Sunday music: the sonatas of Domenico Paradies

Musical Times, Spring 2004 by Sanders, Donald C

This year marks the 250th anniversary of the first publication of Domenico Paradies's 12 Sonate di gravicembalo.

MOST PIANISTS and harpsichordists remember the name Domenico Paradies because of the short, but brilliant composition best-known as 'Toccata in A'. Published many times separately and in collections, the Toccata was a favourite of Dame Myra Hess, who included it in the Myra Hess album.1 Many of those familiar with the Toccata are not aware that the composer never gave it that title and that it is actually the finale of the sixth of the 12 Sonate di gravicembalo of Paradies, which appeared in London 250 years ago.

Aside from that celebrated movement, the Paradies sonatas have seldom been performed in recent years, and they might have been relegated to obscurity except for a famous endorsement by one of history's most successful musical pedagogues. In December 1774 Leopold Mozart, on one of his concert tours with Wolfgang, wrote home to Salzburg that 'Nannerl should practice the clavier most diligently, especially the sonatas of Paradisi and Bach'.2 The fact that the elder Mozart mentioned Paradies's music alongside that of either of the Bach sons is remarkable, considering the reputation that they enjoyed in the German-speaking musical world during that era.

The long career of Paradies, born Pietro Domenico Paradisi in Naples in 1707, was marked by a series of failures as an opera composer. Around 1739 he moved to Venice where his efforts to establish a reputation in that flourishing operatic centre were frustrated. He was, however, stimulated by the progressive keyboard music that was being produced there, especially that of his contemporary Baldassare Galuppi (1706-85).3

Paradisi emigrated to London in 1746 and anglicised the spelling of his name. His string of operatic failures continued there with the poor reception of his Fetonte at the King's Theatre, Haymarket. Charles Burney in his A general history of music (1776-89) described the arias in that work as 'ill-phrased and lacking in grace '.4 Despite his lack of success as a composer for the theatre, Paradies became renowned in England as a harpsichordist and as a teacher of keyboard and voice.

Although he continued to produce vocal music and at least two concertos for keyboard and orchestra, he is known almost exclusively today for the 12 sonatas, published in London by John Johnson in 1754. Several subsequent British reprints as well as editions by Le Clerc and Imbault in Paris and Roger in Amsterdam attest to their popularity in the 18th century. Selected sonatas and some individual movements appear in 19th- and 20th-century keyboard anthologies, and the entire collection exists in a modern German edition (Schott: Mainz, 1971). In 1770, anticipating his retirement, Paradies sold his manuscript collection to Richard (later Viscount) Fitzwilliam.5 He returned to Venice, where he lived until his death in 1791.

The sonatas of Paradies are usually mentioned perfunctorily in studies of keyboard literature along with those of numerous other Italian pre-Classic composers such as Galuppi, Lodovico Giustini, Giovanni Benedetto Platti, Domenico Alberti, Giovanni Marco Rutini, and several others. The sheer quantity of these Italian sonatas and the fact that many of them predate the important early German ones has assured their inclusion in studies of the genre, but many of them admittedly seem insubstantial in relation to works like the Prussian sonatas (1742-43) of Carl Phillip Emanuel Bach.

What then are the attributes that have kept Paradies's sonatas in print so consistently and that prompted Leopold Mozart's enthusiasm for them? A brief look at the development of the vast pre-Classic keyboard literature help to put Paradies's sonatas into historical perspective.

DURING the middle decades of the 18th century two somewhat contrasting styles of keyboard music evolved simultaneously. The first was essentially German, best represented by the sonatas of Emanuel Bach. These works were progressive in their tendency toward a three-movement overall structure and first movements in sonata form with substantial development sections and complete recapitulations. Slow movements, especially those of Bach, were expressive and often dramatic, anticipating some passages in Haydn and certain middle period works of Beethoven like the 'Tempest' Sonata. Conservative elements in this music are a preference for contrapuntal or quasi-contrapuntal textures rather than the 'singing-allegro' style that was to become a hallmark of the Viennese classic keyboard music.

The second style is typically found in sonatas by the aforementioned Italian composers. These works are less consistent in overall structure than those of the best-known German composers, varying from two to five movements.6 They also tend to contain shorter and more perfunctory development sections and often have incomplete recapitulations. Often they are harmonically bland, with little chromaticism and a limited chord vocabulary. Generally, they are more lyrical and less contrapuntal than their German counterparts. The emphasis on melody often serves to articulate the formal structure very clearly. The use of broken-chord figuration in the left hand (including what would come to be the most characteristic of Classic accompaniment patterns, the Alberti bass) highlights the melody, creating the cantabile sound that we most often associate with Mozart.