In October 2014 scholars from Europe and North America took part in a conference dedicated to two important figures active during the eighteenth century as composers and virtuosos of the violin, to mark the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of their death: Pietro Antonio Locatelli (Bergamo, 1695–Amsterdam, 1764) and Jean-Marie Leclair l’aîné (Lyon 1697–Paris, 1764). The event was organized by the Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini (Lucca) in partnership with the Fondazione MIA of Bergamo and the Palazzetto Bru Zane – Centre de Musique Romantique Française in Venice, and also with the collaboration of the Edizione Nazionale Italiana delle Opere Complete di Locatelli. Accommodated in the magnificent Sala Locatelli of the Fondazione MIA, the conference was subdivided into six sessions. First came ‘Pietro Antonio Locatelli and His Legacy’, with speakers Paola Palermo (Bergamo), Christoph Riedo (Universität Freiburg, Switzerland) and Ewa Chamczyk (Uniwersytet Warszawski), followed by ‘French Routes’, featuring Étienne Jardin (Palazzetto Bru Zane – Centre de Musique Romantique Française), Candida Felici (Conservatorio di Musica di Cosenza) and Paola Besutti (Università di Teramo). The third session, ‘Pierre-Marie-François de Sales Baillot’, was held to mark the bicentenary of Baillot's foundation of his séances de musique de chambre (chamber music concerts). Papers were given by Priscille Lachat-Sarrete (Université Paris-Sorbonne), Alessandro Mastropietro (Università di Catania) and Lorenzo Triviño López (Conservatorio Superior de Música de Malaga). The fourth session, ‘Jean-Marie Leclair and His Legacy’, included talks by Walter Kreyszig (University of Saskatchewan and Universität Wien), Sallynee Amawat (McGill University) and then Guillaume Tardif (University of Alberta). ‘Background Voices’ featured Annalisa Barzanò (Associazione Alfredo Piatti, Bergamo), Charris Efthimiou (Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Graz), Ana Lombardía (Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice), Simone Laghi (Cardiff University) and Jesús Fernández Sinde (Universidad Complutense de Madrid). Finally Gregorio Carraro (Università di Padova) and Tommaso Luison (Fondazione Teatro Comunale, Bologna) read papers for the session ‘Giuseppe Tartini’.
Considered a pioneer of modern violin technique and a great virtuoso in the use of the bow, Locatelli owes his fame to his Op. 3, L’arte del violino (Amsterdam: Le Cène, 1733). Disseminated especially in France, this opus appeared alongside the works of Jean-Marie Leclair, regarded as the founder of the ‘French violin school’. Musicological studies on the subject of Locatelli, however, began to appear only in the mid-twentieth century. First came Arend Koole, Leven en Werken van Pietro Antonio Locatelli da Bergamo 1694–1794 [sic]: Italiaans Musycqmeester tot Amsterdam (Amsterdam: Jasonpers, Universiteitspers, 1949); Albert Dunning and Albert Koole, ‘Pietro Antonio Locatelli: Nieuwe Bijdragen tot de Kennis van zijn Leven en Werken’, Tijdschrift van de Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis 20/1–2 (1964–1965), 52–96; and John Hendrik Calmeyer, ‘The Life, Times and Works of Pietro Antonio Locatelli’ (PhD dissertation, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1969). The more mature writings of Albert Dunning – Pietro Antonio Locatelli: Der Virtuose und seine Welt, two volumes (Buren: Knuf, 1981), and Albert Dunning, ed., Intorno a Locatelli: studi in occasione del tricentenario della nascita di Pietro Antonio Locatelli (1695–1764), two volumes (Lucca: LIM, 1995) – have remained the most important until the recent monograph by Fulvia Morabito, Pietro Antonio Locatelli (Palermo: L’Epos, 2005). The years 1994–2002 saw the completion of a critical edition of Locatelli's works (which was designated an Italian national edition by a ministerial decree of 2 June 1999).
Fulvia Morabito (Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini, Lucca) inaugurated the first day with an introductory address, ‘Towards the “Locatelli Renaissance”’, that discussed Locatelli sources and the reception of his works. This critically examined existing literature on the composer and offered an up-to-date survey of sources of his music within a more general reconsideration of the repertory and European violinistic tradition in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Circulated throughout Europe via prints and unauthorized manuscripts, Locatelli's music achieved a notable dissemination and, as Morabito related, his compositions were reproduced during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, starting from their first appearance, in no fewer than 116 manuscripts, 40 early printed editions and 150 modern editions. Among these, the most famous, and accordingly most often reproduced, works were the flute sonatas of Op. 2 and the violin sonatas of Op. 6, while among the orchestral works Op. 3 stood out. These statistics, Morabito argued, belie the common belief that after the eighteenth century the composer fell into oblivion.
Remaining with Locatelli, Paola Palermo's contribution provided an update on documentary research into biographical and archival sources for the composer. After surveying Locatelli biography in general terms, Palermo drew attention to new documents relating to the composer's childhood and early years in Bergamo. In particular, she had tracked down the original Libri Baptizatorum for Pietro Antonio and his siblings, as well as the records of his parents’ marriage and of the deaths of his sister Domenica and father Filippo, besides providing further information on his family tree. In the light of these newly discovered sources, the contributions of both Palermo and Morabito may well stimulate new investigations into the life and music of the composer from Bergamo.
