Baroque Flowers – Floreal Dialogues of Affetti in 17th- and 18th-Century Music

Composer(s)

(b Paris, 1672; d Mantes, 28 June 1745). Son of Michel Forqueray (1650–1714/5), a violinist and dancing-master who settled in Paris in 1670. The Mercure galant of April 1682 records that at an early age Forqueray

had the honour … of playing the basse de violon before the king, making His Majesty so pleased that he commanded that someone should teach [Forqueray] to play the bass viol … he profited so much from the lessons that … there are few who equal him.

According to his obituarist, he remained at court for five or six years and was educated with the court pages. At least six viol players were employed at court, including Marin Marais, but several sources state that he was taught only by his father, and d’Aquin noted that he was never a pupil of Marais. Forqueray often entertained the king during mealtimes and was called upon to play for foreign ambassadors. At the end of the 1689 he became ordinaire de la chambre du roi. La Borde recorded that by the age of 20 he was ‘the most accomplished viol player of his time’. He also built up a reputation as a teacher; the Duke of Orléans (the future regent) and his son Louis, the exiled Duke of Bavaria and the Duke of Burgundy were among his pupils.

In 1697 he married Henriette-Angélique Houssu, daughter of an organist and herself a harpsichordist. They lived for a time at the residence of the Prince of Carignan, where (3) Jean-Baptiste Forqueray was born. Antoine gave concerts with his wife, but the marriage was unsuccessful: his wife left him five times, describing her husband as hot-headed. They separated in 1710, after which Antoine lived in high style, neglecting his impoverished family until ordered to provide for them. In 1731 he retired to Mantes. There was some reconciliation with his family, although he altered his will several times to exclude his son: he evetually left him 20,000 livres and some valuable viols, although the bulk of his estate went to his surviving daughter.

Contemporary writings reveal Forqueray as a player of exceptional virtuosity, keenly interested in the latest developments from Italy. The Mercure de France (August 1738) describes how ‘he wished to do on the viol everything that they [the Italian violinists] could do on the violin’. The report continues that he succeeded in his ambition, translating their technical acrobatics into passage-work for the viol ‘with startling accuracy’; this made his music ‘more piquant and more recherché’ than that of Marais. Above all Forqueray possessed a brilliant gift for improvisation; his obituarist testifies to his ‘lively and fertile imagination’ and Le Blanc recalls he would ‘affect to be whimsical, fantastic and bizarre’. The regent showed his appreciation of Forqueray’s extraordinary talents by presenting him with lavish gifts that included covering him for a debt of 100,000 livres from speculation in the Mississippi company. Although Forqueray’s obituarist refers to ‘about 300 pieces’ surviving by him, apart from the book of pièces de viole published as his, by his son, in 1747 (see below), only five pièces de viole (four in F-Pn Vm7 6296), two transcriptions by Visée for theorbo (B 279152), a handful of dance melodies and a manuscript for three viols ascribed to ‘Forcroy’ (in Lm) are known. These pieces are limited in harmonic vocabulary but demonstrate a love of virtuosity and a delight in the use of high registers.

Benedetto Marcello: (b Venice, 24 June or 24 July 1686; d Brescia, 24 July 1739). Italian composer and writer. The son of a Venetian nobleman, he followed the career path of all Venetian nobles of his time: he was admitted to the Maggior Consiglio of the Republic on 4 December 1706 and, after completing studies in literature and law, served in various magistracies over the next two decades. The last decade of his life is riddled with mysteries: he married the commoner Rosanna Scalfi, his singing pupil, in May 1728; had a religious experience in August of the same year; was exiled to the Istrian city of Pula (then part of the Venetian Republic) for three years (1730–33) as provincial governor; was absent from civic records for the next five years; and received his final appointment in Brescia as chief financial officer.

It is not easy to segment the musical continuum of Marcello’s life, since he held no regular appointments of a musical nature and the majority of his musical works are undated. This demonstrates how severely separated in social experience dilettante composers were from the common ranks of musical maestri. Nonetheless, Marcello’s cultivated intellect exerted, particularly through his psalm settings and cantatas, a major influence on Italian musical thought and performance throughout the 18th century and, to various degrees, on the musical practices of many other European countries until the end of the 19th century. After a perfunctory involvement with instrumental music, his main interests as a composer, particularly between 1710 and 1720, were the cantata and the chamber duet. Thereafter, his attention turned to works on a larger scale: the 50 Psalms of David, the serenata and the oratorio. The claim that Marcello forwent composition after 1728 cannot be entirely true since two of his oratorios neatly circumscribed his years in Pula.

