Antonio Lotti: EMS 8 January

[doversoul1]

Lucie Skeaping marks the 350th anniversary of Italian composer Antonio Lotti's birth with some of his famous choral works alongside lesser known pieces of chamber music and opera.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b087qg2t

[verismissimo]

Lucie Skeaping marks the 350th anniversary of Italian composer Antonio Lotti's birth with some of his famous choral works alongside lesser known pieces of chamber music and opera.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b087qg2t

Lotti was one of the baroque composers that Mathilde Marchesi taught regularly to her pupils. Melba went on to record an aria from his opera L'infidelta punita in 1910. But Lotti's music had comprehensively fallen out of the repertoire by then, and has only made a slight comeback in recent years.

The question I'm currently grappling with is this: Is Melba's interpretation anything like a performance in the composer's time? Indeed, are performances by the current crop of male and female sopranos and mezzos closer than Melba or further away?

What do you think, dovers (and others)?

[doversoul1]

The question of how early music was sung in the composers’ time has come up before and almost always finished up with ‘we can never know’.

I am no expert on the matter and this is a completely simplistic argument, if that (based on a couple of articles on wiki).

1) Mathilde Marchesi was a renowned teacher of singing, and a proponent of the bel canto vocal method
2) the term bel canto is sometimes attached to Italian operas written by Vincenzo Bellini (1801–1835) and Gaetano Donizetti (1797–1848).
3) The phrase "bel canto" was not commonly used until the latter part of the 19th century, when it was set in opposition to the development of a weightier, more powerful style of speech-inflected singing associated with German opera and, above all, Richard Wagner's revolutionary music dramas.

Put these together, we could sort of conclude that singers in Lotti’s time did not use bel canto which was the method (I guess) Marchesi used to sing. However, this does not mean;

performances by the current crop of male and female sopranos and mezzos closer than Melba

Let’s hope the expert members will enlighten us.

But do you know why Marchesi chose to teach Lotti’s works?

[verismissimo]

Many thanks, dovers.

Madame Marchesi was very focused on teaching her young ladies in Paris in the late 19th century true bel canto skills. She wrote:

In my voice-training class the vocalizzi … are studied … I usually commence with the old Italian masters, such as Carissimi, Scarlatti, Lotti, Pergolesi, Marcello, Jommelli, Paesiello, and, later on, of course, Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, without omitting Mozart.

Her own pedagogical lineage goes back through Manuel Garcia II, Manuel Garcia I, Ansani, Porpora. It was Porpora who was the teacher of the great castrati Farinelli, Caffarelli and others in the early 18th century.

[doversoul1]

verismissimo

Her own pedagogical lineage goes back through Manuel Garcia II, Manuel Garcia I, Ansani, Porpora. It was Porpora who was the teacher of the great castrati Farinelli, Caffarelli and others in the early 18th century.

I suppose one thing we can almost be sure is that the way in which singers performed changed profoundly when public performance became the norm.

Lotti is a contemporary of Alessandro Scarlatti whose chamber cantatas I am quite addicted to. Scarlatti’s chamber cantatas were private entertainment and as such performed in private rooms (I guess even his operas were for small audiences). Whereas those superstar castrati whom Porpora taught were performers in public opera houses and were renowned not only for the beauty of their voices but also by the physical power of their singing. I doubt Porpora spent too much time teaching a dying art of singing chamber cantatas of yesteryear.

You could say that Madame Marchesi’s performance* of Lotti was the product of her time in the same way as Mendelssohn’s St Matthew Passion belongs to his time.
* As I don’t know her performance, this is a guess.