Divas and Scholars

by Philip Gossett

  13. I have been assured that her nerves settled down in subsequent performances.

  14. A critical edition, however, should offer alternatives in particularly problematic musical situations, as we shall see.

  15. Berlioz describes both the three-string and four-string double bass, asserting that: “The three string bass is tuned in fifths, written G—d—a” (see Macdonald, Berlioz’s Orchestration Treatise, p. 54). Later, however, he speaks of “English double basses” tuned to A—d—g. According to Macdonald (p. 55), Berlioz added “the sentence about English double basses [...] to the 1855 edition after visiting England several times.” It seems as if Berlioz either did not know that the English were following Italian practice or chose to ignore it. The evidence from Verdi’s Il trovatore, cited later in this chapter, leaves no doubt about the lowest string a composer expected to find on an Italian double bass at midcentury.

  16. I am positing a uniform practice on the part of players within a single country, a single city, or a single opera house, but the reality is likely to have been much messier, with some players having different kinds of instruments within the same orchestra and some players employing nonstandard tunings. To the extent that there was a normative behavior, however, it is the one described here. There are occasional notes in double bass parts, where they are not doubling the violoncello, that extend below the normal compass: players took these in stride and modified their parts according to the practical limitations of their instruments.

  17. See Rossini, Duetto per Violoncello e Contrabasso, ed. Slatford, an edition based on Rossini’s autograph manuscript and instrumental parts in Dragonetti’s hand.

  18. See Rossini, Sei sonate a quattro, based on manuscript parts, authenticated by Rossini, conserved in Washington, at the Library of Congress. The history of the pieces is complex, however, and no one has sorted out the extensive evidence found in manuscript and printed materials of the period, both pertaining to the original scoring and to adaptations of that scoring for regular string quartet, wind ensemble, and so forth.

  19. Such a scordatura among Italian sources, with the A tuned down to G, is mentioned in Rodney Slatford, “Double bass,” in Grove Music Online (accessed 4 May 2004). A single F at m. 26 of the Andante, however, may well have been played an octave higher.

  20. Contemporary sources, under censorial constraints, changed the first phrase to “Ma all’uom di santo zelo” (to the man of saintly zeal) and the second to “Rodolfo, ascoltatemi” (Rodolfo, listen to me). Both phrases were restored to their original form in Hansell’s critical edition of the score (see Verdi, Stiffelio, 377–79, as well as notes 171–173 and 186–189 on pp. 145 and 146 of the commentary). The reconstruction of the score of Stiffelio has been described in chapter 5.

  21. When the critical edition of Stiffelio was first rehearsed at the Metropolitan Opera in 1993, this passage created considerable consternation in the double bass section, since many of these very low notes can be played on the modern double bass, whose lowest normal string is tuned as E but which frequently has an extension string that extends the range as low as C or even B1. Still, there is no reason to think that Verdi wanted these sonorities. Hansell’s published critical edition therefore clarifies the matter by annotating the notes at mm. 170–188 “note effettivi” (sounding notes), returning to “note normali” (normal notes) at m. 189 (see pp. 377–79). As Hansell remarks, “It seems clear that he [Verdi] was notating the part at sounding pitch so as not to produce a notation in which the written notes for Vc are below those for Cb on a single staff” (commentary, 145).

  22. See the Scena ed Aria Leonora (N. 12) in the critical edition of the opera, at m. 71 (p. 328 in the score); see also note 71 on p. 101 in the commentary. It cannot be excluded, of course, that some players had a four-string bass, even in Rome, in which case they would simply have played the part as written.

  23. For some nice photographs of late eighteenth-century oboes, see the article “Oboe” by Philip Bate in Sadie, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 13:466–67. See also the revised portion of the article “Oboe” by Geoffrey Burgess, concerning the nineteenth-century oboe, in Grove Music Online (accessed 4 May 2004). Burgess’s assertion, however, that “the virtuoso solos in Rossini’s operas—notably La scala di seta (1812) and La gazza ladra (1817)—were written for Baldassare Centroni (1784–1860), who for most of his career played a two-key oboe,” cannot be sustained. Centroni lived and worked in Bologna, teaching ultimately at the Liceo Musicale, and there is no evidence that he was involved in performances either at the Teatro San Moisè of Venice (where La scala di seta had its premiere) or at the Teatro alla Scala of Milan (where La gazza ladra had its premiere). Nonetheless, Rossini was a close friend of Centroni’s, and he wrote for the kind of instrument Centroni employed. Indeed, Centroni participated in the first Italian performance of the Stabat Mater in Bologna in 1842 (see Lettere e documenti, 3a : 722n). The most recent study of the early oboe is Haynes, The Eloquent Oboe. The best general history remains Bate, The Oboe.

