Un air d’Italie: the mandolin in Paris in the 18th century
Pizzicar Galante/Anna Schivazappa (mandolin)
rec. 2022, Castelfranco Veneto, Italy
Sung texts and translations included.
Arcana A552 [69]
Some of my friends and acquaintances regard my fondness for the mandolin as an aberration which I will eventually outgrow, though as I approach my 76th birthday, I am not sure that that is a probable scenario. The mandolin, while it may have a limited range, is capable (in the right hands) of articulating music both complex and delicate. This was recognised, at various times by, for example, Telemann, J.S. Bach, Vivaldi, Mozart (in Don Giovanni) and the song ‘Komm Liebe Zither’, Hummel (a fine concerto in G major), Beethoven (e.g. the Sonatina in C minor and the Andante and Variations in D (WoO43, 1-2). Perhaps more surprisingly, Mahler wrote parts for the mandolin in his Seventh and Eighth Symphonies and Das Lied von der Erde. Given that Bach, Vivaldi and Beethoven thought it worth writing for the mandolin, I am not inclined to apologise for the fact that I find it worth listening to. I wonder if for some with an interest in classical music the mandolin has become ‘tainted’ by its associations with folk music and light music.
Obviously, if you like your music large-scale and profound, this disc is not for you. I have enjoyed and admired it for the music’s intimacy and humanity, its vivacity and charm: for the sophisticated skill of Anna Schivazappa, both virtuosic and sensitive and, on two tracks, the air from Dezède’s Julie and the Serenade from Grétry’s L’Amant jalouse, the verbal intelligence and beautiful tone of Marc Mauillon, along with the disciplined but supple support of Pizzicar Galante throughout.
This is music for intimate settings; most of the music on this disc would surely have been performed in Parisian salons. As such, its scale makes it well suited for modern domestic listening.
Théodora Psychoyou’s excellent booklet notes give a knowledgeable account of the fashionable status of the mandolin in Eighteenth-Century Paris, a fashion which was at its height in the second half of the century. Psychoyou points to one reason for its popularity: “its tuning in fifths, exactly like the violin (G-D-A-E) … made the instrument easily accessible to non-specialist musicians and amateurs”. Parisians who wanted to learn to play the mandolin were well served by a number of teachers (many of them Italian) and by a plethora of teaching manuals. Some significant Italian mandolinisti settled in Paris; one such was the Roman, Carlo Sodi (1715-1788), who settled in the French capital in 1749 (where his younger brother Pietro was already a harpist in the orchestra of the Comédie Italienne) and spent the rest of his life there. In April 1750 he gave a recital at the Concert Spirituel, became a teacher of the mandolin, and composed a number of operas and operettas which were often performed at the city’s Comédie Italienne.
The composers whose music is recorded here are not major figures in the history of music, but several of them were significant figures in their own time. Grétry, for example, “brought pre-Revolutionary opéra comique to its highest point of development” (David Charlton, The New Penguin Opera Guide, ed. Amanda Holden, 2001, p.344). The aria ‘Tandis que tout sommeil’ from Act II of Grétry’s comedy L’amant jaloux, ou Les fausses appearances is a thoroughly charming piece, sung delightfully by Marc Mouillon, accompanied by Anna Schivazappa. This interpretation is full of tenderness, but entirely without the slightest hint of excess sentimentality. This aria seems to survive in a range of contemporary arrangements and transcriptions, of which I have heard a few (mostly on YouTube) – none of which have quite the simple charm of this version (a simplicity created by considerable art).
Though not quite so well-known as Grétry, Nicolas Dezède also played a significant role in the development of opéra comique. Martin Cooper has described him as “one of the most successful composers of this genre” (The Age of Enlightenment 1745-1790, ed. Egon Wellesz and Frederick Sternfeld, OUP, 1973, p.207). This arietta, which begins ‘Lison dormait dans un bocage’ – the opening words will be familiar to lovers of Mozart – comes from his opera Julie which was premiered in September 1772 and was a considerable success, so much so that it was succeeded in the following year by L’erreur d’un moment, ou La Suite de Julie. When Mozart wrote his 9 variations on ‘Lison dormait’ in the summer of 1788 (in Paris) he gave Dezède’s arietta a kind of immortality. Marc Mauillon is again impressive, more forcefully emotional here and the mandolin part, beautifully played by Schivazappa, is more interesting than that in ‘Tandis que tout sommeil’.
