Itinerary of a recording
Claudio Ronco
Salvatore
Lanzetti, Napolitano,
Sonate op.I n. 5-6-7-8-9-11-12
Nuova Era Records, 1991.
cod 7048
Claudio Ronco
Stefano Veggetti
Diana Petech
Joachim Held
MP3 files
The man * The
interpretation * The
language * The Path
1- The man.
«...
despite its intimist, wise appearance this music may be placed
among the extreme arts: it gives expression to a singular, untimely
deviant even deranged subject, though with an ultimate touch
of sophistication it refuses the mask of madness.»
(Roland Barthes: Le Chant Romantique, in France Culture
(12/5/76).
There is little to be said about Salvatore Lanzetti
that is not to be found in any good dictionary of music: born
in Naples about 1710, died in Turin about 1780 (his real name
was Lancetti, but in the north of Italy everybody pronouced "violoncello"
with a z, "violonzello"). A pupil of the conservatory
of Santa Maria di Lorero in Naples, he was a cellist and composer,
active first in Lucca (where he played with F. M. Veracini) and
then at the court of Turin in 1727/28 and from 1760 until his
death. He was in London from 1739 to 1754 or '56 and also played
in Sicily, France and Germany. He is considered to be one of
the first great virtuoso cellists. He published at least six
collections of Sonatas for Cello and Basso Continuo (opus II,
howover, is nothing other than a re-working of opus I, transcribed
for the flute) and a method: Principes de l'application du
Violoncelle par tous les tons, which appeared in 1779 circa
in Amsterdam. Other Sonatas remained as manuscripts. Madame Marie
Thérèse Bouquet, musicologist at the Sorbonne,
very kindly offered me consolation when she confessed that she
could add next to nothing to the few details available about
this composer: at most she could add a few questions...
She did however point out to me the existence of two wills, drawn
up in 1750, separated by no more than a few months: the first
during a serious illness, and the second before Lanzetti left
on a journey to France, when he was completely restored to health.
From these two documents we learn that he possessed a considerable
fortune in shares, goods and property; he had a brother, Daniele,
a well-known theatrical agent in Italy (Vivaldi met him in Ferrara
in 1736), and another brother, Luigi, whose son Domenico was
an acclaimed cellist and composer. It is known that in 1737 he
married the sister of the Besozzi brothers (the famous Turin
oboists) but that in 1748 she filed for and obtained a divorce
on the grounds of torture ("sevizie"). I also know
that he was greatly appreciated in Turin, and in 1727 received
a salary of 1200 lire per annum (as much as a first violinist
and conductor), as well as a further 200 lire to provide himself
with an appartment. Lastly, it seems that he was the first
to perform a cello solo in the Concerts Spirituels in
Paris, on the 10th and 31st of May 1736, the year which saw the
publication of his first work: the Sonatas of our recording.
As I write there is nothing else to be added, except what may
be gleaned from a reading of his publication on the frontispiece
on which, under his name, he proudly states his origin: Salvatore
Lanzetti, Napolitano.
These Sonatas show us that Lanzetti was one of the first virtuoso
cellists to lead cello technique forward towards the conquest
of the most difficult uses of the bow (balzato ["leaping"
- the bow rebounding off the string], picchettato ["knocking"],
martellato ["hammered" - with a series of short sharp
blows upon the string] etc.), the performance of double-stopped
passages, of ingenious two-part patterns that call for bold,
complex fingering; and, above all, the mastery of the use of
the thumb as a "capotasto"', one of the most important
evolutions in string playing that permitted remarkable extension
of the cello's range as far as soprano high sharps.
His career may have been restricted by the limited interest that
the cello excited in his time: it was, after all, a "bass',
and the lower range indicated the plebeian, servant caste. The
idea of rising to the Olympus of the higher notes, of being a
"prince" or an "angel" for a few short passages,
did not, perhaps, even attract the curiosity of those who recognised
the sexual ambiguity of this type of instrument: "angelic
and sublime" (or morbid) like the song of the castrato.
The times were nor ripe: his patrons had not yet had the French
Revolution (at most they caught its scent in the air and were
worried), and perhaps Lanzetti, like a true Neapolitan -or as
we think all Neapolitans should be- aware of the necessity of
changing the tastes and prejudices of others, may have opposed
a noble, poetic indolence, or given himself over to melancholic,
perhaps sorrowing, disappointment. I know nothing more. All that
remains is a teaching method of no great interest, the few cello
Sonatas that I believe extraordinary, and a portrait in sanguine
which brings out all the pride of his "Neapolitanness",
where we see a man whose gaze is disillusioned, a little bitter
and ironic, but also extraordinarily mad, if indeed madness can
have been a part of his trade as Court Virtuoso Musician,
just like that provocative, exasperated "gesture" with
which he played the cello.
The
man * The language * The
Path
II- The interpretation
".. Interpretation
is seen here as the ability ro read the anagrammes of the text
(...), to draw out from the rhetoric of tone, rhythm and melody
the net of accents; and the accent is the truth of music, the
element that moves the interpretation."
(from R. Barthes, L'obvie et 1'obtus, Essais critiques III, Editions
du Seuil, Paris, 1982)
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Sonata
invariably appears (with a few exceptions) as two parallel staves:
on the upper staff a melodic line furnished with practically
everything that the musician needs to know to perform it; and
on the lower staff a line of music generally lacking in indications
and suggestions about what is needed to accompany the upper line.
