REBEL Baroque Ensemble – October 5, 2010

Harlequin Unmasked: Festive Music of the Carnival for dancers, recorder & strings

The commedia dell arte was a very physical form of improvisational theatre that dates from 16th century Italy. It is peopled with stock characters such as Scaramouche, Pantalone, Pulcinella and, of course, Arlquino or Harlequin. Each of these main characters is identified by their specific mask, costume, and movement characteristics. Female roles in the commedia were either specific characters like Columbine, female counterparts to male characters like Arlequina, or named for the actress who played the role, such as the character of Isabella (Isabella Andreini). The plot for a commedia play was outlined and posted backstage, and the actors would improvise on this rough scenario. Under the patronage of Louis XIV, the commedia dell arte flourished for a while in France. But when his pious mistress, Madame de Maintenon deemed the Italian comedians indecent, they were thrown out of their theatre and commedia was not performed in Paris for about twenty years.

It was also under the patronage of Louis XIV that dance became a codified art form through the invention of the five positions of the feet, still in use in classical ballet today. A system of notating dance was also invented under his auspices, which, then as now, enables the dances to be reconstructed. The dance of 18th century France can be separated into three styles – ballroom, noble, and grotesque. The step vocabulary of each was based on the ballroom style, with legs rotated outwardly from the hip joints and referred to as the “true” positions. But in grotesque dances, we often find the feet rotated inwardly or in “false” positions.

The mixture of commedia dell arte characters and 18th century dance is limited to four dances that were notated for Arlequino, with specific head and arm gestures. While three of these notations are undated manuscripts, one alone was published in London in 1728. There is also a collection of dances that are verbally and pictorially described by Gregorio Lambranzi and published in 1716. Included are several dances for Harlequin and his wife, Scaramouche, Pantalone, and Il Dottore.

For our performances of Harlequin Unmasked, we have used period sources to create our 18th century style dances. The Campra/Charpentier suite serves as an introduction to the characters of Harlequin and Harlequina and includes one of the three notated dances for Harlequin mentioned above. Using scenarios from the commedia dell arte, we have created three adventures for Harlequin and Columbine (Vivaldi Concerto in D major). For the Schmelzer Serenata con altre arie, we have used an idea from one of the most famous English Harlequins. John Rich, known as Lun, was considered a brilliant mime and dancer in his day. As Harlequin, he had the ability to scratch his ear with his foot, and also purportedly danced three hundred steps at a quick pace in the space of three yards. Tonight, we use his scenario of the birth of Harlequin, but continue it with Shakespeare’s concept of “The Ages of Man.” We hope you enjoy Harlequin and Harlequina masked and unmasked!

Thomas Baird & Paige Whitley-Bauguess

Notes on the Music

The ouverture burlesque is “a farcical, entertaining overture in which serious melodies serve as a foil for laughable ones made of fifths and octaves,” according to Johann Gottfried Walther’s Musical Lexicon, published in 1732 in Leipzig. Burlesque style was associated with parody and the grotesque and so it created a fitting framework for an instrumental suite of dances based on the characters of the commedia dell’arte. In 1722, a year after coming to Hamburg, Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767) consolidated his position as the city’s Musikdirektor by becoming involved with theatrical productions at the opera. City officials had offered him a substantial salary increase and allowed him to expand his influence beyond Hamburg’s churches in exchange for his agreeing to stay in Hamburg, thus declining the post of Kantor which he had been offered by Leipzig. He was attuned to drama and music’s narrative power and was one of the few late-baroque composers to embrace quasi-programmatic instrumental music. One theory has it that he wrote his Ouverture burlesque, TWV 55:B8, to precede a commedia dell’arte performance at the Hamburg theater. This, however, is not fully supported by the surviving source material for the piece, a manuscript copy made on Saxon paper in the early 1720s at the latest, which suggests the piece must have been composed before his arrival in Hamburg. Telemann used the French versions of the characters’ names. The character Scaramouche was one of the later additions to the commedia dell’arte, created by the actor Tiberio Fiorelli who was the leader of the troop of Comédiens Italiens who had shared the theater of the Palais Royal in Paris with Molière’s Comédie Française. Scaramouche was typically a boastful buffoon dressed in black, usually Spanish-style clothing. Telemann amplified the effect by portraying multiple Scaramouches in the first dance movement of this suite. All the other characters Telemann portrays are Zanni, servant characters. Harlequin is perhaps the most famous of the stock characters, a mischievous, acrobatic clown, clad in particolored diamonds, in love with the clever Colombine. According to Walther’s Lexicon a harlequinade is a fool’s dance or procession. Pierrot is a loyal, dependable servant dressed in white. Mezzetin is normally dressed in stripes and often treated as an extreme or exotic character. Telemann dresses him as a Turk, through the use of what his audience would have considered barbarous-sounding music which actually owes more to the composer’s knowledge of Polish folk music than of anything remotely Turkish or Asiatic.

