TRADITIONAL FORMS OF DRAMATIC ENTERTAINMENT

In spite of several well-intentioned attempts to prove the contrary, classical Arab literature did not know drama as it was conceived in the west from the times of the ancient Greeks to the present, namely as an art form in which an action is ‘imitated’ through dialogue spoken by human actors on a stage. True enough, a specifically Arabic literary form, the maqāmah, developed in the tenth century, generally assumed to be the invention of al-Hamadhānī (969–1008): a tale in elaborate euphuistic rhyming prose intermixed with verse, often relating the adventures of an eloquent vagabond who ekes out a living by impersonating other characters and fooling people. It is a unique form, incorporating both narrative and dramatic elements without being either a short story or a drama proper. Clearly, out of the maqāmah grew the Arabic shadow play (khayāl al-ẓill), probably under Far Eastern influence, in which human characters are represented by shadows cast upon a screen by flat, coloured leather puppets held in front of a torch and manipulated by a hidden puppet master (khayāliyy or rayyis), who also introduced the characters and delivered dialogue and songs with the help of associates.

The shadow play, particularly in its earliest (and, as it happens, most sophisticated) surviving examples, namely the work of Ibn Dāniyāl (1248–1311), is the closest thing in classical Arabic literature to western drama, even though the actors are only puppets.

No other musical instrument has until recent years been so widely used among all classes throughout the world as the violin. One reason, of course, is quite simply the musical perfection of the instrument – its sonority and flexibility in the hands of musicians anywhere, especially, with its capacity for clean and strongly rhythmic articulation and its penetrating tone, its suitability for the performance of dance music of all styles. At the time of its invention dance musicians throughout Europe were playing a variety of bowed string instruments from the gue (probably a type of rectangular box zither) in Britain's northernmost islands, to the rebec-like lira of Greece. Such musicians, professional and amateur, looked favourably on the newcomer: first, they must have found the violin an improvement on their own instruments and, for the most part, they could readily transfer their bowing and fingering techniques to the violin. Secondly, there must have been some status attached to an instrument which found favour in courts and homes of the wealthy, even though in those milieux the violinist was often considered to be a professional musician of rather low rank.

Outside Europe the adoption of the violin can further be seen as an index to the expansion of European influence over the centuries. Wherever they went colonists and traders took violins with them and, as often as not, encouraged indigenous musicians to learn to make and play them. Because we know that professional violinists were seen as low-class providers of dance music compared with the more genteel amateur players of the viol family, we are not surprised to learn, for example, that the early white settlers in North America preferred to teach their musically talented black slaves to play the violin for them so that they themselves were spared the task and were free to indulge in what became at times a passion for social dancing.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the violin underwent an astonishing transformation of role. A lowly dance instrument at the beginning of the period, it had by 1800 become a dominant force in Western musical culture. Virtuoso violinists were feted at court and public concert alike, and only singers were more highly rewarded. While none could perhaps be placed among the very front rank of composers, many violinists were important creative figures, including Heinrich von Biber, Arcangelo Carelli, Antonio Vivaldi and Giovanni Battista Viotti. Indeed the instrument's capabilities influenced the course of musical style itself, to the extent that singers in the early eighteenth century were expected to be able to rival the figurations of violin music. The period also saw the establishment of the string basis of the orchestra, and violinists such as Jean-Baptiste Lully and Johann Stamitz played a major part in the refinement of orchestral discipline. In addition the violin was accepted during the eighteenth century as an accomplishment for gentlemen amateurs.

These developments were closely tied in with those of musical life in general. Early-seventeenth-century Italy was a hotbed of experiment, culminating in the operatic masterpieces of Monteverdi. The violin was the only instrument fully able to match the voice in the new aesthetic, which favoured a subjective and strongly projected individuality, expressed in a dramatic ‘affective’ idiom, with exuberant virtuosity and ornamentation. Both violinists and style spread through Austria and Germany, but the new Italian manner was rejected in seventeenth-century France, and only guardedly accepted in England.

