Johann Heinrich Schmelzer (1623–1680)
Sonata IV from Sonatae unarum fidium
for Violin and Basso continuo (1664)

I. [Chaconne]
II. Sarabande
III. Guige
IV. [without title]
V. Allegro – Presto

Giovanni Antonio Pandolfi Mealli (1624–c. 1687)
Sonata for Violin and Basso continuo in A minor Op. 3 No. 1 La Stella (1660)

Sonata for Violin and Basso continuo in D major Op. 3 No. 4 La Castella

Vincenzo Bonizzi (?–1630)
Jouissance vous donneray
from Alcune opere di diversi auttori, passagiate per la viola bastarda (1626)

Giovanni Antonio Pandolfi Mealli
Sonata for Violina and Basso continuo in D major Op. 3 No. 2 La Melana 

Sonata for Violin and Basso continuo in A minor Op. 3 No. 2 La Cesta

Intermission

Giovanni Girolamo Kapsberger (1580–1651)
Toccata
Gagliarda
Corrente
from Libro primo d'intavolatura di lauto (1611)

Giovanni Antonio Pandolfi Mealli
Sonata for Violin and Basso continuo in E minor Op. 4 No. 1 La Bernabea 

Sonata for Violin and Basso continuo in F major Op. 4 No. 3 La Monella Romanesca

Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber (1644–1704)
Sonata for Violin and Basso continuo in F major (1681)

I. Adagio – Presto
II. Aria – Variatio 
III. Variatio. Grave

Rediscovering a Composing Virtuoso
The Life and Works of Giovanni Antonio Pandolfi Mealli

Franz Gratl

The Portuguese word barocco was originally utilized to describe irregularly shaped pearls. It only became established during the 19th century as the term Baroque to encompass an entire epoch—considered apt to describe the highly ornate and at times bizarre characteristics of architecture, visual arts, and music. It is therefore not surprising that the first musicologists who studied the violin sonatas of Giovanni Antonio Pandolfi Mealli were at a loss as how to evaluate this frequently bizarre and consequently utterly “Baroque” music. It took until the final quarter of the 20th century, in the wake of the intensive preoccupation with Early Music within the framework of historically informed performance practice, for the music-historical significance of these works to become apparent. These sonatas form a link between the virtuoso Italian instrumental style of the Early Baroque and the violin music of the High Baroque in southern Germany and Austria, culminating in the music of composers such as Schmelzer and Biber. Pandolfi Mealli long remained a somewhat obscure figure, chiefly because so few details of his biography were accessible. He was really only known for his two collections of sonatas Op. 3 and Op. 4, which were printed by Michael Wagner in Innsbruck in 1660, and for his employment as a chamber musician in the ensemble at the court of the Archduke Ferdinand Karl of Austrian-Tyrol and his wife Anna de’ Medici.

At the beginning of the new millennium, the Italian violinist and musicologist Fabrizio Longo presented the findings of his research into this violin virtuoso and composer. According to Longo, Giovanni Antonio was born as Domenico Pandolfi in Montepulciano, Tuscany, in 1624. A half-brother is documented as having been a castrato at the royal Polish court, and music must therefore have played a certain role in the family. After the death of his father, Domenico moved with his mother Verginia Bartalini to Venice where another half-brother already lived. Nothing is known about Pandolfi Mealli’s musical training and career before the year 1660. It is highly likely that he had already published works prior to this date as the collections printed in Innsbruck are his Opp. 3 and 4: Opp. 1 and 2 have been lost. Pandolfi Mealli must have aspired to a religious career at a certain unknown point during his lifetime, but we do not know whether his name change had anything to do with his ordination as a priest. The entry in the Innsbruck publications identifies the violinist as Don Giovanni Antonio Pandolfi Mealli; he therefore appears to have assumed the surname of his maternal half-brothers. This dubious change of name is one of the many larger and smaller inconsistencies in Pandolfi Mealli’s biography—as a secular priest (as implied by the title “D[on]”), he would normally have retained his baptismal name.

Pandolfi Mealli was active at the Innsbruck court by 1660 at the latest, in the dedication year of the sonatas for the Tyrolean regents. It could be imagined that the two collections of works served as a musical “letter of recommendation,” but on the title page of the printed editions, Pandolfi Mealli is already described as “Musico del Serenissimo Ferdinando Carlo Arciduca d’Austria.” The “foreign musicians” in Innsbruck were directed by the famous opera composer Antonio Cesti, and their primary performance duties were in the theater—Ferdinand Karl and Anna were “mad about opera” and spared no expenses for the magnificent musical and theatrical performances based on Italian models. Like many of his colleagues, Pandolfi Mealli was most probably dismissed following the death of Archduke Ferdinand Karl in 1662: the new ruler, Archduke Sigismund Franz, was forced to undertake economic measures due to the extravagance of his predecessor that also affected the music at court. In 1669, we rediscover a Giovanni Antonio Pandolfi in Messina as a first violinist in the chapel of the Senate of the Cathedral, who was the author of the collection Sonate cioe balletti, sarabande, correnti, passacagli, capriccetti, e una trombetta a uno e dui violini con la terza parte della viola a beneplacito, published in Rome in 1669. He was forced to leave Messina in haste after having murdered a castrato colleague of the chapel. He initially fled to France and subsequently found a position in the Royal Chapel in Madrid in 1678 where he also appears to have died in 1687.

