Talent and Technology
International Music Season
Eden Court Theatre Inverness, 1995
Technology is not always the ally of art, but in the case of the concerto, the two have frequently gone hand in hand. Robin Seavill looks at the history of the concerto from its earliest beginnings up to the present day.
Put simply, a concerto is a piece for one or more soloists and orchestra. In terms of sheer numbers written, its golden age was the Baroque period, that century and a half between 1600 and 1750, the era which saw the earliest dramatic operas and ended symbolically with the death of JS Bach.
Before that, the word had simply meant a voice or voices singing “in concert” with minimal orchestral accompaniment usually a basso continuo played on low-register strings. As the new century progressed, however, and the modal system on which medieval plainchant and church music had been founded gradually gave way to the “modern” system of major and minor scales, there was a definite move away from the purely religious into more secular areas. Operas and oratorios began to appear still featuring the voice, but now supported by richer harmonies and a more contrapuntal instrumental backing. Simultaneously, instruments themselves became more reliable and euphonious, allowing reciprocal development of playing technique and providing new opportunities for groups of players to take on the traditional vocal role. So the size of the supporting orchestra began to grow, and this new large format, the concerto grosso, came to be among the most dominant musical forms of the 17th century.
In addition to the concerto grosso, there was also the solo concerto featuring a single performer, usually a violinist who would play accompanied by a group of about a dozen instruments. Strings still ruled the staves at this time as keyboards were considered unsuitable to take on the solo part – not that keyboard virtuosi were any rarer than their counterparts on the violin, or any less skilful; it’s just that the centre of the musical universe at the time was Venice, and in Vanice they preferred their strings above all else.
Arcangelo Corelli has been called one of the fathers of the modern concerto. His concerti grossi are among the earliest works to divide the musical substance equally between the small group of soloists (the concertino) and the full orchestra (ripieno or tutti). But it was Giuseppe Torelli, one od the leading figures in the last years of the Bologna School, who first set up a significant distinction between what these two groups actually played. While the orchestra pursued its stately thematic way, the violin was invited to leap out of the arrangements in lively bursts, setting up a bright invigorating contrast.
Antonio Vivaldi was to exploit this innovation to the full. His vastly popular Le Quattro Stagioni, the first four of a 12-strong collection of concertos, were designed mainly as a showcase for his own dazzling technique, yet ironically this was one of the factors which led to the decline of his fortunes in his own lifetime. As the cultural focus shifted north, Vivaldi’s pyrotechnical flair was considered to be beyond the bounds of decorum and good taste (showing off, in other words), and spectacular as his virtuoso parts frequently are, the pieces as a whole tend to play safe with little further exploration of the form, and even the Venetians grew tired of him eventually.
Perhaps the music scene as a whole was simply becoming bored with the strong-dominated concertos of the masters and was looking for a newer sound. The answer, quite literally, was blowing in the wind. Scarlatti, Corelli, and Albinoni between them had written concertos for various wind instruments, while in Germany the Kapellmeister od Hamburg, Heorg Philipp Telemann, was producing numerous works for similar combinations of oboes, horns and trumpets. Still, it would be true to say that most working composers at the time were content to write for their public or their patron and provide only what was needed, no more no less. It needed a musician of genius to pick up the concerto form as a whole, thoroughly absorb everything which had gone before, and stamp his authority on the next stage of its development. That genius was JS Bach.
Einstein has called Bach “the great river into which all things flowed”. Under the benevolent patronage of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen, Bach brought the Italian style of virtuoso performance to a new and appreciative audience and in the Brandenburg Concertos in particular, written between 1717 and 1721, he presented a full and dazzling catalogue of the form’s possibilities. They look ahead to areas they hadn’t yet been touched: No 5, for instance, contains an extended cadenza-like passage that was to anticipate the next great master, Mozart.
Throughout the 18th century, then, due principally to the efforts of Bach, composers delighted in producing flashy solo parts for themselves or for a local virtuoso, while those lucky enough to be in the employ of a like-minded patron would do their best to supply pieces which would make the amateur instrumentalist look good. And again, largely thanks to Bach, the next instrument to take centre stage was the keyboard, Handel and Scarlatti, exact contemporaries and friendly rivals, were considered best organist and most accomplished harpsichord player respectively until, towards the end of the century, as music moved into the Classical period, there appeared a keyboard-player par excellence, a musical genius who seemed to be able to do everything better than anybody else.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote well over a dozen concertos for a variety of instruments other than his own, including several for flute, a sound he was reputed to have loathed. But above all it was his 23 works for piano and orchestra that were to have the most lasting influence on the concerto form. Just as his dramatic sense in the composition of opera had led him to integrate arias into their orchestral setting far more comprehensively than had been the custom hitherto, so in the piano concertos he brought new sophistication to the interplay of soloist and orchestra, making them play off each other, swap phrases, even change roles.