  24. See Gossett, “Le sinfonie di Rossini,” 13–30. The overture is printed in the critical edition of Tancredi: for the crescendo in the dominant, see pp. 14–18 (mm. 96–112); for that in the tonic, see pp. 21–23 (mm. 142–158).

  25. Even Berlioz, writing several decades later and after significant improvements in the mechanisms introduced by nineteenth-century instrument makers, remarks that “the two highest notes, e and f, must be used with great caution” (Macdonald, Berlioz’s Orchestration Treatise, 102). In later operas, Rossini does occasionally write e’’’ for oboe, but never when the pitch is exposed. For another excellent Rossinian example of an omitted e’’’ see the Sinfonia of Ermione, at m. 204. For a similar example, in the same Sinfonia, where the flute avoids the high b’ ” in a musically unconvincing fashion, see mm. 130 and 138.

  26. I quote from Norrington’s essay, copyright 1988, in the booklet accompanying Symphonies 1 and 6 (EMI, CDC 7 49746 2), 4. I

  27. Frequently the pitches were notated as c and G, i.e., “tonic” and “dominant,” with the tuning specified in the margin, “in Fa,” “in Re,” etc. Donizetti used this system extensively, although Rossini mostly preferred to write sounding pitches in his scores, as did Verdi. In some early operas, however, such as Ernani (but not Nabucco), Verdi continued to use the older c/G notation.

  28. For an extensive treatment of changes in the physical construction of the timpani during the nineteenth century in Italy, as well as the ways in which composers used them, see Meucci, “I timpani e gli strumenti a percussione nell’Ottocento italiano.” A general discussion of the history of the timpani by James Blades and Edmund A. Bowles is found in their article “Timpani,” in Grove Music Online (accessed 8 May 2004). Differences in size and material, of course, had a profound influence on pitch and resonance.

  29. As Meucci demonstrates in “I timpani” (see p. 187), only after 1860 did timpanists in Italian orchestras adopt one of the various “machine” mechanisms for retuning the timpani, even though many timpanists were familiar with and had even experimented with innovations in this area.

  30. See the discussion in Macdonald, Berlioz’s Orchestration Treatise, 265–70.

  31. In the article “Timpani” in Grove Music Online, some of the differences are described in the following terms: “Animal skin is particularly susceptible to humidity, a moisture-laden atmosphere causing the membrane to expand and consequently to produce flatter notes. Indeed, on a damp night high notes may be unobtainable, for the tension required to reach them may cause the skin to split. Conversely, a cold, dry atmosphere may cause the skin to shrink so much that high notes are sharp and low notes cannot be reached because there is no slack. Because of these problems many players using natural skins install heating or moisture-carrying units, fitted inside at the bottom of the kettles. Plastic heads have a different tone quality, with less resonance and elasticity; notes produced on them have a faster decay and more sound, or noise, at
low frequencies, thus producing uneven dynamics.”

  32. See, for example, m. 61, where after eleven measures of the transition in the exposition (50–60), during all of which there has been a tonic pedal on d, the chord changes momentarily to the dominant of B minor, F dominant seventh, a chord that has no room for either a d or an A. As a result, Rossini drops the timpani out for that one measure, having it return in m. 62, where it plays the third degree (d) of a B minor chord, hardly an ideal choice, but at least within the chord. This passage is on pp. 9–11 of the critical edition.

  33. For the first statement, see the article “Timpani” by James Blades in Sadie, The New Grove Dictionary, 18:835; the revised opinion is found in the Bowles revision of the article in Grove Music Online. I want to acknowledge a number of very helpful conversations about modern practice with Richard Horowitz, who served for many years as principal timpanist at the Metropolitan Opera. Meucci, “I timpani” (249) reproduces a page from a marked timpani part for Verdi’s Otello as adapted and performed by the timpanist at La Scala, David Searcy. For a Web page devoted to questions of this kind, consult http://members.cox.net/datimp/. I am grateful to Renato Meucci for bringing my attention to this page, which includes an analysis of some problematic moments in the Verdi Messa da Requiem.