These are the facts that Fabrizio Longo has collected within the framework of his commendable research into Pandolfi Mealli. Whether this paltry information is enough to fabricate a compelling story is doubtful, particularly as so many inconsistencies remain unsolved. On top of the dubious change of name, the sonatas of Don Giovanni Antonio Pandolfi from Messina are not allotted opus numbers and stylistically have little in common with the Innsbruck sonatas. How could Pandolfi Mealli have missed the chance of building on the strength of his Innsbruck collections and continuing the sequence of opus numbering—and why is there nothing of his unmistakable stylistic extravagance in the simple dance movements printed in Rome? Could there have been two different individuals with (almost) identical names? The facts are unfortunately too meagre to bring any certainty. The biography of the violinist would naturally gain a gruesome fascination through his heinous crime, but even without any criminal dealings, Pandolfi Mealli still remains a fascinating figure in European musical history and forms a bridge between Italy and the Alpine region.

Let us therefore turn to the Sonatas Opp. 3 and 4. The first collection was dedicated to the crown princess Anna de’ Medici and the second to her husband, Archduke Ferdinand Karl, who together transformed Innsbruck into an international hub of courtly musical culture. They were fortunate to have employed Antonio Cesti as the rising star of Italian opera in 1652. During the following years, he composed operas exclusively for Innsbruck and directed the Italianate court ensemble, an elite group including numerous musicians with an international reputation. Among the individuals employed in Innsbruck were the violin virtuoso and composer Giovanni Buonaventura Viviani and his cousin Antonio, an organist and composer, the Roman violinist Roberta Sabbatini (called “Roberta del Violino”), the English virtuoso viol player William Young, and the master violinmaker Jakob Stainer as “retainer of the archduke.” It is fascinating to imagine that Pandolfi Mealli could have performed his cutting-edge sonatas ahead of their time on the no less modern and extraordinarily fine-toned instruments created by Stainer… The glorious quality of musical performances at the Innsbruck court delighted such illustrious guests as the Swedish Queen Christina who officially marked her conversion to the Catholic faith in the Innsbruck court church in 1655. Ferdinand Karl celebrated this occasion with a performance of the festive opera L’Argia by Cesti. Christina returned to the court in 1669 and was honored by the performance of a different opera. The operatic stars of the day sang in Innsbruck, including Anna Renzi, Monteverdi’s first Ottavia. Music was performed day and night at court: the public church services at court were embellished with magnificent music, music was played both during meals at the royal table and in private settings, dances were organized, and no festival was complete without music.

Pandolfi Mealli specifies the framework for the performances of his sonatas in their title: they are suitable per chiesa e camera, appropriate both in the church and as chamber music in the royal chambers. From a formal aspect, these works consist of free sequences of contrasting sections in a variety of tempos and musical structures. Typical characteristics include extended pedal points above which the virtuoso figure work of the violin unfold. These extended pedal points frequently created acerbic dissonances, and these contrasts and surprising effects were part of Pandolfi Mealli’s favored artistic inventions and characterize his personal style. These types of effects and the free improvisatory style of figuration are familiar from the stylus phantasticus from the first half of the 17th century, which was shaped by composers including Girolamo Frescobaldi und Johann Jakob Froberger and is also so characteristic of the music of Heinrich lgnaz Franz Biber.

All these sonatas were given special names. Here Pandolfi Mealli was referencing individuals within his closer and wider circles (this was a customary practice particularly in Lombardy), as this list shows: 

Opus 3
Sonata 1 La Stella—Benedetto Stella, Prior of the Cistercian monastery San Giovanni Battista in Perugia 
Sonata 2 La Cesta—Antonio Cesti, chamber music director in Innsbruck, opera composer 
Sonata 3 La Melana—Antonio Melani, court singer in Innsbruck 
Sonata 4 La Castella—Antonio Castelli, court organist in Innsbruck
Sonata 5 La Clemente—Clemente Antoni, castrato, court singer in Innsbruck
Sonata 6 La Sabbatina—either Pompeo Sabbatini, castrato and court singer in Innsbruck, or Roberta Sabbatini “del violino,” violin virtuoso and chamber musician in lnnsbruck

