5. Germany, England and elsewhere: 18th and 19th centuries.
HOWARD MAYER BROWN/IAIN FENLON
At various times in musical history, the word ‘academy’ has meant diverse things, including (i) a formal association of people interested in mutually communicating their opinions on various philosophical, intellectual or cultural issues (most such academies sponsored theatrical events with music and some included discussions of musical questions on their regular agenda), or even, in some few cases, a formal association devoting itself primarily to the study of music; (ii) a more loosely formed circle of intellectuals interested in holding lively discussions on various topics; (iii) an official national society that serves as an arbiter of tastes and standards; (iv) a society formed specifically to sponsor musical performances (including opera); (v) a single concert, either public or private; or (vi) an institution for the training of musicians.
The first of these definitions must be considered the original and therefore the primary meaning. The word itself derives from the mythological character Akademos, after whom a garden or grove in Athens was named, where it is said that the Greek philosopher Plato met his students to discuss philosophy, although recent scholarship has shown that exclusive reference to Plato was never intended by users of the word (Chambers, 1995). In spite of the existence of various medieval institutions formed to debate intellectual or philosophical questions, and which therefore might be called ‘academies’, the tradition of the academy in the West is often associated with the alleged resuscitation of the idea of the Platonic academy in late 15th-century Florence. This ‘Platonic Academy’, founded in 1470, centred on the figure of Marsilio Ficino, a philosopher supported by members of the Medici family and commissioned by them to translate the works of Plato into Latin. It has been claimed that Ficino conceived the idea of bringing together occasionally, on an informal basis, in emulation of Plato's original academy, those Florentine nobles and intellectuals who had intellectual interests in common, especially a desire to hear him expound his ideas about Plato (see della Torre, 1902); revisionist writing has, however, dismissed the Accademia Platonica as fictitious (Hankins, 1990).
The 16th century saw the rise of numerous academies in Italy, if not in direct response to the Platonic Academy in Florence – their character also owes much, for example, to the religious and secular confraternities of the late Middle Ages – then at least echoing the general idea of a meeting place for intellectual discussion. Several thousand such societies in Italy from the 16th century to the 19th have been listed (see Maylender, 1926–30). Some of those established in the 16th and 17th centuries, such as the Accademia della Crusca in Florence (founded in 1582), the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome (1603), and the Accademia Filarmonica in Bologna (1666), are still in existence today. Others flourished for only a few years, for example the Accademia degli Elevati of Florence, devoted exclusively to the cultivation of music; founded by Marco da Gagliano in 1607, it enjoyed an active life up to 1609, but seems thereafter to have languished, disappearing from view altogether by 1626 (see Strainchamps, 1976).
Most of these associations brought together members of the upper classes of society, scholars and intellectuals, literati, artists and musicians. The typical Italian academy of the 16th century had its own constitution and held regularly scheduled meetings where papers on literary, artistic, philosophical and even sometimes musical questions were read and discussed. In many academies the members took academic pseudonyms (for example, Count Giovanni Maria de' Bardi of Florence was known as ‘il Puro’ in the Accademia degli Alterati, his son Pietro as ‘l'Avvinato’ and the poet Ottavio Rinuccini as ‘il Sonnacchioso’. Academies became important forums for the dissemination of ideas in 16th-century Italy and also served as models for associations of various kinds in later times and different places. Among their more important functions – which have little or nothing to do with the history of music – many academies had as their mission the obligation to establish and preserve the vernacular language and to identify the principal intellectuals of their countries. Thus the Accademia della Crusca in Italy took on the responsibility of compiling a definitive dictionary of the Italian language, while the various national academies of eastern Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries constitute associations of the leading official intellectuals in each country (they also serve to sponsor various research projects); and the Académie Française fulfils both functions, defending the purity of the French language and by electing from time to time new members to join the ranks of the ‘immortel(le)s’.
During the 16th century, Italian academies became important venues for the airing of musical questions. The discussions in various Florentine academies about the nature of ancient music are probably the best-known examples of the way topics of current intellectual interest were handled by academicians. Members of the Accademia degli Alterati of Florence, for example, contributed to the lively debate in the late 16th century about the implications for modern music of speculations about the organization of ancient music and its powers to communicate with its audience (Palisca, 1968). Even more theoretical in its approach to music was the Venetian Accademia della Fama (also known as the Accademia Venetiana). Under the guidance of Zarlino, who was a member, the academy proposed to publish a number of treatises by both ancient and modern writers as part of an ambitious publishing programme covering all the main areas of knowledge. This scheme, which owed much to Aldo Manuzio's conception of the intimate relationship between scholarship and the press in the pursuit of accurate and authoritative texts, never came to fruition (see Fenlon, 1995).
