The terz-guitar and its repertoire
The terz-guitar, an instrument akin to the standard guitar yet endowed with a higher tessitura, was invented and reached its early splendour in the first decades of the nineteenth century, an age in which the guitar as we commonly conceive it had only just consolidated its morphology of six single strings and was witnessing the emergence of a new original literature. Guitarist-composers engaging in the creation of new music for the instrument felt the need, especially in chamber settings, for a guitar capable of occupying the upper register more readily than the conventional model. This was no bold experiment: on the contrary, it was a natural development, for organological families had for centuries included, within their ranks, instruments similar in construction and operation but designed to play in bass, tenor, or soprano registers according to circumstance.
The terz-guitar is thus a soprano voice – the natural, higher counterpart of the traditional guitar – and takes its name from sounding a minor third above a standard instrument (which, in turn, may imitate its sonority by raising the tuning with a movable capo). By virtue of its tessitura, the terz-guitar is modest in size and bears a distinctive sonic identity: its extension into the high and upper registers, together with the higher tension of its strings, grants a tone not particularly full-bodied yet decidedly bright, chaste and crystalline. This timbre marries felicitously with that of the traditional guitar, whose more ample lower range places it naturally in the tenor register.
It is therefore not surprising that, although its repertoire includes several notable solo works, the terz-guitar should find its ideal home in the duo with the standard guitar: this music album is a florilegium of pieces dedicated to this very ensemble. The composers represented here were active in Northern Italy and in the central territories of the then Austro-Hungarian Empire, regions in which the terz-guitar, or a standard guitar equipped with a capo at the third fret, enjoyed particular favour, especially in ensemble practice.
It is no coincidence that the programme opens with a tutelary figure of the guitar’s literature, the Italian Mauro Giuliani (1781–1829), who found in Vienna his consecration as a wondrous virtuoso and composer for the instrument. Giuliani employed the terz-guitar on several occasions in ensemble contexts: besides the collections and individual works in which it appears alongside the traditional guitar – including a spectacular transcription of the overture to Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito – he went so far as to dedicate to it two ambitious works still seldom performed today: the Variations on “Nume perdonami…” Op. 102 for terz-guitar and string quartet, and the Concerto Op. 70 for terz-guitar and orchestra.
The Three Concertante Rondos Op. 66, dated 1815, offer a glimpse of that radiant freshness – poised between bel-canto agility and Biedermeier affability – that is the hallmark of the Bisceglie-born composer. Varied is the expressive arc of this cycle, graced with brilliant writing in which Giuliani resists the temptation to assign the terz-guitar the role of unchallenged soloist, instead shaping a genuinely concertante dialogue between the two instruments. By invoking the title Rondo, the composer naturally draws on the related form, in which a principal theme A alternates with others in the familiar sequence A–B–A–C–A… The first Rondo, an Allegretto set in motion by the courteous sway of an Alberti-bass figure, is followed by a movement titled Grazioso, in which moments of exuberant agility give way, from time to time, to a kindly seriousness, never truly stern and tinged with an impalpable irony. The third piece, again an Allegretto, bears from its super-acute opening gesture the imprint of a theatrical and piquant Rossinian reminiscence, a nod to one of Giuliani’s most steadfast stylistic lodestars.
The name of the Milanese Antonio Maria Nava (1776–1826), represented here by the Three Divertimenti Op. 52 (1821), has yet to attain the resonance it deserves. His writing exploits the guitar’s resources with sure craftsmanship and, though less innovative for its era than Giuliani’s, is nonetheless infused with evocative orchestral gestures, an effect certain to impress the bourgeois amateurs who at the time formed the essential foundation of the guitar’s success.
The first Divertimento, in a single movement, unfolds in the manner of an Andante maestoso, cast in a sonata-like form with very brief transitions between its themes – the first stentorian in character, the second more lyrical and composed – and their respective expositions. More elaborate is the second Divertimento, opening with an Allegretto maestoso likewise grounded in a stark contrast between a solemn theme and one of more intimate lyricism; here one glimpses an effective evocation of horn sonorities, reaffirming the orchestral lineage of its gestures. A sunny, untroubled Allegretto rondo follows. The third Divertimento alone begins with an Andante cantabile, whose character alternates between a serene first theme and a darker second according to an A–B–A design; once more, an Allegretto in rondo form brings matters to a cheerfully unequivocal close.
The album concludes with music composed only a few years after that of Giuliani and Nava yet marked by an entirely different temperament. The gentle, playful serenity that permeates the works of the two Italian composers – evoking, by turns, Hummel, Rossini and Haydn – fades here into the imaginative, shaded atmospheres that inhabit the writing of Caspar Joseph Mertz (1800–1856).
Of Slovak origins and a formidable guitar virtuoso, Mertz was profoundly influenced both by contemporary piano literature and by an imaginative world steeped in the spirit of Romanticism. Proof lies in the fact that, alongside fantasies on opera airs, virtuosic showpieces and collections of salon pieces, he composed Bardenklänge, a cycle for solo guitar inspired in various places by James MacPherson’s Poems of Ossian, whose influence shaped literary taste from the late eighteenth century for at least three generations.
That Mertz was familiar with the world of the terz-guitar is suggested by evidence – brought to light by scholar Graziano Salvoni – that he owned a ten-string terz-model. Beyond its unusual pairing with piano, the terz-guitar appears several times in Mertz’s works for duo with the traditional guitar. The four pieces included in this album were published in St Petersburg and issued under Opus 38, a number which, though present in the printed edition, does not correspond to the authoritative catalogue prepared by Salvoni.
Deutsche Weise presents a melody of bucolic, folk-like innocence, each reprise framed within a different stylistic guise: among the “backgrounds” Mertz sets behind the theme are iconic evocations of bells (a scene of village life, perhaps?) and a grandiose chorale-style reharmonisation. Barcarole is a nocturnal tableau of poignant intensity: Mertz deploys harmonics and repeated notes to evoke the trembling of the waves and the moonlit gleams scattered across the water, an evocation closer, perhaps, to the pianistic world of John Field than to Chopin’s. A meditative pendant to the Barcarole is the rhapsodic Impromptu, whose title, as well as its pathetic lyricism and certain harmonic turns, point directly to Franz Schubert, a pillar of Viennese musical culture whom Mertz demonstrably knew in depth. Deutsche Weise, Barcarole and Impromptu wind the spring that releases itself in Der Ball, a dazzling ballroom scene ignited by a flaming octave flourish and replete with a polonaise and a waltz of Verdian flavour, all framed by passages of sweeping orchestral breadth.
Despite the differing stylistic inclinations of the individual composers, the pieces collected here convey human sentiment with immediacy and grace, free from excess and from virtuosity pursued for its own sake. Animating this theatrical tableau is a constant dialogic tension made possible—not merely by the rapport between performers but—by the writing itself, which continuously exchanges the roles of soloist and accompanist.
The duo for terz-guitar and traditional guitar bears witness to a musical culture that did not recognise itself solely in transcendental virtuosity, but cherished the simple, natural expression of the affections, enjoying them in the intimate setting of the salon as well as within the associative forms typical of bourgeois society. It is a world far removed from the muscular poses of much twentieth-century guitar literature; the literature through which the wider public first came to regard the guitar as a fully-fledged solo instrument. Yet despite this distance – or perhaps, paradoxically, precisely because of it – the music on this album stands forth fully in its own identity, ready to move us today with elegance, poise and measure.
Leonardo De Marchi
(Venice–Rimini, 3–6 December 2025)
Translation by Luca Soattin and Megan Katie McKie