This accompaniment is more than one thing at the same time: the
"Basso continuo" contains, hidden in its melodic line,
a "fundamental bass", which one ought to recognise
at sight and be able to let the listener hear. The Continuo may
or may not have numbers written above the notes indicating the
harmony, but in any case only the bare minimum is indicated for
the performance of the Sonata - naturally with a great variety
of possible solutions - so that, in this part particularly, the
composer is inevitably held back from total possession of his
creation and from his own clear idea of what he wanted it to
be.
Opinions about how the Continuo should be performed are thus
controversial: is one to improvise on well-practised patterns
that are suited to the style and taste of the composer? Is one
to invent ex tempore musical sound qualities, situations and
developments? (In this context we should bear in mind the fact
that the Baroque Sonata was not generally written thinking of
eternity, but was expected to have a life cycle of a few seasons.)
Or again should one carefully arrange a well structured accompaniment,
perfect in every detail, so that every piece be offered a precise,
clear and invariable meaning? Probably all of these: I really
cannot believe that for two centuries performers refused to score
and prepare the Basso Continuo carefully; I am convinced on the
other hand that at times they developed it like a miniature orchestration,
just as certain keyboard accompaniments written by Bach, Handel
and others lead us to imagine.
In performing these Sonatas I have not aspired to so much, nor
would I have trusted in my ability to succeed within the time
limits of a recording: a Compact Disc today is little more than
an ephemera. Or rather: it is the great number of discs that
are produced that make it thus. Yet this music too deserves long
study, spread over the various experiences and mentalities of
music, just as has been done for those composers who have become
myths and models. Beethoven and Mozart have been performed and
studied incessantly: their "depth" derives in part
from this constant application. Purcell, Bach and Vivaldi had
to wait for generations to pass before musicians of a different
age recovered their work, and a couple of centuries before attempts
were made to reconstruct their authentic language faithfully.
For Lanzetti, I have been able to do no more than offer an earnest
performance, though one that had been pondered in only a few
months and realized in only a few days, for this first publication
of the work, in front of microphones that are much less attractive
than a real, live audience. I have, however, tried to orchestrate
the Basso using it as a potential orchestra, exploiting, that
is to say, all the combinations of sounds that I was capable
of imagining and producing. The choice of harpsichord and theorba
offers textures of timbre that are very different one from another?
Fine, they are used to highlight particular sections, or to emphasize
rhetorical solutions (for example the melancholy of a development
in minor) or again to isolate musical moments in which I am looking
for a special sense which I wish to render with greater clarity.
In any case the true Continuo instrument for these Sonatas is
the second cello: only this instrument is a true second voice,
or third, when the solo part duets with itself. I have asked
the second cello to perform the Basso, trying to follow me or
to contrast me, to join or separate itself from my musical discourse,
and also to harmonise as much as possible with double string
playing, as was the custom in Lanzetti's time. I have preferred
to score these parts rather than to have them improvised, for
they complement and enrich the double stopping of the solo voice,
and can share in its temerity as if there were an imitator of
Lanzetti himself playing the Basso.
In some instances I have chosen to have the second cello play
an octave lower, like a double bass (for example in the Allegro
of Sonata VI, where the instrument had to be tuned down a tone),
in other parts an octave higher (the parts written on the soprano
stuff in Sonata XII, and various passages in Sonata IX). I am
confident that these are not merely arbitrary decisions: they
should be contemplated among the many possibilities that the
extreme simplicity with which the Basso is written, leave to
the artistry of the performer. Scoring even a single double string
in a part that was destined for more than one instrument, would
have created confusion, as the addition of ligatures as bowing
and phrase marks would have confused the reading of the figured
bass. I could cite further little justifications based on practical
experience, but suffice it to say that I see the Basso Continuo
as a place where we should admit all the means and "artifices"
that we might plausibly presume were in use in the specific epoch
and school, and I mean by this everything that can be learnt
from the solo parts, even the most eccentric, of virtuoso performers.
Bearing this in mind I have accepted a copy of a theorba built
in the early seventeenth century, for the Sonatas of a hundred
years on, but I know that it was used thronghout the age of the
Basso Continuo, and perhaps only for this. The harpsichord
in this recording is a copy of a rather late Flemish instrument,
but is not unlike the instruments that Lanzetti would have found
at the time of these Sonatas; and then -forgive the brutality
of my confession- it was the only instrument available at the
time of our recording. The cellos, however, have been rigorously
restored to what we believe was their original condition, with
bows that are (correct) period copies, and gut strings with all
the ensuing qualities and problems. The pitch we have chosen
is 440, since this was most probably the pitch used in northern
Italy in the first half of the eighteenth century (circa 445);
the recording studio is modern, but has the same dimensions as
a baroque theatre; only two microphones, placed at a reasonable
distance, seemed to give a satisfactory reproduction of an ideal
listening position.
