Touring Italy

The Utrecht Early Music Festival provided the perfect setting for the International Symposium Music of the Grand Tour in 17th-century Italy (24–26 August 2006), directed by Margaret Murata and Dinko Fabris. In one of the first papers Jan Nuchelmans presented an overview of the 25-year history of this major festival and opened the discussion with a consideration of which kinds of music had been mentioned—and which not—in the writings of foreign visitors to Italy. He also examined the modernity of opera as a visual and auditory experience, and the impact this had on travellers who sought the Renaissance equilibrium for which Italy was famous.

The purpose of the symposium was the quest for engagement between musicological research and performance. It was not by chance that the theme of the festival was 'Le nuove musiche'; several works directly related to the symposium were performed: for example, Francesco Lucio's Il Medoro, Stefano Landi's La morte di Orfeo, Marco Marazzoli's La vita humana and a concert dedicated to Salomone Rossi. In this sense the symposium's panels served as a forum for discussion between musicologists and performers. In the first panel Fabio Bonizzoni and Thérèse de Goede dealt with questions arising from the accompaniment of 'le nuove musiche'. Bonizzoni outlined the need to draw conclusions from both keyboard music and polyphony in order to realize the continuo instead of looking only to theoretical treatises. The second panel, led by Carlo Majer, included Mike Fentross and Wim Trompert, musical director and producer respectively of the production of Cavalli's Ipermestra performed during the festival. This panel continued a debate begun in Hendrick Schulze's paper, where he demonstrated how the primary sources for Cavalli are useful for modern revival of his work, since the composer himself used them to direct some of his works (Xerse, Statira or Artemisia) and annotated them at the keyboard. Ellen Rosand went into detail about the production of Ipermestra for Florence, analysing the correspondence between Gian Carlo de' Medici and Cavalli's go-between in Venice. From the performer's point of view Carlo Majer outlined the problem of staging Baroque opera today, drawing a comparison with the problems of adaptation encountered by a child adopted from another culture.

Margaret Murata, picking up on Jan Nuchelmans' theme of the outsider's perception of the musical reality of Italy, explored the less well-known diaries of travellers from various places who undertook the Grand Tour at various times during the 17th century, and set them alongside the better-known writings of people like Raguenet, and underlined the distinction between the private and public aspects common to the musical experiences related by all these travellers. Other papers also dealt with the outsider's experience and the ways in which these visitors assimilated Italian music on their return to their native countries. For example, Rudolf Rasch in his contribution on the Dutch composer Constantijn Huygens; Natascha Veldhorst in her examination of the influence of the madrigal Cruda Amarilis on Dutch music and verse of the period; and Louise Stein, who described the musical experiences of several Spaniards in Italy such as José de Guerra or the Marquis of Carpio. In his concluding contribution to the symposium, Dinko Fabris presented a critical evaluation of the historiographical and methodological framework for musicology in working with the kinds of sources (such as diaries) left by these outsiders.

In order to complement this vision from outside, other papers concentrated on Italian music itself. John Griffiths re-examined the idea of stylistic opposition between Renaissance and Baroque music, and attempted to trace continuity rather than a sense of rupture. He displaced vocal music from its customary central position in the process of stylistic change and emphasized the importance of instrumental music through a study of intabulations, and a consideration of the role of performers in the creation of the 'new style'. Moreover, he attempted to link a presumed unwritten tradition with specific performers such as Cosimo Bottegari, Fabrizio Dentice and the mysterious castrato Barbarino. On the other hand, Richard Wistreich focused on the...