A style of virtuoso solo bass viol playing favoured in Italy from about 1580 to about 1630, which condensed a polyphonic composition (madrigal, chanson or motet) to a single line, whilst retaining the original range, and with the addition of elaborate diminutions, embellishments and new counterpoint (see Diminution (i)). The bastarda technique was not exclusive to the viol: Francesco Rognoni (1620) explained that it could be performed on ‘organs, lutes, harps and similar instruments’; however, the viol's agility and three and a half octave range made it ‘the queen’ of the bastarda style.
In 1584 Girolamo Dalla Casa (d 1601) published his Il vero modo di diminuir, the earliest treatise to use the term ‘viola bastarda’. Dalla Casa gave ten examples of diminutions for viola bastarda (five based on madrigals and five on chansons) of progressive difficulty starting with diminutions in quavers and moving on to semiquavers, demisemiquavers and triplet demisemiquavers over a range of D-f''. The other important treatise on viola bastarda playing is Rognoni's Selva de varii passaggi (Milan, 1620). He cautioned players against improvising more than six sequences in succession ‘because it would then be tedious and offensive’, to avoid ‘making parallel octaves and 5ths with any of the parts’, and he finally reminded them ‘that it is of greater worth to sustain one note with grace or a sweet and gentle stroke of the bow than to make so many diminutions beyond that which is required’.
Dalla Casa wrote that ‘you can [also] play these madrigals in company’, and suggested the lute as a possible supporting instrument (playing the original composition). Sometimes viola bastarda diminutions were accompanied by viol consort. However, in 1591 Giovanni Bassano recommended the accompaniment of a ‘plucked instrument’ (lute or harpsichord) with a second instrument on the bass line. The later bastarda compositions by Oratio Bassani [della Viola] (d Parma 1615) and Vincenzo Bonizzi (d 1630) were provided with a continuo bass.
39 viola bastarda compositions survive; the ten by Dalla Casa are the earliest. Riccardo Rognoni's four pieces, published eight years later in Passaggi per potersi essercitare, were the first to be truly idiomatic to the viol, employing syncopated leaps and taking the instrument up to b'' on the d' string. However, the most innovative settings of the school are the two by Oratio Bassani on Lassus's Susanne un jour and Wert's Cara la vita mia (both in GB-Lbl Add.30491). In these works Bassani uses the simple bass part of his chosen madrigal as a foil for breathtakingly virtuoso embellishments, generally freed from any further relationship to the original composition. Bassani delights in bold dissonance and striking syncopation; and the ‘pasaggi d'imitationi’ found in Riccardo Rognoni's pieces are now developed within the sequence. Indeed these are perhaps the most virtuoso viol pieces ever to be written. Bassani's nephew and pupil Francesco Maria Bassani kept a pedagogic notebook, Regole di contrapunto, which contains eight pieces, seven of which are probably by Oratio. Whilst they do not make the same technical demands as the two in Add.30491, they display a stylistic likeness; interestingly, two are toccatas over a free bass-line, possibly intended as a prelude to the more extended madrigal settings. The later compositions by Francesco Rognoni (son of Riccardo) and Bonizzi return to the conservative method of embellishing the whole contrapuntal work. Francesco Rognoni's publication contains some ‘essempi per sonar alla bastarda’ which give suggestions of how to divide a bass line.
All viola bastarda music is written for the standard viol tuning, of 4ths with a 3rd in the middle. It most commonly uses the lowest string tuned to D (i.e. like the modern bass viol) but sometimes the lowest string is a G (i.e. using the range of a modern tenor) or an A; the later players of the early 16th century, such as Bassani and Bonizzi, also used a tuning based on a low A' or G'. Regarding the instrument's size, Francesco Rognoni, whose compositions use the D tuning, stated: ‘The viola bastarda … is an instrument which is neither a tenor nor a bass viol, but which is between the two in size’. However, the term in 16th-century descriptions seems to refer to the instrument's function rather than to its size; in addition, the wide pitch range of the lowest note for surviving works indicates that viols of different sizes were used as appropriate (or as available).
During the 50 years that the viola bastarda flourished the technique developed from one that found its roots in the prima pratica to the latest seconda pratica style, experimenting with highly virtuosic and rhetorical improvisation over a supporting continuo bass. The legacy of the viola bastarda technique can be seen in the new idiomatic violin music of Monteverdi and Marini, and also in the English lyra viol music and the practice of divisions on a ground. There are two examples of viola bastarda music outside Italy. In London in 1613, the Italian, Angelo Notari, who worked at James I's court, published diminutions in bastarda style on the tenor and bass parts of Cipriano de Rore's madrigal Ben qui si mostra il ciel, and the dulcian player in Vienna, Bartolemeo de Selma y Salaverde, included three bastarda settings in his Primo libro of 1636.
References to the viola bastarda by Praetorius and Adam Jarzębski are misleading. Praetorius, in his Syntagma musicum, ii (1618, 2/1619), gave a variety of tunings that would appear to be more appropriate to the lyra viol than the viola bastarda. Jarzębski used the title ‘viola bastarda’ for the bass viol part in his trio and quartet sonatas, which are of a modest range and only occasionally ornamented with divisions. (Jarzębski's misnomer may have arisen because he worked at the court of Sigismund III of Poland where Francesco Rognoni had also been employed.)
(all transcribed in Paras, 1986)
Girolamo Dalla Casa: Il vero modo di diminuir (Venice, 1584/R)
Giovanni Bassano: Motetti, madrigali et canzoni francese (Venice, 1591)
Riccardo Rognoni: Passaggi per potersi essercitare nel diminuire terminatamente con ogni sorte di instrumenti, et anco diversi passaggi per la semplice voce humana (Venice, 1592)
Aurelio Virgiliano: Il Dolcimelo (MS, c1600, I-Bc) [facs., Florence, 1979]
Oratio Bassani: (MS, 1626, GB-Lbl Add.30491)
Giovanni de Macque or Francesco Lambardi: (MS, 1626, GB-Lbl Add.30491)
Francesco Maria Bassani: Regole di contrapunto (MS, 1620–22, I-Bc)
Antonio Notari: Prima musiche nuove (London, 1613)
Francesco Rognoni: Selva de varii passagi secondo l'uso moderno, ii (Milan, 1620/R)
Vincenzo Bonizzi: Alcune opere, di diverse auttori a diverse voci, passaggiate principalmente per la viola bastarda (Venice, 1626/R)
Bartolomé de Selma y Salaverde: Primo libro, canzoni fantasie et correnti da suonar (Venice, 1638/R)
Veronika Gutmann: ‘Viola bastarda: Instrument oder Diminutionspraxis’, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, xxxv (1978), 178–209
Jason Paras: The Music for the Viola Bastarda (Bloomington, 1986)
S. Saunders: ‘Giovanni Valentini's “In te Domine speravi” and the Demise of the Viola Bastarda’, JVdGSA, xxviii (1991), 1–20
LUCY ROBINSON