The Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music

Volume 24 (2018) No. 1

Passaggio in Italia: Music on the Grand Tour in the Seventeenth Century. Edited by Dinko Fabris and Margaret Murata. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2015. [276 pp. ISBN 978-2-503-53568-5.]

Reviewed by Kimberly Beck Hieb*

1, An International Effort

2. Perspectives and Methodologies

3. Conclusion

References

1. An International Effort

1.1 This volume presents a selection of papers first shared at a conference of the same title in August of 2006, a collaborative effort by an international coalition of scholars dedicated to the study of music of the Italian Seicento. The essays explore the “most musical” cities in seventeenth-century Italy: after first focusing on Florence, they turn to Venice, then to Rome, and finally to Naples. Aristocratic travelers followed a similar trajectory on the Grand Tour—a practice usually associated with the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but with roots in the seventeenth—leaving behind a wealth of resources describing their experiences with Italian music while simultaneously facilitating the dissemination of Italian music throughout Europe more broadly.

1.2 The diverse array of voices in the book includes those of scholars from Italy, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Australia, France, and the United States. The contributors are predominantly senior scholars in the field with an expansive knowledge of secondary literature and an intimate familiarity with archival sources resulting from years of research and revisiting archives in search of new evidence and fresh insights. This highly specialized approach to the music of seventeenth-century Italy, which is a stronger force in some essays than others, may alienate readers who are less familiar with seventeenth-century contexts and sources. The intended audience, rather, is one of scholars who are already immersed in the study of seventeenth-century music, if not specifically Italian music of the period.

1.3 Chapters by the volume’s editors, Dinko Fabris and Margaret Murata, contextualize the research explored in the essays that follow. In “Italian Soundscapes: Souvenirs from the Grand Tour,” Fabris introduces idiomatic elements of resources related to the Grand Tour and presents the underlying research questions posed by the conference organizers, inquiries that address the experience of visitors to Italy in the seventeenth century. Anthropological methodologies employed by Peter Burke in The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy,^[1] especially the idea of an “alien eye,” the importance of contemplating the different perspectives of “outsiders” and “insiders,” permeate the essay. Fabris examines how letters, diaries, or essays written by travelers can tell us just as much about the author and his or her homeland as the foreign place or experience the author is writing about. Murata, in “Musical Encounters Public and Private,” provides a hierarchical taxonomy of performance spaces in seventeenth-century Italy, dividing first public from private venues. The public venues are then presented as either sacred/devotional spaces or outdoor performance settings. Private venues include those for chamber music, private religious ceremonies, and formal entertainments. Quotations from primary sources in a variety of languages (English, French, and German), including the travel journal of Pyotr Andreyevich Tolstoy (cited in English), bring these venues to life with vivid descriptions of musical events and experiences.

2. Perspectives and Methodologies

2.1 The essays in Passaggio in Italia embrace a rich variety of methodologies that rely heavily on primary source materials. Scholars examine travel diaries, published and unpublished accounts of particular events, and music prints and manuscripts. The consideration of many obscure sources will, one hopes, inspire new avenues of scholarly inquiry. Moreover, the wide variety of methodologies applied in the study of these primary sources adds depth to the volume as a whole. While the format of the book (216 x 280 mm.) is a bit awkward, the larger size allows for substantial illustrations and appropriately sized musical examples, of which there are quite a few (thirty-five black and white figures).

2.2 The act of performance is the focal point in essays by Richard Wistreich and Hendrik Schulze. In “High, Middle, and Low: Singing Monteverdi,” Wistreich explains musical and historical insights gained from a performer’s perspective. He consults vocal ornamentation manuals such as those of Giovanni Camillo Maffei and Lodovico Zacconi, but also points to the limitations of these sources, preferring instead to ponder how singers today can combine historical inquiry with personal experience to foster a productive relationship with singers of the past. Schulze examines manuscript scores for Venetian composer Francesco Cavalli’s operas, to gain insight into both the composer’s process and the realization of the pieces in performance, in “Cavalli as Performer: What the Manuscript Score Can Tell Us.”

2.3 The transmission of Italian music in foreign lands as a specific result of the Grand Tour, a tangential element in the essays of both Schulze and Wistreich, is pivotal in Natascha Veldhorst’s chapter, “Caccini in the Netherlands.” After establishing the hegemony of Italian culture in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, Veldhorst explores contrafacta and arrangements for lute, recorder, organ, and carillon of Giulio Caccini’s Amarilli mia bella that survive in seventeenth-century Dutch sources. Since these “Dutchified” versions of the tune, which appear in both sacred and secular contexts, clearly signal the overwhelming presence of the melody in the Low Countries (despite the fact that neither of Caccini’s two volumes of monody was published in the Netherlands), Veldhorst questions whether the Dutch even realized that Caccini’s tune was Italian in origin. Her essay offers a profound look at the afterlife of a piece of music, which can, in fact, venture out on a “grand tour” of its own after leaving the mind of its composer.

