It is always a significant event when new publications expand our knowledge of the musical production of the Bononcini family, particularly the little-studied oeuvre of Antonio Maria. The second son of Giovanni Maria (1642–1678), brother of Giovanni (1670–1747) and half-brother of the little-known Giovanni Maria ‘Angelo’ (1678–1753), Antonio Maria was considered a composer of great talent. His style was described by Giovanni Battista Martini as ‘so elevated, lively, artful and delightful, that he is distinguished above most early 18th-century composers’ (Lowell Lindgren, ‘Bononcini, Antonio Maria’, in Grove Music Online www.oxfordmusiconline.com (31 July 2024)). Compared to what we know about his eldest brother, Giovanni, knowledge of Antonio's life is still fragmentary. Born in Modena in 1677, a few months before his father's death, he followed his eldest brother to Bologna, Rome, Vienna, Berlin and back to Italy after the accession of Emperor Charles VI in 1711. In the following years his operas were staged in Naples, Milan, Reggio Emilia, Rome and Venice, testifying to the high regard in which his work was held. He spent the last years of his life in Modena. Antonio reached the pinnacle of his career in 1721, when he was appointed maestro di cappella, but died a few years later, in 1726. In the first decade of the 1700s he composed dramatic works, oratorios and cantatas for the Viennese court, including six cantatas accompanied by winds and basso continuo, and six by strings and continuo (both dated 1708), contributing significantly to music in Vienna under Joseph I (see Konstantin Hirschmann, ‘“Componimenti”, “poemetti” und “feste”: Musiktheatrale Huldigung am Hof Josephs I.’ (PhD dissertation, Universität Wien, 2024)).
Three years after the publication of the cantatas with winds (Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Mus. Hs. 17587), an edition of the remaining six with strings from Mus. Hs. 17607 has appeared with A-R Editions. The editor of both volumes is Laurence Bennett, a highly experienced scholar of the Viennese cantata and author of The Italian Cantata in Vienna: Entertainment in the Age of Absolutism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). The exceptional quality of Bononcini's music, the interesting array of sources and the relevance of the composer's contribution to the history of the cantata in Vienna render this edition a significant contribution to the expanding field of Italian cantata scholarship (the website Clori: archivio della cantata italiana, www.cantataitaliana.it, which contains nearly ten thousand entries, clearly records this trend).
The volume reviewed here comprises a brief introduction, the transcription and English translation of the Italian poetic texts, the edition of music and a succinct critical report. Given the length of the printed music (176 pages), the Introduction, which largely reproduces the content of the previous volume, is relatively brief in comparison with those in earlier editions by A-R. There is a lack of sufficient depth in the discussion and of references that would allow performers and scholars to carry out a more complete contextualization of the sources and the music. The first section, ‘Antonio Bononcini's Career’, is based on general and sometimes dated references. Indeed, the more recent contributions and non-English literature are omitted, including an essay devoted specifically to these cantatas (Livio Marcaletti, ‘Le cantate con strumenti di Antonio Bononcini (Vienna 1708): nuove prospettive su organici e prassi esecutiva per la cantata del primo Settecento’, in La cantata da camera intorno agli anni italiani di Händel: problemi e prospettive di ricerca, ed. Teresa M. Gialdroni (Rome: Accademia Nazionale di S. Cecilia, 2009)). The volume I Bononcini da Modena all'Europa (1666–1747), edited by Marc Vanscheeuwijck (Lucca: LIM, 2020), which has made a significant contribution to the rejuvenation of Bononcini research, is also overlooked. The light treatment of the subject contrasts with the space devoted to listing recordings of Antonio Maria's works (page xi), which is not very useful in this context.
The Introduction's middle section is a concise overview of cantatas with instrumental accompaniment preserved in Vienna, supported by a concise table on page xii. The emphasis in this part is on a comparison of these pieces with the other six (from Mus. Hs. 17587) and on the edited works’ most important aspects, in particular the alternation of concerto grosso and concertino sections and the use of solos and concertante instruments. Once again, however, this analysis forgoes references to important related works, including Livio Marcaletti's ‘“Viennese-Flavored” Orchestration in Antonio Bononcini's Stage Works for Emperor Joseph I: A Preliminary Inquiry’, in I Bononcini da Modena all'Europa, and to the most comprehensive study of Viennese instrumentation in the early eighteenth century (Dagmar Glüxam, Instrumentarium und Instrumentalstil in der Wiener Hofoper zwischen 1705 und 1740 (Tutzing: Schneider, 2006)).
The Introduction's final section describes the poetic texts and their meanings, as well as a number of musical features, from dynamic effects to formal design and instrumental writing, culminating in the declaration that ‘Antonio surpasses his Viennese contemporaries in virtually every style category’ (xiii). The examples given underline the composer's mastery, but the lack of a specific comparison with ‘Viennese contemporaries’ – many of them Italian composers who composed and published dozens of cantatas in their homeland and in several countries, altering style and instrumentation according to the context and situation – does not allow us to measure how exceptional the edited cantatas truly are. Much more helpful would have been a deeper comparison both with Antonio Maria's cantatas with basso continuo as well as with Giovanni's output, here limited to the trite, and debatable, juxtaposition between Giovanni's profligacy and his brother's ‘superior craftsmanship and imagination’ (xii). And on this point, a minor detail: the decision to abbreviate the composer's name to ‘Antonio’ (also on the frontispiece) does not seem particularly effective, even if the full version ‘Antonio Maria’ is used once at the beginning of the Introduction, especially when dealing with a family including four composers with similar names.