Besides the importance of Italian academies in discussing musical questions, they played a significant role in musical history simply because those connected with princely courts were among the most important sponsors of the theatrical entertainments. Many academies organized performances of comedies and other plays, in which their members acted, and sometimes academies (or individual academicians) were charged with arranging the entertainment for princely weddings, state visits by visiting dignitaries or other important occasional or regular events. Through these activities, music became an important element of the academic enterprise, for theatrical entertainments almost always included some musical component. The plays most closely associated with the Accademia degl'Intronati in Siena, for example, Il sacrificio and Gl'ingannati, apparently written by various members of the academy and first performed by them in 1531, are filled with music. Francesco Corteccia composed five madrigals to words by the poet Ugolino Martelli that were sung as intermedi at the first performance of Francesco d'Ambra's comedy Il furto, sponsored by the Accademia Fiorentina in 1544; Corteccia's cycle is one of the very few complete sets of non-courtly intermedi to have survived from the 16th century. And the most famous intermedi of the entire century, those organized by the Medici court in Florence in 1589, to celebrate the wedding of Ferdinando de' Medici to Christine of Lorraine, were first performed between the acts of Girolamo Bargagli's La pellegrina, which was acted by members of the Sienese Accademia degl'Intronati, of which Bargagli was himself a member. One of the earliest court operas, Monteverdi's Orfeo (1607), was commissioned by Prince Francesco Gonzaga of Mantua to entertain members of the Accademia degli Invaghiti.
By the 18th century the Accademia degl'Intronati had its own theatre, described on the title-page of various opera librettos as the ‘Teatro Grande della nobilissima Accademia degl'Intronati’, where opera was performed during Carnival season. Various other academies even served as financial guarantors of opera seasons. Thus the Accademia degli Immobili in Florence supported opera productions at the Teatro della Pergola during the early 18th century.
A few academies in 16th-century Italy concentrated exclusively on the study of music; several more made it a prominent aspect of their activities. The earliest to do so, the Accademia Filarmonica of Verona, was founded in 1543 as a coalition of two previously existing organizations (Turrini, 1941). They had a formal constitution, held regular meetings, and owned a meeting-room with an extensive library (including a good deal of music) and a collection of instruments. In 1548 they hired as musical director a full-time professional musician, Giovanni Nasco, who was required to be present every afternoon, presumably to assist members by giving them instruction and performing with them. He was also charged with setting to music whatever poetry members gave him. The settings remained the property of the academy, and Nasco had to get permission to publish them.
Although the members of the Veronese Accademia Filarmonica appear to have made music mostly for their own amusement – visitors were normally not allowed into their meetings – they also gave public performances from time to time. They appear to have specialized in performing compositions (mostly madrigals) in combinations of voices with instruments, although their library included a wide variety of genres and kinds of compositions. They sponsored, for example, a new polyphonic Mass of the Holy Spirit to be performed in a Veronese church annually on 1 May, the anniversary of their founding, and organized more secular entertainments during Carnival. Perhaps it was for these outdoor Carnival celebrations that they used the trumpets, drums and fifes that they owned, and which still survive.
Nasco left the academy in 1551; a succession of relatively well-known composers were subsequently hired to take his place, including Vincenzo Ruffo, Alessandro Romano and Lambert Courtois. The academicians achieved a certain fame throughout Italy during the 16th and early 17th centuries; more than half of the madrigals published in the 16th century that were dedicated to academies were addressed to the Accademia Filarmonica, including volumes by Ruffo (1554), Wert (1571), Pallavicino (1579), Marenzio (1582 and later) and Ingegneri (1587). Similar in orientation was the Accademia degli Unisoni, founded in Perugia by Raffaele Sozi in 1561. In addition to its regular meetings to perform vocal and instrumental music, the Unisoni promoted lectures and discussions of other ‘speculative sciences’, including mathematics, rhetoric, moral philosophy and poetry, as well as music. Other Italian academies that had madrigal books dedicated to them – and thus were presumably especially interested in music – include the Costanti of Vicenza (Nasco, 1557; Portinaro, 1557; Bonardo, 1565); the Desiosi of Conegliano (Piccioni, 1577); the Elevati of Padua (Portinaro, 1560); the Novelli of Verona (Cavatoni, 1572); and the Olimpici of Vicenza (Pordenon, 1580). In 1585 the Olimpici inaugurated their new theatre, designed by Palladio on Vitruvian principles, with a performance of Sophocles' Oedipus rex in the vernacular; for this occasion choruses in a suitably ‘antique’ style were composed by Andrea Gabrieli.
