[Letter from Gloria Rose]Author(s): Gloria RoseSource: Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring, 1969), pp. 141-142Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/830825 .

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Gloria Rose, Iowa City, sends the

following communication:

I WISH TO correct a mistake in my article "Agazzari and the Improvising Orches- tra," this JOURNAL XVIII (1965), pp- 382-

393. It was brought to my attention by a passage in Simon Towneley's chapter "Early Italian Opera" in the New Ox- ford History of Music, IV (London, 1968), p. 83I.

The instrumental phrase in Marco da Gagliano's Dafne which I discussed on pp. 390-391 is in fact explained in the

composer's preface to his opera. During Apollo's singing of "Non curi la mia pianta," Marco da Gagliano explains, "four players of the viol (braccio or gamba matters little) should be put in one of the nearest passages, in a place where, not seen by the people, they should see Apollo, and as he puts his bow onto his lira, they should play the three notes written, taking care to draw matching bowstrokes, so that it may seem a single bow."

Thus the instrumental phrase which looks so curious in the score of Marco da Gagliano's Dafne was intended as a special dramatic effect, for a special pur- pose in this particular scene. The pur- pose was to simulate, by four stringed instruments, perhaps already available in the orchestra, a presumably dummy or at least silent "lira" which the singer tak- ing the role of Apollo was only pretend- ing to play on the stage. Four ordinary stringed instruments, playing four parts, were needed for this simulation, for the evident reason that the "lira" in Apollo's hands was not a plucked, Greek lyre but a bowed, Renaissance lira da braccio, which has a rather flat bridge and is reg- ularly played in full chords. This, again, need cause no surprise, since Renaissance painters did habitually depict Apollo with this anachronistic but poetically

plausible instrument, which after all was what the name lira had then ordinarily come to mean.

On the other hand, this explanation, which I regret having overlooked in con- nection with the Dafne passage, cannot have anything to do with the still odder

appearance of the instrumental phrases in Luigi Rossi's Palazzo incantato men- tioned and illustrated on pp. 391-392 of

my article. These phrases resemble the Dafne phrase in using instruments in re- sponse to a dramatic situation: Prasildo exclaims, "But with joyous harmony I hear the air enriched." There, however, the resemblance ceases. These phrases, unlike the Dafne phrase, are neither com- plete nor even intelligible in themselves. In different manuscripts, they appear a little differently, not always adding up metrically or making sense musically. Nor do they provide sufficient notes to meet the instruction, "Here all the in- struments play." The text is, it seems, partly corrupt, and the harmony as writ- ten would sound more weird than joy- ous. But in any case it is incomplete. There is no such simple, alternative ex- planation such as Marco da Gagliano's own preface gives for the Dafne passage, as a special off-stage effect. We are there- fore left with the conclusion drawn in my article: these phrases in Luigi Rossi's Palazzo incantato are meant as the basis of a more or less improvised ritornello.

Since my article appeared, Janet E. Beat has well pointed out, in The Mon- teverdi Companion (London, 1968), p. 294, that two whole sinfonie in Monte- verdi's Ritorno d'Ulisse in patria are no- tated for a bass part only. She has further (pp. 295-296) pointed very interestingly to an instrumental piece in Cavalli's Didone which "provides us with a clue to the way in which we may interpret the improvised sinfonia in Act I, scene 4, of Monteverdi's II Ritorno d'Ulisse." These two sinfonie in the Ritorno d'Ulisse in patria were discussed also by Anna Amalie Abert, Claudio Monteverdi und das musikalische Drama (Lippstadt, 1954), not very plausibly on p. 62 but more suggestively on p. 324, n. 347a, where

COMMUNICATIONS 141

tenor part book is, in fact, an oblong quarto similar to her no. 131, which is described in the Abecedariumnt as a quarto.

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142 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY

the possibility of musical "shorthand" was tentatively raised. The sinfonie occur in Act I, Scene I and Act I, Scene 4 of II Ritorno d'Ulisse in patria; they appear in Malipiero's edition of the Opere in vol. Iz, pp. 13 and 36, and in Robert Haas's edition for the DTO, Jahrg. 29, vol. 57, pp. 8 and 20.

Now the first of these sinfonie, con- sisting of four bass notes on C, bears the following extraordinary direction:

Concluded the present sinfonia [i.e. the one just heard] in lively time, there begins the following sad, low one, until Penelope has arrived on the stage to begin singing.

This sinfonia is repeated so many times [as necessary] until Penelope ar- rives on the stage.

The second of these sinfonie consists of two bass notes on C. Here the stage directions read:

Here comes out the Phaeacians' boat, which carries Ulysses, who is sleeping; and so that he is not awakened, the following sinfonia is performed, played softly always on one chord [corda: the sense requires this translation here].

This last is a stage spectacle requiring a fair amount of time, and consequently of music, to carry through. Even if two (or four) bass notes could in themselves conceivably be thought to deserve the name sinfonia, the stage spectacle requires a true sinfonia; and the conclusion there- fore seems irresistible that the bass notes are notated as the foundation of a more or less improvised sinfonia of the re- quired duration, the bass notes being re- peated or protracted as a tonic pedal.

It is valuable to recall here that the opening Toccata of Monteverdi's Orfeo stands in just this manner on the repeti- tion of a single bass note, also written C, though sounding concert D because of the rise of a tone in pitch caused by muting the baroque trumpets. In this case the music is written out, and it shows us instrumental parts of effective simplicity, admirably suited to their purpose, yet

well within a style such as we can im- agine to have been improvised on other similar occasions. Tuneful and inventive as the figuration is, it all stays in plain tonic C major, and could obviously have been continued longer if required.

It begins to appear that similar occa- sions were not uncommon in 17th-cen- tury operas. The comparison of instru- mental parts written out as in the opening Toccata of Monteverdi's Orfeo, and as in the Cavalli piece perceptively noticed by Janet Beat, may help us in complet- ing for ourselves the many sinfonie which survive notated as mere fragments, if at all, in 17th-century opera scores.

Joshua Rifkin, Princeton University, sends the following communication:

FEW THINGS can cause more trouble to the student of 17th-century keyboard manuscripts than the frequent appearance in these sources of isolated sections from larger compositions. Identification of such fragments is as often as not the result of happy accident. Thus it hardly seems surprising that the origin of the Fuga di Sign: Geor. Frob. contained in the MS Brasov, Bibliothek, Mus. MS 808 should have escaped the conscientious scrutiny of John H. Baron ("A i7th- Century Keyboard Tablature in Brasov," this JOURNAL XX, 1967, pp. 279-285). As Mr. Baron suspects, the work comes from the pen of Johann Jakob Froberger; it forms the final part of a Toccata in D minor, No. XIX in Guido Adler's complete edition of Froberger's keyboard music (Denkmdler der Tonkunst in bster- reich X/2, pp. 19-2 i; the fugal section

begins at measure 52). The Toccata also appears in Helmut Schultz's Froberger selection in Peter's Meister des Cembalos series (Leipzig, 1935).

Hanoch Avenary, University of Tel- Aviv, sends the following communi- cation:

THE WHOLE BODY of Byzantine melodies

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