Arcangelo Corelli in the portrait by Hugh Howard. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
In 1714 an Amsterdam publisher brings out, posthumously, the twelve Concerti grossi of Arcangelo Corelli’s Opus 6. Eight years later, in 1722, Rameau’s Treatise on Harmony appears in Paris and the first book of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier in Leipzig; the same year is stamped on the oldest Cristofori fortepiano we possess, and within that handful of years the first concert societies open in London and Paris and Vivaldi publishes The Four Seasons. Eight years, a whiplash. Alessandro Baricco, in the Breve storia eretica della musica classica (a short heretical history of classical music) that this magazine is working through instalment by instalment, calls it the Big Bang: the moment when the hunter-gatherers of sound, the ones from the previous instalment, invent agriculture. Corelli lays out the cultivated fields, the tonality that gives every concerto a centre and a return; Rameau writes the rules of farming; the fortepiano becomes the farm machine that will carry those harvests into every drawing room.
And then there is the tastiest page in the book, the one where Baricco makes the gesture that gives the work its title: he dismantles the founding myth he has just told. Because the story of the Well-Tempered Clavier as the detonator of the Big Bang, he says, is so beautiful that it isn’t true. Bach, in 1722, was an honoured provincial musician whom almost nobody knew outside his courts: Mozart and Beethoven knew little more than his name, and to make him the founding father you had to wait for the nineteenth century, which rediscovered him because it was looking for a father. He did not write for the fortepiano, an instrument he had tried without enthusiasm. And, the final blow, he did not love equal temperament: his “well-tempered” hinted at a more refined tuning, whose secret he never revealed. Even the idea of preludes and fugues in every key had a precedent, Fischer’s Ariadne Musica, from which Bach borrowed even a couple of themes. The perfect story, Baricco concludes, with the formula that is worth the price of the book, tells something exact at the cost of many inaccuracies: it is the technique of every successful founding myth.
Why this page concerns us, and not only as readers. Because the history of music most of us carry in our heads is made like this: built after the fact, with fathers elected by their children and dates arranged to look good. Recognising it takes nothing away from the music; it takes something away only from the laziness with which we tell it. It is the job this magazine tries to do every day, Requiem included: telling the exact thing apart from its glorious inaccuracies. The book sits in the Melos library, on the history and criticism shelf; and the author, for anyone who wants to shake his hand, will be on a Roman stage on 15 November, which we will come back to soon.