The first keynote address, given by Rudolf Rasch (Universiteit Utrecht), also reassessed Locatelli's career, contextualizing its salient features in relation to the biography of Leclair. Rasch identified similarities and differences in the biographies of the two composers, drawing attention to the existing documentary lacunae. He also laid particular emphasis on the development of their careers in their geographical context. Although his exposition became a little didactic, Rasch's panoramic approach contributed a broad perspective on the musical geography of Europe at that time, pointing out the different typologies of musicians’ movements in the eighteenth century (‘visit’, ‘short stay’ and ‘permanent move’), and of their career opportunities (‘national career’, ‘foreign career’ and ‘international career’), while addressing in addition the identities of these composers (‘geographical identity’ and ‘cultural identity’).
The same direction was taken by some other contributions that attempted to identify the points of contact and divergence between the Italian and French violinistic traditions (Felici, Besutti, Carraro, Riedo, Lombardía and Laghi), as well as the influence that these schools exerted on each other. For example, Candida Felici discussed the reception enjoyed by Italian violinists in France (drawing on the writings of Pierre-Louis d’Aquin de Chateau-Lyon, Noël-Antoine Pluche, Denis Diderot and Jean Le Ronde d’Alembert, as well as articles in the Mercure de France) and the influence that the Tartini school had in Paris, where important alumni such as Pierre Pagin settled. And the composer from Padua himself was the subject of a masterly paper by Sergio Durante, professor at the Università di Padova, president of the Edizione Nazionale Locatelli and noted specialist in the works of Giuseppe Tartini. Durante stressed how the generation of Locatelli, Leclair and Tartini was characterized by a movement away from national styles towards an internationalization that promised greater ‘usability’ for their works and answered market demands for published music. However, Tartini displayed a more modern, ‘capitalist’ mentality than his two colleagues. The greater part of his music survives only in manuscript: he disseminated knowledge of his art via his pupils, charging heavily for lessons and concerning himself more with performance than with composition. Indeed, Tartini viewed his own public concerts as a means both of attracting local patrons and of increasing the fame of his renowned academy, nicknamed the ‘scuola delle nazioni’ (School of the Nations).
A paper devoted specifically to Jean-Marie Leclair l’aîné was presented by Neal Zaslaw (Cornell University), who wrote his master's and PhD theses on this very composer (both at Columbia University, in 1965 and 1970 respectively) and contributed the article on Leclair to the second edition of the New Grove. Zaslaw's paper focused on the different accounts of Leclair's life, commenting on his reception during the nineteenth century and reviewing part of the iconographic documentation relating to the ‘myth’ of the violin in the light of coeval literature. Not shy of making a few critical points (which became the subject of a vigorous debate with Rasch), Zaslaw used his paper to introduce hypotheses concerning the lacunae that exist today in our knowledge of the careers of Locatelli and Leclair. Some of his remarks expanded on a recent editorial in Ad Parnassum (12/24, October 2014), where Zaslaw revealed how Leclair became the centre of a dispute between the defenders of the various national styles.
New information about Leclair was also offered by Étienne Jardin (‘Retrouver Leclair’), who showed how the works of this composer had become unknown by the beginning of the nineteenth century. His study took as its starting-point the role assigned to the composer in the theoretical and aesthetic debates that occupied French music criticism during the whole of the nineteenth century and part of the twentieth. For his precise and scrupulous paper Jardin had examined the programmes of as many as 841 Parisian concerts that took place between 1794 and 1815 (‘Répertoire des programmes de concert en France’, research group under the direction of Jardin, Cécile Duflo and Patrick Taïeb), tracing the rediscovery of the composer back to the Paris Conservatoire, and especially to the work of Pierre Baillot, with the aid of new documentary evidence.
One cannot but conclude that the study of Leclair's works still lags behind that of Tartini and Locatelli (Tartini was recently the subject of a special number of Ad Parnassum: 11/22, 2013). Locatelli, in particular, has had the good fortune to receive a complete critical modern edition of his works, which represents the first national edition of any Italian composer to achieve this state of completion between the Second World War and the present day. Nevertheless, the conference produced some broad discussions that were able to draw on interdisciplinary studies both old and new. It was precisely the interest in the influence of these two virtuosos within the violinistic tradition that suggested the title of the conference. Focusing attention on the stylistic and biographical peculiarities of the two composers has helped to widen and deepen the debate by introducing new points of view and topics for research. To that end, a volume of collected essays that includes some of the papers read at the conference, entitled Locatelli and the Violin Bravura Tradition (edited by Fulvia Morabito), has been published in March 2015 by Brepols Publishers as volume 9 in the series Studies on Italian Music History issued by the Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini.
In addition, on account of his importance for the French musical scene, a session of the conference was devoted, as we have seen, to Pierre Baillot. Concerning this person, it is appropriate to mention the recent digitalization of the collection previously belonging to Daniel Lainé, a direct descendant of Baillot, held by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. This contains among other things the programmes of the public concerts organized by Baillot between 1814 and 1840, in which one finds incipits of the works performed and lists of the subscribers to the concerts. This archive, digitalized by the Palazzetto Bru Zane, may be consulted online at <http://bruzanemediabase.com/Fonds-d-archives/Fonds-Baillot>.
