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Paisiello: Complete Keyboard Concertos Giovanni Paisiello was one of the most important Italian composers of the late 18th century. His considerable melodic gift, combined with a decidedly individual sense of style, manifests parallels with Haydn and even foreshadows aspects of Beethoven. Although he was most famous in his lifetime for his operas and sacred music, Paisiello’s eight keyboard concertos demonstrate that he must have been a performer of outstanding gifts. Born in Taranto, Sicily, in 1740, Paisiello received a Jesuit education and, because of his excellent singing voice, was sent to study under Francesco Durante at the Conservatorio di S. Onofrio in Naples. It was for the theatre of the Conservatorio that he wrote his first stage works, a series of intermezzi which were so well received that he was commissioned to write operas for Bologna and Rome, laying the foundation for his highly successful career as an opera composer. After leaving the Conservatorio in 1763 he resided in Naples, where his continued production of operas made him even more popular than his rivals Piccinni and Cimarosa. It was also in Naples that he began to write church music. Paisiello’s fame spread so far that in 1776, at the invitation of the Empress Catherine the Great, he travelled to Russia, accepting an appointment as maestro di cappella to the Russian court in St Petersburg. His duties included dealing with the orchestra and singers of the court establishment and the composition of operas for the court theatre: in view of the Empress’s tastes these were mainly opere serie, rather than the comedies he had been writing in Naples. He also provided a more varied operatic repertoire for some of the smaller theatres of the capital. Paisiello remained in Russia for eight years, producing a stream of works which solidified his reputation across Europe. Among these was Il barbiere di Siviglia, composed in 1782 – a generation before the opera on the same libretto by Rossini – an example of a new brilliance in operatic writing which exercised a decisive influence on the development
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of the genre. In 1784 Paisiello left Russia and returned – via Vienna, where he became friendly with Mozart – to Naples, entering the service of King Ferdinand IV, for whom he composed several of his finest operas. An exclusive contract from the court required him to write one opera seria a year for the Teatro San Carlo; the contract bound Paisiello to remain in Naples and brought a return to his earlier, lighter style. In 1787 he became maestro della real camera and was eventually permitted to compose for theatres elsewhere, with operas staged in Padua, London and Venice. In the early years of the French Revolution he also came to the notice of the young Napoleon, because he composed a funeral march for the French General Louis Lazare Hoche in 1797. When Napoleon became Emperor in 1802 he invited Paisiello to Paris, making him conductor of the court in the Tuileries with a munificent salary. He became maître de chapelle to Napoleon, commissioned to write two operas a year and a march every month. He was so much disliked by the Parisian public, however, that he returned to Naples by 1804. Here he continued to enjoy the favour of the Bonaparte family, for whom he wrote sacred music, though his reputation was now on the wane and his works were starting to appear old-fashioned. With the fall of Napoleon’s cause Paisiello’s own professional fate was sealed, and he died in 1816. Paisiello composed 94 operas altogether. The majority of them are comedies in a spirited vein: over the years his powers of characterization sharpened and his orchestration became more colourful – features that Mozart certainly took note of. Perhaps his best-known tune was ‘Nel cor più non mi sento’ from La Molinara, which Beethoven paid the compliment of making the subject of a set of piano variations, WoO70. L’Idolo cinese (The Chinese Idol, first staged 1767) was one of Paisiello’s greatest successes in Naples and was a favourite of Emma, Lady Hamilton, the mistress of Lord Nelson. His equally numerous sacred works included cantatas, oratorios and a setting of Metastasio’s La passione di Gesù Cristo (The Passion of Jesus Christ). There
