Correspondence

Baroque Concertos

Did musicians of the Baroque period think of the concerto as what we would call chamber music, to be played one-to-a-part, or as part of an orchestral repertoire? Michael Talbot, in his review in Music & Letters (86 (2005), 287–90) of my book The Scoring of Baroque Concertos, evidently regards the question itself as misconceived, and hence any attempt to answer it as futile: 'This question would be well worth investigating in depth if the antithesis . . . were not false from the start.' False, because in Talbot's opinion Baroque composers, 'ultra-pragmatic in their approach', were concerned only about proportions and balance, not total numbers (so much for the debate about Bach's chorus!). 'The raison d'être of early instrumental concertos', he asserts, 'was their suitability for large ensembles in which part-sharing . . . was practised', although if one's resources were limited one could if necessary play them one-to-a-part ('a workable, if not ideal, solution' in the case of Albinoni's Op. 7). Such 'tolerant pluralism', it seems, explains why it was in the composers' interest 'to maximize the flexibility of the published product—to build in a choice factor'.

But is this a true picture of the Baroque concerto? And is it so heretical to think of checking its validity against the evidence of the surviving performing material? One thing that such an investigation quickly reveals is that only rarely did eighteenth-century printed parts allow for the sort of flexibility Professor Talbot suggests. True, Corelli and a few of his Roman and Bolognese contemporaries explicitly allowed their ripieno parts to be doubled, but for the Venetians and their many imitators throughout Europe the parts were simply not designed for performance by multiple strings. Any attempt to share parts in, say, Vivaldi's L'estro armonico would have led to all sorts of difficulties because the 'Solo' and 'Tutti' markings are too sporadic to tell partners where to drop out and re-enter. The accidental omission of an occasional dynamic marking or slur, though regrettable, is hardly disastrous, but to leave some performers not knowing where they should and should not play would be unacceptably negligent. Only if it is assumed that the parts were intended for single players and the words 'Solo' and 'Tutti' merely convey useful, but not essential, information do the difficulties disappear.

Talbot makes no secret of his hostility to my detailed discussion of the one-to-a-part issue, and scatters his review with unwarranted phrases such as 'repeatedly has to resort to tortured reasoning', 'very special pleading', and 'cunning sleight of hand'. I take particular exception to his suggestion that 'the book seizes eagerly on those hard cases that can be pressed into its service, while marginalizing or ignoring any that suggest the opposite', for I have never attempted to fit the facts to a preconceived idea, but have always scrupulously followed where the evidence leads, even if on occasion it shows that a particular set of concertos was played 'orchestrally'. I have certainly not excluded iconographical and documentary evidence, although it is rarely possible to be sure that it relates to the performance of concertos rather than some other genre, except in the few cases where composers themselves provided explanatory prefaces—which of course do not necessarily apply to other composers' music. The suggestion that concertos may have been played by a small number of musicians even when a larger group was present is not 'a cunning sleight of hand' but a perfectly reasonable hypothesis, for there is abundant evidence that this was a common practice a little later in the century. Of the many hundreds of sets of parts for symphonies and concertos in the Regensburg archive, for example, about two-thirds of the symphonies have duplicated violin and bass parts, but nearly all the concertos (more than 90% of them) have just one of each. It is the original performing material that offers the best objective evidence of what actually happened, and (with apologies to Talbot...