Lastly my approach to these pieces. I possess the Paris edition
which is undated, but is presumably the second, probably printed
by Le Clerc in 1738 or '39 (the first edition will have been
the 1736 Amsterdam version). This collection begins with four
short Sonatas, of medium or little difficulty (the level of difficulty
found in Vivaldi's or Marcello's Sonatas), fairly conventional,
but quite charming (especially Sonata III, with its delightful
Minuet). From the fifth onward the Sonatas become dramatic compositions,
and are rich and virtuoso, as if the first pieces were intended
for amateurs, and the others for professionals (understandably:
at the time there were more amateurs than professionals among
the purchasers of musical publications). Two Sonatas, number
eight and number ten, were certainly intended for a five-string
cello; despite this fact I have performed number eight on the
usual four-string instrument (and number ten is not included
in the CD ). In the other Sonatas even the frequent sharp passages
are conceived for a normal cello, with advanced use of the capotasto
thumb, indispensable even if they are performed on a five-string
cello. The style follows a formula that was quite common at the
time: a mixture of French and Italian taste, but with several
moments (e.g. the Adagio in Sonata VIII) which sound as though
they were written in the years of Boccherini and Haydn (or in
imitation of certain German music like C.P.E. Bach): the galant
gesture, the "lightness" of the phrases, their linearity
seem already "classic", but their are no doubts about
the dating of the works. Elsewhere the scoring is bizarre in
the asymmetry of its rhythms (Minuetto of Sonata V; central development
section of the Largo of VI) or in the frequent interruption of
melodies with pauses, or with arpeggio chords, whose execution
is not clarified.
Ritornellos are present in less than half of the pieces, though
never in slow or cantabile movements. The Adagios, Andantes and
Largos, in fact, follow emotive directions that are clearly evidenced
in the scoring and in the invention of the phrases: I do not
think they would tolerate any repetition not founded in their
poetical design. Nor would there be any scope - either in the
Adagios or in the Allegros - for inserting ritornellos with significant
diminutions or embellishments: I believe that Lanzetti left this
sort of thing to Corelli's music, and that his idea of composing
was quite different from all this. He writes, naturally enough,
as a cello virtuoso; such that all his ideas seem to spring from
his instrument; I imagine, therefore, that he must have taken
delight in attributing precise values to certain sounds in certain
positions on the fingerboard; for example: the central B flat
on the first string (a slightly unnatural note, since the hand
of the baroque player is habitually looking for the A that precedes
it) is a note which recors invariably in almost all the movements
of his Sonatas, always tending to generate tension, dramatic
stress, both when it is to be "shouted" and when it
is to be "whispered"
Again, in the numerous passages for two voices in the solo part,
a note is often doubled by the Basso. One would almost like to
have it played by the other instrument, so as to avoid the risk
of producing unpleasant unisons if not perfectly in tune. Yet
(playing them in tune) the effect is marvellous, thanks to a
well-hidden virtuosity. The truth is that the greatest difficulties
in Lanzetti seem to hide from superficial ears, rather than shining
out in "special effects"; it is a good sign, but not
for Lanzetti, who lived in an age that too often was superficial,
at least as far as music was concerned.
Indeed, it was by playing this music, rather than by reading
it, that I perceived its nature: it is music made of gestures,
movements of the body, pulsations, calm or troubled breaths,
of the desire to "be" and to "speak". It
is dance, song, vision, everything that a body can create. This
is why I gave up looking for the "logical sense" in
the phrases of its structural development, in their rhetorical
valency, in the mesh of agogic accents, and I sought out only
the value of my gestures in the act of performing the written
notes: there I found that real, living «body», that
moves in a manner perfectly coherent with its nature, pronouncing
phrases and fragments of great poetry. I looked for the "actions"
of that body that lie hidden behind the codes of its written
form, within the weave of its accents, all those dense, strong
sounds, charged with "intentions", that generate movement.
To all these I dedicated my capacity for concentration, my emotivity,
my desire to express something that was born within me. And I
believe I have interpreted Lanzetti.
the
man * The interpretation * The
Path
III. The language
" .. for
if only you wish to move back a little to its (music's) origin,
you will find a living, enduring, inexhaustible source of philosophical
cognitions that are not common." (Decio Agostino Trento:
preface to "Trattato di Musica..." by G. Tartini,
Padua, 1754).
Perhaps I am incapable of seeking, in the arts,
anything other than the signs of unrest. Perhaps because those
signs stir my desire for art, or perhaps they are simply elementary,
universal signs of an attention that moves towards the unconscious,
like the act of listening which is directed automatically towards
the content and meaning of a discourse and then, at other times,
only to the abstract sound of the voice, with its unending chain
of significances.
When we attempt to find these signs of unrest, no historical
period is better or worse than another: the most bewigged baroque
will do quite as well as the most tormented romanticism. For
-as we know- a work of art is similar to the human being who
observes it: body and soul, the conscious and the unconscious;
subject to the time in which it articulates its own existence:
changing, communicating, expressing meaning; in short: living
and summing experiences.
In music, the experience of listening may follow a linear progression
in time as in narration, where the present is variously charged
with the past and the future, but is proceeding towards a specific
end (and this is its manner from the ideation of Sonata Form,
throughout the entire Romantic period); or again it may develop
in a "circular" time ideally unmoving, where a supreme
synthesis of things is offered in apparent immobility, -whose
symbol, or artifice, is cyclic action- similar to that of an
allegorical statue absorbed in the timelessness of its messages.
