Veracini Complete Sonate Accademiche

Francesco Maria Veracini (1690–1768) was the foremost figure in a generation of renowned virtuosi, including Giuseppe Tartini (1692–1770), Pietro Locatelli (1695–1764), and Jean-Marie Leclair (1697–1764), who revolutionized the art of violin playing in the early 18th century. All four of these figures dazzled audiences throughout Europe with their astonishing performances. They raised the bar for instrumental soloists with their prolific production of fine and difficult music for the violin, works that daringly expanded the compass of expression and acrobatic performance on the instrument. Veracini’s place as leader of this violinistic ‘rat pack’ ism suggested by the fact that both Locatelli and Tartini, though only slightly younger, took inspiration from his playing and teaching, and Leclair’s path-breaking mature works are in turn, indebted to Locatelli. Veracini’s achievement is crowned and his legacy best preserved in his Opus 2 of 1744, the set of twelve Sonate Accademiche, a work of uniquely varied inspiration and majestic scope.

Veracini was born and educated in Florence, an ancient cultural capital of the Land of Music, a city with a famous history of nurturing the arts with a seriousness of purpose and a specific brand of Humanism that subsumes both virtuosity and sensuality. Growing up in a family of literate professionals schooled in Latin and Greek, and passing daily through streets overlooked by the knowing gazes of saints and heroes sculpted by Donatello and Michelangelo, one may also imagine that the young Francesco Maria learned early the potential for dignity and urgent action in the vocation of an artist. And one may also imagine such a vision moving the young man to strive mightily for transcendent mastery in the arts of counterpoint, harmony, and invention (as well as violin playing). Every page of the Sonate Accademiche is forged of a characteristically Tuscan alloy of discipline, ambition, and sprezzatura.

The most famous anecdote of Veracini’s career tells us that the violinist’s injurious self-defenestration from an upper story window in Dresden was the result of mental instability caused by arduous study of music and alchemy. The implications are intriguing. Throughout the period known as the baroque era in music, various forms of alchemy flourished sporadically in central Europe. These late expressions of renaissance magic sometimes appeared as symbolic spiritual disciplines, at other times as a coarser pursuit. Alchemy was the study of processes of transformation with the object of changing common materials into real or metaphorical (spiritual) gold. One material manifestation of the discipline is Dresden’s famous porcelain industry which literally uses chemical processes to turn dirt (clay and minerals) into gold (money). One of the more spiritual approaches is found in music, an art known from earliest history for its power to transform minds and spirits. This effort is explicit in such a work as Michael Maier’s collection of magical emblems and fugues, Atalanta fugiens (Oppenheim, 1617). It is implicit in fugues of many German composers (Bach and Buxtehude being the most famous exemplars): compositions in which arcane knowledge is brought to bear on complex thought challenges, sonically indicated by musical subjects of mystical abstraction and strangeness. These pieces often feature chromatic intervals in which tones of the natural scale are altered, and employ an array of procedures to develop their subjects, including temporal compression or expansion, dissection, mutation, transposition, juxtaposition, and inversion. These mathematical techniques are the tools of an aural art with a sur-prising power to transform the listener. Veracini’s fugues, with their long chromatic themes and serious working-out of materials, owe much to their German counterparts. Thus Veracini and his Lutheran colleagues join Doctor Faustus and Dürer’s Melancholia in turning to the numerical/spiritual arts of the quadrivium (harmony, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy) to address problems of the soul that seem rarely to have troubled musicians based south of the Alps.

In London, Veracini’s career thrived in the most modern commercial capital in the world, where the public concert scene was rapidly developing into the cosmopolitan phenomenon we still inhabit. The competitive nature of this environment gave license and even added incentive to Veracini’s innate enthusiasm for the sheer entertainment value of violin virtuosity. Veracini never writes flashy trash, but he also never holds back, ever willing to dazzle and delight his audience with giddy pyrotechnics. Veracini also addresses a ticket-buying public with a particularly British way of assimilating popular, even rustic tunes into high art music. He never heard their music, but in England Veracini was breathing the same air and drinking the same water as William Byrd and Ralph Vaugh Williams.

Two sonatas feature traditional tunes Veracini almost certainly heard in per-formances of John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera. The theme of the Cottillon Capriccio Quinto in Veracini’s Sonata Quarta is derived from a French tune performed in the famous ballad opera with the English text, “Youth’s the season made for joys.” This tune appears to be the ur-cottillion: the name of the dance comes from a line in the tune’s French text, “Ma commere, quand je danse, Mon cotillion va-t-il bien?”

The Scottish tune featured in the theme and variations of Sonata No. 10 is‘Tweedside,’ sung in the Beggar’s Opera by Polly Peachum with the text, “The stag, when chas’d all the long day . . . ”

London was also the scene of Veracini’s career as an opera composer, which included three productions for the Opera of the Nobility, the company the Prince of Wales established to compete with Handel’s Royal Academy. An operatic manner of presentation can often be detected in the slow movements of Veracini’s Opus 2, especially in Sonatas 2 and 10.

The Sonate Accademiche collection concludes with a brief two-voice canon, setting the second half of an epigram-matic Latin text:

Cur adhibes tristi numerous cantumque labori?
Ut RElevet MIserum FAtum SOLitosque LAbores.
Why do you apply numbers and song to grievous labor?
That it may relieve wretched fate and accustomed labors.¹

This text is first found in a music manual of 1591 by Adam Gumpelzhaimer, and subsequently appears on the title pages of many continental musical publications. It seems a fitting peroration for a book whose many pleasures and lessons were created, and are only realized, by dint of extraordinarily hard work.

Acknowledgements

Trio Settecento wishes to thank Christophe Landon for the generous loan for use in this recording of a cello made by David Tecchler in Rome in 1705. This extraordinary instrument is thought to be the only Tecchler cello to survive unaltered in size and with its original neck.

¹ Translation by Leofranc Holford Strevens, quoted by Benjamin Hebbert in “Nicolas Lanier 1588–1666 A Portrait Revealed.”