Early Music America Spring 2014 - (Page 59)

BOOK reviews Edited by Mark Kroll Geminiani Studies. Edited by Christopher Hogwood. Ut Orpheus Editions, 2013. xv, 505 pages. Reviewed by Kenneth Slowik. A star pupil of Corelli, Francesco Geminiani (1687-1762) was a composer, arranger, musical essayist, polyglot, and...art dealer. His peripatetic life took him from Lucca (which has still to afford him some of the recognition it lavishes on its other native sons, Puccini and Boccherini) to Rome, Naples, London, Paris, Dublin (where he ultimately died), and points in between. He was frequently lauded. The English music historian Charles Burney wrote in 1781 that "Handel, Geminiani, and Corelli were the sole Divinities of my Youth," while John Hawkins observed that "there being no master of the violin at this day living with whom he can with any propriety be compared.... All the graces and elegancies of melody, all the powers that can engage attention, or that render the passions of the hearer subservient to the will of the artist, were united in his performance." Yet, as editor Christopher Hogwood points out in his typically engaging preface to the present volume, Geminiani's music was never accorded the same reverence as that of Corelli. He was often seen by his contemporaries as arrogant, quarrelsome (to the point of being fiercely litigious, as discussed in Cheryll Duncan's chapter, "Geminiani v. Mrs. Frederica: Legal Battles with an Opera Singer"), and baffling in the extreme (in his self-admitted preference for dealing in paintings and writing treatises to public performance). The 16 essays collected here begin to redress the relative neglect of this composer. In "Thoughts on the 250th Anniversary of Geminiani's Death," Enrico Careri, author of both the Geminiani article in The New Grove and the standard Geminiani biography and work list (Oxford University Press, 1993), acknowledges that the wide spread of Geminiani's activities had contributed to scholars' difficulty in dealing with source material in anything but a geographically and linguistically fragmented fashion. While many of Geminiani's works have been reprinted in facsimile (testimony to the care their author took with their engraving), the projected Geminiani Opera Omnia has only to date published four of its projected 16 volumes (see www.francescogeminiani.com). Neil Zaslaw's "Geminiani in Paris" begins by reminding the reader that Geminiani made at least four trips to the French capital, spending perhaps 40 to 50 months of his life there, during which, between 1749 and 1758, his works were heard at the Concert spiritual on not fewer than 15 occasions. Geminiani's bestknown Parisian opus remains the little-understood Enchanted Forest: As editor Christopher Hogwood points out, Geminiani's music was never accorded the same reverence as that of Corelli. An instrumental composition expressive of the same ideas as the poem [drawn from Gerusalemme liberata] of Tasso of that title. This was presented as a pantomime in five acts (La Forêt Enchantée) by G. N. Servandoni in 1754. Working from information supplied by two contemporary reviews, Zaslaw both sheds doubt on the modern conception that the work was a failure, and offers a convincing hypothetical alignment of its sections (often, but, according to Zaslaw, "wrong-headedly" thought to be a series of concerti grossi) with the plot elements of Servandoni's wordless stage action. Clare Hornsby's "Geminiani's Artistic Collaborator in Paris, Giovanni Niccolò Servandoni" is an excellent companion piece, placing the spectacle of La Forêt Enchantée within the pantomime tradition for which Servandoni was so widely praised by his contemporaries. In "The Dutch Publications of Francesco Geminiani," Rudolf Rasch acknowledges that nearly every work of Geminiani has a complicated publication history, probing further to link Dutch publications with contemporaneous French and English editions. Barra Boydell's "Geminiani in Ireland," Peter Holman's "Geminiani, David Rizzio and the Italian Cult of Scottish Music," and Michael Talbot's "Geminiani's Canon: A Souvenir of a Visit to Scotland" present a profusion of detail about the composer's activities in Great Britain outside of London, and go a good way towards explaining why he included so many popular Scots airs in his 1749 A Treatise of Good Taste in the Art of Musick. Geminiani became a Freemason in London in 1725 and had connections with several Lodges there as well as in Naples. By tracing the role of Geminiani's Masonic friends and publishers throughout his travels, Andrew Pink's "Francesco Geminiani and Freemasonry" establishes that "Freemasonry played an important part in forming the international network of patronage and support that sustained Geminiani's career." In "The Road to Emulation: Geminiani's Elliptical Instructions," Peter Walls establishes both that Geminiani's 1751 The Art of Playing on the Violin is without precedent as "a volume addressed to performers wanting assistance with questions of technique and style relevant to idiomatic and even virtuoso repertoire for the violin" and that its principles reverberated, however weakly, into our own time. Robin Stowell's "The Contribution of Geminiani's The Art of Playing on the Violin to 'The Improved State of the Violin in England'" traces Geminiani's role in the dissemination of Corelli's technique and style through a thorough examination of British violin treatises from his time (including a number of supposititious works falsely ascribed to him) well into the 19th century. In "'You are my Heir': Geminiani's Influence on the Life and Music of Charles Avison," Mark Kroll takes a fascinating look at Avison's orchestral arrangements of Geminiani's Op. 1 violin sonatas, following up his 2005 study "Two Important New Sources for the Music of Charles Avison." Those same sonatas are also the subject of Gregory Barnett's "Geminiani's Op. 1 and the Early Eighteen-Century Violin Sonata," which places them in the context of over 70 other similar Linking to the books: Ut Orpheus Editions www.utorpheus.com Oxford University Press www.oup.com/us Ashgate Publishing www.ashgate.com Music Word Media Group (OOB) Printed copies at amazon.com App at https://chrome.google.com/ webstore W. W. Norton www.wwnorton.com University of Texas Press www.utpress.utexas.edu Harvard University Press www.hup.harvard.edu Suggestions about books to review may be sent to Mark Kroll at books@earlymusic.org. Early Music America Spring 2014 59 http://www.francescogeminiani.com http://www.francescogeminiani.com http://www.utorpheus.com http://www.oup.com/us http://www.ashgate.com http://www.amazon.com https://chrome.google.com/webstore https://chrome.google.com/webstore http://www.wwnorton.com http://www.utpress.utexas.edu http://www.hup.harvard.edu

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Early Music America Spring 2014

Editor's Note
Reader Forum
Sound Bytes
Musings: My No Early Music Dream
Profile: Choral Conductor Amelia LeClair
Recording Reviews
Donors ex machina
Three Small Nails
Early Music Is a Capital Idea
Composing Electronic Music for Baroque Instruments
2014 Guide: Workshops & Festivals
Book Reviews
Ad Index
In Conclusion: 4,568 Pages Ago

Early Music America Spring 2014