Stylus Phantasticus
17th-Century Music at the Habsburg Court
Sunday, March 17, 3:30 pm
First Unitarian Church
at Benefit & Benevolent St., Providence, RI
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Program Notes
Today La Fiocco explores the music of the Stylus Phantasticus, a musical genre identified by Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher in his Musurgia universalis of 1650. A polymath, Kircher was a prolific writer on linguistics, geology, biology, Biblical history, and music theory. Musurgia universalis was a systematic study of music history, theory, and style. A German by birth and training, Kircher lived in Rome from 1633 until his death in 1680. He tells us that music in the “fantastical style” is instrumental, “bound to nothing, neither words nor to a melodic subject. It displays genius and teaches the hidden design of harmony and the ingenious composition of harmonic phrases.” In practical terms, phantasticus passage-work is at times poetic and flowery, and other times overtly flamboyant, often set to boldly affective harmonic underpinning.
The stylus phantasticus grew out of the Venetian Stravaganza style of the 1620s and 1630s when a new repertoire was developing for the violin and cornetto, the principal solo instruments of the early Baroque. Italian musicians brought the style to the Imperial court at Vienna where it was fostered by the music-loving Habsburg emperors Ferdinand II, Ferdinand III and Leopold I. Northern colleagues and students added to the extravagant passage-work their organized Germanic rhetoric and deep sense of religiosity and symbolism, both Roman Catholic and Lutheran.
It is not surprising that the principal collections of music in the stylus phantasticus are Northern European and date from the 1660s through the 1690s. The ornate presentation manuscript assembled by court musician Jacob Ludwig (1623-1698), now known as thePartiturbuch Ludwig, contains 114 instrumental works. Ludwig offered it in 1662 as a gift to Duke Augustus of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, a great collector of manuscripts and the author of a book on chess, on the occasion of his 83rd birthday. The repertory comprises sonatas and variation pieces such as ostinato settings, arias, and ciacconas by Italian, Austrian, and German composers who worked at the court in Vienna and at important Thuringian and Hanseastic cities. The composers represented include Antonio Bertali, Johann Heinrich Schmelzer, Andreas Oswald, Christian Herwich, Giovanni Antonio Pandolfi Mealli, Heinrich Bach (grandfather of Maria Barbara Bach, first wife and also second cousin of Johann Sebastian), and Adam Drese, et al.
The celebrated Düben collection compiled by Swedish organist composer Gustaf Düben (c. 1628-1690) contains 1,500 vocal works and more than 300 instrumental pieces, many of which are in the stylus phantasticus. The Rost Codex is a smaller collection compiled by the musician and priest Franz Rost starting around 1660, perhaps at the request of the Margrave of Baden. Rost completed his music book at Strasbourg, and it was eventually acquired by Sébastian de Brossard and later given to the royal library, which is now the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The fourth important source is the two-volume Prothimia suavissima published in 1662. And then, of course, there are the manuscripts and publications of individual composers who indulged in the stylus phantasticus, including Nicolaes a Kempis, Johann Jacob Froberger, Matthias Weckmann, Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber von Bibern, Johann Heinrich Schmelzer, Dietrich Buxtehude, and even Johann Sebastian Bach, among others.
We begin our musical journey into the world of the stylus phantasticus by exploring its origins in Italy, with a canciona, a “song written for the Most High Lord Don Juan of Austria” by Neapolitan composer Andrea Falconieri. Raised at the ducal court in Parma, Falconieri became court lutenist in 1604 but absconded 10 years later to work for the duke of Mantua. By 1620 he was a player of the guitar and chitarrone at Modena, perhaps after stints in Florence and Rome. He moved to Spain in 1621 to work for the Spanish Habsburg court but returned to Parma in 1629 after reconciling with the ducal family. HisWanderlust still not satisfied, he soon departed for Genoa where, in 1636, he was admonished by the Mother Superior of S. Brigida for “distracting” the nuns with his music. He returned to Naples in 1639 to take up an appointment at the chapel royal, a post he retained until his death from plague in 1656. L’Austria, written for a Habsburg imperial prince, exemplifies Falconieri’s typical structure of three repeated sections in duple meter with a final section in triple meter. Despite the pervasive running passages, the stateliness and chanson-like quality salutes the dignified dedicatee.
Little is known about Giovanni Battista Riccio. He became organist of the Scuola di San Giovanni Evangelista in Venice in 1609, and published three books of sacred music, the last of which, Terzo libro delle Divine Lodi, appeared in 1620 and 1621 also contains 12 instrumental works. The characteristic rhythm of the opening of Canzan La Rubina, long-short-short, derives from the French chanson of the 16th century. The canzona is a genre of the early Baroque era, and the varying affects and figurations are precursors of thestylus phantasticus. Riccio was one of the first composers to specify the recorder and dulcian. He indulges in the use of echo, a device characteristic of the music tradition of the Basilica of San Marco (St. Mark’s), in Venice.