Marcello’s intent in his Salmi, which were published with etchings by Sebastiano Ricci, was to restore dignity to devotional music by reviving musical practices of antiquity (seeillustration). They are set in texturally differentiated sections and are for the most part through-composed. Numerous testimonials (by Gasparini, Antonio and Giovanni Bononcini, Sarri, Mattheson and Telemann) were included in each of the eight volumes. Caldara, who found the music ‘eccentric’, was one of Marcello’s few detractors. Later Italians, in particular Padre Martini and Giovenale Sacchi, revered Marcello’s Salmias models of contrapuntal writing. Still more accomplished examples are the six-voice canon In omnem terram, published with the psalms, and the four-voice Missa Clementina, which Marcello composed for his admission to the Accademia Filarmonica, Bologna, in 1711. Being impressed with the fact that women were not permitted to sing in the ancient temple, Marcello favoured low, mainly male, voices in his psalms. Some 16 of the works incorporate sections based on quotations from Greek and Hebrew psalmody; the original sources are interpolated at the appropriate points. Like his secular vocal music of the 1720s, which is inspired by Roman and Greek epics, the melodic content varies from an ambitus which is very restricted to one which is almost impossibly broad, expressing emotional peaks and depths.

In the 1710s, when Marcello was coaching the young Faustina Bordoni and writing music for Roman nobles, such as the Borghese family, he led, in parallel with Apostolo Zeno’s attempted reform of the opera libretto, a movement to reform singing style. Here his goal was to remove ‘tasteless’ ornamentation and to focus more on actual sound. In this phase of his life, his vocal music was much more lyrical and formally structured. Several of his chamber duets were composed for Laura and Virginia Predieri. The vast majority of his lyrical cantatas seem to have been written for performances at weekly academies (social gatherings of the nobility that featured poetry, music, oratory and debate). The texts, many of which were written by the composer, were usually pastoral. Mattheson praised the rhetorical detail of Marcello’s approach to the setting of (lyrical) aria texts. More original are Marcello’s intensely dramatic cantatas on tragic and heroic subjects from antiquity, which feature such figures as Andromeda, Arianna, Cleopatra, Dido, Medea and Timothy (probably mediated through the dramas of Corneille and Racine). Some of these works lack arias: others use abberations of musical notation to express a heroine’s (or hero’s) mental frenzy or anguish. Although the subject matter is again usually from antiquity, Marcello’s serenatas are somewhat more conventional and use obbligato instruments and instrumental figuration to reinforce images and to convey elements of the drama.

The lighter side of Marcello’s nature was expressed in his several satires. Of prime importance among these is the treatise Il teatro alla moda, first published anonymously in 1720, which is concerned especially with the decline of careful composition and well-rehearsed performance, as well as the invasion of Bolognese singers, at the Teatro S Angelo, Venice. It was especially popular in Italy in the 18th century, in France in the 19th, and in Germany in the early 20th, and it appears never to have been out of print from the time of its writing to the present. Comic musical works include the letter cantata Carissima figlia (1718), in which the singing styles of such opera figures as Vittoria Tesi, Faustina Bordoni and Gaetano Berenstadt are imitated; the castrato madrigals, in which it is debated whether the divinity of the singing of (adult) male sopranos and altos can save them from eternal damnation (1715); and the comic intermezzos Spago e Filetta (?1719). Although Marcello’s two late oratorios are not satirical works, a playful mood prevails.

The impetus for the keyboard and recorder sonatas is likely to have come from academies. While the Marcello family had one of its own on the Fondamenta Nuove in Venice, Benedetto seems to have maintained a network of contacts in Rome, Florence, Bologna and various rural retreats in the Veneto. Only the motivation for composing the Concerti op.1, remains unaccounted for. These works now lack the principal violin part and so accurate evaluation is impossible. Within this opus was the one piece by Marcello known to, and transcribed by, Bach. Of Marcello’s keyboard works, the sonatas are the most important, for they seem to have played a role in the establishment of the genre as it was later developed by Platti, Pescetti, Galuppi and J.C. Bach. His cello sonatas, which are among his most widely performed works today, were probably composed much earlier than their date of publication suggests and, in fact, their authenticity is not beyond question.