The disc opens with a mandolin sonata in three movements (Allegro – Largo amoroso – Allegro) by Gervasio. Gervasio was born in the mandolin’s ‘modern’ home, Naples and he seems to have travelled Europe from his twenties, or earlier, working as a mandolinist, a teacher of singing and mandolin, and as a composer – he is known to have been in London in 1768, in Frankfurt in 1777 and Paris in 1784. Anna Schivazappa plays the sonata on a 2017 mandolin by Tiziano Rizzi of Milan. The continuo section is made up of the viola da gamba of Ronald Martin Alonso, the guitar of Daniel de Morais, the harp of Maria Christina Cleary and the harpsichord of Anna Fontana. The resulting textures are delightful, and the central largo certainly lives up to the epithet amoroso. Here, as elsewhere, Anna Schivazappa’a judgement of phrasing and rhythm is impeccable. The same virtues are evident in the performance of Gervasio’s Sonata in D Major elsewhere on the disc.
Some of the other instrumental pieces come from a source described thus by Théodora Psychoyou of the Sorbonne: “a remarkable collection preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France: a work published in Paris with a title-page attributing the music to Domenico Scarlatti (wrongly, as it turns out) and dating the work to 1751, to the very years when the mandolin was making its first appearance on the Parisian musical scene. […] Anna Schivazappa has succeeded in penetrating the mystery of this false title, which instead concealed, behind the name of the famous composer, transcriptions of opera arias by Italian composers such as Francesco Mancini (Hydaspes), Francesco Bartolomeo Conti (Clotilda), Alessandro Scarlatti and Nicola Francesco Haym (Pyrrhus and Demetrius), all published in France in the 1740s and intended for an unspecified soprano instrument accompanied by continuo”. Three ‘sonatas’ put together by the anonymous arranger are recorded for the first time here – as Sonata Prima in C major, Sonata VI in G minor and Sonata IV in G major. Though not, of course, sonatas in anything more than a very general sense, they make for pleasant enough listening.
Antoine Forqueray (1672-1745) was famous as a virtuoso of, and composer for, the viola da gamba, as well as being the senior figure in a family of violists and composers which included his brother Michel (1687-1757) along with his two sons, Jean-Baptiste-Antoine (1699-1782) and Nicolas-Gilles (1703-1761). The piece by which Forqueray senior is represented on this disc, La Mandoline, was published in a volume of his works, Pièces de viole, edited (somewhat heavily) by his son Jean-Baptiste-Antoine. It is played here by Ronald Martin Alonso, a Cuban-born violist and a regular member of Pizzicar Galante, the ensemble set up by Anna Schivazappa in 2012 to support her in her exploration of the mandolin repertoire and associated music. Martin is supported here by the theorbo of Daniel de Morais. Their account of La Mandoline has a stately grace, interesting textures and a clear sense of rhythm.
This enjoyable disc closes with a performance of La Fürstenberg (that is the title it is given in the documentation accompanying this disc, although I have sometimes seen it referred to as La Füstemberg). The theme is by an unknown French composer of the Seventeenth Century and has been said to be a musical mockery of a countess called La Furstenberg/La Furstemberg who was reputed to be the mistress of the Bishop of Strasbourg. The theme was reused by many later composers, such as Purcell in Act One of his incidental music for The Virtuous Wife. Antonio Riggieri, a mandolinist active in Paris in the 1780s wrote a set of variations on the theme; I remember seeing (though I can’t remember where) a set of variations on the theme for harpsichord, by Josse-François-Joseph Benaut (c.1743-1794); Michel Corette (1705-1795) used the anonymous theme in his work Les Sauvages et la Furstenberg (c.1773) which was amongst the works he designated concertos comiques. The performance (by all the members of Pizzicar Galante except Maria Christina Cleary which closes this disc is less rumbustious than some I have heard, but is engagingly attractive and has enough disciplined energy to be a satisfying conclusion to a fine disc.
Glyn Pursglove
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Contents
Giovanni Battista Gervasio (c.1730-post 1780)
Sonata per mandolin solo, e basso in C major
Nicolas Dezède (1740-1798)
‘Air de Lison’, from Julie (1772)
Anonymous, after Francesco Mancini (1672-1736) and Francesco Bartolomeo Conti (c.1681-1732)
Sonata Prima in C major
Sonata VI in G minor
Antoine Forqueray (1672-1745)
La Mandoline (1747)
Anonymous, after Nicola Francesco Haym (1678-1729), Francesco Mancini and Francesco Bartolomeo Conti
Sonata IV in G major
Gervasio
Sonata per mandolino e basso in D major
André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry (1741-1813)
Serenade “Tandis que tout sommeille” from L’Amour jalouse (1778)
Anonymous
La Fürstenberg
Other performers
Ronald Martin Alonso (viola da gamba), Daniel de Morais (theorbo, archlute, guitar), Maria Christina Cleary (harp), Marc Mauillon (tenor)