Opus 4 
Sonata 1 La Bernabea—Giuseppe Bernabei 
Sonata 2 La Viviana—Antonio Viviani, court chaplain and court organist in Innsbruck 
Sonata 3 La Monella—Romanesca Felippo Bombaglia, castrato, court singer in Innsbruck 
Sonata 4 La Biancuccia—Giovanni Jacopo Biancucci, castrato, court singer in Innsbruck 
Sonata 5 La Stella—Benedetto Stella, Prior of the Cistercian monastery San Giovanni Battista in Perugia
Sonata 6 La Vinciolina—Teodora Vincioli, aristocratic patron from Perugia

What is particularly striking is the double dedication to the Prior of the Cistercian monastery Benedetto Stella and the dedication to the aristocrat Teodora Vincioli. Both were active in Perugia, where Pandolfi Mealli also appears to have spent some time—another aspect of his life requiring closer examination. Perugia is not very far from Montepulciano, the place of his birth. In light of these dedications, the sonatas by Giovanni Antonio Pandolfl Mealli can be viewed as a multifarious homage to the court music ensemble in Innsbruck and his colleagues, its distinguished members.

Franz Gratl holds a PhD in musicology and since 2007 has been curator of the music collection at Tiroler Landesmuseums Ferdinandeum in Innsbruck.

Translation: Lindsay Chalmers-Gerbracht

This essay was originally published in the booklet accompanying Daniel Sepec’s recording of the sonatas by Giovanni Antonio Pandolfi Mealli for Coviello Classics. Used by permission.

Border Crossings
Music by Schmelzer, Bonizzi, Kapsberger, and Biber

Considerable geographical barriers notwithstanding, cultural exchange has defined relations between northern and southern Europe for centuries. When the English music editor Nicholas Yonge published the first volume of Musica Transalpina—a pathbreaking anthology of Italian madrigals—in 1588, composers and performers from Italy had long been making their way across the Alps to work in the courts and chapels of the Habsburg monarchy. The transalpine route was a two-way street: scores of Austrian and German musicians headed south to Italy, which Heinrich Schütz, a disciple of the Venetian master Giovanni Gabrieli, famously called “the true university of music.” Although none of the other composers represented on tonight’s program was directly linked to Giovanni Antonio Pandolfi Mealli, all five were part of an international web of relationships and reciprocal influences that made 17th-century Europe a tightly interconnected, and remarkably fertile, musical ecosystem.

Renowned far and wide as a violin virtuoso, Johann Heinrich Schmelzer was based at the imperial court in Vienna, where the musical establishment also included such notable Italian expatriates as Giovanni Felipe Sances, Antonio Bertali, and Antonio Draghi. The bravura idiom of his D-major Sonata, published in 1664, owes much to the brilliantly extroverted Italian style of instrumental music that Arcangelo Corelli and Antonio Vivaldi would come to epitomize in the ensuing decades. Cast as a chain of increasingly elaborate variations over a repeating four-note figure in the continuo accompaniment, the Sonata highlights Schmelzer’s innovative bowing techniques and daringly unconventional harmonies. Vincenzo Bonizzi’s instrumental embellishment of Adriaen Willaert’s chanson “Jouissance vous donneray” is similarly structured as a set of ornate “divisions” supported by a slower-moving bass line. Bonizzi spent his entire life in and around Parma, where he served for three decades as organist and maestro di cappella at the court of the music-loving Lucrezia d’Este, duchess of Urbino. Lucrezia employed a celebrated trio of viol-playing sisters known as the “concerto delle dame” (consort of ladies), one of whom evidently adopted the viola bastarda, a short-lived cousin of the bass viol for which Bonizzi’s piece was written.

Born in Venice, the son of a German nobleman, Johann Hieronymus (aka Giovanni Girolamo) Kapsberger was closely associated with the emergence of the lute and its long-necked cousin, the theorbo (or archlute), as solo instruments at the turn of the 17th century. The three pieces to be heard tonight appeared in 1611 in his first collection of lute music. Kapsberger’s highly idiosyncratic voice is characterized by an abundance of trills and other ornaments, syncopated rhythms, dramatic outbursts, and lengthy passages in so-called broken style, in which rapid arpeggiated figurations are anchored by intense, searching harmonies. No less bracingly virtuosic is Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber’s Sonata in F major for violin and continuo of 1681, a dazzling showpiece replete with double stops, fast repeated notes, athletic leaps, and tricky string crossings. Bohemian by birth, Biber pursued his career within the sprawling, polyglot empire of the Austrian Habsburgs. Like Schmelzer, with whom he may have studied, he embraced the florid, richly melodic Italian style exemplified by his contemporary and fellow composer-violinist Corelli. Biber’s cutting-edge violin techniques, timbral effects, and tunings are characteristic of the “fantastic style” (stylus phantasticus), which the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher described in 1650 as “the most free and unfettered method of composition, bound to nothing, neither to words, nor to a harmonic subject.”

—Harry Haskell