Marcello’s legacy was greatest for those who lived between 1750 and 1875, when recognition of his Salmi led to their translation into many other languages (French, German, Swedish, English, Russian) and their performance, as liturgically generic sacred works, in a host of different liturgical contexts. It was during this period that a great number of the manuscripts in which Marcello’s secular works are now preserved seem to have been copied. In the 19th century the Salmi were sometimes divided into short ‘motets’ or ‘songs’, or stripped of their texts and offered as instrumental works, or retexted and offered as ‘new’ works. Such varieties of psalm progeny seem to number well beyond 10,000 (arrangers included Paer, Mayr, Rossini and Bizet; Verdi was a great enthusiast). Another work of the same period, the oratorio Joaz, is reckoned to have anticipated the reforms of Gluck many years later. Marcello’s call to restore the classical virtue of ‘noble simplicity’ in music, found in the preface to his Salmi, anticipates the analogous invitation of the German archaeologist Winkelmann (who spoke of sculpture) by 30 years. Although little noted today, Marcello’s role in formulating the values of classicism and promoting their musical implementation was his most significant contribution to cultural history. His influence was enormously, if subtly, pervasive.

Differing national values coloured perceptions of Marcello’s music: the English revered its ‘harmony’, the Germans its ‘melody’ and the Italians its ‘counterpoint’. It was only in the 20th century that Marcello’s name started to fall from grace in lists of important composers in the past. Even as this change occurred, however, the influence of his Salmi was regenerated in ethnomusicology: the materials Marcello quoted from Judaic and Hellenic traditions in the 1720s are frequently requoted (often without attribution) in studies of ancient and oriental music. He undoubtedly would have been amused by the reflexive nature of the esteem that accrued to his work after his death.

Giovanni Girolamo Kapsperger (b ?Venice, c1580; d Rome, Jan 1651). Italian composer, lutenist, theorbist and guitarist of German descent. (He seems to have used the spelling ‘Kapsperger’ rather than the ‘Kapsberger’ favoured by German scholars.) His father, Colonel Guglielmo Kapsperger, was a noble military official with the Imperial House of Austria and may have settled in Venice. Kapsperger was in Rome soon after 1605, where through his reputation as a virtuoso and his status as a nobile alemano he moved in the circles of powerful families such as the Bentivoglio and the Barberini. Other supporters in Rome included the Orders of S Stefano and S Giovanni and the academies of the Umoristi and the Imperfetti whose members arranged for the publication of his works; the academies Kapsperger organized in his house were described as among the ‘wonders of Rome’. Around 1609 he married the Neapolitan Gerolima di Rossi, by whom he had at least three children. In 1612 his Maggio Cantata, dedicated to the Grand duchess Maria Maddalena, was performed in Florence at the Palazzo Pitti.

In 1622 his Apotheosis, on Jesuit themes, was performed at the Collegio Romano on the canonizations of the first two Jesuit saints, Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier; the most elaborate musical production in Rome before the Barberini operas, it marked the period of Kapsperger's deepening relationship with the papal circle. In 1624 his settings of verses by the newly-elected Pope Urban VIII Barberini were published as Poematia et carmina, which G.B. Doni forwarded enthusiastically to Mersenne. In the same year Kapsperger entered the service of Urban's nephew, Cardinal Francesco Barberini, where for 30 years he worked alongside Frescobaldi, Luigi Rossi, Domenico Mazzocchi, Stefano Landi and Doni, and collaborated with the poets Ottavio Tronsarelli, Giovanni Ciampoli and Giulio Rospigliosi (the future Pope Clement IX). His son Filippo Bonifacio also joined Francesco's household. Doni wrote that Kapsperger's music was often sung ‘in the chamber of His Holiness’ and in 1626 and 1627 his masses were performed in the Cappella Sistina at Urban's request. Later, Doni denounced Kapsperger for attempting to replace Palestrina's music with his own at the Sistine Chapel, an allegation uncritically accepted by Hawkins and Ambros (and effectively contaminating Kapsperger's later reputation); Baini, however, remained sceptical of Doni's story and no such incident is documented, although other contemporary accounts describe him as an extraordinary talent but opportunistic, unco-operative and vainglorious. Kapsperger continued as a salaried member of Francesco's household until the death of Urban in 1644 and the dissolution of Francesco's establishment in 1646. Curiously, only two of his works were printed after 1633, when Allacci published an inventory of Kapsperger's music that included the titles of many additional collections that he was preparing for publication. Kapsperger died in 1651 and was buried in the church of St Blaise outside Rome.

