Improvisation was a crucial aspect of musical life in Europe from the late eighteenth century through to the middle of the nineteenth, representing a central moment in both public occasions and the private lives of many artists. Composers dedicated themselves to this practice at length while formulating the musical ideas later found at the core of their published works; improvisation was thus closely linked to composition itself. The full extent of this relation can be inferred from both private documents and reviews of concerts featuring improvisations, while these texts also inform us that composers quite often performed in public as both improvisers and interpreters of pieces written by themselves or others. Improvisations presented in concert were distinguished by a remarkable degree of structural organisation and complexity, demonstrating performers’ consolidated abilities in composition as well as their familiarity with the rules for improvising outlined by theoreticians.
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vii | |
| Introduction |
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1 | (4) |
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PART I Improvisation and music theory |
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5 | (80) |
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1 Formal elements of instrumental improvisation: evidence from written documentation, 1770--1840 |
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7 | (12) |
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2 Musical form in improvisation treatises in the age of Beethoven |
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19 | (11) |
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3 `La solita cadenza'? Vocal improvisation, embellishments and fioriture in opera from the late eighteenth to the first half of the nineteenth century |
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30 | (32) |
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4 `Free forms' in German music theory and the Romantic conception of time |
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62 | (23) |
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PART II From improvisation to composition |
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85 | (76) |
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5 Fantastical forms: formal functionality in improvisational genres of the Classical era |
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87 | (28) |
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6 Four piano fantasias by Hummel: improvisation, motivic processing, harmonic enterprise and the `memory function' |
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115 | (19) |
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Rohan H. Stewart-Macdonald |
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7 A step to the `Wanderer'. Schubert's early Fantasia-Sonata in C minor (D. 48) |
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134 | (15) |
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8 Didacticism and display in the capriccio and prelude for violin, 1785--1840 |
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149 | (12) |
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PART III Freedom as a tool for musical form |
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161 | (74) |
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9 `Quasi una fantasia'? The legacy of improvisational practice in Ludwig van Beethoven's piano sonatas |
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163 | (15) |
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10 Improvisation practices in Beethoven's Kleinere Stucke |
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178 | (15) |
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11 The fate of the antepenultimate: fantasy and closure in the Classical style |
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193 | (13) |
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12 `Ad arbitrio dei cantanti': vocal cadenzas and ornamentation in early nineteenth-century opera |
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206 | (29) |
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| Index |
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235 | |
Gianmario Borio is Professor of Musicology at the University of Pavia and director of the Institute of Music at the Giorgio Cini Foundation, Venice. His publications deal with several aspects of the music of the twentieth century, the history of musical concepts and the theory of musical form.
Angela Carone has been a collaborator at the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice since 2013. Among other topics, she has published essays on Carl Czerny, Franz Schubert and Robert Schumanns instrumental works and the concepts of musical work and style in the eighteenth to early nineteenth century.