After the success of the publication of the concertos of the op. 3 L’estro armonico by Estienne Roger in Amsterdam in 1711, it seemed that the public had an insatiable appetite for concertos by Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741). Over the next decade and a half he obliged by sending nine further sets of concertos to Amsterdam for Roger and his successor Le Cène to publish. In 1729 at Le Cène’s urging, Vivaldi assembled a set of six concertos for “transverse flute” and strings which were published as his op. 10. Apart from the fourth piece in the set, the opus consisted of older piece now reworked for publication. While the traverso was all the rage in northern Europe at the time, its use was newer to Vivaldi and it is not always clear for which instrument he had actually conceived a given work. In the case of the op. 10, no. 5 concerto in F major, RV 434, which calls for the strings to play with mutes throughout, Vivaldi simply handed an existing recorder concerto, RV 442, to the copyist with the instruction to write the middle movement one tone higher, aware that the original key of f minor would not sit well on the traverso. This original concerto for recorder on which op. 10, no. 5 is based is unusual in that each movement is borrowed from one of Vivaldi’s operatic arias. The concerto in D major, RV 94, is one of Vivaldi’s “chamber” concertos, a piece written for specific smaller forces without the full complement of four-part strings. In this case Vivaldi called for recorder, oboe, violin, bassoon, and basso continuo (the single part shared by lower melody instruments and chordal instruments, to which chordal players were expected to add improvised harmonies). In this performance the oboe and bassoon parts are taken over by violin and cello, an accepted eighteenth-century practice.

The Ballet des ombres heureuses, known in English as the Dance of the Blessed Spririts, which prominently features a solo flute, is taken from Act II of Orphée et Eurydice by Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-1787). The original Italian version of the opera, Orfeo ed Euridice, produced in Vienna in 1762 had been successful enough that Gluck was invited to rework the original Italian opera seria into something suitable for French taste. It was presented in a new French version in Paris in 1774. This ballet, heard here in the expanded Paris version, opens the second scene of the Act II, set in Elysium.

Though André Campra (1660-1744) began his career as a highly regarded maître de musique at various churches, eventually at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris from 1694, he has achieved his greatest acclaim as creator of the opéra-ballet or simply ballet. Unlike the tragédie lyrique, the opéra-ballet used modern characters and settings and was constructed in a way so that less successful numbers could be replaced by items which had already achieved audience popularity in previous productions. His initial triumph in the genre was the opéra-ballet Europe galante, which premiered in 1697. In order to conceal his authorship of theatrical music from church authorities, he published under his brother’s name, until in 1700 when royal patronage allowed him to leave his position at the cathedral to devote his talents to the stage. After twenty years of composing for the theater Campra gradually returned to sacred music. He retired from the royal chapel two years before his death at the age of eighty-four.

Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643-1704) was also recognized for both his sacred and theatrical music. Though never receiving a court appointment, he benefitted from the patronage of the Guise family, particularly the pious Marie de Lorraine for whom he served as composer in residence. It is probably also through the Guise family that Charpentier came into contact with Molière, thus in 1672 beginning a successful series of
collaborations with the Troupe du Roy, later the Comédie Française, putting him at odds with Lully who tried to maintain a monopoly on royal patronage for theatrical music. Le malade imaginaire, Molière’s last play was first performed on 10 February 1673, the day of the playwright’s death. To Lully’s chagrin the play was entirely accompanied by Charpentier’s music.

The career of Heinrich Ignaz Biber (1644-1704) was concentrated in appointments at three Austrian courts: Styria, Kroměříž (1668 or earlier to 1670), and Salzburg (from 1670 onwards). Jakob Stainer, probably the greatest German violin maker of all time, having met Biber in Kroměříž, called him in 1670 “der vortreffliche Virtuos” or the formidable virtuoso. Biber pushed violin virtuosity further than any other composer of the seventeenth century. Despite the austere-sounding Latin name, Biber’s Mensa sonora is written specifically with entertainment foremost in mind, if perhaps entertainment of an elevated nature. This music, composed in 1680 and dedicated to the Archbishop of Salzburg, was apparently written to enrich the dining experience of Biber’s patron. Unlike much of his writing for violins, the dance suites of his Mensa sonora are not concerned with instrumental virtuosity, but exhibit a high degree of contrapuntal activity and an interest in tonal color to which he alludes in the German subtitle to the work: Instrumental Table Music with fresh-sounding violin sonorities.