  34. See his introduction to the critical edition of La traviata, xl (English) and lxxiv (Italian).

  35. For other Verdian examples, some in louder passages, some in softer ones, see Meucci, “I timpani,” 200–202.

  36. I have treated this example previously in “Rossini’s Ritornelli.”

  37. See the provisional edition of Rossini, La pietra del paragone, ed. Brauner and Wiklund, Cavatina Clarice (N. 3), mm. 4–14; and the critical edition of L’Italiana in Algeri, ed. Corghi, Cavatina Lindoro (N. 2), mm. 1–9 (pp. 73–74). In example 12.3 I am printing these horn parts as Rossini wrote them, so that they seem to be in C major, and I refer to the pitches in that key; since the horn has an E crook, however, the notes sound a major sixth lower, in E major.

  38. See the critical edition of Otello, Scena e Duettino Desdemona–Emilia (N. 4), mm. 7–30 (pp. 248–52).

  39. For an overview of this literature, see Morley-Pegge, The French Horn, and Fitzpatrick, The Horn and Horn-playing and the Austro-Bohemian Tradition 1680–1830. For a more general treatment of brass instruments, see Herbert and Wallace, The Cambridge Companion to Brass Instruments, especially chapters 8 (“The horn in the Baroque and Classical periods,” by Thomas Hiebert) and 9 (“Design, technology and manufacture since 1800,” by Thomas Myers).

  40. See the Secondo Finale (N. 17) in the critical edition of Tancredi, mm. 101–105 (p. 598).

  41. All pitches produced by acoustic instruments are complex sounds, containing not only the basic pitch, but to varying degrees other pitches in the overtone series. That is what gives these sounds their characteristic timbre.

  42. Whether a conductor today should intervene simply to avoid overbalance of one pitch or another because of instrumental limitations in the nineteenth century is more controversial, but I am certainly not prepared to exclude it, so long as it is done with due caution.

  43. The phrase is found in the critical edition of L’occasione fa il ladro (p. 123). There are similar phrases in many other Rossini operas, including La scala di seta, Otello, and La Cenerentola.

  44. See the Recitativo e Terzetto (N. 7) in the critical edition of Ernani, mm. 336–340 and 344–348 (on pp. 241–2). There are similar passages in the Cavatina Elvira (N. 3), at mm. 122–128, 138–140, 157–159, 173–175, and 183–185 (pp. 75–84); in the Scena e Duetto, indi Terzetto (N. 4) at mm. 209, 217, 284, and 288 (pp. 116–17 and 126–27); in the Finale Primo (N. 5) at mm. 26, 34, 41, 151, 196–197, and 200–201 (pp. 132–34, 154, and 161–63); in the Recitativo e Terzetto (N. 7) at mm. 84–85, 88–89, 120–122, and 212–215 (pp. 206–7, 213, and 227); in the Scena ed Aria Carlo (N. 8) at mm. 231, 234, 279, and 283 (pp. 272–73 and 279–80); and in the Scena e Terzetto Finale (N. 14) at mm. 26 and 271 (pp. 379 and 414).

  45. See Macdonald, Berlioz’s Orchestration Treatise, 167. Berlioz goes on to say that this pitch (and several others) “should never be used for filling in but only for the special effect of their harsh, muffled, savage sound” (170).

  46. Ibid., 181, 182.

  47. For a characteristic example, see the Introduzione (N. 1) to Semiramide, mm. 333–362 in the critical edition (pp. 171–85). In the accompaniment to Assur’s solo “A que’ detti, a quell’aspetto,” Rossini wrote for pizzicato strings (violins, violoncellos, and double basses on the beat, violas off the beat). The off-beat violas are joined by chords in four-part harmony for two bassoons and two horns.

  48. Recall Gianandrea Gavazzeni’s response: “Nothing and nobody will ever convince me that Verdi intended in the first bar [of Falstaff] to differentiate, f from ff, instrumental sections and instruments belonging to the same section.”

  49. According to Meucci, “La trasformazione dell’orchestra,” 451–57, the first musician to assume the role of “maestro concertatore e direttore dell’opera” was Alberto Mazzucato at the Teatro alla Scala in 1854, even before Angelo Mariani, whose influence was so great throughout the 1860s. For further information about the introduction of modern, baton-wielding conductors into Italian opera house, see Jensen, “The Emergence of the Modern Conductor in 19th-Century Italian Opera,” and Chusid, “A Letter by the Composer about Giovanna d’Arco and Some Remarks on the Division of Musical Direction in Verdi’s Day.” For the earlier history of the practice in Paris, see Holoman, “The Emergence of the Orchestral Conductor in Paris in the 1830s.”