2.4 Two authors contributed studies seeking to further elucidate specific genres. In “Travelling Players and Venetian Opera: Further Parallels between Commedia dell’arte and Dramma per musica,” John Walter Hill bolsters the relationship between Italian spoken and sung theatrical traditions that was initially established by Nino Pirrotta in his 1955 article “Commedia dell’arte and Opera.”^[2] While many of the comparative studies regarding these genres focus on the comic elements of the commedia dell’arte and dramma per musica traditions, Hill explores the rhetorical gestures in the serious roles, especially those gestures set out by Andrea Perrucci in Dell’arte rapresentativa premeditate ed all’improvviso (Naples, 1699), to fortify the connection between the two genres. Arnaldo Morelli considers the Roman oratorio’s ability to traverse sacred and secular performance contexts to serve as entertainment as opposed to an act of piety, in “The Oratorio in Rome in the Seicento: Its Sites and Its Public.” The “alien eye” perspective is at work here, as Morelli cites narrative accounts, both published and personal, from a diverse collection of voices recalling oratorio performances and practices; he articulates the wide use of the stile recitativo in the Roman oratories and the high level of musical performance on stage, noting particularly the significant instrumental writing that accompanied particularly talented singers to create quite the spectacle in seventeenth-century Rome.

2.5 Music serves as a representation of cultural climate in essays by Franco Piperno (“ ‘L’armoniose idee della sua mente’: Corelli, the Arcadians, and the Primacy of Rome”) and Wendy Heller (“Barbara Strozzi and the Taming of the Male Poetic Voice”). Piperno draws compelling connections between music and architecture, composers and architects. Drawing on existing examples of eighteenth-century architecture and depictions thereof in drawings and engravings, Piperno encourages one to listen to the instrumental works of Arcangelo Corelli as musical monuments of seventeenth-century Rome. Wendy Heller turns to private venues—specifically to the Venetian academy where Barbara Strozzi’s performances would have been available only to the “most discerning visitors” to Venice, those with both an interest in music and the right connections. Heller studies Strozzi’s nuanced settings of texts likely penned by members of the academy, inferring the singer-composer’s presentation of a subverted woman’s point of view, not unlike the practices of female blues singers in the early twentieth century.

2.6 Several scholars set out to grant a new voice to the “little guy.” Beth Glixon, in “ ‘Fortuna instabile’: Francesco Lucio and Opera Production in Seventeenth-Century Venice,” uncovers the work of Francesco Lucio, a lesser known contemporary of Francesco Cavalli, in Venice. Glixon focuses on the business of opera, using court documents and other archival materials to construct the unstable relationships between Lucio, his investors, and his singers and other musicians. Like Glixon’s, John Griffith’s contribution, “Singer-songwriters, the Lute, and the Stile nuovo,” focuses on the works of lesser known individuals and their influence in developing musical styles. In an effort to move away from the prevailing notion of Giulio Caccini as chief inventor of monody and craft a thicker and more inclusive history of monody, Griffiths argues that the “new monody” was not simply conceived in Florence around 1600 but rather evolved as a result of experimentation that started much earlier, in the works of singer-songwriters such as Florentine Cosimo Bottegari, among others.

2.7 The “alien eye” perspective serves as the foundation for essays by Iain Fenlon, Jean-François Lattarico, Rudolf Rasch, and Louise Stein. Local politics figure prominently in two of these essays. In “A French Visitor to Florence, May 1589,” Iain Fenlon studies the contents of an anonymous French travel diary, a significant extract of which is appended in the original French, to reconstruct the foreigner’s distinct impression of the well-known Medici wedding entertainments, in particular the intermedi for the play La pellegrina. Fenlon contrasts the detailed account by the French traveler—who experienced awe and wonderment but missed many of the political allusions—with the official published description by Bastiano de Rossi, where the mythological symbolism is fully laid out. The sole French contribution to the volume, by Jean-François Lattarico, “ La vie humaine dans les livrets de Giulio Rospigliosi: Eléments pour une analyse typologique des personnages,” explores how operas staged by the Barberini family in Rome were crafted in a highly diplomatic manner, to speak effectively to individual constituents in an audience of highly varied nationalities.

2.8 Calling on travel itineraries, personal letters, and the contents of his library after his death, Rudolf Rasch’s essay, “ ‘Italia decolor’? Constantijn Huygens and Italian Music,” explores the southbound journeys of the Dutchman, positioning the Grand Tour as an element of Huygens’s life as a period aristocrat. The final essay, by Louise Stein, “Three Spaniards Meet Italian Opera in the Age of Spanish Imperialism,” studies Italian opera from the Spanish point of view. While Spanish visual artists were often sent to Italy for training, the musicians did not follow the same path, so when the Spanish landed in Italy, as they often did because of the complicated political relationship between the regions, they took in Italian opera from the perspective of an “alien eye” (or ear). Letters from Spanish diplomats and travel diaries recount personal reactions to Italian opera. Tracing the travels of one particular Spaniard, the marquis of Carpio, from Venice to Rome and eventually to Naples, Stein shows the evolution of a traveler’s perspective as he became more familiar with Italian musical genres and styles.

3. Conclusion

3.1 As can be gleaned from the variety of perspectives and methodologies outlined above, not all of the essays in Passaggio in Italia focus intently on the central theme of the volume, that of travelers’ musical experiences on the Grand Tour. While the anthropological methodology of Peter Burke introduced by Fabris at the outset is clearly at work in several of the essays, some authors nearly neglect the construct altogether, save for a phrase in the abstract or a brief paragraph mentioning the Grand Tour in an introduction, crafting essays that would be perfectly at home in any volume about music in Italy in the seventeenth century. This was a bit of a disappointment in view of the vast amount of existing scholarship on seventeenth-century Italian music and the fresh approach invited by the research questions that Fabris articulates.

3.2 Whether focused specifically on the theme of the book or not, all of the essays in the volume draw heavily on primary sources, many of which are explored for the very first time in this publication. This is Passaggio’s greatest strength. A particularly rich set of resources is included in the bibliography as well. These essays provide an excellent starting place for further research. Moreover, the wide variety of voices and methodologies grants the reader a fresh experience in each essay.