(The following is the first part of a two-part treatise. The second part will appear in the winter issue of The Double Reed. Ed.)
Introduction
Vivaldi
About the writer
In its two year history, the Miller-Skinner Bassoon Symposium, held each summer on the campus of Towson State University near Baltimore, Maryland, has been able to bring to its participants new insights into all phases of the bassoonist's art.
The 1985 edition, in addition to John Miller's master classes and Lou Skinner's reed-making sessions, focused on ornamentation, especially in the works of Vivaldi and Mozart. John Miller's own interest in the subject led him to contact Frederick Neumann, Professor of Music Emeritus at the University of Richmond, and the author of Ornamentation in Baroque and Post-Baroque Music, an exhaustive study of ornamentation in the 17th and 18th centuries, and invited him to lecture at the symposium.
Professor Neumann studied ten Vivaldi bassoon concertos and the Mozart Concerto in B-flat (K. 191) and Sonata (K. 292). His insights into the ornamentation in these works should be of interest to musicians everywhere who would want to perform works of these composers in an authentic manner.
Professor Neumann has kindly agreed to permit the publication of the text and examples from his lecture.
Musical ornamentation has been with us from time immemorial. It is only one among many manifestations of an urge to embellish which must respond to a basic human need, since we find it in a wide variety of pursuits in all cultures and all periods. There is ornamentation in the figurative arts, in architecture, in fashion, in jewelry, in make-up, in hair-do, in landscaping, even in rhetoric, and of course in the decorative arts, which are totally dedicated to embellishing the environment. I mention these facts not as an ornamental prelude, but to explain the vast role that ornamentation plays in music of all times.
The extent of this role is not generally recognized. When we speak of musical ornamentation we think of the 17th and 18th centuries, of strange symbols and little notes, and maybe of cadenzas. The reason for this limited view resides in changed habits of notation and performance conventions that obscure the still considerable role of ornamentation in the 19th and 20th centuries. Symbols gradually vanished and the role of improvisation, except in jazz, was suppressed. Because of these changes, ornamentation is more of a performance problem in the music of the 17th and 18th centuries, where symbols are often ambiguous and the role of improvisation uncertain, than in later years when composers exerted more control over the performer.
During this period of the baroque and classical styles, we have to distinguish ornaments that are fully written out in regular notes, those that are indicated by symbols, be they abstract signs or little unmetrical notes, and those that do not appear in the score but are expected to be improvised by the performer.
Those that are written out in regular notes solve the hardest problem, that of design, but they still challenge us to recognize their ornamental nature and to render them therefore with a certain amount of rhythmic freedom that reflects the improvisatory origin of musical embellishments.
In the second category, the symbol -indicated ornaments, we face the problem of their proper interpretation.
The third and hardest category confronts us with the need first to diagnose where ornamental additions are needed, desirable, or optional, and then to invent their proper design.
All three categories are applicable to both Vivaldi and Mozart but in a different manner as might be expected from their different nationalities, different styles, and different dates: Vivaldi (1675-1741) died almost fifteen years before Mozart (1756-1791) was born.
Vivaldi
I shall turn first to problems
of ornamentation in Vivaldi's music with special regard to the
bassoon and start with ornaments that are not indicated in the
score.
The Italian masters in Vivaldi's time played their slow movements in an ornate style, with florid embellishments. Generally, they did not specify these passaggi, as the ornamented figurations were called. They wrote down only the structural keynotes of the melody and expected the performer to flesh out the skeleton with ornamental designs. Some masters, Vivaldi among them, were inconsistent about the way they handled the passaggi. Sometimes they wrote out the desired embellishments in full, although on other occasions they resorted to the skeletal notation.
Then we find works that occupy a middle ground: the ornamentation is sketched in but not fully executed. Here it is usually advisable to add a few more decorations to those indicated. A rule of thumb to apply here would be that a slow movement whose fastest notes are eighths with only occasional sixteenths is skeletal and needs to be embellished; a movement that contains many passages in thirty-second notes is likely to be fully ornamented; one whose fastest notes are sixteenths might not need but will often be receptive to some additional animation with thirty-seconds.
