Corelli: Concerti Grossi, Op. 6

ARCANGELO CORELLI (1653-1713):
CONCERTI GROSSI, opus 6 & THEIR TRANSCRIPTIONS 

Arcangelo Corelli’s career flourished during one of Rome’s most artistically fertile periods. He was born in 1653 near Ravenna to a family of well-to-do landowners, and was sent to study the violin in Bologna, home of a number of famous string players who handed on the tradition to their young prodigies. By 1675, he had moved to Rome where he quickly established himself as one of the city’s greatest virtuosos and most celebrated musicians, known equally as a performer and composer. He earned further fame as an orchestral director who imposed exceptional discipline on his players. He led performances in the homes of Queen Christina of Sweden, Cardinal Benedetto Pamphili and Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni; and directed public concerts at civil ceremonies, religious services, or private banquets. Throughout the 1680s and 1690s his works appeared in print at regular intervals, culminating in the celebrated opus 5 sonatas.

The decades surrounding 1700 saw a rapid increase in the number of music publishers and music publications in Europe. Corelli was among the composers who most benefited from the expanded audience and wider dissemination of instrumental music. He was the first popular composer whose reputation derived from his publications, and because of them, his works became the earliest instrumental classics. The opus 5 violin sonatas, for example, went through forty-two editions and countless arrangements and parodies in the century from its publication to 1800. From about 1710, Corelli retired from public appearances and concentrated on selecting and revising pieces for the set of concertos that he would publish as opus 6. The set was published in 1712 in Amsterdam, where they were beautifully engraved rather than printed from moveable type. While Corelli certainly composed a vast quantity of chamber music, only his twelve concertos for two violins and violoncello—along with an Introduction and Sinfonia to Giovanni Lorenzo Lulier’s oratorio Santa Beatrice d’Este—are all that remain of his orchestral music.

THE WORKS IN THEIR ORIGINAL FORM

Corelli’s collection of concerti grossi represents a lifetime of public performance, during which he may have composed well more than a hundred concertos. These twelve are in fact a set of individual movements, assembled by Corelli to form models of his concerto grosso style. Corelli repeatedly made improvements to his works, hardly being able to leave well enough alone. And all the opus 6 concertos have more movements than a typical concerto, providing yet another reason to believe that they were assembled from various manuscripts. It is likely that any one them derives material from as many previous sources as there are movements.

They are usually divided into two groups. The first eight are in the sonata da chiesa style, though only one—the so-called “Christmas concerto” with its final pastoral movement—has a tie to religious imagery or celebrations. The last four follow the format of the sonata da camera, indicated by the presence of dance movements. But such a division hardly does justice to either the heterogeneity or the kaleidoscopic variety of opus 6. The style of the music reflects Corelli’s playing style: “learned, elegant, pathetic,” in the words of one contemporary. All the concertos are models of subtlety and nuance, and they share a singing, cantabile expressiveness that spurred a thousand clichéd imitations.

In 1708, he wrote “[I am] fully aware of my own weaknesses, so that only recently, in spite of numerous, long drawn-out corrections, I scarcely had the confidence to put before the public eye those few works I entrusted to the printer.” Despite his humbleness, these concertos are brilliant examples of the oft-changing and contrasting elements that are so integral to Corelli’s compositional style. It is interesting to note the full title of the collection: Concerti Grossi con duoi Violini e Violoncello di Concertino obligati e duoi altri Violini, Viola e Basso de Concerto Grosso ad arbitrio, che si potranno radoppiare (Concerti grossi for two violins and violoncello in the obligatory solo group and two other violins, viola and bass in the orchestra [ripieno], which is optional and whose numbers may be increased). In other words, the elasticity of their scoring enables performances by as few as three or four players, or as many as are available.