The arpeggione was a sort of bowed guitar invented by one of the most famous of the "romantic period" guitar makers, Johann Stauffer. The only well known piece composed for it was the famous sonata by Schubert, which is played on virtually everything but an arpeggione. The young Belgian cellist Nicolas Deletaille, who played the Beethoven Sonata I posted yesterday, is trying to revive the instrument. His has adjustable frets to play intervals closer to pure intervals, something the original didn't have.
Looking at the score it seems to be written like guitar music, in G clef an octave above pitch. I believe the instrument has the same tuning as the guitar.
Score
* For once
Just a note to thank you for the beautiful music. Music that on my own I never would have known.
ReplyDeleteI'll have to spend more time listening to it as I can.
It's a pleasure. I have a real need to listen to new things and old things made new. This recording of a sonata I've heard played many times on many different instruments gave me a totally new view of it. It's incredible how intimate it is on the original instruments. Considering he wrote the piece for a friend of his who had become a virtuoso of this level after a year of playing it (the instrument was invented in 1823, the sonata written in 1824) and that the instrument went out of fashion about a decade after that, it's amazing how Schubert wrote something so wonderfully idiomatic on that brief acquaintance. People are always going on about Mozart's precocity but I think Schubert's music is downright miraculous. He had been under treatment, with mercury, for a case of acute early stage syphilis and must have known it was a horrific disease which would eventually kill him. It's amazing he could have written the music he did during that period but to write so much, so fast that was so good and to take the time out to gain the intuition to write this sonata for a newly invented instrument so incredibly well the word miracle is all I can think of that approaches it.
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