In the latter case it is only the individual observer that can
make it dynamic, translating it in his own intellectual and emotional
activity. Thus it is -in varying degrees- in every art form;
or at least it seams to me that only thus can its decodification
and fruition be commenced: from the abstract to the concrete,
or vice versa, producing those results that our culture and sensibility
can achieve. Such then is music too: ineffable in its extreme
abstraction, in the fact that it shares in the idea of a space-time
collocation that is peculiar to the gods and not to mortals,
or concrete, "physical" in that it is similar to a
pulsating, rejoicing, suffering body.
Music too eventually treads the path that leads to the opposite
of its initial condition: in the absence of a "tale"
structured in time and in the "material" of humanity
(a Bach Fugue, for example), there emerges an inner plot, a "voyage",
an approach to emotive events that have something to say. When
the music develops situations that can be identified (it
is "descriptive" by means of rhetorical effect: associations
{horns/hunting] become allusions or metaphors;
similarities [violin tremolo/shudder, bass tremolo/terror] are
cases of paronomasia..., all in all chaotic, uncontrollable chains
of potential equivalencies - or of figures in which we can read
more than one meaning, held in control only by the music's general
rhetorical structure or by a title) or that can be derived directly
from a concrete reality (such as certain guttural sounds produced
by the jazz saxophonist, which move their listener violently,
since he can feel the sound vibrating in his own throat), we
may find ourselves roaming in the natural abstraction of "narrating" in music, towards a pure, absolutely free form of wandering;
in Vivaldi just as in Shostakovich. This because -though the
fact is not widely known- the work of art is similar to the search
of the artist, to his awareness (or lack of awareness) of the
fact that Art is first and foremost the act of seeking,
of awaiting the ideal or perfect artistic event.
When I study the shifts and paths of musical language through
the centuries, I have the impression that I am awaiting something;
the fragments that I seem to find are always stimulating, for
in a sense they belong to me intensely; all of this whispers
a simple secret to me: everything is within me, and is susceptible
of decodification, like a microcosm. I must recognise my language
as being similar to those steps forward and digressions found
in history, for I too am "structured" in that manner:
it is the result of the regular sedimentation, of the constant
overlapping of events and experiences in the history of our civilisation;
each of these still belongs to us and is a part of a whole, that
is at one and the same time, chaotic and organised; every fragment
may be isolated here, but may continue to act within the whole,
without being consumed. Every history -collective or personal-
is "transparent" in its overlapping with another. Observing
the "metamorphoses" of a Vivaldi into a Beethoven,
then is really the same as looking at oneself in a mirror (with
all of the vanity that this entails).
And Lanzetti? Lanzetti is a character of his time -of History,
irretrievable in his totality- but also of my time, as long as
the "mask" I don to perform his work (authentic instruments,
authentic language) does not annul me as an individual. A mask
may not be transparent (it would be annulled even in its ritual
value), it can nonetheless generate new codes, which when they
are decodified, do not lead us back to a world, an "external"
place, be it historical or symbolical, but to an "interiority",
where every meaning is possible: the Theatre which shifts its
focus from the mythological individual, to the "concrete" individual in his totality.
Lanzetti is indeed a theatrical narrating musician. He has his
tale proceed in a time that is marked out by the perception of
life, and that is consistent with the rationality of the body
and the irrationality of the soul or the mind. His music is dionysiac
(from man towards god) not apollonian (from god towards man):
it calls out in the listener a panic in the Greck sense: the
anxiety, the uncertain fear that the Ancients attributed to the
presence in nature of the god Pan. It seems to seek expression
in an almost literary form, developing and arranging ideas that
resemble complex rhetorical figures (one example may suffice:
Antanaclasis or Reflexio: we encounter this figure
a number of times, but we need only listen to it in the Adagio
Cantabile of Sonata V: a brief, concise musical phrase is expressed,
and then disappears. It emerges again at the end of other phrases
which develop their own, separate discourse. As it reemerges,
its "sense" is perceptibly altered, and the listener
wanders: what does it mean? what is happening? why does it return
and express things which seem to be so different?). I really
cannot say how well schooled Lanzetti was; studying was no easy
matter in those days, but music was in great demand, and so much
work was done and much repetition was used: this means
that many "cultured" aspects of his music may well
be there quite by chance, or rather by virtue of an excellent
instinct for imitation. Yet I would like to think that his choices
(even if unconscious) were horn of a desire to narrate in tragic
fashion through the ambiguity of his manner (Italian/French,
galant/restless, playful/tragic) in an attempt to counter those
who made music only for pleasure: to entertain. To seek
out then, and to choose that which would be the "crisis"
in the romantic sense of the word; what the painter Füssli
would describe in a splendid aphorism some decades later as "the
central moment, the moment of expectation, the crisis; this is
the moment that counts, full of the past, charged with future...".
If so it was, then this is why Lanzetti wrote for his own hands
and arms that could play the cello: body and soul closely bound
together, seem suspended in that absolute expectation that is
the unique and inappellable condition of being human. This is
the twin reality of the mystic; he desires nothing more.
Lanzetti is indeed a Virtuoso of the eighteenth century, whose
profession causes him to seek to render natural to himself what
must sound transcendental to his audience. Clearly his work may
not be too unlike the work that his century imposes, and to communicate
his language must resemble the rhetoric that is in currency.
