Handwritten page of the first partimento of Book I by Fedele Fenaroli. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Few people know the name of Bonifazio Asioli today, but for half of the Italian nineteenth century harmony meant his surname: students learned from Asioli the way they now learn from the workbook adopted in class. Born in Correggio in 1769, a child prodigy who was composing masses at eight, Asioli was the kind of man on whom institutions are built: when Napoleonic Milan founded its Conservatory in 1808, its first director, then known as the censor, was Asioli.
His treatises, the Trattato d’armonia e d’accompagnamento and the teaching works that followed from it, performed a precise historical operation: they translated into modern, orderly, printable Italian the knowledge that the Neapolitan conservatories had handed down for a century through partimenti, the basses to be realised at the harpsichord, updating it with what was arriving from across the Alps, Rameau and his science of chords. The result was a practical, graded method, designed for public schools and no longer for workshops: the epochal shift from apprenticeship to education. If nineteenth-century Italy was able to turn out chapel masters, conductors and opera composers in series, it is because an entire generation trained on those pages.
History, though, wanted to add its irony. The institution Asioli had founded and organised, the Milan Conservatory, a quarter of a century later applied its own rules with such diligence that it rejected an eighteen-year-old from Busseto named Verdi, as we recounted here a few days ago. The two stories should be read together, because they are two faces of the same coin: the schooling of music democratised knowledge that had previously passed through birth and luck, and at the same time created a bureaucracy capable of failing to recognise talent when it shows up without the requirements. Asioli, who was a practical man, would probably have let the boy in through the service door.
His harmony treatise sits in the Melos library, in reproduction, on the theory shelf: a copy that smells of school, with the patience of workbooks. It is the least glorious book in our library, and one of the most important: masterpieces are written by geniuses, but geniuses are prepared by someone who wrote a good chapter on seventh chords.