polymath of the baroque: agostino steffani and his musicby colin timms

Polymath of the Baroque: Agostino Steffani and His Music by Colin TimmsReview by: Stuart CheneyNotes, Second Series, Vol. 63, No. 4 (Jun., 2007), pp. 827-829Published by: Music Library AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4487880 .

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BOOK REVIEWS EDITED BY ROBERT FOLLET

BAROQUE MUSIC

Polymath of the Baroque: Agostino Steffani and His Music. By Colin Timms. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. [xviii, 422 p. ISBN 0195154738. $99.00.] Illustrations, music examples, bibliography, index.

Colin Timms has synthesized much of his life's scholarly work in his biography of Agostino Steffani (1654-1728), and readers interested in Italian and German music of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, especially the widespread phe- nomenon of Italian dramatic music im- ported into Germany, owe the author a debt of gratitude for elucidating so clearly the life and works of one of the period's principal figures. If anyone were to write this book it would have to be Timms, whose work over thirty-seven years has frequently centered on Steffani's chamber vocal works and other genres. The author has already written at least sixteen studies on the composer's biography and music, along with producing editions of the music; among these are groundbreaking works on Steffani's chamber duets (including Timms's Ph.D. dissertation), operas, corre- spondence, and Handel's indebtedness to Steffani's secular and even sacred vocal works. The British Academy recognized Polymath of the Baroque by awarding it the 2004 Derek Allen Prize.

Part 1 (chapters 1-5) provides the biographical portion of the book, with a chap- ter each on Steffani's early life in Castel- franco and Padua, his professional tenures in Munich, Hanover, and Dfisseldorf, and finally his position as Apostolic Vicar of North Germany. Timms draws on an impressive command of a multitude of historical sources, including manuscript scores; li- bretti; letters by the composer, his patrons, and observers; extensive archival resources in Hanover, Munich, Rome, Venice, and Wfirzburg; and a wide array of historical studies written since the mid-eighteenth

century. This means that the few specula- tions Timms necessarily makes in order to fill in significant gaps in the biography are

highly informed. Part 2 (chapters 6-9) examines the music

in four chapters, divided between the com-

poser's sacred works, two chapters devoted to the operas, and his chamber works.

Specific examples of Steffani's music, along with their place in each genre's tradition, are clearly explained. Timms writes fluidly and engagingly in both parts of the book, each of which requires specialized ap- proaches to the subjects at hand. Three useful appendices follow. Appendix A pre- sents a small group of documents in their

original Italian or German, including an

autobiographical letter by the composer. Appendix B is the first published catalog of Steffani's musical output, which will prove to be one of the most useful aspects of the book; its twenty pages organize the works

by genre and provide information on the

principal manuscript and printed sources, including some modern editions. Each of Steffani's sixteen operas is broken down in

Appendix C by such features as overall dramatic structure, types of vocal scorings, arias and their subtypes, instrumental involvement in arias, and key-relationship sta- tistics for the recitatives.

An extraordinarily gifted singer, Steffani was taken at age twelve from Italy to Munich, where he was to spend twenty-one years in the service of the elector of Bavaria. He later spent fifteen years in Hanover, six in Dfisseldorf, and most of his

remaining nineteen years back in Hanover. Owing to his musical and especially diplomatic activities, Steffani was unusually well

827



828 NOTES, June 2007

traveled; besides his principal cities of resi- dence, he lived and worked in Venice, Rome, Paris, Turin, Vienna, Brussels, The Hague, Herten, Leipzig, Dresden, Heidel- berg, Brunswick, and Florence. In 1722 Steffani retired to Padua near his native Castelfranco, but was persuaded back into ecclesiastical duty in 1725 and returned to Hanover. His wide travels produced an- other impressive list, that of the several prominent musicians with whom he crossed paths: his teachers Johann Caspar Kerll and Ercole Bernabei, plus Gaetano Berenstadt, Jean-Baptiste Farinel, John Ernest Galliard, George Frideric Handel, August Kfihnel, Carlo Pallavicino, Johannes Schenck, Silvius Leopold Weiss, and proba- bly Arcangelo Corelli and Alessandro Scarlatti.

Steffani lived during a period when many significant musical, literary, and religious positions in Catholic Germany were held by Italians. Rather than attempting to cover all aspects of his subject's long and full life, Timms prudently omits full details of Steffani's illustrious diplomatic career and his service to the church, concentrating instead on musical activities and how the extra-musical endeavors affected the composer's travels, personal interactions, and especially his productivity. The rich biographical coverage in Part 1 sheds considerable light, for example, on conditions of opera productions in Steffani's principal lo- cations, particularly in Hanover.

When elements such as Steffani's political and religious life are investigated, they are appropriately and deftly woven into the discussions of the music and its circumstances. Examples include the pieces com- posed in Rome under Bernabei's tutelage, the dearth of operatic activity at Hanover during negotiations for both the elevation of Hanover to an electorate in the Holy Roman Empire and Steffani's intense diplomatic activities preceding the War of the Spanish Succession, and the fascinating relationship with the Academy of Vocal Music in London during the composer's final two years.

