Gaetano Brunetti (1744-1798): Catalogo critico, tematico y cronologico.

Guin, Elisabeth Le

Gaetano Brunetti (1744-1798): Catalogo critico, tematico y cronologico. By German Labrador Lopez de Azcona. Coleccion de monografias, no. 8. Madrid: Asociacion espanola de documentacion musical, 2005. [495 p. ISBN: 8492219580. $79.95.] Bibliographic references, index.

The musician or music historian whose interest in Gaetano Brunetti may have been fired by hearing one of Newell Jenkins' recordings of the symphonies (this assuming she has a turntable: they were made in the 1960s)--or perhaps by some unusually adventurous programming on the part of a violinist or chamber group, working off the handful of published editions--will find her initial impressions tersely confirmed by the authors of the entry for Gaetano Brunetti in Grove Music Online, who aver the "unusual imagination" of this composer. (Alice B. Belgray and Newell Jenkins, "Brunetti, Gaetano," Grove Music Online, http:// www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/04179 [accessed 19 February 2009]). This assessment is expanded upon in the Grove Music Online article on the Symphony:

  Brunetti's highly original symphonies ... include a number of stormy
  works with an unusually high proportion of minor tonalities matched
  by abrupt rhythms and jagged melodic lines. His music is effective in
  performance and appealing for its Haydnesque rhythmic verve and taut
  continuity. (Jan Larue, et al. "Symphony" [rev. 27 April 2006], Grove
  Music Online, http
  //www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/27254pg1
  [accessed 19 February 2009], at I/13: "Other Centres.")

Should our musician or musicologist wish to follow up on her initial interest, however, with a more systematic perusal of Brunetti's music, she will find herself directly in rather deep bibliographical waters--too deep for the great majority of those who might be in a position to make this music heard. Some of Brunetti's music exists in modern editions--a signal effort was made thirty years ago, when Jenkins edited the symphonies (Newell Jenkins, ed., The Symphony: Gaetano Brunetti, in The Symphony, 1720-1840, ed. Barry Brook. Series A, no. 5. [New York: Garland, 1979])--but the selection of his other works currently available to performers can hardly be called comprehensive. As for aids to research: a catalog was produced in the nineteenth century by Louis Labitte, a Parisian collector; this has never been published. More recent catalogs have been partial and genre-based: Jenkins published a catalog of the symphonies in his edition, and there are two North American dissertations (Alice Belgray catalogs the violin sonatas in her "Gaetano Brunetti: An Exploratory Bio-bibliographical Study" [Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1970], while Rene Ramos essays another treatment of the symphonies in "The Symphonies of Gaetano Brunetti" [Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1997]). Neither dissertation has been published by a commercial or academic press.

This sketchy situation has been vastly improved by the 2005 publication of German Labrador's catalog of the works of Brunetti. This is the first comprehensive treatment of the work of this interesting composer, and it is a model of responsible and thoughtful scholarship. The first half of the book consists of a thematic and chronological catalog of the 346 works whose existence Labrador has been able to confirm (some being lost, but attested in earlier thematic catalogs); the second half offers a composer biography, details of the sources and of the principles used in establishing chronology, and supplementary information about each genre of Brunetti's work. A particular courtesy to Anglophone readers is the inclusion of a translated introduction presenting the current state of research and publication on Brunetti and handily summarizing editorial policy.

The catalog proper divides Brunetti's production into instrumental and vocal music. Instrumental music, the great bulk of Brunetti's production, is further sectionalized by instrumentation in increasing numbers, from violin sonatas through duos, trios, quarters, etc, up through symphonies; vocal music is divided into secular and sacred. Within each subsection, Labrador has attempted to establish chronological order, a particularly thorny undertaking, since almost all of the sources are in manuscript and only some are dated. Only in the symphonies does he abandon this policy, accepting the numeration established by Labitte, continued by Jenkins and Ramos, and now ratified by the Library of Congress. The catalog entries are visually elegant, with the incipits of each movement of multimovement works given, and essential bibliographic information clearly laid out.