Violin treatises through the years have consistently emphasised the importance of a comfortable and natural bearing when holding the instrument, but it was not until the early nineteenth century that there was any general agreement on the precise position to be adopted. The nineteenth-century violinist's goal was a noble and relaxed posture, with head upright, feet normally in line but slightly apart, and body-weight distributed with a slight bias towards the left side. The seated position involved bending the right wrist and elbow rather more, turning the right leg slightly inwards (to avoid contact between knee and bow when bowing at the point on the upper strings) and supporting the left leg (and hence the body-weight) on a footstool, thereby enabling the trunk to remain erect. Flesch (1923) considers the position of the feet extremely important, discussing three possible positions: the joined-together, rectangular leg position in which the feet are close together; the acutangular leg position, in which the feet are separated, with either right or left foot advanced and the body-weight on the rear foot (this resembles the recommendations of Suzuki, but the advanced left foot takes the bodyweight); and his preferred ‘spread leg’ position, which offers the greatest stability and freedom. Galamian is more flexible of attitude, claiming that ‘How to stand or to sit should not be the object of exact prescriptions other than that the player should feel at ease.’ However, he does insist that exaggerated body movement should be avoided when playing.

The Baroque

The term ‘concerto’, implying an aggregation of performing forces large or small, described many musical genres in the early seventeenth century. These ranged from vocal music accompanied by instrumentalists, to purely instrumental music in which the element of contrast was prominent. The development of the concertato style is witnessed both in the later madrigal books of Monteverdi and in the church music and madrigals of Venetian composers such as Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli. The Gabrielis' Concerti per voci e stromenti musicali (1587), comprising sacred music and madrigals in six to sixteen parts, is the earliest known publication to use the term ‘concerto’ in its title. The instrumental concerto emerged as an independent form towards the end of the seventeenth century and soon evolved into a genre in which virtuosity was a significant ingredient.

Italy

The earliest type of purely instrumental concerto, the concerto grosso, contrasted a large (concerto grosso) and a small group (concertino) of performers. The first essays in this genre emerged with Stradella in Rome in the 1670s, but Corelli brought the form to its first peak with his collection of twelve concerti grossi for strings Op. 6 (1714). these are essentially elaborations of Corelli's trio sonata ideal, the ‘concertino’ section consisting of two violins and a cello. Eight of the set conform to the da chiesa (church) slow–fast–slow–fast pattern, excluding movements of a dance character but including fugal fast movements; the other four comprise largely sequences of dance-like movements in da camera (chamber) fashion.

During its history, the violin has been associated with an abundance of other instruments, not to mention its particularly close relationship with the human voice, to which it has often been compared. To chronicle this would be a formidable task, but fortunately, over a number of centuries, musical taste has favoured a quite limited range of specific groupings which quickly acquired the status of ‘genre’. A Haydn string quartet suggests not just an instrumental combination but a specific mode of treatment, and it is such characteristic forms rather than any ad hoc instrumentation which must demand the closest attention. For the present purposes an ensemble is defined rather arbitrarily as any group of two or more instrumentalists, but excluding compositions for violin and keyboard, the main concern being that repertory categorised today by the equally arbitrary term ‘chamber music’. The New Grove Dictionary defines this as ‘music for small ensembles of solo instruments, written for performance under domestic circumstances’, but this is especially inadequate for the seventeenth century, when small ensemble music need not have been performed in ‘chambers’, while ‘chamber ensembles’ may have been used as ‘orchestras’ in public theatres or churches. Some flexibility has therefore seemed advisable, at least for the first two centuries of this development.

At the turn of the century Joachim and Sarasate, two of the most prominent exponents of nineteenth-century violin playing, were still active. Highly regarded throughout their careers, the two figures represented opposite ideals: Joachim was the serious musician who probed the musical essence of a composition, and Sarasate the elegant violinist who played with a sleek but somewhat glib virtuosity. Renowned for the depth and spiritual quality of his interpretations, Joachim was venerated as the greatest interpreter of the German masterworks. He had first performed the Beethoven concerto as a thirteen-year-old under the baton of Mendelssohn and, as leader of the distinguished Joachim Quartet, did much to bring the Beethoven quartets to the public's attention. As a close friend of Brahms, Joachim not only championed many of the composer's works, but also inspired and advised Brahms, notably in the writing of his Violin Concerto. By contrast, Beethoven and Brahms were composers for whom Sarasate had little affinity. The violinist Albert Spalding recalled that ‘he played Beethoven with the perfumed polish of a courtier who doesn't quite believe what he is saying to Majesty’. As for the Brahms concerto, Sarasate unashamedly refused to perform the work, explaining, ‘Why should I stand there while the oboe has the only proper melody in the whole piece?’ It would be unfair, however, to dismiss Sarasate's achievement on the basis of his musical tastes. He was a unique personality, and had sufficient musical qualities to inspire a wide variety of composers to write works for him.

