Playing the partitura correctly and well: Basso continuo accompaniment practices in church music from late eighteenth-century Salzburg

Abstract

Scholars have long known that basso continuo accompaniment at the organ was part of standard Austrian church music practice in the late eighteenth century. Despite this, hardly any studies have examined this performance practice. The aim of this thesis is to contribute to our understanding of its performance by examining how court organists in late eighteenth-century Salzburg realised a basso continuo when accompanying church music. Six manuals, written by Salzburg court organists from the time of Georg Muffat to Michael Haydn, contain the foundations of this information. The purpose of this study is to ascertain the method that these organists used to realise an accompaniment from a figured bass, which Austrian musicians called ‘partitura’. As invaluable as the Salzburg manuals are, they contain very little textural commentary. In fact, they mostly consist of illustrations of standardised musical patterns (what Robert Gjerdingen terms ‘schemata’). From an analysis of these schemata, I reconstruct the Salzburg organists’ method for improvising a partitura. Then, I corroborate the findings of this analysis with an examination of the ways in which Salzburg composers commonly notated organ parts for church music compositions. From this study, I conclude that this method involved organists realising schemata from a figured bass in a manner appropriate to the style of composition they were accompanying. I explain this method using four ‘fundamental principles’, labelled ‘disposition’, ‘exchange’, ‘punctuation’ and ‘style’. The first three of these principles are collectively termed ‘construction principles’ as they describe the structure of a partitura and were derived from a structural analysis of the schemata in the manuals. The style principle, on the other hand, examines how the stylistic attributes of a composition dictate the appropriate application of these principles, which is communicated to organists through notational symbols, such as clefs and figuring. The four fundamental principles that outline the Salzburg method for playing a partitura “correctly and well” (an expression Salzburg organists Johann Baptist Samber and Matthäus Gugl use in the titles of their manuals) provide us with insights into the practices of professional court organists of a small, yet significant, city on the periphery of the Habsburg Empire. Besides being the home of Wolfgang Mozart, once a Salzburg court organist himself, the city boasted organists of the calibre of Georg Muffat and Michael Haydn. In addition to shining light on their methods of partitura playing, this study shows that Salzburg court organists understood basso continuo in contrapuntal terms. This challenges some of our most basic conceptions of ‘common practice tonality’ and asks us to reassess how we analyse and perform basso continuo, a practice that was integral to eighteenth-century performance and compositional practice.