Corelli’s Violin: About the Program

By Thomas Gerber

There are examples in the arts of individual creators whose work is so compelling and innovative that artists in other lands and in ensuing generations are influenced, even shaped, by them.  In the world of music, Richard Wagner is often cited as such a towering figure; in the world of Early Music, many venerate Claudio Monteverdi for changing the course of the Renaissance toward the Baroque. This "great man" theory, on the other hand, is said by some to minimize unfairly the less dazzling historical figures, currents, and trends which lead up to, and set the stage for, the "great men."

One composer heard this afternoon, Arcangelo Corelli, can be viewed in the context of this discussion.  Born a generation before the other composers on the program, Corelli is universally lauded as both the creator of the "concerto grosso," and the man responsible for enlivening and expanding the possibilities of the violin.  The concerto grosso, in the years after Corelli, became the characteristic orchestral genre of the Baroque, later supplanted only by the symphony in the Classical Era.  The capacity for both vocally inspired expression and technical virtuosity, supposedly hitherto unexplored, is seen in Corelli's string writing; later composers, many violinists themselves, took these qualities to heart, pushing the idiom of violin music to greater extremes.  The violin became the preeminent instrument of the Baroque.

One other aspect of Corelli's contribution to music, less immediately apparent to the ear, is his solidification of tonality as the harmonic language of Western music.  His use of the bass line to drive chordal progression; his placement of melody and cadence and even polyphony within a tonic-key-related narrative; his control of dissonance inevitably moving to consonance via the device of the suspension -- all established tonality as an intrinsic characteristic, a structural worldview, as it were, that bade farewell to the mode-based language of the Renaissance, and of the many prior centuries wherein modality was the only game in town.  

That said, Corelli did not invent the concerto grosso; that may have been Alessandro Stradella (1643-1682).  We can see advanced violin writing in the music of composers before Corelli:  a stunning precedent is the set of Rosary Sonatas by Heinrich Biber (1644-1704).  Tonality as a musical building block essentially took the entire 17th century to evolve.  None of this is to say that Corelli is not a great man, a historical turning point, but a healthy perspective can't hurt.   

Of the composers other than Corelli in "Corelli's Violin," Francesco Geminiani is the only one to have actually studied with him.  Born in the Tuscan city of Lucca -- also the birthplace, by the way, of Giacomo Puccini -- Geminiani relocated to London in 1714, shortly after Handel.  He was celebrated there as a virtuoso violinist, enjoying the patronage of several wealthy Englishmen, including William Capel, third Earl of Essex.  He was a respected teacher, as well as the author of several musical treatises, the most enduring of which is his "Art of Playing on the Violin" (1751).  Interestingly, he seems to have cultivated what today we might call a side hustle:  collecting and selling art.  His Concerto Grosso in F, heard today, is one of the reworkings of Corelli's Opp. 1, 3, and 5, containing a special gift to violists everywhere:  a solo part in the concertino section, a role often -- and sadly -- denied them.

Born just five years after the cessation of the 30 Years War, Arcangelo Corelli came from a prosperous land-owning family near Ferrara, in the Papal States.  By age 13, he was in Bologna, a hotbed of violinists, and by age 22 or so was resident in Rome, where he would remain for the rest of his life.  He, like Geminiani, enjoyed substantial patronage, but, in his case, mostly from wealthy princes of the Church, such as Cardinals Pamphili and Ottoboni.  One secular exception was the abdicator, Queen Christina of Sweden, who had set up a court-in-exile in Rome and hired Corelli to lead her orchestra.  An esteemed violinist, teacher, and composer of sonatas and concerti grossi, he was a rare Italian in that he wrote no vocal music, neither sacred nor operatic. Corelli, in his 50s and well established in Rome, occasionally found himself in ensembles playing with a 20-something harpsichordist/composer visiting Italy from the North -- Georg Friedrich Handel. Corelli's Concerto Grosso in C minor, Op. 6, No. 3, ably demonstrates how a concerto grosso ("grand concerto") works:  the orchestra (the "ripieno") plays the main theme, then a smaller group of soloists (the "concertino") plays a contrasting passage that highlights the soloists' virtuosity, then the ripieno and the concertino trade back and forth for the remainder of the movement. This structural design is a hallmark of 18th-century music, and is manifested in countless adaptive ways even unto today. 

Speaking of composers from the North, we now leave Italy and travel to Germany, where we meet Georg Philipp Telemann.  His "Violin Concerto in Bb" contrasts with the Geminiani and Corelli in that it is a solo concerto, although the general concept of solo versus orchestra still predominates. Here we experience the fruits of the opening up of violin technique credited to Corelli's innovations decades earlier.  Noteworthy is that, here, Telemann employs an overall four-movement plan (slow-fast-slow-fast) from earlier in the Baroque, at the same time that Antonio Vivaldi -- and a composer upon whom Vivaldi had great influence, J.S. Bach -- have trimmed the number of movements to three (fast-slow-fast).  Telemann may have been the most prolific composer in all of history.  He would have had Bach's position at St. Thomas in Leipzig, had he not found a more attractive post up in Hamburg.  The third movement in the Bb Concerto features a solo violin expressively floating over an accompaniment of simultaneous triplets and quadruplets; will the players "tripletize" the quadruplets to even things out (a common solution), or will they relish the juxtaposition?     

We travel next to a city which Telemann visited more than once, where in Paris we meet Jean-Marie Leclair, referred to as "l'aine" (the elder, as he had several younger brother musicians, including, confusingly enough, Jean-Marie Leclair "le cadet" [the younger]).  Born in Lyon to a family of lace-makers, Leclair lived as a young man in Turin, capital then of the Duchy of Savoy, where he studied violin and dance.  The combination of the two disparate arts seems unlikely today, but in Leclair's time dance teachers were often skilled violinists, since the combination allowed them to teach the steps and provide the music in a kind of one-man-band fashion.  By 1723 he was settled in Paris, with occasional stints out of town under the patronage of various nobles.  For some of the 1730s, he served King Louis XV as Director of Music of the Chapel.  A celebrated violinist, most of his output focuses on the violin, although an opera survives, "Scylla et Glaucus" (1746).  Even today, a cold-case crime, his murder in 1764, was surmised to have been committed either by his estranged second wife (financial gain), his nephew (a lesser composer's jealousy), or even perhaps the handyman (motive shrouded in mystery).

A German composer who enjoyed great success as a young man in Italy (1706-1710), George Frideric Handel (the English spelling he adopted, eschewing Georg Friedrich) is of course a star of the High Baroque Era.  In many respects the polar opposite of fellow German Johann Sebastian Bach, he and Bach nevertheless were friends and correspondents.  Handel's move to London in his late 20s would see him become ensconced there as the preeminent composer of the largest scale works, opera and, later in life, oratorio. As anybody who has experienced his most revered work, "Messiah," can attest, his ability to match the affect of the music to the emotion inherent in the words was unmatched.  His instrumental music is similarly engaging, comprised of voluminous solo and concerto keyboard music, chamber music, the concerti grossi, other assorted works, and the famous suites "Water Music" and "Music for the Royal Fireworks."  The 12 concertos in Op. 6, contain some reworked (i.e., "borrowed") material but are mostly newly composed, completed in an astonishing four weeks in 1740. Even here, 27 years after the death of Corelli, the Roman composer's influence can be detected in the structure, style, and vocabulary of Handel's Op. 6, No. 1, "Concerto grosso in G."