His way of being a cellist is then simply derived from the fact
that he plays the cello in those years: he accompanies instruments
and voices in the theatre or in Chambers; he follows,
flatters and converses with the soloist; he represents scene
setting, space and measure for the singer who is executing the
Recitative or the Chamber Aria with Continuo. He may duet with
the bass and tenor voices, even with the Sopranos: he is capable
of becoming their substitute, and inevitably he will eventually
appreciate the immense expressive strength, that lies hidden
in the "substitution" of a voice made of bone, cartilage,
muscle, gut, humour and tissue -all in vibration, all sharing
in a sound which is heard in its entirety by other similar
bodies- with the voice of a vaguely anthropomorphic instrument,
if the latter is handled with skill. The body recognises the
sense of its own sounds, and on this occasion the game of substitutions
has tremendous potential, for, as Barthes puts it: "if sensible
phenomena do possess a meaning, it is always to be found in movement,
in substitution; in short: in an absence which is more clearly
seen" (op. cit.). This then produces an unending chain of
other meanings, which a man of the theatre, with his intuition
and experience, can easily recognise and exploit. It is evident
then, that the virtuoso instrumentalist will in the end create
music on his own sound and personality, and thus will compose
things that resemble his own mental and physical persona:
selfportraits (once again, the element of vanity...).
Thus if Lanzetti's cello "sings", it is not merely
because it has singing as a model, but is principally because,
having been brought up among the finest theatrical singers, like
these singers it does not articulate sounds in musical
phrases, but pronounces a text, founded on sounds; in
other words, his cello "speaks". And it speaks because,
in a sense, it has become a living, throbbing body, complete
with an "idiom" of its own with which it can express
itself: its style, that is to say. This cello and the music written
for it, through a rhetorical language which is still perfectly
effective, enter into a parallel "world", which has
its own Nature and Culture, sure that their messages can be decodified,
since they are expressed in a similar, though metaphysical,
reality.
The ear tries to catch "signs": "I listen as I
read, that is to say, on the basis of certain codes", Barthes
remarks. Thus it is that if Lanzetti's cello "speaks"
to tell its tale, then his music too -his "tale"- becomes
a body, which moves, acts, listens and moves on gathering experiences.
While all this is going on, we perceive its truth, for everything
can be recognised in the authentic onward motion of life, that
can be identified in its natural directions. Thus it is moreover,
that the performing artist must offer himself alone as an individual
being: authentic, unique, perfectly human: not sublime or divine.
The person who performs guides the person who listens by means
of his own experience of the things that belong to a shared reality,
as in hyper realist theatre: "love with me, for I love.
Share in my suffering, for I suffer", he might say.
I attempt to "pronounce" every phrase that I play,
I try to imagine the sound as a "body" that bends,
stretches, leaps, contracts, speaks; for -as lovers of Dance
will understand- in a manner that I feel intensely and that fascinates
me, every movement of the body is immediately "translated" into movement of the soul.
The
man * The interpretation * The
language *
IV- The Path
"The unconscious,
structured as a language, is the object of a particular and exemplary
way of listening: the way of the psychoanalyst." (R. Barthes;
op. cit.)
I have reflected at length over the decision to
publish the following (many are irritated by the notion of reading
music through images, and would like to feal free of it), but
even the God of the Bible, immaterial and without form as he
is, needs to use hands, eyes, ears to be understood and followed...
and then, more than anything else this is my personal, interior,
almost secret path, often hidden behind a performance that is
apparently less dramatic; but these are the ideas I used to make
the musicians who accompanied me understand me, and thanks to
these "tracks" we shared in a musical experience. I
shall publish then, and if I am wrong to do so, I shall take
the blame.
Greek vocabulary is a useful aid in ordering the succession of
events during the performance on this disc (this too is a suggestion
of Barthes). There is a fact, pragma; a chance occurrence,
tyche; a solution, telos; a surprise, apodeston;
an action, drama. Everything comes about as if we were
in the theatre: we take the disc, insert it into the player,
sit in front of the loudspeakers, the curtain rises: we follow
the events, receive the messages; when it has finished, we feel
that something has happened within us. The pragma, the
fact, is I playing my cello, my colleagues, their instruments.
The tyche, the chance occurrence, is the manner in which
the interpretation of the Sonatas begins to uncover directions,
correlations, "signals" of meaning: the baroque Sonata
is aleatory enough to turn even into the opposite of what one
intended to propose. It is with a great deal of chance that I
find suggestions on how to direct musical events; seeking them
in rational ways might be merely deception. The telos,
the solution, comes about by necessity: in this, musical ideas
find their concrete form a finality: what I hear now has a more
precise sense, for to give it a sense, now, is no longer a desire:
it is a necessity; I cannot accept the abstract, if I have not
attained it through the concrete. The apodeston, the surprise,
is the destabilising event, the first to generate the "crisis",
to drive me violently towards action; but it also resembles the
re-awakening of the consciousness, the exciting revelation: it
is unfurled, and opens out new horizons; the desire is:
to go on, to become involved in the facts, to act. The drama
the action, can now be experienced wholly, accepted without restrictions,
shared in the first person. The first rule in music is, perhaps,
to excite in the listener the "desire" for music, and
perhaps this very desire is the "action". All
of this happens in any case, both in the act of playing and in
the Sonata itself. What follows then, is the path I have taken
through the seven Sonatas on this disc.