The following section contains a transcription of the Italian texts taken from the score. The metrical reconstruction and mise-en-page are reliable, although the introduction of a tiny space between the da capo section and the following lines seems unconvincing. The indentation marks each turn from recitativo secco to cavata, even where it goes against the formal design of the poems, from which Antonio Maria and his contemporaries usually depart to create unexpected musical solutions. The choice of a slight modernization of spelling and orthography, and a general preservation of the linguistic patina that would have been perfectly recognizable at an Italian-speaking court such as Vienna, seem well founded. However, it would have been very important for the contextualization of these poems to have included some hypotheses about their author(s) and provenance, considering that ‘Sul margine adorato’ was also set to music by Giovanni Lorenzo Lulier and Dionisio Fregiotti (in B-Lc, 28/3D04), opening a possible link with Rome, while Giovanni produced another version of ‘Sopra l'orme d'Irene’ (today in F-Pn X 118A; see Lowell Lindgren, ‘Bononcini's “agreable and easie style, and those fine inventions in his basses (to which he was led by an instrument upon which he excells)”’, in Aspects of the Secular Cantata in Late Baroque Italy, ed. Michael Talbot (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 140–141). Given the highly virtuoso vocal writing of the compositions and their high level of expressiveness, the question of which singers would have sung the cantatas is an intriguing one, but it also remains unanswered.
The music is well edited, and the format of the volume ensures excellent readability. Both the vocal and the instrumental parts have been carefully edited, and the basso-continuo figures are often correctly transcribed and accurately placed, although editorial suggestions could occasionally have clarified passages in which the ciphers transcribed from the sources give only a slight hint of the desired harmonic sequence. Nevertheless, some errors occur when the score contains mistakes or is difficult to read. In the recitative ‘In quelle chiome d'oro’ from the cantata Lontananza, for example, an accidental relative to a note in the continuo is twice misunderstood as a sharp third, confusing the meaning of the whole passage, which is also corrupted by a misreading of the poetic text in bar 6. Furthermore, there is an incorrect anticipation of the ♭6/4/2 chord on the first beat of bar 1 in the first recitative of Sopra l'orme d'Irene and of the flat sixth at the beginning of bar 10 in the second recitative (clearly indicated as natural in the source).
From a performer's perspective, some page turns do not work perhaps as well as they should, especially for the continuo player, who has several awkward ones. Fortunately, the performer does not have to turn back to the beginning in the da capo arias, as the editor has retained the written-out da capo, a ‘historically informed’ solution implemented in the main source and in other contemporary Viennese scores, such as Giovanni Bononcini's L'Euleo festeggiante (Mus. Hs. 16288) and La Fede publica (Mus. Hs. 16281; see my ‘Sotto le ali della “grand'aquila”: L'Euleo festeggiante di Giovanni Bononcini’, in I Bononcini da Modena all'Europa, 244). ‘Solo’ and ‘Tutti’ directions are carefully indicated throughout the score, although the opening list on page 2 reveals an ambiguous proliferation of continuo parts among the group of ‘solo instruments’. This is caused by the distinction between solo and continuo violoncello and the differentiation between ‘Cembalo’ and ‘Basso Continuo’, leaving the latter as an empty, inconsistent label. Slurs, tempo markings and text underlay are well placed and, apart from a few spelling errors and some inconsistencies in the extension of slurs between parts (see, for example, the aria ‘M'uccida amore’ from Tanto avezzo ho il core), the result is clear and comfortable to read.
In accordance with the approach adopted in the Introduction, the Critical Report provides a concise overview of the principal sources and six surviving instrumental parts in Mus. Hs. 15931, which have been consulted as a supplementary source. The text does not provide any information about the copyists involved or a bibliographical contextualization of the sources. The succinctness of the paratexts is particularly striking when compared to the Introduction found in the inaugural volume of the series devoted to Antonio Maria, which is currently regarded as a benchmark for the study of his instrumental music (Lowell Lindgren, ed., Antonio Bononcini, Complete Sonatas for Violoncello and Basso Continuo (Madison, WI: A-R Editions, 1996)). This included not only a more in-depth analysis of the sources, but also highly valuable sections on performance practice, instrumentation and figuration, and a considerably more comprehensive and stimulating array of contextual information. At the same time, the decision to produce a streamlined edition aimed at performers and to guarantee wide circulation of the music seems incompatible with the high price (US$240).
The merit of the volume is that it provides insight into the extensive and valuable repertoire of the Italian cantata in early eighteenth-century Vienna. Indeed, Bennett has done much to bring this repertoire to the attention of the musicological community. Leaving aside the value of this initiative in and of itself, certain editorial approaches and misinterpretations do somewhat diminish the potential impact of the volume, which risks remaining an isolated attempt to rediscover both Antonio Maria's cantatas and those of his Italian contemporaries in Vienna. My hope is that this volume will be followed by more inspiring, wide-reaching editions that will lead towards a more comprehensive rediscovery of this body of works and to opening new paths of investigation into Antonio Maria Bononcini and his cantatas, both of which are long deserved and necessary.
