(It. ‘little hop’; Fr. pas de Brabant; Ger. Hoppertanz, Hupfertanz; Sp. alta, alta danza).
A generic term for moderately rapid Italian dances, usually in triple metre and involving jumping movements.
The earliest known use of the term saltarello occurs in a Tuscan manuscript from the late 14th or early 15th century (GB-Lbl Add.29987, facs. in MSD, xiii, 1965), in which 15 textless monophonic pieces are included under the general heading ‘Istampitta’. The last seven items of the group include four pieces labelled ‘saltarello’, along with a ‘trotto’ and the comparatively well-known dances La Manfredina and Lamento di Tristano. Like the estampies that precede them (see Estampie), the saltarellos consist of several repeated strains, each with a first and second ending (marked ‘aperto’ and ‘chiuso’ in the manuscript). Intriguingly the saltarellos do not share a common metre: two may be transcribed in 6/8 (ex.1), one in 3/4, and one in 4/4, leading Sachs (Eine Weltgeschichte des Tanzes, 1933; Eng. trans., 1937/R) to conclude that only the first three were true saltarellos, the last being assumed an example of the 15th-century duple-metre quarternaria, sometimes called ‘saltarello tedesco’. His conclusion suggests a link between these four dances and the court dances of the 15th and 16th centuries that, however, has yet to be proved; as no choreographies from before the 1430s are known to survive, there is little evidence that these dances had anything in common with later saltarellos.
In the 15th century the name ‘saltarello’ was applied to one of the dances of the bassadanza family (see Basse danse), the most serious and elegant of contemporary Italian court dances. A number of Italian dancing-masters, including Domenico da Piacenza, Antonio Cornazano and Guglielmo Ebreo, described a method of deriving four progressively faster and more athletic dances from a single bassadanza cantus firmus; generally, the cantus firmus was written in either black breves or white semibreves, which had no mensural significance, and the musicians accompanying the dance were to ‘rhythm’ them according to the kind of dance required. For the bassadanza itself each cantus firmus note would be a perfect long, for the quarternaria or saltarello tedesco each would be an imperfect long, for the saltarello each would be a perfect breve, and for the Piva each would be an imperfect breve. Ex.2 shows the application of these successive rhythms to the popular basse danse tune La Spagna. It is thought that accompanying musicians improvised two or more parts around the bassadanza tenor, but no corroborating sets of polyphonic ‘rhythmed’ bassadanzas are known to survive.
Little is known about the actual movements of the 15th-century saltarello. Saltarello movements were included in many 15th-century balli (see Ballo) as well as in the bassadanza itself, however, and it is from the extant choreographies for these pantomimic theatrical dances that our knowledge of them comes. Domenico da Piacenza’s ballo choreography ‘Verçepe’ (c1420), for example, includes a series of saltarello steps at the beginning and end, as well as interspersed elsewhere in the main part of the dance (ex.3).
As early as 1465 Cornazano had explained the mensural relationships of the bassadanza in reverse, using the saltarello as his point of reference; by the early 16th century, in fact, both extremes of the family had fallen into disuse, so that the most common dance group was some variant of the inner quarternaria–saltarello pair (see Nachtanz). Although some saltarellos appeared as independent pieces in the growing number of instrumental music collections printed in the 16th century, most surviving examples are afterdances to paduane, as in Joan Ambrosio Dalza’s Intabulatura de lauto of 1508 (see Pavan) or passamezzos (see Passamezzo). As afterdances saltarellos usually derived both melodic and harmonic material from their duple-metre partners, depending on them to such an extent that a musical saltarello was often little more than a metrical transformation of its pavan or passamezzo; the resulting dance had regular four-bar phrases and a clear sense of harmonic direction. An important characteristic of the 16th-century saltarello was an ambiguity of metre such that a piece often seems in transcription to alternate between 6/8 and 3/4. Ex.4 shows the beginnings of a passamezzo and its saltarello. Performers should take care to note that all 16th-century saltarellos were intended to be played in triple metre, although many seem to be in duple in the original prints because of the use of tactus barring and a mensuration of C (see Heartz’s preface to CEKM, viii, 1965).