The violin: introduction and terminology

The violin is an endlessly fascinating instrument, both historically and artistically. A performer's instrument may be four hundred years old, but it will not differ significantly from one made yesterday. That the frail-looking violin has endured shows the perfection of its design, both as an expressive instrument of music and as a beautiful object in itself.

The violin is a mechanically simple but acoustically complex instrument. The four tapered tuning pegs for adjusting the G, D, A and E strings are made usually from rosewood or boxwood for durability, and project laterally from the backward curving pegbox (see Fig. 1). This latter ends in the scroll, a baroque adornment which is a characteristic feature of the violin family. The backward slope of the pegbox tensions the strings across the ebony nut, which is grooved to locate and raise them just above the surface of the ebony fingerboard, against which the strings are stopped by the fingers of the left hand. The fingerboard is glued to the neck, which is carved in one piece with the pegbox and scroll from maple (acer pseudoplatanus). It has a curved top in cross-section, and increases in width from the nut end to permit wider string spacing across the bridge, allowing easier movement for the bow.

Treatises

It was not until the end of the seventeenth century that instruction books devoted exclusively to violin technique were published, John Lenton's The Gentleman's Diversion … (1693) being recognised as the first extant violin tutor. Like most of its immediate successors, it was intended for the amateur musician. Its elementary content was no substitute for oral instruction by a teacher, on whom many depended in order to learn techniques ‘which may be knowne but not described’. Earlier in the century some treatises had begun to reflect both the liberation of instruments from their subordination to the voice and the improved social position of the violin itself by incorporating descriptions of contemporary instruments, sometimes with some basic technical information. But these were publications addressed to musicians as a whole, dealing with a wide range of instruments, and were not specialist violin texts. Among the most significant of these ‘multi-purpose’ volumes were Praetorius's Syntagma musicum (1618–20), Mersenne's Harmonie uni verselle (1636), Zanetti's Il scolaro … per imparar a suonare di violino, et altri stromenti (1645), Prinner's Musicalischer Schlissl (1677), Speer's Gründ-richtiger … Unterricht (1687) and Falck's Idea boni cantoris (1688). John Playford's A Brief Introduction to the Skill of Musick demonstrates the increasing popularity of the violin in amateur circles, a complete section, ‘Playing on the Treble Violin’, being added in a second revised edition (1658) published four years after the first.

Introduction

A study of the physics of the violin gives a fascinating insight into how the instrument converts the player's intricate motions into musical sounds. Practising musicians are often blissfully unaware of the ways in which their instruments function, but a basic understanding of the mechanics involved can be of great benefit when teaching, selecting instruments or dealing with minor problems. It also brings a little more objectivity to a subject otherwise clouded with myth, mystique and superstition.

The twentieth century has witnessed a great increase in the scientific evaluation and development of a wide range of musical instruments. Occasionally, investigations are designed specifically to improve the performance of instruments or to achieve greater control during their manufacture. Some of these studies have been successful. More usually, they are carried out purely for the sake of curiosity – a desire to seek a rational explanation of an observed phenomenon. The researcher now has a wide range of powerful analytical techniques at his disposal. For example, he can use sensitive electronic instrumentation, high-speed computers and even lasers to probe the tiny vibrations of the violin. Although these physical studies have demonstrated the basic action of the violin and unravelled a few of its 'mysteries', they are still far from answering those tantalising questions relating to the finer details of violin tone.

