When they think of Joseph Riepel, performers and scholars of eighteenth-century music tend to think of the words monte, fonte and ponte (mountain, fountain and bridge). If this is an association that exceeded his intentions – surely he did not set out to become history's ‘monte guy’ – these catchy terms embody a key strategy of his Anfangsgründe zur musicalischen Setzkunst of 1752–1768: to appeal to readers on a variety of levels. In the second chapter of this series of essays on music theory, addressed to those who desire ‘visible examples’, Riepel introduced his buzzwords to explain in a visually enticing manner three different modes for constructing patterns of melodic–harmonic continuation. The use of three Latin terms to describe a pattern of ascent towards a section in the dominant, usually coupled with a similarly ascending melodic line (monte), a pattern of descent via the supertonic back to the tonic (fonte) and a prolongation of the dominant cadencing back to the tonic (ponte) was surely meant tongue-in-cheek, just one of his frequent Latin puns. But the choice of names was also a cunning ruse to aid the learner.
This is perfectly in line with the essay's broader modus operandi. Between 1752 and 1768 Riepel published his Anfangsgründe in instalments that mimicked regular lessons. The material was broken into ten chapters that built on each other; furthermore, and perhaps borrowing Fux's presentation in the Gradus ad parnassum, Riepel presented the lessons as a dialogue between the Praeceptor (teacher) and the Discantista (student). He wrote deliberately in the German vernacular using the familiar form of address between the two participants throughout, thereby creating a casual tone and insinuating a reciprocity between the two protagonists that he was to formalize in later chapters. But with this choice of language and tone Riepel also positioned himself outside of the tradition of music theory teaching that had traditionally adopted a doctrinaire delivery in learned – not humorous! – Latin.
Riepel opened the second chapter of the Anfangsgründe by promising the imminent publication of various violin concertos. Likewise he prefaced the first edition of his Violin Concertos in B flat major, G minor and G major with a short epistolary discussion of various points from the Anfangsgründe. Stefan Eckert, in his version of the concertos for A-R Editions, has presented this Preface in the original German side-by-side with his English translation. The Preface consists of two letters, the first from a friend called Leiper – an anagram of Riepel – to the author, the second a response, and finally a note from the publisher that introduces a long list of book dealers across the German-speaking lands that will sell both the concertos and the first two chapters of the Anfangsgründe. That there is a relationship between Riepel's theoretical writings and these concertos, then, is established beyond doubt – as Eckert points out (vii). Yet the exact nature of this relationship is perhaps worth pondering over a little more than the Preface to this edition can do, especially if we want to address the larger question of who and what exactly the concertos were written for and what their modern edition can achieve today. These questions also need to be raised in order to understand the connection between the first three concertos and the final fourth in this volume.
The first three concertos were published together as Trio primo da Camera in Regensburg (1756) and later as Tré Concerti in Paris (c1767). Prints of both survive, alongside a manuscript copy. The fourth concerto presented here, in C major, exists in manuscript only and appears never to have been published. That the first three concertos were published at all is perhaps more surprising: assuming that they had been composed originally for performance at the court of Thurn und Taxis, where Riepel was employed for more than thirty years from 1749 onwards, one would expect their manuscript scores simply to have been subsumed into the courtly music collection according to the normal practice after the performance of a Kapellmeister's instrumental works. As it happens, these concertos were published as a set, suggesting that Riepel considered them suitable for amateur performers; in fact, the reference to the concertos in his Anfangsgründe suggests that he may have written them for didactic purposes in the first place, rather than for courtly entertainment. It is the C major concerto, meanwhile, which really bears the hallmarks of a concerto for courtly entertainment, with its addition of oboes, bassoons and horns as well as its grand opening homophonic gesture with violins and violas in unison, mirrored by the homophonic military opening of its final movement. Such opening gestures are certainly a feature of the other three concertos as well, albeit without the explicit addition of wind instruments; as the manuscript for these three indicates the ad libitum use of oboes to double the violins, the tutti sections of the concertos may have been conceived very similarly. However, the solo violin part of the C major concerto exceeds the virtuosity of the others by far: though the epistolary Preface to the first three concertos mentioned the occasional c3 to be played as a fourth-finger extension in ‘common fingering’, the C major concerto demands a thorough mastery of high positions and of bariolage-type chord blocking across all positions, sounded out in equally demanding right-hand string-crossing patterns – a favourite of the contemporary Italian violin school. A Vivaldian association is noticeable in the three published concertos at times, for instance in the use of the viola as a bassetto voice in the G minor concerto's slow movement. But the Italian style of virtuosity is absent.