The rhythm of baroque music contains something urgent, unrelenting,
as though it were trying to represent the time to which
every living being is subject. In short, if music is rhythm and
melody, then the melody is the soul: free, potentially unconditioned,
but temporarily bound to a body, of its own nature a prisoner
of time: the rhythm. The Baroque might never tire of playing
with this idea, ordering it in varying manners in rhetorical
figures: Allegory, Simile, Comparison, Metaphor Thus rhythm -or
the absence of rhythm- becomes the fundamental element
of the music (whereas in romanticism the "body" might
also be the melody: the theme). And in the Adagio Cantabile
of Sonata V we do indeed begin without a real rhythm: two pauses
written on the bass line dissolve its initial rhythmic sketch
into nothingness. It is as though it had no body but ouly a "desire"
for a body: I have no form yet, I am only an idea: I rise
up in search of a heaven, and the Basso calls me back -rhythmically-
to earth.
After the second pause sign, there are four trills, like nervous
shudders: I feel as though I were shaking off my torpor: now
I have a body, and I enter the rhythmic "machine" with
energy. With anger too: here is the first of the high B flats,
which I must play as though suffocating a scream in my throat;
immediately after this, I walk almost in pain, my head is bent:
now I have a body, and it moves through the fatigue and suffering
of living; it moves on, accepting and rejecting, stopping and
then running. It discovers that it is proud and desirous of love,
of kindness. It lets itself be drawn along (with ouly a minimal
attempt at holding itself back) by a movement from the Basso,
a movement that is majestic, impetuous, emphatic. It cedes again,
picks itself up again, walks on in pain, its head bent; it rebels,
and once again the pauses reappear: two, as before, but now that
body exists, and I cannot but accept it.
There is a pause: a silence which sounds alarmed to me; then
I read: "Volti" [turn the page] (in other places
I find "Segue" [next section follows without
a break] or "Volti subito" [turn the page quickly])
and I continue. I realise that it is the marked strict rhythm
that is disturbing, and that it is the pivot on which rests the
entire dramatic effectiveness of the piece. The Allegro brings
it back in the same function, but at first it seems to be clearly
separated from the preceding movement, and it is here that I
detect the first truly significant signal of Lanzetti's restlessness:
it begins like a brilliant, virtuoso movement; throughout the
first part it develops like a light comedy: a charming dialogue
between lovers, a succession of sparkling and sweet incitements;
then, in the second part, it becomes tormented: the same incipit,
now in C major (a third higher and thus more emphatic; in rhetoric
hyperbole) becomes aggressive, agitated. All the phrases
become painful or more perturbed; trills repeated on the same
note come back again. Tricks of the bow which, at the beginning,
were joyful acrobatics, are now performed on the outer strings,
with anger, effort; everything seems to be exasperated and seems
not to reach any conclusion: only the return of the initial key
with a phrase of convenience, to annul, to cancel a discourse
that was becoming intolerably serious. It is as though it finished
in nothingness, in emptiness: there is an ellipsis of thought
(reticence, aposiopesis) and we feel it quite clearly:
silence dictated by modesty. At this point the score calls for
the Ritornello of the second half too, but I could never
repeat it; I am convinced that it is there only as a sign of
respect to symmetry, but nobody would want it. In this non-conclusion
I am left dangling on a thread: I can only fall straight down
into the Minuet. It seems to begin from nothing, or to
have come out of another silence; I want the two cellos alone,
for all the first part. The harpsichord enters in the major,
to confirm its joyful colour A little later I play a duet
alone, with the Basso gracefully chasing after me. In the Da
Capo everything seems to fall into its rightful place: a
galant Sonata, in elegant livery, for a high society audience,
well served and entertained.
The sixth Sonata seems galant too, when I begin the Allegro.
Galant and calm, like a walk in a park amidst calm, smiling middle-class
strollers. It calls to my mind pieces of celebratory music by
Elgar: "unproblematic", self-assured, with a clear
conscience.
I move amids fond phrases: the music I play reassures me, pleases
me, tells of pleasures. But immediately the following Largo is
an intensely melancholic melody; it proceeds a while, then it
is suspended a moment (there is a pause marked), and suddenly
it is replaced by a totally different figure: a chromatic descent,
dancing on regular, dotted quadruplets, light -calling to my
mind a coach driving along calmly- yet full of subtle agitation:
undefinable, somewhere between a sense of weariness, of disillusionment,
and a gesture of extreme emotion, almost of sorrow. It finishes,
and the melancholy theme returns; now it is tormented: it writhes,
it seems to have no end, but it lives in its own sublime sensuality.
I should never want to leave it: to forget my destination. Another
pause, and the coach rolls on again, with a rhythm like an obsession,
a trance. Have I been riding in the coach all the time?
Dreaming at times, and moving away from the place where she whom
I love was present, she who made my life pleasing by being at
my side? A pause mark suitable for a cadenza brings these questions
to mind, just before the last note of the Largo.
The harmonic path of the Sonata is simple and effective: B flat
major the first movement, and G minor the Largo, which closes
on its dominant, very gentle in concluding the final movement
with a return to B flat; Lanzetti uses this pattern almost always.