In addition to the sonata and concerto, the violin repertory comprises four further principal areas: music for unaccompanied violin; variations; short genre pieces for violin with orchestra or keyboard; and transcriptions. The first examples of music for unaccompanied violin date from the late seventeenth century and the genre reached its first peak with the works of J. S. Bach. Interest in the medium then declined until it was revived in the current century by composers such as Reger, Hindemith, Bartók and Prokofiev. Among shorter genres, the variation form remained a favourite vehicle for performers from the early seventeenth century. It came to fuller flower towards the end of the eighteenth century with the popularity of the air varié, using a popular operatic aria or national folktune as its variation source, and became the favourite vehicle for bravura display exploited by virtuosi such as Paganini, de Bériot, Vieuxtemps, Ernst and others. The short genre piece, including romances, elegies, ballades and legends or national dances like polonaises, mazurkas or jotas, similarly found particular favour during the nineteenth century, and transcriptions of masterpieces of former times also became popular at about the same time.

Music for unaccompanied violin

Probably the earliest extended work for unaccompanied violin is Biber's Passacaglia (c.1675), comprising sixty-five variations on the descending tetrachord G–F–Eb–D, included as the last in the collection of sixteen ‘Rosary’ Sonatas. But there are also several shorter examples incorporated in John Playford's The Division Violin (1684) and Nicola Matteis's four books of Ayres of the Violin (Books 1 and 2, 1676; 3 and 4, 1685).

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the derivative French classical school of violin playing was pre-eminent, based at the Conservatoire de Musique in Paris (established in 1795). The parent Italian violin school had largely run its course, but it was an Italian, Viotti, who had largely been responsible for laying the foundations of the highly systematised French approach to violin playing and teaching, and his methods were disseminated widely through his own performances and teaching. With the extension of the French school into Belgium in the 1840s and the influence of violinist-composers such as Spohr in Germany, the stage was set for the full flush of Romanticism to blossom in the form of the itinerant virtuoso, ‘one of the essential and corroding institutions in music history’ responsible for both the development and the debasement of the violin art.

France and Belgium

By the beginning of the nineteenth century Viotti had retired almost entirely from music in order to devote his attentions to his London wine business, the eventual failure of which left him with substantial debts; Gaviniés, Leclair's successor as leader of the French violin school, had left his legacy of distinguished pupils (e.g. Baudron, Capron, Guénin, Leduc and Paisible), some of whom had come under his wing while he was violin professor at the Paris Conservatoire; and Michel Woldemar (1750–1815) was encouraging the cultivation of more virtuosic techniques after the ‘school’ of his mentor Lolli. Although Viotti performed in public for less than ten years, the qualities of his playing dominated an entire generation of violinists. His technical brilliance, the breadth, beauty and power of his tone and the overall expressive characteristics of his performances captured the imagination of his listeners. Paul Alday, Cartier, Duranowski, Vacher, Labarre, Libon, Robberechts, F.W. Pixis and Rode were among his pupils, and both Kreutzer and Baillot have been regarded as disciples.

Introduction

The violin sonata took two avenues of development in the Baroque era. The seventeenth-century form, for violin and continuo, involved the violin as principal melodist. Harmonic support in the form of semi-improvised chords or the realisation of a prescribed figured bass was provided by a keyboard instrument (normally an organ or harpsichord), which could be joined or replaced by a plucked instrument (chitarrone or archlute); in addition, the bass line could be sustained, normally by a string instrument such as a cello or gamba. The sonata emerged first in Northern Italy, spreading to Austria and Germany, and later to England and France. The principal centres of sonata activity were Venice, Bologna, Vienna, Dresden, Hamburg, London and Paris, the very centres where patronage and publication were most easily attained. As the genre evolved during the seventeenth century, two different types emerged: the sonata da camera (‘chamber sonata’), which is essentially a suite of stylised dances; and the sonata da chiesa (‘church sonata’), the movements of which have no dance allegiances.

The sonata's second avenue of development, the so-called ‘accompanied sonata’, involved the violinist in a subordinate role to an obbligato keyboard. This type, which challenged the dominance of the sonata with continuo and eventually superseded it, began and ended in the Classical period, giving way to the true duo sonata for two equal protagonists.