Bassoonists are lucky since the adagios of their concertos seem to be sufficiently ornamented in the score, lightening our problem of interpretation. It means that generally no additional embellishment is needed, but it does not mean that occasionally some such additions are not acceptable or even desirable, as can be the case when the orchestral accompaniment is static and the solo part becomes "sleepy." In Figure 1B from the Concerto in d, the lively figures of the violins provide enough interest to justify the slow-moving phrase of the bassoon. Yet if a player felt the need for more animation he could not be faulted if he were to add some embellishment, maybe of the kind shown in Figure 1C. Generally, it is wiser to use discretion and err on the side of too little than too much: if a melody is beautiful, it can stand on its own even unadorned, whereas an excess of ornament can make it impossible to recognize the melody's shape through the thicket of luxuriant overgrowth.
It is important to identify the ornamental character of written out passage work in fast notes because such character has implications for rhythm and tempo. A musical passage which is ornamental should be rendered with the lightness and elegance that befits its surface character of a decoration. It should not be rendered with heaviness and slowness as if it were the melody proper where each of its notes calls for expressiveness. Such interpretation is wrongly focused on the single trees instead of on the forest. To get the right focus, it is helpful to search for the melodic core under the decorative cloak, then add the written passage as if it were a free improvisation.
Consider Figure 2A from Concerto in B-flat. Its melodic core may be something like Figure 2B or any of many similar solutions. When we then add the written notes of the passage we realize that its notated rhythm is not of the thematic essence, but can and ought to be flexibly treated in a way that notation cannot indicate. Here, I think, it is unnecessary to make a clear contrast between the thirtysecond and sixty-fourth notes, but treat them as ten roughly equivalent notes that start slowly and then get slightly faster. When taking such rhythmic rubato freedoms we have to be alert to a possibly desired exact rhythm co-ordination with another voice in the ensemble. However, for ornamental passages this will only rarely be the case.
Regarding tempo, the suggested dismantling of the ornamental passages will alone mostly suggest a more flowing pace than we might otherwise be inclined to take. Generally I would caution against taking slow movements in Vivaldi and other masters of the period too slowly. As far as I could ascertain, a subdividing of the beat was not practiced in the 17th and 18th centuries and may not have been used until the early 19th century. An adagio in C meter has to be conceived as being in four, not in eight slow beats.
By and large, the problem of improvised passaggi, or coloraturas, is limited to the slow movements. But because of the easygoing ways of the Italians with embellishments in general, we should feel free to add occasional passage work even in fast movements where the accompaniment is without melodic interest and the solo part appears lean.
"Small" ornaments such as appoggiaturas, grace notes, slides, mordents, and trills, can be added anywhere where they seem to fit without creating fussiness or overcharging a line.
Let us turn now to those of the small ornaments that are indicated by symbol. Because of the just mentioned laxness of the Italians with unmarked additions of small as well as extended ornaments, they were slow in adopting symbols other than those for the trill. The French, who liked to curb the Italian-type freedom of improvisatory additions, had pioneered the use of symbols for the small ornaments. These little notes were without metrical value and were to be played between the regular notes, taking their value from either the preceding or the following notes. The Italians adopted their use some 30-40 years after the French. Vivaldi himself was slow in adopting them. They are absent from his early concertos and make their appearance in operas and concertos of the mid-1720s. Since the bassoon concertos I have seen all make use of the little unmetrical notes, I would assume that they date at least from the time after circa 1725.
According to the New Grove Dictionary of Music, Vivaldi wrote some thirty-nine bassoon concertos, including two that are incomplete and four whose thematic materials and accompaniment are shared with concertos for other instruments. If I may extrapolate from the roughly ten I have examined, the only small ornaments we need to be concerned about are the trill, the Vorschlag (i.e., either the appoggiatura or the grace note), and the slide.
First let us consider the trill. We must rid ourselves of the widespread belief that each trill is to start with the upper auxiliary on the beat. This principle does not apply to the Italian trill, which, as a rule, started with the main note. In Figures 3A and 3B from the Concerto in a, nothing else makes sense: in Figure 3A, the descending scale has to land on A, the written note of the trill; in Figure 3B the same melodic logic demands the trill's start on F to complete the triadic figuration. Similarly, the trill chains of Figure 3C from the same concerto call for main note start to bring out, rather than obscure, the ascending scale.
As always, there are exceptions. The Italians were fond of the appoggiatura, and, notably at cadences, they often liked to precede a trill with an appoggiatura. See for an illustration Figure 4A from the Concerto in C or 4B from the Concerto in a.