  50. Even today there are different instrumental preferences and performing styles between French orchestras, for example, and Viennese ones.

  51. See Macdonald, Berlioz’s Orchestration Treatise, p. 210. According to Berlioz (p. 212), even when composers used terms such as “alto trombone” or “bass trombone” in their scores, the parts were not only played by “tenor trombones,” but were intended for those instruments, which were more agile than the old “bass trombones.” According to Clifford Bevan, “The Low Brass,” in Herbert and Wallace, The Cambridge Companion to Brass Instruments (p. 151), during Verdi’s lifetime “it was Italian practice to use a section of three tenor trombones.”

  52. This is the case with the two Neapolitan operas, Mosè in Egitto and Maometto II, that Rossini adapted for Paris as Moïse and Le Siège de Corinthe. He did not include a fourth brass instrument in either of his other French operas, Le Comte Ory and Guillaume Tell, but he did require a serpentone in two further Neapolitan scores, Armida and Ricciardo e Zoraide. Helen Greenwald points out to me that in Zelmira, Rossini indicates “Tromboni e Serpan[tone]” in the list of instruments for one number, the Aria Antenore (N. 6), but writes no separate part for the instrument.

  53. Meucci, in “Il cimbasso e gli strumenti affini nell’Ottocento italiano,” refers to a place in Il corsaro where the term “bombardone” appears on an added leaf (f. 87), rather than “cimbasso.” He neglects to point out, however, that this leaf is in a copyist’s hand. See Verdi, Il corsaro, ed. Hudson, Note 58–66 to the Cavatina Gulnara (N. 6), pp. 46–48.

  54. Thanks to Renato Meucci, real progress has been made. See his “Il cimbasso.”

  55. The letter to Ricordi is cited in part in Abbiati, Giuseppe Verdi, 3:525–26. This translation is taken from Busch, Verdi’s “Aida,” 266–67.

  56. Meucci, “Il cimbasso,” 110–16.

  57. See Simon Wills, “Brass in the Modern Orchestra” in Herbert and Wallace, The Cambridge Companion to Brass Instruments, 157–76 (esp. 175–76).

  58. Bevan, in “The Low Brass,” identifies the modern instrument with the Verdian bass trombone (“trombone Verdi, or late nineteenth-century cimbasso”), which “assumed a distinctive ‘T’-shape, its mechanism and associated tubing positioned vertically and the bell facing forwards over the player’s shoulder” (152).

  59. Meucci, “Il cimbasso,” 13
0–31.

  60. Precisely the same question could be asked about the chorus.

  61. The standard work on the subject remains Koury, Orchestral Performance Practices in the Nineteenth Century. Koury’s scope, however, extends to all performance venues and all countries, so that he provides rather scanty information about the situation in Italian opera houses.

  62. See the Finale Primo (N. 7) in the critical edition to Tancredi, mm. 10–30 (pp. 209–17).

  63. Harwood, “Verdi’s Reform of the Italian Opera Orchestra,” cites considerable evidence that “Italian orchestras seemed to lack a sufficient number of strings, especially violas and cellos, but often had relatively large double bass sections” (109).

  64. See the preface to the critical edition of Guillaume Tell, lix, as well as Note 1–48 in the commentary to the overture (p. 70). According to Harwood, “Verdi’s Reform,” 114, this was the size of the Parisian string section also in 1837 (Table 5); see also Koury, Orchestral Performance Practices, 157.

  65. For some representative data, see Harwood, “Verdi’s Reform,” 109–12, Meucci, “La trasformazione dell’orchestra,” 438–39; and Conati and Pavarani, Orchestre in Emilia-Romagna nell’Ottocento e Novecento, 33–35. More recent research into a number of Italian orchestras (including those of Parma, Trieste, Milan, Florence, and Naples) is reported in Piperno, “Le orchestre dei teatri d’opera italiani nell’Ottocento.”

  66. According to Bartlet (see Guillaume Tell, commentary to the overture, p. 70), Troupenas, Rossini’s Parisian publisher, prepared a set of performance materials for a smaller ensemble than that of the Opéra, assigning the third and fourth solo violoncello parts to two solo violas.