La ricezione dei metodi compositivi italiani nella Vienna di Beethoven

Abstract

This paper aims to outline possible connections with Italian compositional methods that Beethoven may have encountered – directly or indirectly – and to place them in the broader context of their reception in Vienna around 1800. The most obvious connection is undoubtedly with the important Italian master who intersected Beethoven’s life in Vienna for several years beginning in 1801: Antonio Salieri. But to what extent were Salieri’s pedagogical methods genuinely ‘Italian’, given that he left Venice at the age of sixteen to study composition in Vienna with Florian Gassmann? The article aims to provide a brief overview of Salieri’s teaching methods insofar as they can be reconstructed from historical accounts and the exercises Beethoven completed during his studies with him. Through these sources an attempt will be made to focus on the practical, theoretical and stylistic approach adopted by Salieri, placing it within the more general framework of contemporary teaching methods. On the basis of articles and testimonies of the time, it will be argued that already in Beethoven’s time Italian compositional methods were perceived as ‘classical’, and thus partly as archaic models belonging to the past. However, their traces appear so deep that they resurface at various levels, from theoretical treatises to teaching techniques, from improvisational models to the musical vocabulary itself.