Every so often we find a trill is preceded by a little note on the upper auxiliary indicating the trill's start on the latter. It is not necessarily played on the beat and, indeed, is often played before the beat. We find this notation mainly on a trill that follows the leap of an augmented or diminished interval where the auxiliary smoothens the melodic line. See Figures 5A and 5B.
There are other cases of little notes before trills, not involving such leaps, which indicated that the trill was to start on the upper auxiliary, since this practice was otherwise not understood in Vivaldi's time. I have the strong feeling that these little notes preceding trills were, as a rule, meant to be short and either before or on the beat according to the given situation. I don't believe that they ever indicate a long appoggiatura like those of Figure 4A or 4B above since we don't seem to find them in front of cadential trills.
On the other hand, for trills that are not preceded by the little note and are not cadential trills, the first choice should be the start with the main note.
Turning now to the appoggiaturas and grace notes, Vivaldi uses exclusively the sign of a little eighth note and never varies its denomination. Rules of a later period such as those of Giuseppe Tartini (1692-1770) that an appoggiatura indicated by a small note-symbol takes one half of a binary and two thirds of a dotted note do not seem to apply to Vivaldi.
For Vivaldi, and more specifically for the bassoon works, it seems that the little note always stands for a short note that might fall either before (grace note) or on the beat (appoggiatura). Although it is written as an eighth note, this grace note is seldom played that length, let alone a longer value. Such meaning is clear in Figure 6 from the Concerto in e, where the juxtaposition, many times consistently repeated, of Vivaldi's symbols and written-out Lombard rhythms, admits only the grace-note (i.e., anticipated) meaning of the symbols. Such meaning is also obvious in the formula
which I have called the "Italian mordent," found in the same concerto, or in the related phrase of Figure 7 from the Concerto in d.
Other tierces coulées, the filling
in of descending thirds, like those of Figure
6, are also most likely candidates for grace note use such as
Figure 8A from the Concerto in F, or 8B from the Concerto
in d.
The frequent grace note meaning of the symbol is certain.
It is really possible that this was the basic meaning for Vivaldi
since there is no musical evidence that would contradict such
a meaning. Considering the latitude conceded to the performer,
it is, however, probable that short downbeat rendition is often
equally justified. If both styles are legitimate transcriptions
for the symbol, we can often achieve attractive results by mixing
them. Figure 9A from the Concerto in F might be done as
in Figure 9B.
In Figure 10 from the same concerto, I would recommend grace notes throughout. We must not be misled by the figure at the start of each measure which, in the time of Haydn and Mozart, became a formula that was routinely resolved into four equal notes. In the mid 18th century when the formula first emerged, the four notes were not yet equalized, but the first note was played shorter. In Vivaldi, it is no formula yet, but a chance occurrence. I am as certain as one can be in these matters that the Mozart solution is not fitting here, and that a grace note treatment should be the first choice.
An interpretation using the small note on the down beat will probably be more likely to be fitting when the grace repeats the preceding pitch. In Figure I I from Concerto in E-flat, a short appoggiatura treatment would seem in order. In Figure 12 from the Concerto in d, either a grace note or a brief, but unaccented, appoggiatura would make sense. Incidentally, when a brief appoggiatura is unaccented, the difference between it and a grace note will often blur.
To sum up, the single little note in Vivaldi, in general, is short, either as a grace note or as a short appoggiatura. Long appoggiaturas occur, of course, but are either written out in regular notes, or, as in cadential trills, not indicated and left to the discretion of the performer.
About
the writer...
FREDERICK NEUMANN is Professor Emeritus of Music at the University
of Richmond. He began his studies in politics and economics in
Germany and, after World war 11, emigrated to the United States
where he studied music and music education at Columbia, earning
a PhD in 1952. A violinist, Professor Neumann studied extensively
in Europe and from 1957-1964 was the concertmaster of the Richmond
Symphony Orchestra. Professor Neumann is well known for his research
on violin technique and performance practice in Baroque music.
His books include Ornamentation in Baroque and Post-Baroque
Music, and Essays in Performance Practice. A new book,
Ornamentation and Improvisation in Mozart is due to be
published in early 1986.
DAVID ROSS is a bassoonist in the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra and a member of the music faculty at Syracuse University where he directs early music activities.