If the C major concerto had been written for performance rather than publication in the first instance, its manuscript sources are interesting: the sole extant copy, a set of manuscript parts at the Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, includes a written-out cadenza for the second-movement Arioso as well as a cadenza for the final Allegro assai. In addition, a source in a different hand, the Beilage Esl VIII 508, which was inserted at some later point into the stack of parts, contains a complete embellished solo violin part for the Arioso, an embellished Eingang leading to the final statement of the opening tutti in bar 78 of that movement, and a further cadenza. Given the comparative rarity of such written-out cadenzas from mid-century, this is a significant performance-practice source, and its use as such is aided in Eckert's edition by the presentation of both solo parts within the orchestral score. The relationship between the two manuscripts is not entirely clear, and Eckert does not describe the nature of the manuscripts further. However, one image of the three facsimile reproductions of the first manuscript suggests that this was not a fair copy. Taking the cue from the Anfangsgründe, one might therefore conjecture that Riepel used such slow movements, and perhaps others as well, as study pieces for his students. Riepel certainly seems to have demanded of his students that they ornament the concertos in appropriate places, some of which he indicated by means of a piacere.
If the addition of cadenzas in the C major concerto provides an important performance-practice document, all four works lend themselves to the type of empirical study that Riepel was promoting in his theoretical writings. Quite apart from learning form and phrase structure through example, playing ‘with’ these concertos becomes a tool to teach mid-eighteenth-century taste through controlled application of variation and ornamentation, without being prescriptive. His manner of ‘unlocking the secrets of music’, as Johann Adam Hiller described it in 1766 (‘die Geheimnisse der Tonkunst aufzuschließen’; Hiller, Wöchentliche Nachrichten und Anmerkungen die Musik betreffend (15 July 1766), volume 1 (Leipzig: Verlag der Zeitungs-Expedition, 1766; facsimile edition Hildesheim: Olms, 1970), 19), marks a profound step in the disenchantment of the musical sciences. Riepel's is an empirical method that teaches the ear and the senses as the ear's extension. Riepel himself, as the imaginary Praeceptor, notes in the third part of his Harmonisches Sylbenmaß that through conversation with disciples ‘I myself learn something new at every moment’ (‘ich lerne alle Augenblick etwas bey unsern Übungen’; Thomas Emmering, Joseph Riepel: Sämtliche Schriften zur Musiktheorie (Vienna: Böhlau, 1996), volume 2, 161). He then goes on to an elaborate exercise of thematic ‘Verwechslungskunst’, the artful and in Riepel's view limitless substitution of related phrases for one another, based on the beginning of a concerto that is not dissimilar to the opening tuttis of the first and last movements of the grand C major concerto presented here. Riepel's approach deliberately subverts the formulaic and systematic in its stipulation of the need for a continuous play between form and elaboration. In Riepel's own words it is indeed ‘Herr Urbstädter’ (Emmering, Joseph Riepel, 161) who dislikes the ‘Verwechslungskunst’, no doubt the same learned, schoolmasterly pedant that Riepel alias Leiper mocks in the concertos’ Preface along with his ‘Zirkelhelden der musikalisch-correspondierenden Gesellschaft’ (3) – a pun, lost in translation, on the Pythagorean approach to music as science, not practice, associated with the scholarly circle surrounding Lorenz Christoph Mitzler.
To the extent that Riepel's writings amount to a system, this is a system of learning rather than a system of knowledge. In this sense Riepel is like an unassuming enfant terrible with a large capacity for self-mockery, not least in his frequent Latin word games (the montes and fontes are the least of them) that link the empirical world of the music-lover to the realm of serious music theory. Eckert's edition of the concertos – and his writing on the use of Riepel's minuet structure as a teaching tool (Stefan Eckert, ‘“So You Want to Write a Minuet?”: Historical Perspectives in Teaching Theory’, Music Theory Online 11/2 (2005) <www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.05.11.2/mto.05.11.2.eckert_frames.html> (10 September 2014)) – is a most welcome counterpart to Emmering's collected edition of the composer's theoretical writings. Eckert allows us to grasp Riepel's aims and gives us material to follow them. The edition is sensitively edited, with great transparency in the editorial handling of sources – a welcome feature, because the concertos are ripe with articulation and dynamics, both of which form part of the learning process. Through these, the galant is not two-dimensional in its linear and vertical structure but rises from the page in peaks and troughs. Yet studying the pieces from the score, I fear, defeats Riepel's method of learning by doing. If these pieces were indeed demonstrations of Riepel's practical approach to compositional instruction, their true value may be unlocked only by those who approach the works as performance materials. This should be facilitated by the fact that the first three concertos are conceived such that they also work well as quintets; it is therefore regrettable that A-R Editions is currently offering the orchestral parts in piano reduction only.