Labrador's principle of organization-by-instrumentation, his use of movement incipits, and his inclusion of the critical and biographical element all recall Yves Gerard's magisterial catalog of the works of Brunetti's compatriot and contemporary, Luigi Boccherini, which was coordinated with the biography produced by his patroness, Germaine de Rothschild. (Yves Gerard, Thematic, Bibliographical, and Critical Catalogue of the Works of Luigi Boccherini, trans. Andreas Mayor [New York: Oxford University Press, 1969]; Germaine de Rothschild, Luigi Beccherini; sa vie, son oeuvre [Paris: Plon, 1962].) There are some key differences, however. Gerard's catalog entries proffer quite a bit of circumstantial and peripheral information, up to and including his personal opinions of the authenticity of particular works (and at times, amusingly, his frustration with the lamentable state in which he found his source materials). Labrador takes a much more discreet approach; his catalog entries are pretty strictly bibliographic, and do not cross the line at all into matters of context, much less opinion. This ends up meaning that the catalog user will almost certainly have to engage in a certain amount of flipping back and forth between the entries per se, and the information presented in chapters 4 and 5 of the second half of the book, where such vital information as dates of works (both known and hypothesized) and details of their original purpose and performance practice can be found. The book's second half is only in Spanish; however, a good deal of this supplementary information is presented in tables and graphs, which are easy enough to read regardless of language. In this respect the book is perhaps not maximally convenient as a catalog, but it is thorough in a way not possible with a more anecdotal presentation.

Labrador's biographical chapter offers a wealth of ancillary information about Brunetti and his work in the courts of Carlos III and IV. This is valuable not just for being the most detailed biography of Brunetti published to date, but for the glimpses it provides into a musician's life in service of Spanish royalty. Despite his privileged position after 1770, as private violin instructor of the Prince of Asturias, Brunetti's life was probably fairly typical in its challenges, which, as the following passage suggests, were both considerable and unrelenting:

  After having enjoyed a period of some stability during the years in
  which he served in the Royal Chapel (in fact, it would be the most
  tranquil of his whole life), Brunetti began to follow the royal
  circuit in 1771 [this refers to the peculiarly peripatetic habits of
  the Bourbon court, which circulated throughout the year among five
  different palaces in and around Madrid]. ...  The royal family and
  all those with responsibilities in the administration [of the court]
  had to move from one place to the next along with their families,
  possessions, and dependents, which made for a frantic mode of life
  throughout the entire year, with periods of stability that very
  rarely reached three months at a stretch. (p. 348; translation by the
  author)

It is within this more or less constant upheaval, bounded by a strict and unquestioning adherence to the musical tastes of his royal master, that Brunetti's "unusual imagination" flourished.

The details of the intricate process of dating the manuscripts, which involved Labrador in the study of watermarks and paper manufacture in Spain and Italy, form the stuff of chapter 3 in the second part and are particularly fascinating; at times this chapter reads like a kind of musicological detective story. Certainly it is a lesson in the value (as well as the method) of a minute focus on documentation. On the strength of elegant work like Labrador's, I would venture to suggest that it is high time we rescued positivism from the bad-word status it has tended to suffer in Anglophone scholarship ever since Joseph Kerman's Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985).

Labrador's book is a major bibliographic contribution, and as such should be a part of any serious music research library. However, this book has a further, symbolic importance. Within the general and longstanding scholarly neglect of Spain as a part of musical Europe, the eighteenth century may well take the prize; up until about a generation ago, eighteenth-century Spanish music was routinely ignored, and sometimes disparaged, by the great majority of scholars native and foreign. The main "argument" against it was its heavy admixture of extra-peninsular--above all, Italian-influences; in other words, music like Brunetti's was not considered to be "Spanish enough." (Domenico Scarlatti's and Boccherini's music was generally studied as if it were simply Italian, with treatments of "Spanishness" consisting of identifying, or imagining, exotic references).

This nationalist red tide is clearly on the way out, and nowhere more so than in Spain itself, where the cosmopolitan music and musical life of the eighteenth century have come to represent a new musicological pluralism in the twenty-first. Young Spanish scholars are producing thoughtful and exciting work on this period, work that brings together the best fruits of a fine positivist training with a willingness to think anew and radically about matters of musical style and identity. Tiresome old ideas of musical "Spanishness" have been pretty well deconstructed thereby: a fact to which we Anglophones, who are as guilty of perpetuating these ideas as anybody, would do well to pay attention. Labrador's catalog, which without interrogation or apology presents as Spanish the work of an Italian-born composer, is one example of just how far inland this new wave of musicological cosmopolitanism comes.

ELISABETH LE GUIN

University of California, Los Angeles