Johann Heinrich Schmelzer (1620-1680) is Biber’s clearest musical precursor in the lineage of Austrian violinist composers, even if the earliest surviving document of him as a musician indicates that he was employed as a cornettist. As violinist and composer he enjoyed the highest favor of the Hapsburg emperor, Leopold I. Schmelzer became vice-Kapellmeister in 1671, was ennobled two years later, and in 1679 was appointed Kapellmeister. Allegorical and narrative dance pageants, in which the royal family sometimes participated, were an important part of life and ceremonies of the Hapsburg court. Themes ranged from classical mythology to commedia dell’arte farces. Schmelzer wrote more than 150 dance suites in the form of drammi per musica and serenatas along with numerous individual dances. His Serenata con altre arie shows Schmelzer in his role as one of the official ballet composers to the Hapsburg court in Vienna. Though we have no specific record of the dance or story that would have gone with this music, the programmatic nature of some of the titles—Erlicino (Harlequin), Campanella ([funeral] bells), and Lamento—are very suggestive. It is unusual that this suite begins in a five-part texture, but employs only four instrumental parts from the Ciaconna to the end. It is possible that the suite was assembled, at least in part, from pre-existing movements, which could explain the reduction in instrumental voice halfway through the piece.
—John Moran

Notes on the Dance

The commedia dell’arte was a very physical form of improvisational theater that dates from sixteenth-century Italy. It is peopled with stock characters such as Scaramouche, Pantalone, Pulcinella and, of course, Arlquino or Harlequin. Each of these main characters is identified by their specific mask, costume, and movement characteristics. Female roles in the commedia were either specific characters such as Columbine, female counterparts to male characters like Arlequina, or named for the actress who played the role, such as the character of Isabella (Isabella Andreini). The plot for a commedia play was outlined and posted backstage, and the actors would improvise on this rough scenario. Under the patronage of Louis XIV, the commedia dell’arte flourished for a while in France. However, when his pious mistress, Madame de Maintenon, deemed the Italian comedians indecent, they were thrown out of their theater and commedia was not performed in Paris for about twenty years.

It was also under the patronage of Louis XIV that dance became a codified art form through the invention of the five positions of the feet, still in use in classical ballet today. A system for notating dance was also invented under his auspices, which, then as now, enables the dances to be reconstructed. The dance of eighteenth-century France can be separated into three styles: ballroom, noble, and grotesque. The step vocabulary of each was based on the ballroom style, with legs rotated outwardly from the hip joints and referred to as the “true” positions, but in grotesque dances, we often find the feet rotated inwardly or in “false” positions.

The mixture of commedia dell’arte characters and eighteenth-century dance is limited to four surviving dances notated for Arlequino, with specific head and arm gestures. While three of these notations are undated manuscripts, one alone was published in London in 1728. There is also a collection of dances that are verbally and pictorially described by Gregorio Lambranzi and published in 1716. Included are several dances for Harlequin and his wife, Scaramouche, Pantalone, and Il Dottore.

For our performances of Harlequin Unmasked, we have used period sources to create our eighteenth-century style dances. The Campra/Charpentier suite serves as an introduction to the characters of Harlequin and Harlequina and includes three notated dances: “A Chacoon for a Harlequin” (Le Roussau 1720/1728) to music from Charpentier’s Le Malade Imaginaire (1673), “Entrée pour une femme” (Pécour 1704) from Campra’s Le Carnaval de Venise (1699) performed by “masques,” and “2e Entrée des festes venitienne” (Pécour 1713) from Campra’s Les Fêtes Vénitiennes (1710) also performed by “masques”. Using scenarios from the commedia dell’arte, we have created three adventures for Harlequin and Harlequina (Vivaldi Concerto in D major): The Venetian Lady, The Love Letter, and The Portrait. For the Schmelzer Serenata con altre arie, we have used an idea from one of the most famous English Harlequins. John Rich, known as Lun, was considered a brilliant mime and dancer in his day. As Harlequin, he had the ability to scratch his ear with his foot, and also purportedly danced three hundred steps at a quick pace in the space of three yards. Tonight, we use his scenario of the birth of Harlequin, but continue it with Shakespeare’s concept of “The Ages of Man”. We hope you enjoy Harlequin and Harlequina masked and unmasked!
—Thomas Baird & Paige Whitley-Bauguess