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are also several settings of the Mass; some of these were for Napoleon, but in 1814, benefitting from a general amnesty, Paisiello composed a Mass for the chapel of the restored French King, Louis XVIII. Paisiello was evidently a fine keyboard-player, but it is not clear whether his eight keyboard concertos were written with himself in mind as soloist. The first two of them, designed for the harpsichord, were written during his years in St Petersburg and are dedicated to noble patrons who may have been his keyboard pupils. The expansive Concerto No.1 in C dates from between 1780 and 1783, and is dedicated to a lady-in-waiting to Catherine the Great, described as ‘Signora de Sinnavine’. Overall it is the simplest of all Paisiello’s concertos: orthodox in layout and a little stiff in style, the work nevertheless has a dainty charm that is displayed in the Allegro first movement in sonata form, a melodious Larghetto in F major for the slow movement, and a lively Rondo finale. Concerto No.2 in F, written for the Grand Duchess Maria Feodorovna, is perhaps a slighter work, but inhabits a similar idiom of classical poise and restraint. The central Largo is the most memorable movement; in fact Paisiello proves in these works to have a particular talent for melodious and affecting slow movements. The next three concertos, on a more modest scale, seem to form a group. They specify fortepiano as the keyboard instrument, and were composed in or slightly before 1788, for the diversion of Princess Maria Louisa of Parma, the wife of King Charles IV of Spain, who succeeded to the throne in that year. Concerto No.3 in A is a concise work, its initial Allegro giusto opening with a substantial orchestral exposition that is then echoed and decorated by the soloist. This is an animated and good-humoured movement, with figures that seem to evoke birdsong. The first movement flows without a break into a Largo slow movement, which is in the same key – thus keeping seriousness at bay – and the finale, which also follows without a break, is a minuet-like movement with contrasting episodes for the soloist. Paisiello adds a pair of horns to the orchestra in Concerto No.5 in D, which is broadly similar in style. There is sparkling
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keyboard-writing in the first movement, though its slow movement – in which the tonality turns to D minor and the soloist is accompanied only by violins – strikes a deeper note. As in several of Paisiello’s concertos, the finale leaves room for an improvised cadenza. The jewel among these three concertos, however, is surely Concerto No.4 in G minor, an extraordinary, dramatic work whose intensity and pathos in the first movement is comparable to Haydn’s Sturm und Drang compositions of the 1770s, while the richness and nobility of the slow movement, in the relative major, has been compared to early Beethoven. The rondo finale alternates deftly and surprisingly between minor-key pathos and major-key ebullience. It is possible that all three of these concertos owe something to Paisiello’s friendly relations with Mozart in 1784. The previous year Mozart had composed variations on a theme from Paisiello’s opera I filosofi immaginari (K398), and then in 1784 he heard Paisiello’s Il re Teodoro in Venezia (King Theodoric in Venice), specially composed for Vienna. On 13 June Mozart invited Paisiello, who was still composing the opera, to a musical soirée in Döbling, outside Vienna, at the house of Gottfried Ignaz von Ployer, agent in Vienna of the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg. Ployer’s daughter Babette was one of Mozart’s most talented piano pupils, and he had just written for her his Piano Concerto No.17 in G K453 – a work he particularly wanted Paisiello to hear. While Paisiello’s style did not subsequently become any more Mozartian, he may well have recognized the extraordinary wealth of expressive possibilities that Mozart had discovered in concerto form. Of the three remaining concertos Paisiello was to write, Concerto No.6 in B flat is a concise and serene composition with a rondo finale in unusually moderate tempo. Concerto No.7 in A is a comparatively short work, more like a miniature concerto, where the first movement is on a modest scale and the affecting Larghetto is merely an introduction to the brief rondo finale. Of all Paisiello’s concertos, however, it is Concerto No.8 in C that most plausibly displays a debt to Mozart. It returns to fairly
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generous dimensions, and is clearly the work of composer at the height of his powers in its forceful opening Allegro, the Andantino slow movement with its hints of operatic aria, and the graceful, good-humoured finale. 훿 Malcolm MacDonald, 2011
Recording: 8–14 March 1992 (CD 1); 8–14 March 1989 (CD 2), Rome Cover image – Andrea da Crescia (19th century): Bay of Naples Photo: Cadogan Gallery, London, UK / The Bridgeman Art Library 1994 ARTS MUSIC Issued under licence from ARTS Productions Ltd. www.artsproductions.eu 훿 2011 Brilliant Classics
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