] Before her untimely death, Alison Dunlop began a study of the lives and careers of court musicians in early eighteenth-century Vienna; her brilliant archival work had already resulted in several publications.[3] Thomas Hochradner’s new edition of Köchel’s Fux catalog should shed further light on court music of the early eighteenth century.[4]
3. Watermarks and copyists
3.1 Bennett’s remarks on watermarks and copyists show that these are clearly in need of further study for this era in general, at least for Vienna, and it seems rather a pity that he didn’t tackle these issues systematically and in detail as he examined the sources. A “three-crescent design” (pp. 129, 133–34, and elsewhere) is not a terribly useful description of a watermark, as the three crescent moons come in many different sizes and shapes, and the design indicates merely that the paper is of fine quality and Italian origin.[5] Descriptions of copyists too are sometimes unsatisfactory, and left me—someone who has spent a lot of time looking at manuscripts of this era—wondering how the author could be so certain. Johannes Prominczel, who completed a dissertation on the sacred music of Marc’ Antonio Ziani, is now engaged in a study of the copyists at the imperial court that promises to shed important light on the production of the music in this era.[6]
4. Musical style
4.1 Bennett knows the music so thoroughly that he is able to write with confidence about differences in style among composers. His parameters for analysis of the cantatas of 1700–1711 are wide-ranging, creative, and revealing. They include structural plans; instrumentation; the da capo aria and its design, proportions, and formal articulation; the peaks and shapes of melodic motion; harmony, including treatment of the bass line, modulatory schemes, and dissonance; surface rhythm; timbre; and the relationship of text and music. For each, the author discusses examples illustrating the individual styles of several composers. The detail makes this part of the book a useful guide to the style of these composers in general, providing principles that can be applied to music beyond the cantata. The extensive section on the da capo aria is particularly thoughtful and thorough, and illustrates the ways composers brought variety and individuality to a form often considered static. It is clear that Bennett finds the music of Antonio Bononcini, much less famous than his elder brother Giovanni, the most interesting of the era.
4.2 For music that is focused on the solo voice and written for an audience enthusiastic about Italian culture, the chapter on the relationship of text and music is a little disappointing in its brevity. Individual sections deal interestingly with issues such as influence of the text upon a cantata’s design and on the construction of melodies, how composers bring out certain words, “tone color and dynamics” (one page), “descriptive treatment of the text” (one page), and “affective treatment of the text” (five pages devoted primarily to text painting on the large and small scale). I would have liked to see addressed how the music may have appealed to and moved its audience. Bennett mentions the use of allegory and other personal references in the texts (for example, on p. 97). But a composer could take a text and give it specific meaning through the setting, as Carlo Agostino Badia does in his oratorio Il martirio di Santa Susanna.[7] There he highlights the words “costanze” and “forte” in two arias, casting the work as a tribute to Archduke Carl as king of Spain, and as a comment on the ongoing War of the Spanish Succession. (“Costanza e fortezza” was a commonly used version of Carl’s personal motto.) There are cases of arias in operas or serenatas that play on the famous singers’ names.[8] I would expect the intimate genre of the cantata to include many such passages as Habsburg insider jokes that would be picked up by listeners.
4.3 Giovanni Bononcini’s text setting was praised by the librettist Paolo Rolli in 1724 as “indescribably expressive of human passion,”[9] and I wish this aspect of the music had been explored in more depth. With Bennett’s great knowledge of this music, I am certain that he could say some very interesting things. But perhaps what I suggest would have produced a book twice as long.
5. Conclusion
5.1 The Italian Cantata in Vienna is well organized and engagingly written; it provides a fine guide to the subject, useful far beyond the genre of the cantata. That some topics are treated in less detail than they might have been is not so much a criticism of the book as an observation that Bennett has not yet exhausted the richness of this genre in this time and place.