The finale is a Gavotte with six variations: here, on
an elementary Basso, always repeated in the same form, I decide
to play on an obsession: in these variations I can find nothing
other than bitterness, and I accept it as it is: an obsession,
or at most a monologue on an obsession (how indeed could it be
a dialogue, if the journey has led me away from my beloved?)
I reach the conclusion without having shaken off my obsession:
I shall continue to hold it within myself: obsessionately.
Sonata VII also begins with a galant movement (it is rhetorical:
it is called Captatio Benevolentiæ...); it is rich
in ideas, surprises, brilliant and curious gestures. Yet it has
no conclusion: it flows (or is transformed) into an impassioned
fugato: as I play it, I feel as though I were being sucked
into the whirl of a frenzied dance. Halfway through it suddenly
changes: out of nothing there emerges the minor key, with
a phrase that sounds like a tongue-twister in Neapolitan sorcery
(this is why I play it with "notes inegales":
not to make it French, but to produce that effect of popular
music, that certain "swing" that is a little magic
and a little primitive), then it takes on darker shades, like
a Sabbah painted by Salvatore Rosa, and the return to
the major key is only a reversal of the lights: nothing could
stop the rush of notes: I cannot yield, or hold back, except
in a chord that once again is suspended in emptiness: before
me, the Largo in E minor and the inertia of the "fuga"
squeezing me from behind. Here there is a long note, while the
Basso begins a regular, slow, expanding movement; then a trill
(it must gradually increase in tension: carry the voice),
then a melody, that is so intense, so impassioned that it must
be shouted with one's whole body, until blood pulses with the
pulsing of the Basso (the dynamic mark is Forte: it is
to be taken literally: with physical strength). Then straightaway
it is all interrupted: we read: "piano, Arpeggiato",
and the same sequence of pulse beats is repeated in emptiness,
in the desert, in the startling absence of the melody. The first
time I played it, I felt a sense of bewilderment, then I came
to love that absence better than any reappearance of the melody,
splendid though it is; when it disappears it seems to be all
the more present, and its secret charms me. Is this a dialogue
with nothingness? Or is it an deliberate conscious act of substituting
presences with absences, to rise still higher,
to touch with one's hand an abstraction that is even more sublime
than music itself? The trace -the artifice of that void-
gradually loses effect as the Largo proceeds, and it too becomes
present, concrete, sentimental. It is with this shifting element
(at the beginning it is the Basso line, then it becomes the absence
of a melody, lastly it is played by the solo cello, in two parts)
that we reach the conclusion: a pause of great intensity. After
this I would have the Rondò explode, and it is
an almost satanic Rondò: here we have the trance, the
obsessive beat of primitive dance: it has no beginning and no
end: I listen to only a fragment: it has been and continues to
be. It is a dance that is as old as man: it represents the eternity
of the gods. Yet is it also nearly a revelation of what the fugato
-behind the apparent austerity of its form- was hiding: the magic
of its own origins?
Sonata VIII is a subtle game: its is suspended on the delicate
thread of the bow stroke in the rapid triplets, in seeming contrast
with the indication Allegretto, considering the calm pulsation
of the harmonies and musical ideas. In fact, there is something
serene about the latter, something agitated about the former:
an agitation which, while it may be joyful excitement (Nature
as friend expectation of the beloved) is also a subtle form of
uneasiness (Indian music has a very similar Raga: Lalit;
imagine a prince at dawn on the day of his wedding). The second
movement is an Adagio; majestic at the beginning (triumphant
entrance of celebrating Nymphs?) and tender and loving in its
development. I chose to perform it like a love duet with the
harpsichord. It seems to me to be like a dialogue of tender,
sensual gestures; the harpsichord manages to find something feminine,
innocent, silvery. Those long syncopations with their sweet embellished
resolutions are like long lovers' embraces. And in the Allegro
finale the agitation returns, only this time a little more
dramatic: it is torment, excitement: it is the desolation and
desperation of the abandoned lover. I have tried to find other
things in it, but have been obliged to yield to this violent
anticlimax.
I find this desolation and desperation again in the Sonata IX:
a heavy sensation of pain and weariness. It seems to be a part
of the Adagio, raising it to the point of tears, to a
scream of anguish. I proceed in the Allegro with something
like the rage of one who is trying to drive out the demon of
torment: trying, even weeping over myself to relieve the pain,
but finishing by screaming it out aloud, abandoning myself to
lamentation. Paradoxically, this act of screaming out against
the fear of death is a shout of life, and in it we may recognise
all human dignity. It seems to find no path to follow: only broken,
acephalous sentences, like funeral columns. To conclude, Lanzetti
here writes a very brief, stylised phrase, so strongly contrasting
with everything that has gone before, that it sounds sarcastic
(I have toned it down by playing it twice, for I could not bear
its brevity; but in rhetoric this is Antiphrasis: it means
the opposite of what it affirms) I perceive the probable reason
for this choice: a clear sharp cut is needed to end this movement,
and this calls for a language that is quite different:
the actor has let himself go too far, he has become a real man,
has really soffered; now he is an actor again; he takes his bow,
and the scene changes. It is a Rondò full of sweet
melancholy, agitated to the point of madness. At the point in
which the cello voice is to rise up to the high sharps, I wanted
to have the harpsichord play alone an octave higher: I felt that
in this way I could make the musical effect less ferocious, though
I have repented a little: when I left the Basso "a loco"
and the second cello played too, the impression of solitude in
my part was harrowing; but I found it excessive.
