The Repertoire - Part IV
Ferdinando Carulli
by George Warren
The late Leif Christensen, was, as all his friends knew,
one of the most broadly grounded guitarists in the world when it came
to the literature of the instrument. He knew all periods; he snubbed
none. His tragically brief recording career only gave a small indication
of his interests and enthusiasms. Leif played contemporary music well
(his was the first recorded performance, and arguably the best, of the
Henze Royal Winter Music sonatas). But a year or so before Leif's
death Colin Cooper of Classical Guitar magazine asked him what
he thought of the current status of guitar composition, and his answer
set Cooper back on his heels. He thought a moment and said, "The best
comes up to Carulli, perhaps."
Carulli? Carulli? I can hear the anguished groans all the way
to my friend Ray Burley's house in Oxford.
But there you are. Christensen wasn't a man to pull your nose for you,
or to make light conversation. When he said something he usually meant
it. The comment was partly a sadder-and-wiser commentary on the state
of contemporary guitar music, by a man who'd played virtually everything--and
partly a re-examination and re-evaluation of the period of common practice.
Leif, mind you, was the first great pioneer of the movement to play
nineteenth century guitar music on nineteenth century instruments. His
recordings, on antique guitars, of Regondi and Sor and Giuliani were
landmarks in the movement, and his posthumous influence is still powerfully
at work. Leif had the knack of listening to music with a fresh new ear,
and of blowing the dust off things other people had neglected--even
other people whose own competence, understanding and adventurous spirits
were beyond question. We all neglected Regondi (the late Siegfried Behrend,
who was one of the most adventurous guitarists I've ever known, once
spoke of him as "10,000 notes signifying nothing"), and then Leif showed
us all how to play him. Now we all know what made Regondi the most famous
guitarist-composer of his day.
All right. You simply had to listen to anything Leif Christensen said.
He had that kind of authority, young as he was. Today, then, we consider
Ferdinando Carulli (1770-1841).
Let's admit it right off. Carulli wrote too much. He was the Alexandre
Dumas père of music. (It's a good comparison. The two knew each
other, after all, and Dumas was a fan of Carulli's.) Both men wrote
like factories, not composers. They had enormous glibness, enormous
competence, enormous audiences. They might have done well to have burned
a certain percentage of their work rather than seeing it come to print.
So why didn't they? Carulli is not on the record in the matter. Dumas
is. He, at least, admitted freely that he needed money, lots of it.
Dumas employed researchers to do the research for his historical novels
(I understand perfectly. I did myself, writing novels of my own). He
even hired people to take dictation, write whole sections of his books
for him, flesh out bare outlines. (I never figured out how to afford
this.) Is this how Carulli managed to publish over 400 works in his
23 years in Paris, despite a busy concertizing career and a heavy teaching
schedule? Did he have apprentices helping him grind out the work? Are
we talking about a sort of "School of Rubens" approach here, with the
master doing a cartoon and the pupils doing a bucket-brigade job applying
the paint? (I remember the "Medici room" in the Louvre. I will personally
eat every dab of paint Rubens actually applied himself to those ten-foot
circus poster horrors.)
The "School of Carulli" approach is my own tentative answer to the question,
which is simply stated in two parts: 1. Given this fecundity, why is
so much of Carulli so good? 2. And why is so much of the rest of it
so bad? (Look at the lone--and exquisite--Rubens in the National Gallery
in Washington. All the difference in the world: this one he painted
himself.)
All right. Let's see if I can find you some good Carulli to play. Try,
for starters, then, a fat volume called Oeuvres choisies pour guitare
seule, a 1979 facsimile edition selected by François Lesure for
Minkoff Reprints, Geneva. You may even have some fun with this book.
There are, for instance, student pieces virtually anyone can play, and
some of them are quite beguiling: the three easy sonatas of op. 7; six
delicious sets of variations, op. 73, on Airs Nationaux de tous les
Peuples d'Europe; a simple, programmatic pièce historique
called La Paix, possibly commemorating the end of the 1830 revolution.
All of this is delicious stuff if you don't demand that a piece be as
serious a work as a late Beethoven quartet. There's even one good concert
piece in it, so uncharacteristic that people won't believe you when
you tell them they've been listening to Carulli. This is a Fandango:
Danse Espagnole, op. 73, No. 2, and it's akin to the one Soler wrote
for the harpsichord and the one Boccherini wrote for guitar and string
quartet (in Quintet No. 4 in D). It'd make a terrific encore, particularly
if you souped up the last seven measures with a bit of rousing rasgueado
and ended the piece with a real bang.
More: there's a fine Sonata in C, op. 16 (Moderato, Adagio, Rondo Allegretto),
and there's another of Carulli's odd programmatic pieces, Les Amours
de Adonis et Venue, op. 42, and if you're used to Carulli sticking
to C and D and A, you're in for a surprise; there's a whole "Largo"
movement of the latter piece in F minor, followed by a C major Allegretto
that pauses on an F sharp major chord and a fermata, indicating that
the player is to improvise his own cadenza here and somehow modulate
to the next movement in G major; how many of Carulli's present-day critics
know how to find their way through the cycle of fifths from a dominant
F sharp to G, using material from the previous movement and staying
in the style of the piece?