The two Italian academies most famous in the history of music – the Accademia Filarmonica of Bologna and the Accademia degli Arcadi of Rome – grew up in the 17th century. In his monastery of S Michele in Bosco, near Bologna, Adriano Banchieri founded the Accademia dei Floridi in 1614 or 1615 (the date is traditionally given as 1615, but Banchieri had published the academy's constitution in his Cartella musicale of 1614). The academy was devoted to the study of music, concerts and the cultivation of belles lettres. The Accademia dei Floridi underwent various transformations in the following several decades, changing its name first to Accademia dei Filomusi and then to the Accademia dei Filaschisi. Eventually it served as a model for the Accademia Filarmonica, founded in 1666 by Count Vincenzo Maria Carrati, an academy that still survives. There were three classes of musicians elected to membership in the Accademia Filarmonica: compositori, cantori and suonatori. Early in their existence the Filarmonici met twice weekly in the Carrati palace, to hear music composed and performed by their members. They soon gained a European-wide reputation as a distinguished musical academy. During its long life, it has admitted to membership a large number of well-known composers, performers and scholars, including G.B. Vitali, Tosi, Corelli, Torelli, Francesco Gasparini, Benedetto Marcello, Farinelli, Jommelli, G.B. Martini (whose notes on the history of the academy have been published in modern edition: see Martini, 1776 and 1973), Grétry, Mozart, Meyerbeer, Liszt, Rossini, Verdi, Wagner, Brahms, Saint-Saëns, Puccini and Ravel.
The intellectual vacuum left in Rome after the death in 1689 of Queen Christina of Sweden led to the establishment the next year of the Accademia degli Arcadi by members of her circle of literary figures and musicians, notably G.M. Crescimbeni. The Arcadian academy soon became one of the most important cultural institutions of its time, even establishing branches (or ‘colonies’) in various other Italian cities, probably the only academy to consolidate its cultural power in this way. Pretending to escape the complexities of modern life by reverting to the idyllic lives of shepherds, the Arcadians were in the vanguard of the attempts to counteract what were seen as Baroque excesses by recourse to a new simplicity and an aesthetic based on the rules of reason and moderation. Among the musicians associated with the Arcadians were Corelli, Pasquini, Alessandro Scarlatti and Benedetto Marcello. The Accademia degli Arcadi, is especially famous in the history of music, though, for its influence in the establishment of a new kind of opera libretto in which, among other things, the characters make decisions based on reason or on moral issues larger than their own amatory interests. The librettos of Apostolo Zeno (a member of the Venetian colony of Arcadians) exemplify these new principles. The new ideals are best exemplified in the librettos of the Arcadian Pietro Metastasio, dating from the 1720s onwards, with their strong political bias in extolling the nobility of good rulers. It is from debates around the Arcadians, too, that the view began to be held that academies supported conformity and encouraged conservative art.
Besides formal academies – with constitutions, regular scheduled meetings and fixed agendas – there were also, as early as the 15th century, a number of more loosely organized circles of intellectuals in Italy. These more informal groups have also been described as academies and need to be taken into account in any fuller history of the institution. Beginning in the early 1440s, for example, King Alfonso I of Aragon, ruler of Naples, met regularly with his more erudite courtiers to discuss cultural questions, and this circle of intellectuals (which much later became the Accademia Pontaniana) has been called the earliest academy in Italy. According to Antonfrancesco Doni, Verdelot was among the ‘people with intellectual interests, whether foreigners or Florentines’ (Nardi, Le storie della città di Firenze) who met in the gardens known as the Orti Oricellari; members of these informal gatherings, among them Machiavelli, included music among their activities. Similarly, the circle around the Venetian patrician Domenico Venier in the mid-16th century – initially devoted to the cultivation of Pietro Bembo's literary ideals – has been called an academy (among others, by Venier's Venetian contemporaries), although it was never formally organized as such and had no constitution or regular meetings; the fact that the poet and composer Girolamo Parabosco was a member suggests that music may have been among its concerns. Such loose groupings of like-minded intellectuals, centred on one dominant figure, might better be called ‘salons’ and should in any case be distinguished from regularly constituted academies.
