The Italian concerto in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries

Abstract

The early history of the concerto is intimately linked to the early history of the orchestra in the modern sense of that word: an ensemble in which each of the string parts is taken by several players. What instrumental compositions termed concerto written before 1700 have in common, despite their great variety of structure and style, is suitability for performance with doubled parts. This suitability was not – and should not today be misinterpreted as – an explicit compulsion to perform early concertos with massed strings, but it set the defining parameters. In brief, the nascent concerto acquired defining features that drew it apart from its parent genre, the sonata. By the first decade of the eighteenth century, it had made a sufficient impact on the musical scene to become the object of transcriptions for organ by J. S. Bach's cousin Johann Gottfried Walther. Bach continued the practice himself in the following decade, and the logical point of arrival was his Italian Concerto , published in 1735: a concerto for a solo instrument (two-manual harpsichord) that mimics a solo concerto for violin in every respect except scoring.