Op. 76 is quite another matter: three Solos pour Guitare composed
for, dedicated to, and written faithfully in the style of Carulli's
friend and contemporary Antoine l'Hoyer (dates uncertain). Glissandi;
long passages in slurs in sixty-fourth notes; long and contemplative
written-out cadenzas; constant demands on the player's technique and
ability to interpret. We are in Regondi country here, and a Christensen,
a player with a fresh eye and ear, is needed, and badly.
Onward! Here's Carulli once more in an Iberian turn of mind: a Divertissement
a 1'Espagnole, op. 138, full of rasgueados and flourishes and special
effects. It's billed as Etrennes a Mes Eleves (New Year's Gifts
to my Pupils). Evidently Carulli's pupils liked an occasional dip into
Spain, as mine usually did, as yours probably do. This was a reward
for sticking to scales and exercises.
Toward the end of the book things start to move toward the obvious concert
piece, and it'd take a heck of an eleve to master op. 141, a Grand Polonaise
worth any performer's time and labor, one which uses up the whole fingerboard
and makes real demands on the player's interpretive skills. It's full
of brilliant effects, and ends with a thoroughly satisfying bang, skillfully
avoiding the usual 10,000 restatements of the V-I cadence and building
to a fine climax before the final "orchestral" finish. (A note: don't
take it too fast. Polonaises like this are "moderato," and develop their
own electricity without peppy initial tempi or subsequent accelerandi.)
The last pair of pieces in the book are an oddity, having nothing to
do with each other yet arriving lumped together as op. 162. The opening
theme with variations, in A, starts as simply as Giuliani's set of variations
on the march from Les Deux Tournées does, and goes just
as crazy before it's over. The unrelated Rondo in C that follows is
an endurance contest requiring steely fingers and sure knowledge of
how to phrase in rondo form (there's a certain need for precisely timed
ritardandi just before each re-entrance of the theme). This, like the
polonaise described above, is not fit material for dubs or sissies,
any more than those big Regondi pieces are. You'll get a workout, depend
on it.
So what else is Carulli known for? Try his justly famous guitar duos.
And when you're done with the "easy" works, like op. 120, you'll find
an excellent three-volume collection of some of Carulli's best duos,
in beautifully printed scores published by Gendai Guitar, Tokyo, and
available from Guitar Solo Publications. There's material enough here
for several all-Carulli concerts, and the fare varies in quality from
good to excellent. (Sor, who seldom had a kind word to say about any
of his contemporaries, praises Carulli's duos in his Method, and can
be presumed to have taught them and played them.)
Volume I includes all of the Six Petites Duos Dialogues, op.
34; you'll know at least one of them from the Julian and John albums.
The rest of the book is comprised of the Trois Nocturnes, op.
90, of which No. 1 was recorded by Newman and Oltman a while back. (My
own favorite, easy and effective, is No. 2.)
Volume II presents the absolutely wonderful Trois Serenades of
op. 96. Everybody and his brother have recorded No. 1; the trick here
is to remind yourself you're playing grand opera, and keep the melodrama
front and center. No. 3 is an old Presti and Lagoya favorite, and unless
I've missed something their recording of it may still be in print in
Germany. The rest of the book is given over to the Deux Airs Russes
Variées, op. 110 (make sure your broken octaves are in trim
before you tackle these!).
Oddly enough, the editors of this collection reward you for your hard
work by putting the easiest pieces in the last volume. This is devoted
to the Six Petits Duos nocturnes faceles et brillans, op. 128.
Only the first of these has been recorded, to my knowledge, by the late
Siegfried Behrend and one of his best pupils, Martin Maria Krueger.
Much of it can be sight-read by good players. All of the pieces are
just as described, "easy and brilliant."
Even more than with the solos, you'll find yourself surprised at how
pleasant these pieces are to play, and how effective they are in live
performance. I played a duo job every Thursday night for a year, once,
and included a Carulli duet of some substance at every performance;
I can tell you it always had its effect, and often upstaged better-known
works one might have thought much easier to sell to strangers.
Night after night, little by little, Carulli won my respect. If you
loosen up a bit, and get in the spirit of things, he may just win yours.
This is the fourth in a series of articles adapted from "the
repertoire" columns by George Warren, published in Guitar Review.
This article first appeared in Guitar Review, Winter 1991. George Warren,
a Carmel Classic Guitar Society member, has written music reviews for
American Record Guide, Record Review, and Guitar &
Lute.
Links to related web pages:
Fandango - Danse Espagnole, featured
music in January 2002 CCGS Journal
Free
Carulli sheet music from Free-Scores.com
Guitar Review
