When Wagner visited Rossini in Paris in March 1860, one of the topics that they talked about was the dominance of opera over other forms of musical creativity in Italy. Thanks to Edmond Michotte, the Belgian musicologist who brought the two musicians together and who noted down the words they exchanged on that historic occasion, we have one of the most important testimonies of the problem of idiom and style, a problem which was at the same time also historical and sociological, that the dictatorship of the theatre (commissions, relations with impresarios and publishers, creative symbiosis with singers) forced Italian composers to face up to.
Rossini, now old and no longer present on the operatic scene, could not have been more explicit. When Wagner asked him what was the source of those isolated moments in his catalogue where one could see research and study of forms, he replied: “Oh, I had a natural talent, and great instinct. Not having had a thorough musical instruction (and where indeed could I have found it in the Italy of my time?) the little that I knew was learnt from German scores”. The heart of the question is here, in the abyss that had come into being in the space of a few decades between the world of the theatre and that of music itself. When Mozart visited Italy he was certain that he would be able to learn some doctrinal secrets. Half a century later the rupture between theatre and absolute music had become immense, the separation irremediable. Theatre was not only a magnetic attraction for young musical talents: it was the destiny that awaited them.
The concept of education (Bildung in German, or paideia) which meant something for Beethoven, for Mendelssohn and even for Wagner, had been replaced by a sort of practical apprenticeship that served to prepare the tools of a trade that would enable the musician to satisfy the requirements of the market. “In my case, I had to support my father, my mother and my grand-mother”: these are the simple, clear words Rossini addressed to Wagner. Donizetti is an exemplary case. From his first opera, Pigmalione, composed when he was not yet twenty years old, Donizetti’s catalogue causes a sensation of giddiness as we consider dates and places. The opera machine undoubtedly ground on following the nervous impulses of a man who was literally unable to remain inactive, but also because the path of a composer of opera did not allow for pauses, moments of introspective meditation or the return to study. The forms of pure music, Trios, Quartets, Quintets, the Sonata, the Symphony, paid the price of course. What in central Europe was an experimental workshop, a research laboratory, a space dedicated to speculative activity, free of other obligations and thus all the more exciting in the results that it obtained, in Italy remained a half-hearted activity or a moment of relaxation in the frenetic rhythm of opera commissions: or represented an initial stage of study, a formal duty that had to be dealt with before a musician could move on to what really mattered, the human voice. And yet Donizetti, who had accepted the rules of the opera market, more so perhaps than any other and had emerged drained of his strength, had his own good fortune. Johann Simon Mayr, the Bavarian composer, maestro di cappella at the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Bergamo, had him as his pupil from the time when Gaetano was only eight years old. A pro-German coterie had formed around Mayr, who was a virtuoso viola player, dedicated to a passionate study of the works of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and also of Reicha and Mayseder. The home of Alessandro Bertoli in Bergamo was a sort of crypt, a secret sanctuary for the young accolyte: from this centre a series of public initiatives of historic importance emerged, as for example the Bergamo performance of Haydn’s Creation in 1809. Young Gaetano, a chorister at Santa Maria Maggiore, most probably took part in the performance.
Donizetti's interest in the forms of absolute music is confirmed by the series of Quartets he composed in 1821: each of them was modelled on a particular composer, and Gaetano delighted in showing off his imitative virtuosity, composing in turn a Quartet “à la Beethoven”, “à la Haydn”, “à la Krommer”. These compositions have conserved a degree of fame. The story of the works collected here for the first time in this rich, representative anthology presented by the Ex Novo Ensemble is much more obscure. These are pieces written far various instrumental groups within the ambit of chamber music: evidence of the lightning-fast apprenticeship that Donizetti served under Mayr's guidance, and fragments, perhaps, of an unfulfilled vocation, of a destiny denied to history. What would have become of Italian music if a composer like Donizetti, in financial circumstances different from those in which his birth placed him, had chosen to continue the study of the genres he had touched upon in his youth, the Sonata for two instruments, the Trio, the Theme and Variations? The most telling answer to this question may be found in the silence maintained by Rossini after Guillaume Tell.
The instrumental compositions that are collected here were created as stylistic essays during a stage of study, and are set against the background of tributes paid to friends, like a certain “Begnigni” to whom the curious Studio primo per clarinetto of 1821 is dedicated; to noblemen like “Signor Alessandro Zineroni” who received the fresh Variations in B flat major for violin and piano with their refined rhythmic transformation of the theme in the final Presto-Scherzando; or again to a real benefactress such as Marianna Pezzati Grattaroli, whose money enabled Donizetti to avoid military service and to whom he dedicated the two Sonatas he composed in 1819, the Sonata for flute and piano, with the gentle pathos, already steeped in theatrical taste, of the introductory Largo and the bright, witty gestuality of the following Allegro, and the Sonata for violin and piano, a work which makes no small demands of the keyboard soloist.
Sonatas, Trios ...the titles are no more than names: not only because the pieces are generally structured as slow introductions followed by a single movement in sonata form, but especially because the music moves and develops not along the lines of the deductive logic typical of German chamber writing but in terms of conventional patterns. There are, nonetheless, moments of interest and glimpses of absolute beauty: we refer, for example, to the skilful, efficacious dosing of timbre found in the Trio in E flat major for piano, violin and cello of 1817; or the abandonment to elegiac lyricism in the Largo in G minor for cello and piano; or to the melancholy strains unexpectedly running through the “development”, with the rapid shift into the key of A minor, in the Trio for flute, bassoon and piano. In these few bars we catch sight of an unrepeatable potential, a fleeting charge of promises, which history will go on to deny or apportion elsewhere.
Francesco Maria Colombo