Timms elucidates the music in a variety of ways. He discusses the wide range of styles in Steffani's sacred works (principally psalms and motets for three to eight voices, some with basso continuo and other instru-

mental involvement), as well as the most significant aspects of his operas and the genre's practices in Venice and Germany. The individual case studies of six of the operas take the reader to each of the composer's three operatic centers of activity; there are two each for works produced in Munich, Hanover, and Dfisseldorf, treating subjects such as dramatic devices, revisions, historicism, and borrowing. Until his operas become better known, Steffani's chamber duets are his best known pieces, and because it is a subject to which Timms has returned over the decades, the discussion here is naturally one of the best informed.

The artistic and political circumstances that Timms so clearly describes are essen- tial background to the music: there are details of artistic productions and patronage, governance and diplomatic negotiations, and the lifestyles and travels of dozens of professional musicians. Steffani's extensive contacts with leading musical figures in

Italy, Germany, France, and England, and Timms's discussion of these, means that nearly every page offers an interesting anecdote or an insight about a contempo- raneous personality. The author also up- dates and corrects misinformation found in other writings about Steffani and the milieu in which he operated. Throughout Polymath of the Baroque Timms provides hundreds of details concerning the sources and publications of Steffani's music. Especially helpful is his illumination of the state of sources (manuscripts, publications, and arrangements) during the composer's lifetime.

The publisher's efforts to keep costs down have two potentially discouraging re- sults. The first, the small size of the type, occurred in a handful of other fine Oxford University Press books issued around the same time (including Jonathan Glixon's Honoring God and the City: Music at the Venetian Confraternities, 1260-1807 [New York: Oxford University Press, 2003], and Elliott Antokoletz's Musical Symbolism in the Operas of Debussy and Bart6k: Trauma, Gender, and the Unfolding of the Unconscious [New York: Oxford University Press, 2004]). The problem was nearly solved by the generous spacing around headings, tables, music ex-

amples, and illustrations that at least pre- vent the page from feeling too cramped.



Book Reviews 829

And it must be said that the most recent Oxford publications no longer use such small type.

On a possibly more bothersome point, the publisher employs in Polymath of the Baroque the regrettable citation style so of- ten encountered in scholarly books today, one that forces readers to follow a tedious citation path from a note number within the text to the notes themselves-near the back of the book but in abbreviated and in- complete format-then on to the bibliography if one seeks the full information. Time and effort would be saved if the reader could find it all at the bottom of the page on which it is cited, or at least if the end- notes were more complete. The organization of the bibliography itself into distinct sections (archival, biographical pertaining to Steffani, musical background, and finally historical and cultural background) makes the task of identifying Timms's source for a given citation even more difficult.

On the other hand, the bibliography's present structure is helpful if used as a re- search tool itself, since its organization provides the reader with an extensive and or- derly body of writings on the topic. This, together with the excellent index and overall organization of the chapters, makes the book a very useful reference work concerning Steffani and his time for those readers who would wish to consult the book for quick retrieval of facts.

Polymath of the Baroque is the book on Steffani in more than one sense. Timms, who is closer to the subject than anyone else, goes well beyond what scholars have been able to offer up to now about this musician's works and their considerable signif- icance. Steffani's career and compositions warrant serious consideration, not least because his music influenced Handel as well as Giovanni Bononcini, Mattheson, Tele- mann, J. S. Bach, and others. Timms's biography is ultimately an exemplary treatment of a pivotal musician.

STUART CHENEY

Southern Methodist University

A Thematic Catalogue of the Works of Michel-Richard de Lalande (1657- 1726). By Lionel Sawkins. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. [xlvii,

700 p. ISBN 0-19-816360-6. $225.] Music examples, facsimiles, tables, bib- liographies, indexes.

Lionel Sawkins has been working with the music of Michel-Richard de Lalande for more than thirty years, and he has long been recognized by his colleagues as the leading authority. He began publishing on Lalande in 1975, and by 1984 had complete control of the sources for Lalande's motets, contributing 400 entries to the Catalogue thematique des sources du grand motet (ed. Jean Mongredien [Munich: K. G. Saur, 1984]). Along the way, Sawkins wrote a dissertation, "The Sacred Music of Michel- Richard de Lalande (1657-1726)" (Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1993), and edited a great deal of Lalande's music. The

present thematic catalog, all 700 big pages of it, is a lifetime achievement and a re- sounding success.

The importance of Lalande is perhaps not common knowledge today even among musicologists and music librarians. A gen- eration younger than Jean-Baptiste Lully, Lalande quickly rose to prominence at the court of Louis XIV. He became one of the four Sous-maitres de la chapelle in 1683, per- sonally chosen by the king, and then Surintendant de la musique de la chambre in 1689. In the last year of his life, 1726, he had many of his works performed at the new Concert Spirituel in Paris, and he was an icon of French musical life, particularly in the sacred realm. From 1700 to 1770, Parisian newspapers chronicled no fewer than 600 performances of his motets at the Concert Spirituel. His music slipped out of the repertory in the nineteenth century, and when the twentieth-century revival of music by composers like Schiitz and Vivaldi occurred, Lalande was ignored. This catalog should be an enormous help in foster- ing a modern appreciation for this great composer.

The long gestation period of this catalog means that a good deal of its information has been made available elsewhere. Sawkins

published a relatively substantial article and worklist in Marcelle Benoit's Dictionnaire de la musique en France aux XVIle et XVIIIe siecles (Paris: Fayard, 1992). The Sawkins num- bers were made public in the second edi- tion of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and



polymath of the baroque: agostino steffani and his musicby colin timms

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