Andrea Gabrieli helped establish the Venetian school that would become celebrated for its virtuosity throughout 17th-century Europe. It was the harmonic boldness and melodic flamboyance of the Venetian tradition, centered at St. Marks, that would be reinterpreted in the North as the stylus phantasticus. Through his work and travels, Andrea Gabrieli had a wide-reaching influence on composers in the Italian peninsula, including his more famous nephew Giovanni, and in the vast Habsburg territories. As a member of the retinue of Albrecht V, duke of Bavaria, he participated in the Frankfurt coronation of Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II, and had an opportunity to directly influence German musicians. He was a prolific and highly fashionable composer of sacred and secular music, and his keyboard music was particularly celebrated. The brief intonazione in the second tone, that is, Dorian mode in the “hypo” or lower form on G, is a quasi-improvisatory prelude that we employ to establish the mood for Donati’s motet O glorioso Domina, in accordance with contemporaneous practice.
Ignazio Donati never traveled beyond the Italian peninsula. He was born in Casalmaggiore, in the region of Parma and served as maestro di capella at Urbino from 1596 to 1598, held positions at Pesaro, Fano, and Ferrara, and returned to Urbino from 1612 to 1615. From 1623 to 1629 he served at Novara Cathedral (perhaps where the future Ursuline and celebrated composer/teacher Isabella Leonarda heard his music as a young child), moved to Lodi and then Milan, where he died in 1638. Nearly all his surviving music is sacred and demonstrates a mastery of the prima pratica style of late Renaissance as well as attempts at the moderno or seconda pratica style championed by Monteverdi.
The Marian hymn O glorious Domina appears as “concerto terzo” in a collection of sacred music by diverse composers entitled Flores praestantissimorum virorum published at Milan in 1626. The performance indication is Duoi canti ouer Ten. ouer vna voce, & instromento à modo di Ecco, in accordance with the newer style of combining voices and instruments. The vocal setting is mostly syllabic, with several tasteful flourishes or passaggi that decorate individual words. Donati specifies the violin elsewhere but the cornetto, considered the ideal substitute for the human voice, works well with the soprano voice. It serves at times as an echo effect, and other times reinforces the voice a third below.
With the Habsburg court at Vienna gaining a taste for the new Italian virtuosic style, many musicians traversed the Alps for prestigious opportunities at the Imperial chapel,Hofkapelle, and the many princely courts that ostensibly were subservient to the emperor. Music, especially sacred music, was of great importance to the Habsburgs, who had been lavish patrons since the later Middle Ages. Ferdinand III, Leopold I, and Joseph I were themselves fine composers. Such was their devotion that despite the decimation of numerous German, Austrian, and Bohemian towns during the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), the economic and social upheaval, and casualties from battle, pillage, famine, and disease estimated in the millions, musical life at the Habsburg court thrived, and throughout the 17th century the emperors elevated some of their favorite musicians to the minor nobility.
Born in Verona around 1621, Massimiliano Neri’s father served as a musician at the courts of Munich, Neuburg, and Düsseldorf and his mother played and taught the harpsichord. As a young man, he was appointed first organist of St. Marks, a position he held for 20 years. Neri sojourned in Vienna in 1651 where he played for the nuptials of Ferdinand III and Eleanor Gonzaga, a feat that earned him a patent of nobility. After returning to Venice, he once again relocated to the North in 1663 to work at Cologne and Bonn. Canzon Primawas published at Venice in 1644. The canzona of this period was a single movement, multi-section work with an imitative structure, with sections that alternative between fast and slow and express individual moods or affects. The opening motive is usually long-short-short, or, as in this case, a slight variant that alludes to secular song origin. Nonetheless, canzonas were usually appropriate to play in church settings.
Verona native Antonio Bertali was about 19 when he entered the service of the Imperial chapel at Vienna. A fine violinist, he was entrusted with composing a wedding cantata for the future Ferdinand III to his Spanish cousin the Infanta Anna Maria in 1631, a Mass for the Imperial Diet of 1636, and a Requiem Mass for Ferdinand II in 1637. In 1649 he succeeded Giovanni Valentini to the coveted post of Kapellmeister. His engaging and virtuosic instrumental music is preserved in all four important sources of stylus phantasticus music: the Düben collection, Partiturbuch Ludwig, the Rost Codex, and the two volumes of Prothimia suavissima.