But like Vivaldi in Venice fifty years before, around the mid-1780s his popularity suddenly dwindled, even though the winter of 1785–6 was to see possibly his three greatest piano concertos of all, nos. 23 in A major, 24 in C minor (much admired by Beethoven) and 25 in C major. Just ten years later Beethoven himself was to make his first public appearance as composer and pianist with his B Flat Major Piano Concerto, which was to herald the arrival of that glittering centrepiece of the Romantic period, the symphonic concerto.
Bigger than anything which had gone before, Beethoven’s concertos are remarkable for the enormous demands they make not only on the technique of the performer, but also on the fabric of his instrument. Yet his work as a whole was not seen by his contemporaries as necessarily a logical progression from Mozart. Indeed, the next great exponents of the concerto form were to shift the spotlight firmly back onto the skills of the soloist, a move fostered by the increasingly advanced keyboards they had to work with.
Liszt and Chopin were the two greatest keyboard practitioners of the age, and between them they illustrate the two sides of the Romantic coin. In the two piano concertos Liszt wrote in the 1830s, the solo instrument characteristically starts the piece and proceeds to dominate the orchestra throughout. In contrast, Chopin was the quiet reflective one. Although he wrote almost exclusively for the piano, his two concertos of 1829 and 1830 shoe a much closer blending of soloist and orchestra than Liszt would have deemed acceptable or even desirable. Like all his works, they both require the utmost subtlety of technique, and the slow movement of the first is widely considered to be one of the beautiful piano parts ever written.
The polarity between these differing approaches was to be characteristic of the next seventy years, By the end of the century, two battle lines were drawn up on the field of the concerto – on one side, the supporters of solo flamboyance championed by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov, on the other, symphonic integration under Schumann and Brahms.
Brahms’ excursions into the form yielded two concertos for piano, one for violin and another for double violin and cello. They hark back to the Classical style with big themes and sweeping sonorities, and confirm his own view that he was “a man born too late”/ The Violin Concerto in D Major, written for the virtuoso Joseph Joachim, contains solo passages of such complexity that it was called “a concerto not for but against the violin”. Of the two Russian masters, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov wrote four concertos each, mostly for piano. Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No 1 has one of the most resounding opening passages in all music, and it seems hardly credible now that the virtuoso Rubinstein refused to premiere the work, calling it “Worthless, unplayable, clumsy and plagiarised”. Rachmaninov was another in this continuing line of composer-performers. His 2nd Piano Concerto, together with his other most popular work, Variations on a Theme of Paganini, still impress the mind and heart together, as well as being showcases for the display of prodigious digital dexterity. Yet matching and sometimes even exceeding these works in sheer emotional power must be Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E Minor, surely one of the most moving pieces in the whole orchestral repertoire,
Along with Sibelius and Richard Strauss, Elgar was among the last of the old-school composers employing traditional styles as standard. In the 20th century the concerto, no less than every other branch of art, has undergone so many changes and suffered so many fads that its progress has been discursive at best. The Second Viennese School under Schoenberg, Berg and Webern has sought to replace the familiar major and minor keys with an experimental 12-note scale. Bartok’s piano concertos extended the percussive qualities of the instrument while his Concerto for Orchestra in five movements is virtually a regression to Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite in its spirit and mood. Walton, Britten and Tippett have continued to write tradition concertos throughout this century while others have brought in new solo instruments – for example, Milhaud (percussion), Cage (prepared piano), and even the harmonica has been offered the chance to shine by Hindemith, Arnold and Vaughan Williams. In Thea Musgrave’s Clarinet Concerto, the soloist physically moves around the concert platform forming brief alliances with various sections of the orchestra “against” the conductor.
It all seems a long way from the days when a static virtuoso backed by a small body of accompanists would set out to delight an audience with a simple but elegantly fashioned piece. But talent alone can only do so much, and whatever technological advances await us in the next century, on past form the concerto will doubtless prove to be among the first to profit by them.
The Pictures
A musical evening at court
The Baroque style in architecture was confident, elegant, and rich in ornamentation – just like court life, which was to reach an apogee of taste and refinement during the period. It was mainly in order to provide music for court entertainment that those composers and musicians not writing church music for a living were employed, The standard shape of the three-movement concerto came about as a direct result of the rhythm of the dance – quick, slow, quick – or exercise, rest, reiteration, which as well as providing variety of pace and mood, was also to give a pleasing circular structure to the piece.