Then, tenderly comes the Da Capo. If one has to repeat
the beginning of the Rondò, then one might as well recuperate
a sense of serenity and peace in it (although, if this contains
a rhetoric figure, it is Dubitatio: let the audience choose
the sense of this finale).
The opening of the Sonata XI sounds like a bold, clear, sonorous
symphony. It seems to imitate the interplay of solo and tutti
of a chamber orchestra. The development is lively and serene,
rather like in Sonata VI. Once again such a reassuring, even
conventional movement goes on to startle the listener: a bizarre,
brief, intense Adagio, fragmentized by arpeggio chords,
repeated in Forte, pauses and highly contrasting dynamics.
I decided to render it similar to an almost recitative,
underlining this idea with brief cadenzas on the three pause
signs. This "reciting" led me to a profound, insuperable,
even violent sense of solitude. The final phrase of the Adagio
closes in a penetrating, intense pathetic suspension, and the
cello solo begins piano an Allegro fugato that
is quite different from the one in Sonata VII. The melody that
I have to play here mezza voce, sounds infinitely sweet
and full of sadness: now I think that my intuition was correct:
there is a great sense of solitude. Here again I want the two
cellos: alone. I ask the two other instruments to wait for the
return of the theme before playing together with us. Then everything
passes into another Adagio, very short this time: it seems only
to wish to repeat the finale of the preceding Adagio (it
is almost the same melody), in search of a new development. This
time it develops into a Rondò, almost grotesque in the
way it becomes heavier and tries to be majestic. Convention would
have it repeated after every variation, but in this instance
I do not think this is what Lanzetti wanted: the variations are
written out in succession, and only at the end do we read "Segue
il primo Rondò sino al segno" [repeat the first
Rondò as far as the sign]. The justification may be weak,
but all the variations seem to come from a "world"
that is quite different from the first Rondò, and to be
seeking each other in turn. Thus, amid languid, drunken affections
with the sweet rhythm of the melody (it sounds more like a Sicilienne
than a Rondò) we reach the minor key: and it is the most
pathetic, the most heart-rending, the bitterest that I imagine
could be written for the cello. The return to the first - massive,
heavy, almost clumsy- Rondò is of so little importance
that I discover that I still hold within myself all the feelings
that came before it, all still intact: the finale closes
like a coffer made of iron and solid wood, full of precious things.
Sonata XII opens with triumphant fanfares: the key of D major
helps: it is sonorous and vital as no other key on the cello.
A bold festive phrase (I have been told that it is the same as
one in a cello concerto by Boismortier; who knows who copied?...),
played in unison, renders the idea of an orchestra, and the soloist
plays above it with splendid virtuosity, amidst flashes of light.
This is the Sonata that makes most use of the soprano voice,
in brilliant, ingenious manner, played with humour, charm and
taste. Everything is concluded without a change of tone and without
excessive severity, sounding like the Sinfonia before the curtain
is raised. Indeed, I am certain that this was its intention,
for the Andante cantabile tbat follows really does sound
like a pastoral scene. It is so full of descriptive elements,
all set out in order and clear in their rhetorical meanings,
that I cannot help yielding to the temptation of portraying it
like a painting: set between two large, leafy trees, close by
an amenable hedge, two young lovers; she seems to abandon herself
on the grass, inviting love; he reaches his hand out to her,
as though yielding to her desire, but his gaze is directed towards
the background. Here we see a distant valley, through which flows
a sinuous river. On one side two horn players raise their instruments,
while two deer run away in fright; they are followed by a pack
of fierce dogs and hunters on horseback. Now I no longer know
if he, the lover, asks her to get up and watch the fate of the
deer (with sadness? Lovers think of death with scorn), or if
she asks him not to look, to forget the struggles of life and
abandon himself to the carefree joys of love. As I play, I seem
to hear the horns calling the dogs running, the deer trying to
get away, their fall overwhelmed by the noises of satisfaction
and victory. I seam to see the lover get up or bend down, calling
or being called by the sweet sensuality of the woman. Everything
is motionless, yet alive, dynamic in the secrets of its allegories.
There now follows the most amorous Minuet in the entire collection
of Sonatas: full of a light that is so serene and pleasant that
I could not do other than orchestrate it for all our instruments.
Each has his turn and plays with his own loving phrases, as fair
as the harmony of life that music delights in imitating. Or,
perhaps, as fair as madnes, for, as Barthes remarks: "the
musician is always mad, unlike the writer, who may never be mad,
for he is condemned to meaning".
Post scriptum
All the work
on this disc was born and grew out of a reading of Barthes. It
was therefore inevitable that this should have flowed into this
text, even though mainly unconsciously. Where Barthes is quoted,
he is quoted in a sense that is quite unfaithful to the original
meaning, in a transverse reading that he would surely have appreciated.
I hope my readers will also have appreciated it.
Claudio Ronco,
Venice, july 1990.
(English translation by Timothy
Alan Shaw)
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