The most famous of these salons were, of course, those in Florence in the second half of the 16th century: the Camerata of Count Giovanni de' Bardi and later the companions of Jacopo Corsi. In the 1560s and 70s Bardi and his companions discussed various literary and cultural questions, but they seem to have been especially interested in music and in particular the nature of ancient Greek music and how its alleged impact in the ancient world could be reproduced in modern times. Such groups fulfilled the functions of regular academies in disseminating current ideas about culture fairly widely throughout upper-class society. In the case of Bardi's and Corsi's salons, too, various members also influenced the composition of Florentine court spectacles, such as the well-known intermedi for the 1589 Medici wedding (unified around the theme of the power of music), and the earliest operas.
The word ‘academy’ was also used as early as the 16th century in Italy and elsewhere to describe single concerts, especially (at the beginning) private concerts. Such terms as ‘adunanza’, ‘ridotto’ and ‘cenacolo’ were used – as well as ‘accademia’ – to denote a meeting of intellectuals, meetings that could include music, or consist mostly of music. The well-known ridotto that met in the palace of Mario Bevilacqua in Verona was a group of this kind; it is described in Pietro Porito's Ragionamento (1588) as a place where ‘almost daily, gentlemen gather and exercise themselves in virtuous matters such as playing and singing and discussion of similar topics’. Performances of cantatas in Roman private houses in the 17th century were often called academies, and the usage continued into the 18th century and beyond. To take but one example, the cantata performed in honour of ‘Beato Agostino Novello’ at the Ospedale di S Maria della Scala in Siena in 1761 is described on its title-page as ‘in occasione della pubblica Accademia fatta dagli Alunni e Convittori del Seminario Soleti in onore di detto Beato’: that is, as a public concert (an ‘accademia’) given by the students and alumni of the school.
The earliest academy in France, the Académie de Poésie et de Musique, was established by Jean-Antoine de Baïf and Joachim Thibault de Courville in 1570, with the royal sponsorship of Charles IX. The Académie, which met regularly in Baïf's house in Paris, had two classes of membership: musicians (that is, singers, poets and instrumentalists) and auditors (that is, the subscribers, who were to support the academy financially).
The aim of the academy was to revive the kind of poetry and music used by the ancient Greeks and Romans. Baïf, however, did not wish to study the music of the distant past merely for antiquarian reasons; instead, he attempted to transform the nature of French poetry by applying to it principles of quantitative metre as in Latin (vers mesurés à l'antique) and by setting to it a simple music that would closely follow the ancient metres (musique mesurée à l'antique). He wished to do this not so much for purely aesthetic reasons but rather to bring a new order into music and hence into public order and morality, following neo-Platonic ideals that connect music with morality. His ideas derive, at least distantly, from his knowledge of Ficino's Accademia Platonica in Florence. He was also strongly influenced by his association with the great teacher Jean Dorat of the Collège de Coqueret in Paris and by his friendship with Pierre de Ronsard and the other poets of the Pléiade. There is reason to believe that natural philosophy, mathematics and other subjects were discussed at meetings, not only poetry and music. To further his aims, Baïf sought the help of a number of French musicians, of whom the most distinguished was doubtless Claude Le Jeune, whose experiments with musique mesurée influenced the setting of French poetry to music for several generations even though the Académie de Poésie et de Musique soon disbanded and the examples of ‘pure’ musique mesurée are not entirely convincing aesthetically.
Many of the various associations of amateurs and professionals devoted to the performance of music formed in Germany from the 16th century onwards were called Collegium musicum, and these societies constituted a kind of academy. Fasch's Singakademie, it could be argued, was a kind of collegium musicum. Its formation spurred the foundation of other similar singing societies in many German cities during the 19th century, and most of these were also called Singakademie. There were as well other concert-giving societies called ‘academies’ in Germany, such as the Musikalische Akademie of Munich, formed by the court musicians there in 1811. As in other countries, the word ‘academy’ was also often used in Germany and in Austria to mean a single concert (Mozart habitually used the term), although ‘academic concerts’ were those held at universities, probably following Forkel's model in Göttingen.
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