Church music
Orchestral church music was also to make its own indirect contribution to the developing form. Many Italian churches, like San Petronio in Bologna, supported small groups of professional musicians which, on special occasions, would have their numbers swelled by visiting players whose skills were not of the same calibre. So a distinction would be written into the score allowing for the discrepancy between the skills of the full orchestra and the greater facility of the resident group of soloists.
Stradivari violin
Violin of maple, pine and ebony made by Antonio Stradivari (1644–1737). Just as the piano was to dominate 19th-century music, so the violin was king in 17th-century Italy where the body of the instrument had been perfected by the Amati, Stradivari and Guarneri families of Cremona. The convex bow had also been replaced by the longer, lighter concave version, and in view of the instrument’s continuing popularity over the years it is surprising that the likes of Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Dvořák were only ever to produce one violin concerto apiece.
A Bach manuscript
As well as being able to produce astonishingly neat manuscripts like this, JS Bach was a master of the cadenza. This virtuoso section, usually towards the end of the piece, was designed to show off the player’s skill in a flurry of improvisation, alluding back to the main themes of the movement and bringing the whole work to a satisfyingly dazzling conclusion. Once Bach had begun the trend, succeeding composers were to write out their cadenzas in full, thereby controlling more firmly the artistic structure of the piece while stull allowing free rein to the technical mastery of the soloist.
The 7-year-old Mozart en famille
Most of Mozart’s piano concertos were written for himself as soloist, but the one for two pianos, the last he composed in Salzburg, was performed in company with his talented sister Maria Anne (“Nannerl”). After his move to Vienna, he wrote a triple piano concerto for Countess Lodron and her daughters which subtly makes allowances for their varying degrees of skill. To support himself while he was there he also produced numerous works for his own annual subscription concerts.
A Pianoforte, circa 1720
In 1709, Bartolomeo Cristofori had produced the first percussive piano which allowed contrasts in volume depending on how hard the keys were struck. When the organ-builder Gottfried Silbermann first demonstrated one to Bach, however the composer was as unimpressed by it as Voltaire who called it “an ironmonger’s invention compared to the harpsichord” (which of course plucked the strings as opposed to striking them with hammers). It was until Broadwood in 1851 and Steinway in 1855 produced their stronger metal-framed versions that the modern piano really came into being.
Robert and Clara Schumann
“Hats off, gentlemen – a genius!” said Schumann on first hearing Chopin play variations he had written on a duet from Don Giovanni. Schumann himself, who idolised Beethoven, frequently used the piano in a supporting role to the orchestra rather than as a leading presence. As emotional as his hero’s, Schumann’s style of composition did not always please a public thirsty for solo display. Liszt called his A Minor piece “a concerto without orchestra”, so completely was the solo part blended into the texture of the whole. Nevertheless, it was to influence Brahms’ four concertos, and Grieg, whose piano concerto was written in the same key.
Franz Liszt (1811–1886)
The first pop star in musical history: “Lisztomania” was a term actually coined in his lifetime. So great was his natural ability that legend has it he could sight-read someone else’s complicated music at the keyboard while still carrying on a bantering conversation with a roomful of people, and he was not above calling for silence with the words “Quiet everybody, there’s a good bit coming up.”
PS
I have no technical musical knowledge, so this was all from books and a remembered snippet from the old BBC2 quiz show Face the Music.
Some of it now sounds vulgar to my ear (‘Vivaldi’s pyrotechnical flair was considered to be beyond the bounds of decorum and good taste’ [showing off, in other words]), and even questionable in its conclusions (‘even the Venetians grew tired of him eventually’) – did they? Where would I have got that from? Something to do with a long decline in his reputation which has only been smartly reversed over the last few decades? I don’t know enough to know for sure, but the page needed to be filled and none of the people in the audience who might have read this, knowing more than I did, ever picked me up on it. Either it simply wasn’t worth their time and trouble, or I was largely correct. Frankly, I’m happy either way.
The title seems a bit weird. Maybe that’s the idea I had, but the thing must have got away from me. It certainly doesn’t seem to contain much about the technological development of instruments or materials. Ah well. Can’t win ’em all.
The unusual structure is down to the inordinately long captions I wrote for the accompanying pictures. Rather than interrupt the elegant flow of my effortless argument, I decided the best place to add extra info was in these captions, which ended up taking up half their respective pages. But they were attached to very attractive pictures, so on the whole I was pleased with the piece. At the time I was only just starting to explore the glories of the concert stage, and compiling this essay brought me my first contact with the heavenly sonorities of Rach 2, Sibelius 5 and the Chopin concertos. (I decided early on that calling them concerti would have been too precious for words.)