Vincenzo Manfredini was an interesting individual. Born in Pistoia in 1737, he moved, in 1758, to St. Petersburg and became maestro di cappella to the court’s Italian opera company, not resuming residence in Italy (Bologna) until 1769. He returned to St. Petersburg in 1798 at the behest of the recently-crowned emperor, Paul Petrovich, who had once been his harpsichord student, but Manfredini died there the next year, before assuming any formal position. A composer of, among other things, operas, ballets, symphonies, string quartets, and harpsichord sonatas, Manfredini eventually settled mostly on writing about music. His comments on singing in the Regole armoniche sparked controversies with the Italian castrato Giovanni Battista Mancini, author of Pensieri, e riflessioni pratiche sopra il canto figurato (Vienna, 1774; enlarged 3/1777), and with Esteban de Arteaga, a Spanish aesthetician and author of the earliest critical history of opera, Le rivoluzioni del teatro musicale italiano dalla sua origine fino al presente (Bologna, 1783–8/R, 2/1785). These disputes centered on Mancini’s and Arteaga’s allegations of Manfredini’s decadence and abandonment of classical ideals in the area of vocal music.
The original Regole armoniche is in two parts, dealing with the elements of music and keyboard accompaniment. (A second edition, published in Venice in 1797, is significantly enlarged and revised to include sections on singing and counterpoint.) Manfredini here summarizes all of the rules of accompaniment and illustrates them with written-out realizations, making him quite possibly the only Italian author of an accompaniment treatise to do so. Manfredini strongly advocates the ongoing use of continuo at a time when it clearly is experiencing its demise, and argues for simple, unobtrusive realizations. Regole armoniche is rich in detail and includes fourteen preludes mostly grouped in major-minor key pairs. An important, late source of information on eighteenth-century performing practices, this work is long overdue for translation into English.
Robert Zappulla
René Descartes's Compendium musicæ was one of the most widely-read texts on the mathematics of music in the second half of the seventeenth century. By contrast with the encyclopedic presentations of Mersenne and Kircher it offered a summary of the important ideas and calculations in a book of manageable size, and, at least in England, it seems to have been studied by nearly all of those who wrote on the subject over decades after its publication. It was translated into English, French and Dutch before the end of the century.
It is also a paradoxical work. Written in 1618 but not published until 1650, it is unique among the works of Descartes in surviving in a number of manuscripts which predate the published text. And it presents a somewhat idiosyncratic geometrical approach to the theory of music which drew criticism as well as admiration. Further, it embodies a logarithmic understanding of the sizes of musical intervals which proved intiguing to a number of later mathematicians, notably Nicolaus Mercator and Isaac Newton, who explored the mathematical issues raised by the text in manuscript treatises during the 1650s and 1660s.
Thus, the Compendium is a text which repays close historical study. The manuscripts have been studied in detail by Frédéric de Buzon and Matthijs van Otegem. The Latin text has been published in a critical edition by de Buzon. I have published an article discussing the responses of Mercator and Newton. Newton's treatise on music has been published, with a commentary, by Peter Pesic, but the transcription used relies on only one of the three extant manuscript sources for the text. Translations of the Compendium into modern English and modern French have been published, but the translations made during the seventeenth century have never been edited.
Until the latter part of the eighteenth century, composers had little to guide them when writing for orchestral instruments. Thus there was a pressing need for the three earliest instrumentation treatises, all of which were published in Paris: Valentin Roeser, Essai d'instruction à l'usage de ceux qui composent pour la clarinette et le cor (1764); Louis-Joseph Francoeur, Diapason général de tous les instrumens à vent (1772); and Othon Vandenbroeck, Traité général de tous les instrumens à vent à l'usage des compositeurs (c.1793). What makes these manuals especially valuable is the advice offered composers about writing for the wind and brass instruments in particular. During this period, these instruments' many limitations of both mechanism and intonation had to be taken into account when writing for them. Because most composers played keyboard or violin – which permitted much greater fluency in performance – they wrote for the winds and brass in the same manner as they did for their own instrument. Consequently, their wind and brass parts could not be executed adequately, and players were blamed for the poor results. The treatises address this problem by citing and illustrating passages that are difficult or unplayable on each instrument, notes on which ornaments are difficult or impossible, notes that cannot be played in tune, etc. In addition, they supply basic information about each instrument's range and most favorable register, as well as the intricacies of writing for the horn and various clarinets. The contents of these treatises raise questions about performance standards of the day and whether unrealistic instrumentation may have affected the reception of a composer's work.
Isaac Nathan (1792-1864) was the last significant male pupil of Domenico Corri (1746-1825), who was in turn one of the last pupils of the great Nicola Porpora (1686-1768). Nathan was apprenticed to his Italian master from c.1808-1812 and made such rapid progress that he soon became Corri’s assistant teacher. Within six years of leaving Corri’s school Nathan had these Exercises engraved and printed in royal quarto. They were advertised in 1819 but did not appear until he published his Essay on the History and Theory of Music (London, 1823). Never before reprinted they have eluded nearly all historians of vocal culture.
This new edition is presented in the belief that these Exercises preserve the vocal methods taught by Domencio Corri whose success and fame as a singing master of the Italo-British school were founded on his studies with Porpora. Nathan’s Exercises supplement the teachings of Corri in The Singer’s Preceptor (1810) but offer a more complete course for the preparation of the professional virtuoso, ending with the rare enharmonic scale. They are a unique technical record of the Porpora method, as taught by Corri and Nathan, as well as including some of the earliest observations on Jewish chant printed in England (Nathan’s father was an Ashkenazi chazzan).
The edition presents a facsimile reprint of 70+ engraved pages of vocal exercises, introduced with an historical survey of the Italo-British school of singing and the emergence of its pedagogical literature from the early seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth – developments of worldwide significance that are generally unrecognized in the musicological literature. Nathan’s Exercises are compared in detail with the solfeggi and vocalizzi of contemporary teachers (both native and foreign) working mainly in London. The volume includes an outline of Nathan’s life and works in England and Australia, some Italian and English arias ornamented by him (from rare Australian sources), a dictionary of technical terms and the first systematic bibliography of the Italo-British vocal methods to c.1850.