Ioannis Fulias, “The ‘Maniac’ of G.
Brunetti, the ‘Irresolute man’ of L.
Kozeluch
and the programmatic symphony as a fully developed music genre at about 1780”,
in: Ioannis Fulias –
Petros
Vouvaris –
Giorgos Kitsios –
Kostas Chardas (ed.), Music
and Musicology. Present and future (Conference
proceedings,
under the auspices of the Hellenic Musicological Society, Thessaloniki, 21-23 November
2014), Hellenic Musicological Society, Thessaloniki 2015, p. 121-143.
The
impression
that not only programme music in
general but also, more specifically, the genre of the
programmatic symphony reach their full
flourishing only during the
19th century is so
deeply rooted in the historiography
of music already since the beginning of the 20th
century, that it suggests
the collective consideration of all
similar works of the classical
repertoire as “early”
or “imperfect” samples
in relation to the subsequent
“development” of this
music genre in the
romantic period. However, the
recent emergence, after more than two centuries of oblivion,
of a series of programmatic symphonies from
the late 18th century and
the study on how the composers
represent in their music each selected narrative plot seriously
challenge our hitherto unshakable
beliefs and require
an in-depth revision of
the comprehensive evolutionary framework for this genre
from classicism to
romanticism. This paper indicatively
considers
two highly interesting
– but also totally
ignored – programmatic
symphonies that were written at
about 1780: on the one hand Gaetano
Brunetti’s “Maniac”
(“Il maniatico”), where a “fixed
idea” runs through all four
movements of the work, and on
the other hand Leopold Kozeluch’s “Irresolute
man”
(“L’Irrésolu”),
where the extra-musical background
of the work leaves its
indelible mark on the potentially
interminable overall musical
structure.
© Ioannis
Fulias