The opening of Sonata a 3 is clearly the work of a seasoned composer. It engenders a sense of grandeur that is eloquent and refined, with two predominant rhetorical figuration patterns: two sixteenth notes plus an eighth-note, and a sixteenth note rest plus three sixteenth notes plus a quarter-note. The lively second section presents virtuosic figurations over a dancelike ostinato bass, and each solo instrument enjoys a brief solo passage over the bass pattern. Bertali’s skill is evident, for there are subtle and unexpected modality shifts and cross-relations within the individual figurations, affective devices entirely in keeping with the stylus phantasticus.
Pandolfi Maelli’s Sonata La Clemente, the fifth sonata of his Opus 4, is a highly original and indulgent example of phantasticus writing. It is also a fine example of idiomatic violin writing just at the time that the violin overcame the cornetto as the most expressive, virtuosic, and varied solo instrument. Indeed, Pandolfi Maelli’s Opera 3 and 4 violin sonatas of 1660 forever championed the violin over the cornetto. He worked at Innsbruck for Archduke Ferdinand Charles von Habsburg of Further Austria, where these works were published and dedicated to his patron’s wife, Anna de’Medici. La Clemente is improvisatory and tests the limits of the violin, with surprising rhetorical chromaticism, scalar passages with leaps spanning two octaves, dance figures, echo effects, and regal flourishes that provide us with a glimpse into the originality and virtuosity of the mid-17th century.
Born in Rome ca. 1600, Giovanni Felice Sances was a boy soprano at the Collegio Germanico. He was about 14 when his father pulled him out without notice and suffered imprisonment for breach of contract. But Sances soon reestablished a relationship with the Collegio, which provided him with connections in the North. By December 1636 he sang at the chapel of Ferdinand II and continued to serve under Ferdinand III and Leopold I. In 1669, despite advanced age, Sances succeeded Bertali as Kapellmeister, receiving a patent of nobility the same year. He struggled with serious illness during his last decade but nonetheless continued to direct and compose until the end of his life.
Sances’ music for the Imperial chapel reflects the devotion expression of the emperors, and the motet Ardet cor meum is no exception, for Ferdinand III was particularly devoted to the Virgin Mary and the Immaculate Conception. First published at Venice in 1638,Ardet cor meum sets a text based on the Song of Songs and free sacred poetry. It contains eight brief sections of contrasting duple and triple meter. The modality is essentially what we today consider G major, but there are numerous sudden inflections in the mollis (i.e., flat) hexachord, the equivalent in modern terms to unprepared shifts to G minor. This device is used to highlight specific mystical and passionate references to the Virgin. Indeed, the version heard today is based on the 1651 Leipzig publication in the second part of Geistlicher Concerten und Harmonien, compiled and edited by Ambrosius Profe (1589–1661), a German organist and composer active in Breslau an Silesia. Profe, or an associate, altered Sances’ text as Christocentric rather than Marian, perhaps to engage a wider, i.e., both Lutheran and Catholic audiences in the German territories, and thus the rhetorical modal inflections in this version highlight personal and direct supplications to Christ in contrast to the original version for the Emperor’ (e.g., “Oh how beautiful thou art, my love, and you are spotless becomes “Jesus, be always my Jesus, and cleanse, save, and protect me”).
Giovanni Antonio Bertoli was born in Lonato, a town in Lombardy under Venetian control. He was taught music at the parish church and then in Verona where Antonio Bertali (no relation) was also a student. As a young man, Bertoli traveled north to work at the court of Archduke Carl Joseph, a brother of Ferdinand II who was Prince-Bishop of Breslau (Wrocław) and Bressanone. He later conducted wind ensembles and played cornetto and dulcian, the forerunner of the bassoon Allen is playing today. His Compositioni musicali is considered the first publication of solo sonatas, and the first collection specifically for the dulcian and/or bassoon. The pieces are highly virtuosic, with strophic variations in smaller note values, challenging meters, and brief interludes for the continuo. The rhapsodic writing and virtuosic figurations of this collection epitomize the spirit of the stylus phantasticus.
The stylus phantasticus was firmly adopted in the North by 1650, but one composer, working at an Imperial outpost, mastered the style a decade earlier perhaps owing to early training in Venice, which gave him a solid grounding in the rhapsodic style. We don’t know when Nicolaes a Kempis left his homeland, but by 1626 he was organist at the Brussels Collegiate Church, possibly invited to the Spanish Netherlands by an official at the court of the Archduke [sic!] Isabella Clara Eugenia. During the 1640s he published three large collections of instrumental music suitable for church and chamber settings. The instrumentation varies, with some solo pieces appropriate for either cornetto or violin, and chamber works that could be played on different combinations of instruments including one or more violins, cornettos, viols, recorder, sackbut, and dulcian, with organ, harpsichord, or theorbo continuo. A Kempis called his pieces Symphonias. They are essentially single-movement sonatas with varied sections. Nearly all display the types of stylus phantasticusrhetorical figurations, although some are based on pre-existing structured material thus are technically a different genre.Symphonia XIX indulges in imitation but also allows each part solo passages and passages in dialogue.