Numerous choreographies exist for late 16th-century saltarellos by Italian dancing masters such as Fabritio Caroso (Il ballarino, 1581/R; Nobiltà di dame, 1600/R, 2/1605) and Cesare Negri (Le gratie d’amore, 1602/R, 2/1604 as Nuove inventione di balli). As Sutton (1986) points out, no identifiable step pattern has emerged, and there is no ‘tempo di saltarello’. Rather, certain steps suited to the two-bar units of fast triple meter are found frequently, such as ‘breve Reverences’, ‘broken sequences’, ‘falling jumps’, ‘reprises with foot under’, ‘Sapphic steps’, ‘paired minim steps’ (each to a triple beat or battuta tripla) and ‘knots’ (Sutton, pp.43–4). Some contemporary writers described the saltarello as a faster version of the Italian Galliard (Thoinot Arbeau, Orchésographie, 1588, 2/1589/R) and Thomas Morley (A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke, 1957/R). It could be that at some places this was true, though saltarello choreographies by Caroso, Negri and others do not bear much resemblance to the danced galliard with its five-step ‘tempi di gagliarda’ patterns, alternating variations and walking passages. Both galliards and saltarellos often appeared as an ‘afterdance’ in which the dance music is a proportionally faster rendition of a previous piece, and frequently a saltarello will follow a galliard in the balletto suites of Caroso and Negri. (See also Cinque pas.)
The courtly saltarello waned in popularity in the 17th century, although some stylized versions have survived, such as Peter Philips’s variation ‘in saltarello’ included among the ten divisions of the Galiarda passamezzo in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book and Giovanni Picchi’s saltarellos in Intavolatura di balli d’arpicordo (Venice, 2/1621/R). In 1703, Brossard (Dictionnaire de musique) described it as ‘a kind of movement that is always jumping, which is almost always made in triple metre with a dotted note at the beginning of every bar’. He went on to say that the Forlana, the Siciliana and the English jig (see Gigue (i)) were often said to be written ‘in saltarello’, apparently because of the prevalence of dotted patterns in their characteristic rhythms.
Three choreographies in 6/4 meter are extant in the Beauchamps-Feuillet notation, and may be derived from the saltarello tradition. They are: ‘The Saltarella’, a couple dance ‘made for Her Majesty’s Birthday 1708’ by Isaac, set to music by James Paisible (Little and Marsh, no.7580); ‘La Saltarelle’, a ball dance by L.-G. Pécour set to music from André Campra’s Aréthuse (1701) and Télémaque (1704); and ‘La Saltarelle Nouvelle’, also a ball dance by Pécour, set to forlana music from Campra’s Les fêtes vénitiennes (1710).
Towards the end of the 18th century, a popular folk-dance called the saltarello began to gain favour, first in Rome, then in the Italian regions of Ciociara (part of Latium), Romagna, Abruzzi and the Marches. This dance in 3/4 or 6/8 was generally danced alone or by one couple, and consisted of increasingly rapid hopping steps around an imaginary semicircle, accompanied by ‘violent’ arm movements; musical accompaniment was provided by guitars, tambourines, and often by the singing of onlookers (see ‘Saltarello’, ES). The two saltarellos included by Mendelssohn in the last movement in his Italian Symphony were probably based on tunes for the 19th-century folkdance, as were the saltarellos included in J. Perrot’s ballet Catarina ou La fille du bandit (London, 1846) and in Arthur Saint-Leon’s Il saltarello (Lisbon, 1854–6).
ApelG
BrownI
MGG2 (I. Brainard)
J. Wolf: ‘Die Tänze des Mittelalters’, AMw, i (1918–19), 10–42
O. Gombosi: ‘About Dance and Dance Music in the Late Middle Ages’, MQ, xxvii (1941), 289–305
M. Bukofzer: ‘A Polyphonic Basse Dance of the Renaissance’, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music (New York, 1950), esp. 191
I. Brainard: Die Choreographie der Hoftänze in Burgund, Frankreich und Italien im 15. Jahrhundert (diss., U. of Göttingen, 1956)
L.H. Moe: Dance Music in Printed Italian Lute Tablatures from 1507 to 1611 (diss., Harvard U., 1956)
G. Reaney: ‘The Manuscript London, British Museum, Additional 29987 (Lo)’, MD, xii (1958), 67–91
O. Kinkeldey: ‘Dance Tunes of the Fifteenth Century’, Instrumental Music, ed. D.G. Hughes (Cambridge, MA, 1959), 3, 89–152
I. Brainard: ‘Bassedanse, Bassadanza and Ballo in the 15th Century’, Dance History Research, ed. J. Kealiinohomoku (New York, 1970), 64–79
I. Brainard: Three Court Dances of the Early Renaissance (New York, 1971) [incl. transcr. of ‘Verçepe’]
I. Brainard: ‘Fifteenth- and Early Sixteenth-century Court Dances’, Institute of Court Dances, ed. J. de Laban (New York, 1972), 1–29
J. Sutton: Introduction to F. Caroso: Nobilità di dame (Oxford, 1986)
I. Brainard: The Art of Courtly Dancing in the Early Renaissance (New York, 1991)
M.E. Little and C.G. Marsh: La Danse Noble: an Inventory of Dances and Sources (Williamstown, MA, 1992)
MEREDITH ELLIS LITTLE