Joseph Bodin de Boismortier: (b Thionville, 23 Dec 1689; d Roissy-en-Brie, 28 Oct 1755). French composer. He spent his childhood in Thionville, and went to Metz about 1700. In 1713 he was receveur de la régie royale des tabacsfor the Roussillon troops at Perpignan. On 7 November 1720 he married Marie Valette, the daughter of the city treasurer Guillaume Valette. He remained in Perpignan until about 1723, when he settled in Paris. In September 1724 he took out a royal privilege to engrave his works and began the process of publishing them, which ceased only on his death. From 1743 to 1745 he was sous-chef and then chef d’orchestre at the Foire St Laurent, and also, in 1745, at the Foire St Germain. He was a prolific composer of very profitable works, which according to the Mercure de France (October 1747) brought him over 500,000 écus, enabling him to live a life of fame and luxury without holding any official post. His Christmas motet Fugit nox (now lost), on themes from noëls, was popular at the Concert Spirituel from 1743 to 1770, with L.-C. Daquin and C.-B. Balbastre at the organ. His pastorale Daphnis et Chloé, to a libretto by Pierre Laujon, was well received when it was performed at the Opéra in September 1747, and was even parodied at the Comédie-Italienne under the title of Les bergers de qualité when it was revived on 4 May 1752. After his death his daughter continued to sell his available works, and also published several more.

Boismortier wrote a great deal of music. Many of his compositions, intended for amateur ensembles, require only average technical skill and envisage various possible combinations of instruments, as witness the Sonates pour une flûte et un violon par accords sans basse op.51 and the sonatas for two bassoons and four flutes. He also composed for such fashionable instruments of the time as the musette, hurdy-gurdy and transverse flute. This last was his favourite instrument, and he considerably extended its repertory. In his instrumental pieces he devoted equal attention to the various parts, which can consist simply of a series of imitations; in his earliest sonatas for keyboard and flute, op.91 (c1741–2), the two instruments are complementary, whereas it was usual in such works at the time for the harpsichord to dominate. Boismortier adopted the three-movement form favoured by Italian composers. He wrote concertos for many different instruments. Some, such as his VI concertos pour cinq flûtes traversières ou autres instruments sans basse op.15 (1727), are for unusual ensembles. These are not so much solo concertos as works in the French style of François Couperin’s Concerts royaux (1722) and Rameau’s Pièces de clavecin en concert (1741).

Boismortier’s cantatas and motets skilfully mingle French and Italian elements, with ternary form dominating in the airs. The rather lightweight anonymous texts of his cantatas are typical of the period. He was most at ease in short forms, and after 1738 followed fashion by abandoning the cantata in favour of the cantatille. His agreeable melodies were designed to please the taste of his audience, and the virtuoso vocal writing in his motets is strongly influenced by the Italian style. In his stage works he collaborated with the great librettists of the period: Charles-Antoine Le Clerc de La Bruère (who also wrote the libretto of Rameau’s Dardanus), Pierre Laujon and Charles-Simon Favart. He composed to suit the taste of the time, as in his ballet-comique on a fashionable theme, Don Quichotte chez la duchesse, in which the music does not attempt any local Japanese colour but consists of lively, facile melodies.

Boismortier’s pedagogical works (tutors for the flute and the descant viol) are apparently lost, but the fact that he wrote them is evidence of a didactic concern also shown in such instrumental works as his Diverses pièces pour une flûte traversière seule … propres pour ceux qui commencent à jouer de cet instrument op.22 (1728), and his Quinque sur l’octave, ou Dictionnaire harmonique (1734).

Boismortier’s music demonstrates great facility, and one regrets that he wrote so few works on a large scale. It is difficult not to agree with La Borde, who said: ‘He will always be regarded by professionals as a good harmonist … anyone who will take the trouble to excavate this abandoned mine might find enough gold dust there to make up an ingot’.

Marin Marais (b Paris, bap. 31 May 1656; d Paris, 15 Aug 1728). French composer and viol player. He is one of the outstanding figures in French music of the Baroque period.

Robert de Visée
(b ? c1655; d 1732–3). French guitarist, theorbo, lute and viol player and composer. He was possibly a pupil of Corbetta. He is first mentioned (as theorbist and guitarist) by Le Gallois in 1680, and about that time became a chamber musician to Louis XIV. In the dedication of his first guitar book (1682) he mentions that he was often called upon by the king to amuse the dauphin, and the diary of the Count of Dangeau from the year 1686 states that he regularly played the guitar at the king’s bedside in the evenings. Between 1694 and 1705 Visée frequently performed at the French court, particularly at the evening gatherings of Mme de Maintenon, with the flautists Descoteaux and Philibert, the harpsichordist Jean-Baptiste Buterne and the viol player Antoine Forqueray. In 1709 he was appointed to the post of singer in the royal chamber in recognition of his service to the court, in which he had not until then held a position. In 1719 he was formally appointed guitar teacher to the king, although he had actually been the king’s instructor since 1695; his son François succeeded him in this post in 1721. A letter of Jean Rousseau of 1688 indicates that Visée was a respected musician at Versailles and that he also played the viol.