Polymath of the Baroque: Agostino Steffani and His Music (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Polymath of the Baroque: Agostino Steffani and His Music Stuart Cheney Polymath of the Baroque: Agostino Steffani and His Music. By Colin Timms. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. [xviii, 422 p. ISBN 0195154738. $99.00.] Illustrations, music examples, bibliography, index. Colin Timms has synthesized much of his life's scholarly work in his biography of Agostino Steffani (1654–1728), and readers interested in Italian and German music of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, especially the widespread phenomenon of Italian dramatic music imported into Germany, owe the author a debt of gratitude for elucidating so clearly the life and works of one of the period's principal figures. If anyone were to write this book it would have to be Timms, whose work over thirty-seven years has frequently centered on Steffani's chamber vocal works and other genres. The author has already written at least sixteen studies on the composer's biography and music, along with producing editions of the music; among these are groundbreaking works on Steffani's chamber duets (including Timms's Ph.D. dissertation), operas, correspondence, and Handel's indebtedness to Steffani's secular and even sacred vocal works. The British Academy recognized Polymath of the Baroque by awarding it the 2004 Derek Allen Prize. Part 1 (chapters 1–5) provides the biographical portion of the book, with a chapter each on Steffani's early life in Castelfranco and Padua, his professional tenures in Munich, Hanover, and Düsseldorf, and finally his position as Apostolic Vicar of North Germany. Timms draws on an impressive command of a multitude of historical sources, including manuscript scores; libretti; letters by the composer, his patrons, and observers; extensive archival resources in Hanover, Munich, Rome, Venice, and Würzburg; and a wide array of historical studies written since the mid-eighteenth century. This means that the few speculations Timms necessarily makes in order to fill in significant gaps in the biography are highly informed. Part 2 (chapters 6–9) examines the music in four chapters, divided between the composer's sacred works, two chapters devoted to the operas, and his chamber works. Specific examples of Steffani's music, along with their place in each genre's tradition, are clearly explained. Timms writes fluidly and engagingly in both parts of the book, each of which requires specialized approaches to the subjects at hand. Three useful appendices follow. Appendix A presents a small group of documents in their original Italian or German, including an autobiographical letter by the composer. Appendix B is the first published catalog of Steffani's musical output, which will prove to be one of the most useful aspects of the book; its twenty pages organize the works by genre and provide information on the principal manuscript and printed sources, including some modern editions. Each of Steffani's sixteen operas is broken down in Appendix C by such features as overall dramatic structure, types of vocal scorings, arias and their subtypes, instrumental involvement in arias, and key-relationship statistics for the recitatives. An extraordinarily gifted singer, Steffani was taken at age twelve from Italy to Munich, where he was to spend twenty-one years in the service of the elector of Bavaria. He later spent fifteen years in Hanover, six in Düsseldorf, and most of his remaining nineteen years back in Hanover. Owing to his musical and especially diplomatic activities, Steffani was unusually well [End Page 827] traveled; besides his principal cities of residence, he lived and worked in Venice, Rome, Paris, Turin, Vienna, Brussels, The Hague, Herten, Leipzig, Dresden, Heidelberg, Brunswick, and Florence. In 1722 Steffani retired to Padua near his native Castelfranco, but was persuaded back into ecclesiastical duty in 1725 and returned to Hanover. His wide travels produced another impressive list, that of the several prominent musicians with whom he crossed paths: his teachers Johann Caspar Kerll and Ercole Bernabei, plus Gaetano Berenstadt, Jean-Baptiste Farinel, John Ernest Galliard, George Frideric Handel, August Kühnel, Carlo Pallavicino, Johannes Schenck, Silvius Leopold Weiss, and probably Arcangelo Corelli and Alessandro Scarlatti. Steffani lived during a period when many significant musical, literary, and religious positions in Catholic Germany were held by Italians. Rather than attempting to...