Lutheran composer Samuel Bockshorn was born in what is today Zerčiče, Czechia. The town was mostly destroyed by Imperial forces during the Thirty Years’ War, so his family fled to Hungary. His father, a Lutheran minister, died a few years later, and the young Capricornus (the Latin form of his name), traveled to Vienna, where he gained employment at the Imperial chapel under Valentini and Bertali. Two years later he accepted a position as director of civic music and teacher of Latin at Pressburg (Bratislva, Slovakia). His first publication appeared in 1655, and illustrates his predilection for the Italian style. He sent a copy to Heinrich Schūtz, who approved of his work.
In 1657, “for reasons of health” he quit Pressburg and accepted the position ofKapellmeister at Stuttgart for the Duke of Wūrttemberg. There, he had the occasion to work with celebrated harpsichordist Johann Jacob Froberger. He was granted free access to the court theater and he felt religious comfort in a Lutheran state. Nonetheless, he faced several challenges. The duke’s organist despised him, and his students and colleagues complained he was too demanding. He struck back, saying the cornettists blew their instruments like cowhorns and drank too much. His marriage began to fail and he begged the duke for intervention. Exhausted, he succumbed at age 37, leaving behind an impressive legacy of seven publications of sacred music, three more that would appear posthumously, three collections of madrigals and other secular vocal music, and three collections of instrumental pieces.
Adesto multitude is a Nativity hymn that first appeared in Capricornus’ collection Theatri musici seu sacrarum cantoionum, part 2, published at Würzburg in 1669. It was copied by Gustaf Düben a few years later, the source for today’s performance, and the copy may have slightly altered the text, for the Latin is particularly stilted and hard to interpret. Adesto is a buoyant work with four main sections of contrasting meter. The text is declarative, with the exception of brief melismata on the word plaudite (praise) so that the joyous message of the text is easily understood.
Thuringian violist da gamba Adam Drese was the scion of a family of musicians. He studied with Marco Scacchi in Warsaw and Heinrich Schütz at Dresden and worked at Weimar, where he introduced Italian regional musical dialects to the ducal court. In 1663 Drese moved to Jena to serve as Kapellmeister and private secretary to the duke, and a final move to Arnstadt in 1678 brought him in close contact with the Bach family. There he became a devotee of Pietism, a particularly ascetic Lutheran movement that caused him social scorn towards the end of his life. Written prior to his conversion, Sonata a 3 is in the flamboyant Italianate style laden with Germanic rhetorical discourse between the violin and viola da gamba. The middle section is an ostinato in 6/4 which, like the Bertali ostinato, is enhanced by varying modal inflections.
Christoph Bernhard studied music in Danzig and in Warsaw with Marco Scacchi. In 1648 he was hired as an alto at the electoral court in Dresden and worked under Schütz. The following year he travelled with the Elector’s retinue to sing at a ducal wedding at Gottorf and remained in Denmark to study for another year. In 1655 he became vice-Kapellmeister at Dresden, where in the following year the new duke invited several Italian musicians and then sent Bernhard on two trips to Italy for additional training. Bernhard moved to Hamburg in 1663 to become director of civic and church music. He returned to Dresden to teach the grandsons of Johann Georg II and remained there until his death. He was celebrated as a singer, composer, and music theorist, whose treatises are invaluable to the study of 17th-century musical theory and rhetoric. Schütz honored him by requesting he compose a motet for his funeral.
Fürchtet euch nicht is a setting of Luke 2:1011, perhaps the most famous Nativity text of all. The original scoring was soprano, two violins, and bassoon (or dulcian), which we have adjusted for recorders and viola da gamba. It opens with a stately triple-meter ritornello, and then the instruments support the voice. Indeed, the ritornellos add drama to an otherwise straightforward work. A recitative-like duple meter adagio proclaims the impending birth of the Savior. The Alleluia is particularly Italianate and flamboyant.
We conclude today with a motet of the Thuringia composer Crato Bütner. Bütner worked mostly in Danzig, an area ruled in a personal union with Margrave of Brandenburg but outside the Holy Roman Empire. Bütner was highly influential as a composer and music director. Laudate Pueri, a setting of Psalm 112 (Vulgate), is conserved in the Düben collection. It is joyous and virtuosic, and displays the refined elegance of an experienced composer, combining syllabic text with well-placed melismata on key words, incorporating elements of the styues phantasticus with Germanic organization and mid-17th-century harmonic development.
— Lewis R. Baratz © 2019